Minerva Clark Gets a Clue (10 page)

I sighed. I saw the lifeguards retake their seats and put their whistles in their mouths, which meant they were about to turn the wave machine back on. I stood up. I wanted to check out an inner tube before they were all gone. There was already a long line in front of the equipment booth. Which to tell the truth I did not mind standing in. Suddenly, there was so much to think about. Was Jordan really going to lose the Hightower Scholarship because of this mix-up, or was Julia just “embellishing”—the word Mark Clark said meant dressing up the truth to the point where it was a lie? And what about poor Dwight? And now, poor Clyde Bishop, with his wilted lily hand, sitting in jail for Dwight's murder? And wasn't it all somehow related? I couldn't help thinking it was. But how?

I knew one thing for sure: If Jordan lost the Hightower
she was sunk. She'd be stuck here in Portland doing I don't know what. All college was expensive these days. Even I knew that.

“What about you, Minerva?” said Julia.

“What about me, what?” I said.

“What's the first thing you'd change about yourself?”

“Uh …” My mind went blank. “I don't know.”

“If I was Minerva, I'd say my legs. How can they be both fat and skinny at the same time?” Hannah laughed.

“Or my arms. They're kind of gorillalike. My knuckles practically drag on the ground, have you noticed?” said Julia.

“I think I'd change my hair. It's really … thick … but kind of in a witchy way,” said Hannah, pulling her beautiful satiny hair up and out to the sides of her head.

“What about those little blackheads on the end of her nose?” said Julia.

“And what about the nose itself?” said Hannah. “What about the nostrils?”

Now they were just picking anything. I could see that. It had become a game on top of the original game: Pick on Minerva Clark. Normally, I would have just sucked it up. But I could tell that what used to be considered normal in my life had changed.

“What does this do for you, saying stuff like that? Make you feel more hot and gorgeous? It's pathetic. All
it does is shout out loud and clear how insecure you are.”

Once again, Hannah giggled for no reason. Julia, who was about three degrees less cruel than Hannah, busied herself with taking the plastic lid off her Pepsi and poking at the ice with her straw.

I stood up and bent over to search my jeans pocket for money for the inner tube. It must have been then that Hannah and Julia figured out that my red Speedo didn't really fit me, that it was too long. I heard them whispering behind me, but I just ignored it. What could I do?

I went to stand in the line in front of the equipment room. The line was long, snaking all the way past the lap pool. My face felt hot. I hated it when Hannah and Julia made fun of me, and they'd been doing it in their sneaky awful way since we were in first grade and I was about eight feet taller than everyone else. But underneath my hurt feelings was that weird calm feeling.

If Mark Clark were there, he would try to tell me that Hannah and Julia were just jealous, but they weren't. They were both hot and they knew it. But maybe they were jealous of something else: that I didn't care about their game anymore.

I finally reached the head of the line and laid my dollar on the counter outside the equipment room.

“Sorry, we're all out,” said the inner tube giver-outer.
He turned sideways a little so I could see there was nothing left in the equipment room but a pile of broken lane markers and a few deflated tubes. At first I thought he was at least Morgan's age, because he was at least as tall as Morgan, but I could tell he didn't shave. He had that crunchy green-brown hair that swimmers get from too much chlorine and eyes as blue as a mountain lake. His name tag said Kevin.

“Oh no!” I said. No inner tubes? I wanted so badly to float around in the wave pool, to have an excuse not to talk to Hannah and Julia.

He looked down at me, his thick eyebrows pressed together. “Maybe there's one back here that's not so flat that I can pump up.”

“I don't mean to sound like some freak,” I said. “I was just counting on an inner tube. Floating around helps me think and stuff, you know?”

“You have stuff to think about, do you?” Kevin had picked up one of the deflated black tubes and was feeling around the edge to see how bad the damage was.

“Yeah, actually. I do.”

Kevin dropped the inner tube and looked at me. I looked straight into those mountain-lake blue eyes. He smiled right at me. My brothers smile right at me all the time, but it wasn't like this. Kevin didn't have braces, but he had a retainer.

As if from far away, a cell phone rang. Kevin reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out his phone. I noticed there were red flames on the faceplate. This could have been my cue to wander off, but I stood there like a meathead.

“Yep … got it … yep … you got it …” He looked at me and rolled his eyes. “You'll be here at six o'clock. All right. Good luck in your fight against evil, Toxic Avenger.” He snapped his phone shut. “It was my mom,” he said, although he didn't have to.

“Your mom fights evil?” I asked, laughing.

“She thinks she does. She works at U.S. Bank in the fraud division.”

I must have looked blank.

“You know,” he continued, “catching people stealing debit cards and stuff.”

“Like identity theft and stuff?”

“Yeah, exactly like that.” Kevin grinned, surprised I knew what he was talking about. We looked at each other until I felt the old campfire start to burn in my cheeks. I guess that was one thing that hadn't changed: the ability to get embarrassed when a hot boy looked me straight in the eye.

“It's okay about the inner tube,” I said.

“If someone turns one in early, I'll set it aside for ya.”

“Okay. Cool.”

Suddenly, Hannah and Julia were standing on either side of me. It was so fun talking to Kevin I hadn't been paying attention. I was surprised when Hannah cocked her head to one side and purred, “Hey, Kevin.”

“We thought your name was Devon!” said Julia.

“I did
not
,” said Hannah.

“She wants to know why you haven't called her,” said Julia.

“Whatever,” said Hannah. I could tell she was embarrassed. Hannah made a face at Julia, and I thought it was because she wanted Julia to shut up.

I looked at Kevin and he shrugged. It dawned on me then—d'oh!—that Kevin,
my
Kevin, was Hannah's Devon-or-Evan. He'd obviously been moved from the snack counter to the equipment room.

“Come on, Min, we want to apologize for making you feel bad,” said Hannah, her hand on my arm, guiding me away from Kevin and the equipment booth, and back past the pool deck to our table. I turned back to look at Kevin, but he was already talking to the kid who'd been in line behind me.

“We really are sorry,” said Julia.

About halfway back to the table Julia suddenly dropped her arm around my shoulder and Hannah slipped her arm around my waist, just above my hip. They shoved me between them a little, almost like they
wanted to play London Bridge and they were doing the “take the key and lock her up” part.

It happened in a heartbeat: Julia tugged me back against Hannah's arm, and I felt them both grab the too loose sides of my too long Speedo, then yank up as hard as they could.

I'd been ambushed and wedgied. And this was not just any wedgie, but the biggest wedgie in the history of the water park. No little kid shooting off the slide and hitting the water butt first had ever experienced a wedgie as big as this one. It was my extra long, too loose Speedo, all that extra fabric that allowed for maximum wedgification. I have brothers. I grew up giving and getting wedgies. This one was massive, a 10.0 on the wedgie scale.

I felt a sudden, unmistakable chill on my bare buns. I reached back and felt skin, up to my armpits, I swear. I could not believe I was able to walk. I could not believe Hannah and Julia had not completely cut me in half. The campfire was roaring in my cheeks. I thought of my white butt, with its birthmark that looks like Cuba, out there for everyone to see. I didn't dare turn around to see if Kevin was watching. I prayed to the guardian angel of seventh-grade girls that he was still talking to that kid. What could I do but try to put things right the best I could? I reached back with the pointer fingers of each
hand and pulled the leg holes of my bathing suit back to where they should be.

Hannah and Julia had scampered madly back to the table. They were screeching and sobbing, grabbing their stomachs and making a big stupid show of practically falling out of their chairs.

“It was a joke!” said Julia when I reached the table.

Hannah opened her mouth, but before she could tell me not to get mad, or whatever she was about to say to convince me that she was just a nice, fun girl who liked a good laugh, her cell phone rang from inside her Sponge Bob backpack.

I recognized the ring. It was the same ring Jordan's phone had, the same ring I'd been anxious to stop the day I answered it while she was outside being arrested.

Hannah answered it and her face went through a few expressions in about two seconds: dimply happy to eyebrows raised in surprise to frowny mad. She thrust the phone at me.

“It's for you.”

I sat back down. “Hello?”

“You need new friends.” The voice was familiar. I looked over at the equipment booth and saw Kevin on his cell phone. He pointed at me and grinned.

“He's right,” I said to no one in particular.

Then I did something that cheered me right up: I
snapped Hannah's phone shut, drew my arm back. As I said, I have brothers. I can throw farther than any girl I know. I lobbed her metallic-pink phone high over the heads of all the screaming kids and parents splashing around. It briefly caught the light streaming in through the windows before plunging into the deep end of the lap pool.

By the time Hannah's mom picked us up a few hours later, it was pouring. She was the quietest mom of all the moms I knew, since she didn't speak the best English. It was raining so hard that Hannah's mom had to have the wipers on extra high.
Thwap! Thwap! Thwap!
It was so irritating. The whole day had turned out irritating, except for how nice Kevin was to me.

Hannah and Julia were not my best friends. Usually, when we were driven somewhere we all smooshed together in the backseat and made the same old jokes about being chauffeured around. Today Hannah and Julia got in the backseat and made me sit in the front. I probably had it coming for throwing Hannah's cell phone in the pool. I was surprised how
not
in trouble I got. Hannah merely shrieked, “That is so uncool.” She even had to dive down to the bottom and get it herself. Ha!

Thwap, thwap, thwap
. The wipers were loud enough
to hide their whispers. It didn't bother me much. They could whisper all they wanted, but nothing would take away that perfect moment when Kevin called Hannah's number and asked for
me
.

Still, something bothered me about Kevin's phone call. There was a silver of time after he spoke and before I recognized his voice when I had gotten a fizz of fear. Fear of what? Then, suddenly, a few things occurred to me all at once, like the way you can't find your favorite jeans, hoodies, and toe socks, and it turns out they've all been together in the clothes dryer.

I cracked my knuckles madly, which I knew was not good for the health of my joints, as Mark Clark told me whenever he caught me doing it. The call reminded me of answering the phone in Jordan's car. It reminded me of talking to Quills's friend Toc. I remembered how angry he sounded. And Toc was a sneaky guy. Look at the scam he showed Reggie and me at Tilt, how you could trick the change machine into thinking a Xeroxed five-dollar bill was a real five-dollar bill. That was sort of like identity theft. The same person who'd think of tricking a change machine might also think of tricking a cop by giving him someone else's name. But what did Dwight have to do with it? Maybe he found out that Toc had given the cops Jordan's name? But was that worth killing somebody over? Maybe Dwight was going to turn
Toc in, and Toc was just going to talk to him and didn't mean to kill him.

There were too many questions.

Then I thought of Kevin and his nice blue eyes and shiny swimmer's hair and I thought maybe Toc thought Jordan was hot. Maybe he wanted to hook up with her. Maybe he knew that if he got her in trouble with the law, she'd lose the Hightower and she'd be forced to stay in Portland. Maybe he didn't want her to leave.

My poor joints. I did another round of mad knuckle cracking. I remembered that it was Saturday evening, the night the Humongous Bag of Cashews liked to practice, and they were practicing in our basement. Toc was probably already at Casa Clark, plugging in his guitar and testing his amp. Little did he know he had some explaining to do.

HANNAH'S MOM PULLED UP TO CASA
Clark and I got out and thanked her for the ride. Hannah and Julia waved from the backseat and said, “See you at school,” just as if nothing had happened. Maybe they were afraid if they complained about the phone, I'd bust them about giving me a massive wedgie.

Inside, I went straight to the living room and scooped Jupiter up from his hammock inside his cage. I could hear the TV on upstairs. I took the steps two at a time up to the TV room, where Morgan and Mark Clark were sitting on the Cat Pee Couch. Before we got Jupiter we had a fat tabby named Elroy who'd stroll past your legs and spray them, so that you'd leap up, disgusted, and he could steal the warm spot where you'd been sitting.

Morgan and Mark Clark were watching
The Matrix
and drinking Mountain Dew. When no one can think of anything else to do in this house, they watch
The Matrix
and drink Mountain Dew. A cookie sheet piled high with nachos sat on the coffee table. They would never be able to get away with eating nachos off a cookie sheet if Mom were still around.