“Nobody takes you seriously, either, do they, Mr. Guitar Man?” Chester whispered.
The guitar man turned his head ever so slightly, looked right back at Chester, and winked. Later, when he thought about it, Chester was at least half sure he had imagined the wink. But in that moment there was not a doubt in his mind: the shabby blue guitar man had peered from the painting, looked him right in the eyes, and winked.
And just like that, Chester stopped feeling sorry for himself and had the best idea of his life. “Funding for all extracurriculars is being revoked,” Principal Van Vreeland had pronounced, pounding on the top of her lectern.
But “funding revoked” is not the same thing as “canceled!” Not the same thing at all!
The good idea sprang into Chester’s head with no details, with all the fine points still to be worked out. It was really just a big warm fuzzy mass of good idea. But for Chester, who a minute ago was ready to run home and hide under his bed for a month, that was more than enough. He sat up straight, pointed a finger at the slide, and grinned.
“Nice work, Mr. Guitar Man,” he said, and everyone in the room looked at him like he was some sort of lunatic.
Except Ms. Pinn-Darvish. As she clicked the slide from the Blue Period Picasso to a lovely pink-washed Degas ballerina, the black-haired art teacher contemplated Chester Hu with open admiration.
Clearly, Chester was communing with the art.
Chapter 17
Spleen
On Tuesday morning, Bethesda woke up crazy early and couldn’t fall back asleep. She lay in bed squeezing her favorite teddy bear, Ted-Wo (short for the Teddy Bear Who Replaced the One Whose Head Fell Off in the Washing Machine). Every birthday for the last six birthdays, she had declared herself to be too old for Ted-Wo, given him one last kiss, and stashed him in the bottom drawer of her dresser. But somehow or other, he always made it out of the dresser and back into her bed.
“Well, Ted-Wo,” Bethesda said in a hushed, early-morning voice. “Who do you think stole that trophy?” Ted-Wo was silent on the subject, looking back at her blankly through his one remaining eye. She patted his scraggly fur. “Thanks anyway, pal.”
Bethesda gave up on sleep and headed downstairs to make a waffle. Waiting for the toaster oven to bing, she thought about Tenny’s sudden reappearance, thought about Pamela’s little performance in Spanish class, thought about Reenie Maslow and the friendship between them that should have been, but wasn’t.
And then she started thinking, for some reason, about Assistant Principal Jasper Ferrars. “One person has the key, and one person grants access to this building after four o’clock,” Principal Van Vreeland had said at the assembly. “And that’s this person right here.” Mr. Ferrars had gulped and looked nervous, staring down at those overly shined black shoes of his.
Clearly he was scared of Principal Van Vreeland—but was he just scared of her like always, or was he extra-scared for some reason? Bethesda buttered her waffle thoughtfully, staring out the window as the sun daubed the backyard in gold and green.
“Tenny? You getting ready up there?”
“Uh—yeah. Totally.”
Tenny Boyer was thinking about how to get out of school today. He lay perfectly still, staring at his ceiling, at the spot where three years ago he had written the words zeppelin rules with a glow-in-the-dark highlighter pen.
Yeah, it was cool to see Bethesda again, and even a couple of the other kids. And sure, this mystery thing was kind of a trip. But overall?
“Tenny! Five minutes!”
“Okay, Dad.”
Tenny got out of bed slowly, one foot at a time, and began to dig for something wearable in the crumpled heap of semiclean clothes in the corner of the room.
It wasn’t like St. Francis Xavier Young Men’s Education and Socialization Academy had been some kind of DisneyWorld. The hallways were always perfectly, scarily clean. The other boys did nothing but work, and half of them had crew cuts. There was this insanely mean math teacher named Father Josef, who in the first week of school gave a kid detention for sneezing. And yet now, as he tugged an R.E.M. concert T-shirt over his unbrushed hair, Tenny would have given anything to go back in time, to three weeks ago; to be, at this very moment, struggling into his St. Francis–mandated striped tie and navy blazer.
Tenny stood at his door and tried to make his voice as thick and wheezy as possible. “Hey, uh, Dad? I’m not feeling—ahem—not feeling so hot.”
His father didn’t even bother coming up, just yelled from the foot of the stairs. “Oh, yeah? What’s the problem?”
“Uh…” What was a body part that might get messed up in a serious, but impossible-to-detect way? “I think it’s my spleen.”
There was a split-second pause, and then he heard his father walking from the foot of the stairs back to the kitchen.
“Get dressed, Tenny.”
In Mr. Darlington’s class that day, the eighth graders were divided into small groups to start their weather-event projects. Usually Bethesda had no trouble finding partners for group work. Just two weeks ago, everyone had wanted to team up with her for the grammar game-show project in Dr. Capshaw’s class (“Who Wants to Be an Adverb?”). But today, Suzie and Hayley formed a group with Bessie; Pamela and Natasha offered their last spot to Reenie Maslow, of all people, and Bethesda ended up being one of the only two not picked, paired up by default with the hardworking, studious Victor Glebe.
While they moved their desks around to start working on the project, Bethesda talked to herself.
“He said, ‘I don’t have a key, of course.’”
“Who?” said Victor.
“But why? Why did he say ‘of course’? Why would I think he does have a key?” she muttered, glancing at Mr. Darlington as he wandered about the room.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Victor buried his face in their Earth Sciences textbook, carefully copying out relevant statistics. “‘Flash floods occur in a timescale of less than six hours.’ ‘A flash flood is defined as twenty or more inches of rain falling in under an hour.’”
Bethesda nodded, not really listening. And then, somewhere between “worst in areas of arid soil” and “leading cause of deaths associated with thunderstorms,” she cracked Mr. Ferrars’s secret.
The flyer had said he was appearing in The Mikado all next week. With performances at four and seven. Which meant…
“Of course! That’s it! Perfect!”
Victor Glebe stopped reading and looked at her expressionlessly. “Why would you characterize the deaths of four hundred and sixty-four people in Lisbon, Portugal, in the year 1967 as ‘perfect’?”
“Um… it’s sort of hard to explain.”
Victor frowned and lowered his textbook. “Bethesda…”
“Sorry, sorry,” she said. The last thing Bethesda ever wanted to be was the weak link on a group project! “It’s just—”
“I know. The mystery. Which I am sure you will solve,” Victor gestured impatiently around the class, at the roomful of people all kind-of-mad at Bethesda. “And save the day for us all.”
“Aw. Thanks, Victor.”
He nodded, once. “Now let’s talk floods.”
“Everyone? Today we’re welcoming a new student—oh, no, sorry, an old student, back again. Heya, Tenny.”