“Hey, um, Natasha?” Bethesda asked softly. “Are you doing okay?”
Natasha shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know.”
A leaf drifted down from the oak tree and settled in Natasha’s hair, but she didn’t seem to notice. Bethesda reached over and brushed it away.
“Is this”—Bethesda leaned forward slightly—“about Todd?”
There was a pause before Natasha replied—and it’s a funny thing about that particular pause. If you had asked Bethesda Fielding if she was asking Natasha about Todd as part of her duties as a semi-official private investigator, or just to be a nice person, she would have selected option B. She was friends with Natasha (well, sort of friends), and she was just being a nice person. The girl was obviously a little out of sorts, and it had been pretty clear for the last couple days—couple weeks, now that Bethesda thought about it—that there was something weird going on between her and her old friend Todd.
So she was asking to be nice. But all the same, Bethesda’s foot—which often had better instincts than she did—was tapping a rapid, enthusiastic bippity-bop against the metal base of the picnic table. Her foot in its Chuck Taylor sneaker clearly thought that the innocent, friendly question she’d put to Natasha was relevant to her ongoing investigation.
It didn’t matter, because Natasha didn’t answer. She was distracted by a bird.
It was the blue-and-green swallow, hopping in a crook of the fat old oak tree that oversaw the outdoor seating area. As Bethesda watched, Natasha’s gaze drifted up to where the bird nestled in its branch, and her face glowed with tenderness. Then she waved at the bird, almost as if they were old friends.
“Hey, buddy,” said Natasha to the bird, in such a sweet and simple way that Bethesda said it too. “Hey, buddy.”
The bird tilted its tiny head and chittered politely to Natasha and Bethesda in reply. Then the five-minute bell rang, and all three of them went on their way.
There was, alas, no time left for mystery solving that day. Bethesda had been a total slacker on the weather-phenomenon project for Mr. Darlington’s class, and all of a sudden it was due tomorrow. Victor Glebe, sweetly, acted like he was the one who’d been a jerk—he told her he’d finish the diorama, and if she’d just come up with something for the in-class presentation, they’d be even steven. Bethesda thanked him copiously, and put aside her investigation that night to concentrate on a Flash Flood Fact Wheel of Fun (“Take a Turn! Spin the Wheel! Learn About Sudden and Rapid Torrents of Rain or River Water!”) And their presentation in Science the next day ended up totally great, with Mr. Darlington clapping vigorously for their efforts—as he did for Natasha, Pamela, and Reenie’s group, who gave an emotional description of how windstorms affect migrating falcons; and for Todd and Tucker, who performed a rap Todd had written about a baby eagle dying in a mudslide.
Man, Bethesda thought, what is it with birds around here lately?
Chapter 32
It’s in the Bag
That night, in her unglamorous high-rise condomin-ium apartment, clad in her favorite fuzzy slippers and sipping tea from her favorite mug, Ida Finkleman was having trouble getting her work done. Staring at her from her dining-room table was the score of the West Side Story overture, which her sixth graders would somehow need to master in time for the winter concert. And those quiz questions—there remained a mountain of quiz questions to write.
But instead of doing any of this, Ms. Finkleman booted up her laptop and checked her email. Impatiently she scanned her inbox: an email from her mother about her plans for Thanksgiving; one from her sister Clementine recommending a Tom Waits album, and asking if there was something by Brahms she could recommend in turn.
Nothing from Mr. Ivan Piccolini-Provokovsky of St. Louis, Missouri.
She quickly answered her emails (“still not sure” to her mother, “violin concerto in D” to her sister), stirred a half teaspoonful of sugar into her mug of tea, and picked up her pen to write some quiz questions.
She teased herself for being so disappointed. It had only been a week, after all.
On the other hand, time was running out fast. It was now Wednesday night, and the children were meant to leave for their trip bright and early on Monday morning. Ms. Finkleman turned back to her laptop and typed in the website where she knew she would find the “Save Taproot Valley” video. She watched it and found it to be completely delightful, just as she had the last six times she’d watched it. She sang along with the chorus, clapped for the big dance sections, and chortled merrily when the bear fell down the stairs.
As she was watching, Ms. Finkleman scrolled down to see how the video was doing.
“Two hundred and twelve page views? That’s it?!”
It was beyond Ms. Finkleman’s understanding how Chester’s comic masterpiece could be faring so poorly in the great viewing marketplace of the internet, especially when compared with all the clichéd videos of gurgling babies and kittens behaving in an un-kittenlike manner. “Okay, so the cat can drive a riding lawnmower,” Ms. Finkleman protested to the empty room. “That deserves 450,000 page views?”
The video ended. She really ought to get to work preparing those quizzes. Instead she clicked back over to her email and hit Compose. Surely it couldn’t hurt to follow up.
“Two-hundred and thirteen page views? That’s it?”
Chester was devastated. He clicked Refresh and groaned. After being online for forty-five and a half hours (not that he was counting or anything), “Save Taproot Valley” had been viewed 213 times, and raised a grand total of $316, twenty bucks of which Chester had contributed himself.
“It’s so good, though!” Chester wailed, holding his head between his hands. “It’s so funny!”
Didn’t the universe recognize a brilliant piece of video art when it saw one? If an eighth-grade boy in a bear costume tumbling down a flight of stairs doesn’t deserve overnight-internet-sensation status, what does?
“Chester! Dinner!”
Chester was at his mom’s that week, and normally he liked to listen to her stories about her workday, because his mom was a trauma surgeon, and a lot of her stories were really gross. But today he only pretended to listen, feigning interest in the gory details of a tibia repair while he did math in his head: 316 dollars, divided by 45.5 hours, is right around 7 dollars an hour. Okay, so 7 an hour, times 24 hours in a day…
Oh crud, thought Chester, coughing on a mouthful of beef. Crud!
“Chester? Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
“Are you sure?” His mom looked a little disappointed, as if she had really been hoping to perform the Heimlich maneuver.
At this rate it would take them about seven hundred hours to raise the money. That was like a month—and they had five days until Monday morning, when the buses were supposed to pull up in the horseshoe driveway and take them to Taproot Valley. After dinner, Chester retreated back to his room and hit Refresh. Two more people had watched the movie, and neither had donated anything. One was his Cousin Ilene, who wrote “Great job!” in the comments section; whoever the other person was, they commented that a chicken costume would have been funnier.