“Then why did you do it?” Principal Tate asked.
“To help her,” Toby said quietly. He nodded at Sophie. She almost gasped.
Help her? How? Sophie had to hear this.
By then, Toby’s face was so red his freckles had almost disappeared.
He took another breath. “She was just so crazy to solve mysteries,” he went on. “She even had a detective hat. But there weren’t any mysteries. So I thought I’d make some up.” Toby shrugged and looked down at the floor. “And it was so easy to take the stuff while everyone was lining up for gym. It’s all in my backpack. I was going to return it, really. I mean, if Sophie the Snoop didn’t find it first.”
Sophie was speechless. But a zillion thoughts zipped through her head.
Thoughts like What? And Really? And Sorry, Ms. Steele…
Sophie had snooped around in the substitute’s bag for nothing. And missed lunch, too.
And speaking of missing, how had she missed Toby’s taking all that stuff? She guessed it was because she had not wanted to look at him much.
What was Toby thinking? She made herself look at him just to see. But his face was down. He was looking at his feet.
So she looked at his red head and wondered, Why did he do what he did?
Was it really because he liked the name Sophie the Snoop and wanted to help her earn it? Or was he just saying that to get out of trouble? Was he trying to prove she couldn’t really solve mysteries? Was he just being mean?
That, for sure, was the biggest mystery!
Chapter 9
A few minutes later, Sophie was glad to be out of the principal’s office.
But she was not glad to be back in room 10. Everyone — except Kate — was talking about all the trouble she was in!
Of course, they weren’t just talking about her. They were talking about Toby, too. He’d given everything back and he’d explained what he’d done.
Archie thought it was hilarious. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked him.
“Tweety!” said Ben. He gave his Tweety Bird a hug.
Mindy was furious. “Don’t you ever touch my lip-gloss phone again!” she fumed. She inspected it for damage. Then she quickly dabbed on some lip gloss.
Sophie, meanwhile, slunk back to her seat. The one next to Toby. (As if things weren’t bad enough.) She really, really wished she could ask to move. But she could not even look at Ms. Steele. How could she speak to her?
Sophie felt awful for making the sub’s first day of teaching so hard. She should have known better. How could someone named Sophie be bad, after all?
Sophie guessed that she was not as much of a snoop as she had thought. She was still just plain old boring Sophie the Nothing. As usual.
The good news was that it was almost time for art class with her very favorite teacher, Ms. Bart. So Sophie did not have to stay in her seat next to Toby for long. Art could not come soon enough.
She hoped they would do clay. She felt like squeezing stuff in her hands. Or maybe splatter painting. Sophie could really get into that.
Something — anything — to take her mind off Sophie the Snoop.
But when Sophie got to the art room, she saw that there was a little mirror at each of their seats.
Mindy picked hers up. Sophie rolled her eyes as Mindy blew herself a kiss.
Then Ms. Bart called for their attention. She had her hair in two long, long braids. One had glitter stuck to it. The other looked like it had been dipped in purple paint.
“Hey, everyone,” Ms. Bart said. “Today we’re doing something really cool. We’re going to draw self-portraits. That means you draw a picture of you!”
Really?
Sophie looked around. Everyone else — especially Mindy — seemed to think that it was a great idea. But drawing a picture of herself was the last thing Sophie wanted to do just then.
Kate reached for a pencil and quickly drew something round.
“Aren’t you going to look at yourself first?” Sophie asked.
Kate grinned and shrugged. “Well, I know I have a head,” she replied.
Sophie picked up her mirror. She studied her face. It frowned back. She grabbed a pencil and started to draw, then stopped. Blah! It wasn’t right.
Sophie knew that she was not a great artist. No, Sophie the Artist would never be her name. (Sydney and Eve were the best in her class. And Jack, too, if you counted cartoons.) But she loved to sculpt. And draw. And paint. She especially loved to glue stuff. What did Ms. Bart call that? Oh, right. Collage.
But Kate wasn’t a great artist, either, and she was doing okay with her self-portrait.
And Lily was almost finished. Her self-portrait looked a lot more like Mindy than herself. Sophie wasn’t surprised.
Still, that was better than nothing at all. Nothing at all was what Sophie had.
She tried again. And again. But after twenty minutes, all she had was a paper full of gray smudges. And a lapful of eraser dust.
For the first time ever in art class, Sophie was not having fun.
“Sophie, how are you doing?” Ms. Bart asked as she walked up. She knelt down and looked at Sophie’s blank paper, then at Sophie. “What’s up?”
“I can’t do it,” Sophie said glumly. “I mean, I know what I should look like. But when I try to draw it, it comes out wrong.”
Ms. Bart put her hand on Sophie’s shoulder. “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” she said.
“But if it doesn’t look just like me, what’s the point?” Sophie asked.
Ms. Bart smiled. “Come here. Let me show you something.”
She stood up and Sophie followed her to a bulletin board covered with art. Some looked like a real artist had made it. And some did not.
Ms. Bart pointed to a painting of a man. He had one big black eye and one small one. And a very giant nose. “This is a self-portrait by Pablo Picasso — one of the greatest artists in the world,” she said.
Then she pointed to another. “And this is by the artist Marc Chagall.” It showed an artist painting in a bow tie. His skin was blue. And his hair was green. But those were not the strangest things in the picture.
“He has a lot of fingers!” Sophie told Ms. Bart.
The art teacher grinned. “Really, he had just five on each hand, like you and me. But he chose to paint more”
He chose to? Really?
“You don’t think he lost count? Or messed up?” Sophie asked.
Ms. Bart laughed. “Maybe, Sophie. But that’s what I mean. These artists didn’t care if their paintings looked exactly like them. The paintings showed how they felt. In here.” She pointed to her smock, just above her heart. “You can always take a picture of the outside with a camera. But a drawing can show what’s inside. Don’t you think that’s the best part?”
Yeah, maybe. (Unless you were Mindy VonBoffmann. Her outsides were much better than her insides, in Sophie’s opinion.)
But Sophie didn’t see how this solved her problem at all. “So how do I show what’s inside?” she asked Ms. Bart. “I can see the outside, and I can’t even draw that!”
Ms. Bart squeezed her shoulder. “It’ll come. Just relax.”
Sophie sighed and looked back at the portraits on the wall. Then she noticed another one. It had every color of the rainbow in it. It was hard to tell exactly what the person looked like. But Sophie could see that she had long hair, and she was happy, and it would be easy to be her friend.