Deadwood (17 page)

Back up in her third-floor room, Hannah read the messages—three of them lined up.

S
OMETHING
TO
TELL
U
—
CALL
ME

I
TS
A
SURPRISE—
AJ
WILL
LIKE
IT
2
—CALL
ME

M
AB
YOU
WONT
LIKE
IT—CALL
ME

At first the string of texts annoyed Hannah. As far as Waverly knew, she wouldn't even get them. Hannah guessed sending messages was Waverly's way of thinking something out.

Hannah texted back. W
HAT
ARE
U
TALKING
ABOUT?

Her cell phone rang immediately.

“Hannah?” Waverly's voice sounded odd.

“That's me.”

“I thought your phone was disconnected.”

“Then why were you sending messages?”

“Habit, I guess.” She paused.

“So?” Hannah asked, exasperated. “You just sent me three messages and called. Is there something you want to tell me?”

“Noooo,” she said. “Well, yes, but Libby said to keep it a surprise. We picked a new community history project.”

“Really? Isn't it kind of late for that?”

“Maybe, but Libby's parents helped us. Brynwood Park Mall just got condemned. Can you believe it? Some kind of structural damage from a sinkhole, or something—so we figured, what's the point? We're going to unveil our new project at the game tomorrow. You'll like it—it's better than the history of the mall.”

“Hopefully you'll get luckier than Martin and me. Did you hear that Jake Laughlin wants to chop the Spirit Tree down?”

Waverly didn't answer right away. “I heard something.”

“Ugh. I'd better get back to work.”

Once Hannah had knocked off her math homework, she paged through the Spirit Tree notebook. She was amazed how often Jake's name came up, now that she was looking for him.

Jake the Snake

I love Jake

JL
+
MS

Jake's wasn't the only name—Hannah was surprised how willing vandals were to leave their signatures. Lucky for them that nobody had been trying to track them down until now.

Mark Caputo is a fox

Diane + Mike

Margie Riley is EZ

Saligia rules

The stupidity hurt Hannah's head. She picked up Dr. Wiggins's yearbook from the stack of books on her desk. It looked like it was a hundred years old. She remembered in a flash that her mom had told her that Mr. Richardson had just celebrated his centennial birthday. And then the curse had drained his life force—she was sure of it. Maybe he hadn't had much life left, but every last bit was gone now. If she and Martin couldn't heal the tree, someone else would be next. Mrs. Quillen—or anyone, really. Her mom. No one was safe.

She shuddered and cracked open the book, turning to the four-page spread devoted to the football team and its glorious championship—the golden era, before curses. Before Jake stole everything. And there he was. Despite the shoulder pads, he looked slimmer, his jawline chiseled. He had tucked his helmet under his arm and thrown his big head back, laughing. In black and white, his hair appeared dark and thick, although Hannah guessed it was even redder than it was now, when the white hairs at the temples diluted the color to rusty peach.

She picked up her phone to check the time—she didn't have time to read the whole article, even if she had wanted to read about the football heroics of her number-one enemy. The thing was, in the old pictures, he didn't look evil. He didn't even look like the bloated, pompous bully who bossed Nick and A.J. around. Someone who stole life—that was the same as being a murderer. Back then, he looked like he'd be one of their friends. Maybe even one of
her
friends—one of the boys she'd kick a soccer ball around with. Or used to, before she started spending so much time with Martin and the tree.

She'd even been neglecting Waverly. Hannah realized how glad she was to be working with Martin—they were both excited about the tree. When she was with Waverly, one of them always had to convince the other to take part in anything, whether soccer or the remedial course in Barbies Waverly had given her back in second grade.

Hannah flipped to her text messages—nothing new, thank goodness. Waverly had listened. Then Hannah read the tree's old text message again.

H
URRY
. T
IME
IS
RUNNING
OUT
.

She had known the message was from the tree from the beginning. The phone didn't list a number, but the words came from somewhere. She hit reply, then typed.

H
ANG
ON
. W
E
WON'T
LET
YOU
DOWN
. W
E'LL
STOP
THIS
.

She waited for an answer, but the phone was quiet. Then a noise sounded in the wall behind her head.

Scritch scratch. Scritch scratch. Scritch scratch
. The hemlock branches scraped the house, despite the windless night. There was her answer.

The Spirit Tree had heard her.

25

Libby's Surprise

M
artin sat stonily while Aunt Michelle ranted. He was inconsiderate. He looked like some kind of low-class drug addict in his raggedy black T-shirt. He didn't know how to appreciate that Aunt Michelle was doing something nice for him far beyond the call of duty. He was just like his mother. Worse—like his deadbeat father. He would never learn to be successful until he understood how to treat a mentor.

The lecture began as soon as he opened the car's front door and squeezed onto the four inches of seat not occupied by Aunt Michelle's giant handbag, laptop case, and that stupid striped tote filled with designer garden tools. Martin rolled his eyes at the color-matched handles, then noticed some bark stuck in the blade of a pink electric saw, no bigger than the electric knife Abuelita had used to carve roast pork a million years ago. In fact, most of the tools looked like they'd actually been used.
Weird
, he thought. Suddenly Aunt Michelle was out pruning her own shrubs and pulling weeds. She usually never lifted a finger around the yard except to call the landscapers.

Aunt Michelle's complaints continued all through the drive, and ended only when he shut the door mid-nag when they arrived at the Greater Brynwood Community Center.

He heard Ms. Stemmler's throaty voice echoing through the open windows. Score! The meeting had already begun—he'd missed part of it. Plus, he didn't have to chat up Libby one on one while they waited for class to start. She was bad enough during school, but at Junior JET she seemed to try to sound as much like a junior executive as possible. That is, boring.

“Mr. Cruz,” Ms. Stemmler said, when he peeked around the door, “how shrewd of you to make a dramatic entrance.” Every eye drilled into him. “Often the most powerful people arrive last for any meeting. Let the little people wait.” Ms. Stemmler pleated the creases around her mouth in a tight-lipped smile. “Have a seat while I continue my lecture on
Avaritia.”

Martin slipped into the empty seat next to Libby, grateful that he didn't have to search around for a seat.

“
Avaritia
is a Latin word often translated as greed. We don't like that word quite as much, although Gordon Gekko popularized it for a while.” Ms. Stemmler sniggered. No one picked up the reference to the movie
Wall Street
, so she said, “Greed is good.” Libby wrote the three words down. “Junior Junior Executives don't believe that.” Libby crossed the line out. “We just believe that greed can motivate us to acquire things that are good.”

Martin looked around—every boy was wearing a suit, a sport coat, or at least a blue dress shirt. The girls looked like TV reporters. And they seemed to be paying attention to this crap. Were they already brainwashed?

“But let's not call it greed,” Ms. Stemmler continued. “We prefer the English cognate—avarice. It sounds more refined. Or call it avidity. Whatever you call it, you will never succeed unless you want more than you have. But if you want more, you will get it. All you need to do is ask, and the universe will answer.”

So, if Martin asked never to attend another one of these meetings, would the universe convince Aunt Michelle? Because he sure didn't want to be a Junior Junior Executive. He'd rather be a Junior Girl Scout. Join the Junior League. Attend a Junior Jamboree. Eat a Coffeecake Junior. Freshen up with a Junior Mint.

Martin had blocked out the lecture pretty well at this point. Ms. Stemmler might have called it daydreaming, but he preferred to think of it as an impenetrable Marlician dissociative mind shield. Thus, Martin was surprised when the hour (minus the first ten minutes) ended with a screech of chairs on the speckled tiles as all the blue suits stood up. Libby leaned in toward him.

Uh-oh
, he thought.
Here comes the small talk
.

“I have a surprise for you,” she said, her dark eyes gleaming.

He was actually surprised. “For me?”

“Yes, it's about that old Spirit Tree thing you've been working on.”

“What about it?”

“I can't tell you. It would ruin the surprise. But Waverly and I have a new community history project.” She paused, as if Martin was supposed to beg her to tell him what it was. When he didn't, she said, “And we're going to reveal it at the big game on Saturday.”

Martin's brief feeling of flattery dissolved into dread. “What game?”

She tossed her black hair and laughed as if he were the cutest thing. “I keep forgetting you're new in town. It feels like I've known you forever.”

“So, what game?”

“Lower Brynwood against Radnor. Aren't you going to the football game with Hannah?”

Martin had a thousand more questions for her, but Aunt Michelle appeared in the doorway, wearing an icy smile. She'd drag him out by his ear if he didn't leave immediately. Making the little people wait was one thing, but he didn't dare try it on Aunt Michelle.

Tonight, Junior JET; this weekend, high-school football. He'd never considered going to a game before, but now he wouldn't miss it.

On Friday Mr. Michaelson gave the class a free period to work as teams on the community history project, and Martin couldn't wait to tell Hannah about Libby's so-called surprise.

“I know all about it,” she said, glancing over at Libby and Waverly, who were absorbed in conversation.

“Then what's the surprise?” Martin asked.

“I don't know that part. Just that there is a surprise.”

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Waverly said we'd like it.”

Waverly and Libby giggled when they caught him looking at them. Martin was not reassured. “How would Waverly know what I like?”

“She knows me,” Hannah said, then chewed the corner of her mouth.

“Does she? You told her how we talk to magical trees and try to break curses?”

“When you put it that way, it sounds silly,” she said. “No one normal believes in magic.”

“Not even you?”

“I don't need to. Because it's not magic—it's science.” Hannah pulled out her notebook and flipped to the back section. “While you were playing your dragon computer games and hanging with Libby, I was doing research. Look.”

Martin read the neat scientific timeline that Hannah had printed. He snorted. “Where did you get all this? Don't tell me it was the Internet.”

Hannah grabbed the notebook back. “Some of it was. That doesn't mean it's not true.”

“You might as well admit that it's magic. Jenna called it pseudoscience—a bunch of crackpots talking to plants. Otherwise these scientists would be in our textbooks.”

“Charles Darwin is. See? His last book was about how plants communicate. He wasn't a crackpot.”

Martin looked at the timeline—
The Power of Movement in Plants
. “Never heard of it. Probably everyone thought he went senile in his old age. Man descended from monkeys—sure, makes sense. But plants that move? Got to be soft in the head.”
Like us
, he thought. “And what about these other guys?”

“Well, not all of their experiments were repeated successfully,” Hannah said, flipping back to the page with the transcribed carvings. “Science
is
supposed to be repeatable.”

“Aha.” Martin couldn't help teasing her.

“But maybe the other scientists didn't do it right. Maybe to communicate with a plant, you need very special conditions—an old tree, the right thunderstorm.”