by J. S. Puller
“I don’t know, you tell me,” I said, sitting on the curb. Aside from two stray Yelp reviews, Squeaky Green didn’t have a web presence at all, which was so annoying. I’d searched and searched for hours, until it was three in the morning and I was watching a YouTube video of Kermit the Frog singing “Bein’ Green.” Decidedly off the map, I’d given up on finding Squeaky Green’s digital footprint. But I wasn’t sure what I’d look for on their website anyway, even if I found one. There probably wasn’t a page called “Reasons why your cousin might sneak in.” The internet wasn’t that friendly. Fortunately, I had Violet.
“What do you know about it?”
“It’s owned by Livia Green,” Violet said. “Been in the Green family for years. Livia’s got three kids. One in high school, one in middle school, and the youngest is about TJ’s age. All of them went to Chancelor, at one point or another. Two boys and a girl. Their father left Chicago about five years ago. Military. I don’t think he and Livia ever got married. Right now, Livia is dating a guy who works at the—”
I knew I’d come to the right person.
“But what about the laundromat?” I asked, leaning forward.
“I don’t know,” Violet said, turning back to her list. “It’s a laundromat.”
“Anything interesting about it?”
“What could be interesting about a laundromat?” Violet asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
She sighed. “What are you talking about, Leah?”
I hesitated. It wasn’t so much that Violet was the biggest know-it-all gossip I’d ever met. I wasn’t worried about her ratting me out to Aunt Lisa. I just knew I needed to decide if it was worth breaking TJ’s trust. Trust that didn’t really belong to me in the first place. Honestly, I didn’t know what to do. But if I was ever going to reach TJ, I knew I had to do something. Violet could be a big help.
After a moment, I let out a sigh and nodded, my mind made up. This was for TJ. “My cousin snuck in there last night.”
Violet dropped her pen. “What?”
I had a feeling that it wasn’t often someone beat Violet to a juicy piece of information like that. Leaning over, I picked up the pen and handed it to her. “TJ snuck into the laundromat.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Because I followed him.”
“Leah Abramowitz,” she said, pronouncing my name perfectly, “there’s a devious streak in you.” She gave me a full-braces grin. “I like it.”
I stared at her for a second. I certainly didn’t think of myself as devious. But all right. “Uh… thanks?”
“Tell, tell!”
“There isn’t enough to tell, really,” I said. “I followed him there and saw him go in. That’s it. I was hoping you could fill in the details for me. Is there anything you know? Anything that could explain—”
“No,” Violet said, shaking her head. “Absolutely nothing.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Sneaking to the hot dog place, I could get. Sneaking to the shoe shop—if TJ really liked shoes—I could get. But a coin-op?” She paused. “Your aunt’s building has a washer and dryer, right?”
Somehow, it didn’t surprise me she knew that. I just nodded. “In the basement.”
“Well, that is officially weird.” She swung her legs around, over the arm of the chair, so that she was facing me. With the notebook on her lap, she flipped to a fresh page and started scribbling notes. “Snuck into Squeaky Green last night,” she said as she wrote. “Same direction he always goes in.” She glanced up at me. “Do you think he goes there every time he sneaks out?”
I hadn’t thought about that. “No clue.”
“Unclear if he goes there every night.” She wrote almost as quickly as she spoke. “Do you know if—”
“I don’t know anything! That’s why I’m asking.”
Violet hooked her pen through the spiral of her notebook. “I’m just trying to collect all the facts.”
“I don’t have a lot of those.”
“Well, seems to me that’s the first step.”
“What?”
“Finding out more.”
I shrugged. “I guess.”
“So, it’s settled,” she said, slapping her palms against her knees. “We follow him tonight.”
“Right.” I paused. “What?”
“Weeeeeeeee fooooooooolloooooooow hiiiiiim tooooonight.”
We?
When I looked up at Violet, she was grinning. Not a pretty grin. Not a movie-star-on-the-cover-of-a-magazine grin. More like the villain in a spy movie, plotting the destruction of Earth. You know, if villains in a spy movie wore braces and were twelve. “I figure, we have a pretty good line of sight to your front door from right here.” She pointed just a little ways down the street. “All we have to do is wait. It’s the easiest stakeout ever.”
Easiest stakeout ever? Maybe Violet really was a supervillain. What kind of kid actually went on stakeouts? I didn’t even want to ask. Anyway, I was still trying to figure out how to uninvite her. The last thing I wanted was to put TJ on display.
But Violet continued making plans. “It’s usually a little after seven that he gets going.” She added that note to her collection. “I’ll tell you what. You call your aunt and tell her that I invited you to dinner at my place. We won’t really go to my house, of course. We can just grab snacks and have a picnic in the spot. That way we’ll be sure not to miss him.”
“What about your dad’s dibs?”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Weren’t you listening? I said we’ll have a picnic. Blankets. Lawn chairs. The whole thing. Dibs secure.”
“But you said Chicago drivers—”
“Anyway, my father should probably get home before TJ sets out,” she said, buzzing away. “We can hang out in the car. He lets me borrow the keys sometimes, as long as I don’t try to drive it or anything. Honestly, it’s the only place I can go to listen to my music without my sisters bothering me. Hey, that reminds me! Do you like Dina and the Starlights? I have their latest album, and it’s the best thing ever.”
“Violet, I’m not sure that—”
“I’m thinking of writing up a review of it for my school newspaper.”
“I don’t think—”
“If you don’t like Dina, I guess I can forgive you for that. I mean, it’s seriously wrong. But I can forgive it. I also have Electric Diamond. And the soundtrack to Hamilton, if that’s your kind of thing.”
“Could you just—”
“Of course, Hamilton is everyone’s thing, I think,” she continued. “I mean, it’s got a little bit of everything and it—”
“Violet!”
She blinked, staring at me with those shockingly blue eyes of hers. “What?” she said.
I took a deep breath. “It’s really nice of you to want to help me, Violet,” I said. “But I don’t know that it’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Because…”
“That’s not a reason,” she said, impatient and pouty.
“It’s nothing personal, Violet. It’s just that I—”
“What?”
“I…”
“You what?”
“Ugh!” I stamped both my feet in agitation and then immediately felt bad about it. I couldn’t afford to get so frustrated. I swallowed it back. “I don’t want you telling stories about TJ. If it’s something… if it’s something bad.”
Violet swung her legs down, off the arm of the chair. She stood up and walked over to me. And for a second, she just stood in front of me. Towered over me. But then, she sat down. Sitting on the curb beside me, she was all sharp angles. Elbows and knees. But her voice was soft and mild. “Something bad?” she asked. “What does that mean?”
“I wish I knew.” I shook my head, staring down at the way our shadows reached across the width of the parking space. “There’s something wrong with my cousin, Violet.
And I want to help him, but I don’t know how. It… it’s bothering me. A lot.”
I regretted saying it.
That was the kind of thing I kept to myself. Maybe I told Nicole, if it was really bad. But mostly myself.
“Well, of course it’s bothering you.” She knocked her shoulder against mine. “I mean, there’d be something very wrong with you if you weren’t worried about your cousin.”
Her answer caught me off guard. There were plenty of queen bees in my school. The kids who knew everything about everyone. Who collected gossip, hoarding it, waiting for just the right moment to use it.
To sting.
They didn’t say things like that.
They didn’t act like they cared.
I guess there was a flip side to knowing everything about everyone. Maybe it was entirely possible that you could know everything about everyone and actually care about everyone, too.
At least a little bit.
“Hey,” Violet said, putting a hand on my elbow, “I’m not going to go telling stories about your cousin, okay? I just want to help.”
“Really?”
She shrugged. “Either you believe me, or you don’t. Doesn’t matter. I’m going with you.”
There were a thousand different ways to interpret what she was saying. Maybe she was just bored and needed something to do. Maybe she was nosy. Or maybe, just maybe, Violet really was interested in helping me.
I decided that was what I wanted.
So it was what I chose to believe.
CHAPTER FIVE
Aunt Lisa sent me back three smiley faces and a pink heart when I texted her that I’d made friends with another kid in the neighborhood. I had a feeling those smiley faces were Aunt Lisa’s way of saying I told you so about making friends, but I decided not to worry about it.
She needed to be right about something. She needed a win.
As it turned out, agreeing to hang out with Violet that day ended up being one of the best decisions I ever made.
The two of us had absolutely nothing in common.
Zip.
Zero.
Zilch.
I lived alone with my mom, who was a college professor. Violet was one of four daughters to a Vietnamese mom and Polish dad—a web designer and a science teacher, respectively. I liked putting together puzzles and drones. She liked to write and make lists. I knew every single word to every single song by Selena Gomez. She made a face at the mention of Selena Gomez, calling her music “basic” and insisting that Dina and the Starlights were much, much better.
With so many differences, I figured that we’d never run out of things to say.
And I was right.
We talked and talked the whole afternoon.
“I don’t see any words,” she said, when I showed her the word fortune predictor I’d sent Nicole.
“You just have to let your eyes relax,” I told her.
Violet scrunched up her face. Kind of the opposite of relaxing, really. But after a moment, her expression brightened. “Oh!”
“See something?”
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“I see ‘big.’”
“Okay, that’s a start. Keep looking.”
“And…” Violet’s eyes swept back and forth. “Oh! ‘Neat.’”
“‘Neat’?”
“And ‘star.’”
“All right,” I said. “‘Big.’ ‘Neat.’ ‘Star.’ I guess that means you’re going to be a big star on YouTube, who teaches people how to organize their closet space.” All things considered, not the worst future to imagine for her. I would have taken something like that. I followed at least three dozen different YouTube channels religiously. And I wished I could come up with one of my own, for when I was old enough to have it. Thirteen was only a year away.
But again, there was nothing special enough about me.
Channel owners all had some kind of gimmick. One was good at putting on makeup. Another was good at playing the guitar. And another could figure out what every single detail in any movie trailer meant.
I didn’t have a gimmick of my own.
I just seemed to obsess over the gimmicks of others.
Violet chuckled. “How do you come up with a future like that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Hey, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
I stared at her a moment. “You know, you think about the future a lot. Has anyone ever told you that?”
She waved her hand. Unapologetic. “The future will be here before you know it. You have to plan ahead.” She gave me a nudge with her fingertips. “So?”
“So what?”
“So what do you want to be? When you grow up?”
“I… don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t think about the future all that much.”
“Why not?”
“Because you never know what it’ll be like. Your life can change in a snap.” I snapped my fingers. “One minute, you’re one thing; the next minute, you’re something else.”
Like, one minute, you were living in a house with two happy parents. The next, you were in an apartment and your dad didn’t want anything to do with you, because he was too busy living a happy life on the other side of the country with his replacement family. His two stepsons—my stepbrothers—loved Star Wars.
I hated it.
“That doesn’t mean you can’t imagine,” Violet said.
“When you don’t know what the future’s going to be, you’re just guessing.”
“Everyone guesses.”
“I don’t.” I much preferred facts.
Violet looked skeptical. “Oh,” she said.
“Honestly, I’m not sure what I want to do when I grow up,” I said. “I just know that I want to be…”
“What?”
“Don’t laugh.”
“I won’t. Unless it’s really, really funny.”
I glared at her. But after a moment, I let out a sigh and said, “Special.”
“Special?”
“Yeah.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t really know yet. I just want to find something that… that I’m really good at. Something that no one else can do the way I do it.”
“Okay, what do you like to do?”
“Well…”
“Yeeeeeees?”
I ducked my head, feeling a little sheepish. I’d never told anyone this before. “I sometimes like to read Wikipedia pages. For fun.”
Violet stared at me for a moment with her computer-blue eyes, not even blinking. It definitely wasn’t a normal use of the internet. And we both knew it. “What kind of pages?” she asked.
I shrugged. “All kinds. Anything that seems interesting.”
She raised both eyebrows. “Not so sure how useful that is.”
“It can be useful, sometimes.”
“How?”
“I once read the Wikipedia page about Twinkies. Did you know that the original filling flavor for Twinkies was banana?”
“I can’t say that I did,” Violet said. “But seriously, I’m not sure how knowing about Twinkies is all that useful.”
“Well, I’m on my school’s quiz bowl team.”
“What’s quiz bowl?”
Ha ha. Finally something Violet didn’t know everything about. “Trivia competitions. Just answering questions. Anyway, this one time, the question was about the original flavor of Twinkies. And I knew it.”
Violet shook her head a little bit. “All right. So knowing about Twinkies is sometimes useful. Although I don’t think you can be a professional quiz bowler.”
“Probably not,” I said. Although I had heard about people who made small fortunes as champions on game shows.
“What else do you like?”
I thought about it for a moment. “Stories.” I’d never told anyone that before, either. Not that it was an embarrassing secret or anything. I guess it was just strange. I held up my phon
e with the word fortune predictor. “I like putting together stories.”
“So you could write—”
“Not writing, exactly,” I said. “Not making things up. Not pretending. More like putting together the pieces. Like a jigsaw puzzle.”
“I’m not sure I get it.”
“I don’t, either,” I said. I couldn’t find the right word for it, let alone a way to turn it into some kind of future. So I shrugged and changed the topic a little. “Maybe I could be a photographer. I take pictures all the time.”
“Well, that’s perfect,” Violet said, brightening.
“Perfect?”
“Maybe we’ll work together when we’re older. I’ll need a photographer.”
“So you already know what you’re going to be when you grow up?” Can’t say I was all that surprised, given Violet’s obsession with the future.
Violet nodded. “I’ve known ever since I was six years old.”
“What?”
“I’m going to be a journalist.”
“You want to write—”
“Not write,” she said. “Report. There’s a huge difference.”
“What do you mean?”
“Writers create stories,” she said. “Reporters report stories. You don’t make it up. You tell it like it is.”
I could see what she meant. “Where are you going to get the stories?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Other people. I mean, every person has some kind of story, right?”
“I guess so.”
“They all need to be told. I think the stories will find me.”
“You don’t care what it is?”
“Not really.”
“But what if you don’t like the story?”
“It doesn’t matter if I like it,” she replied. “A story is a story. It exists in the world, which means it needs to be told.”
“You think so?”
“That’s just the way it is.”
“Okay.” Who was I to argue?
“Now,” Violet said. “I think you should take my picture.”
She struck a very, very serious pose.
It involved winking one eye and sticking out her tongue.
Around dinnertime, while I held her dad’s dibs, Violet ran into her house for snacks. I checked my phone and found a text from Nicole:
