He lowered his voice. “OK, I’m in the pantry,” he said. “Talk quick.”
“King did it again!” I said. “This is the third time! Now I have three weird mystery pieces of something.” I retrieved the other two from the hamper and spread them all out on my red and gray striped comforter. There was the first bent gray piece with holes in it. There was the small silver cone-shaped thing. And now there was a little black round bit that looked like a tiny fan. I described them all to Satoshi.
“I have no idea,” he said. “It’s like only having three pieces of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. How are you supposed to guess? Aw, look, we DO have linguini — I told Mom we did! She always forgets to check behind the rice.” I could hear him clattering things around in his pantry.
I wasn’t about to let him get distracted, though. “Do you think they’re David’s?” I asked. “He was really mad at me and Aidan last night. But I don’t get it; why would he have little parts like this? All he does is sleep and play video games. It’s not like these could be part of a PlayStation or anything. I’d recognize them if they were.”
“Have you tried following King?” Satoshi asked. “To see where he goes?”
I looked over at my dog. He was lying wriggled over on his back so I could rub his pale stomach. His ears were flopped over backward. He grinned at me with his pink tongue hanging out.
“He doesn’t go anywhere when I’m here,” I said. “He waits until I’m gone and then goes exploring. There’s no way to catch him in the act because he’d hear me coming.”
“Hmmm,” said Satoshi. There were more rattling and scrunching sounds coming from his end of the phone. “We have an unreasonable amount of peanut butter in here. And whoa, this can of salmon is old.”
“Satoshi, would you please focus?” I said. “I need a good —”
“AHA!” Satoshi yelped. “Flour!”
I sighed. “Wow. You have flour. I’m so happy for you.”
“No, that’s it!” Satoshi said. “That’s what you should do! Dip King’s paws in flour and then go out the door like you’re leaving for a while. When you come back, you can follow his tracks and see where he went!”
I gave King a dubious look. “Do you think that will work?”
“You could try, right?” he said. “And then just sweep it up before your mom gets home.”
It sounded better than any of the non-ideas I’d had. “OK, thanks, Satoshi,” I said. “I’ll give it a shot.”
“Let me know what happens!” he said. “But, uh, don’t call back before six. If the phone rings again, Midori and Mom and her cello teacher will all yell at me.”
I hung up and went downstairs to the kitchen. The bag of flour was already out on the counter because Giovanni was making brownies while Aidan did his homework at the kitchen table. Giovanni gave me a weird look as I poured a little bit of flour into a bowl.
“Uh,” Giovanni said. “Something I should know?”
“Just an experiment,” I said. “I’ll clean it up afterward.”
He pushed his glasses up and peered at me. “Nothing’s going to explode, right?”
“Oh, probably not,” I said, just to see the look on his face.
“An experiment?” Aidan said. “Can I help? Please, can I?”
“No,” I said. “This is a one-person experiment.” He looked down at his geography homework and kicked the table legs. “But if it works,” I added, “I’ll tell you what happens.”
He nodded, and I took the bowl of flour back upstairs.
“OK, King,” I said, lifting him onto the floor. “Now I’m going to go out for a while, so you just be good while I’m gone, OK? And don’t worry about this stuff all over your paws. Nothing to see here.” He tried to pull away as I dipped his paws in the flour, but by some miracle it didn’t spill all over the bedroom floor. When his little brown paws were coated in white, I picked up the bowl and patted his head. “’Bye, King! See you later!”
He stood there sniffing his paws with a bewildered face as I left the room. Although it made me nervous, I cracked David’s door open a few inches. The experiment would only work if King had all the same opportunities he usually did for mischief-making.
I made sure to clomp down the stairs so King would hear me leaving. “I’m going outside for a minute!” I called to Giovanni. “I’ll just be on the front lawn!”
I shut the front door behind me and then realized that I’d look pretty silly standing there with a bowl of flour if anyone I knew came by. I sat down on the steps, hid the bowl behind a potted plant, and checked my watch. I’d give King ten minutes and then go back in.
Just to be safe, I looked up and down the street, but there was no sign of David and Harper and Bowser. Maybe they’d gone to the park, like Satoshi had guessed, although they were the least parklike trio I could think of.
Across the street was a family that had just moved in a few weeks ago. They had a boy in sixth grade — I was pretty sure his name was Noah. He was out in his front yard with their little Shetland sheepdog, teaching her to jump through hoops while he held them out in front of him. Her honey-and-white fur flew as she leaped and barked, leaped and barked. She was as barky as King. When Noah saw me sitting on the steps, he waved hello and I waved back.
While I was watching, a girl with long, straight brown hair in a ponytail pulled into his driveway and dropped her bike on the grass. I think it was my baseball coach’s daughter Rory; her stepsister Cameron is in Aidan’s class. Aidan’s a little afraid of Cameron because she can throw a tantrum about the smallest things — I saw her have a screaming fit at his birthday party last year because her ice cream had melted and made her cake all soggy. The Sheltie bounced over and barked at Rory, then ran back to the hoops.
Half a minute later, another girl with reddish hair biked up with an enormous shaggy black dog loping alongside her. I knew she was Heidi Tyler, another sixth-grader. I remembered her because she’d tried to say hi to Bowser a few times, and she didn’t even seem flustered by how rude David was to her about it.
The three of them talked for a minute, and then Noah opened his front door and shouted something into the house. He came back with a silver chain leash, which he clipped onto the Sheltie. The three of them set off in the direction of the park with the girls pushing their bikes and both dogs trotting happily beside them.
Man, that guy was popular. It seemed like every time I saw him he was with a different set of friends. I didn’t know how he’d made so many friends so quickly, but I guessed from the fact that he always waved to me that he must be pretty cool.
I checked my watch. Ten minutes! Time for the moment of truth.
I ran upstairs to my room just in time to see a waving brown tail disappear under the bed. And sure enough, there were tiny white pawprints all over my floor.
“Let’s see what you got this time,” I said, crouching down to lift up my comforter. King blinked at me in surprise, like What, you’re back already? He came wriggling out to lick my nose. I lay down on my stomach and pulled out a little bundle of orange and blue wires attached to some kind of small electronic-looking green rectangle with lots of silver bits on it.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “Now this actually looks important.”
King puffed out his chest like, I know, aren’t I impressive?
I gathered the other three mystery items and carried all four of them to the door, following King’s pawprints.
They led exactly where I’d feared … straight down the hall, into David’s room.
Oh, no,” I said. “King! Now we have to go in there!”
Not only did I have to get the pieces back into David’s room without him finding out, I also had to clean up the flour tracks that King had left behind in there. Yeah, thanks, Satoshi — that was a great idea.
I grabbed a washcloth from the linen closet, got it a little bit wet, and quickly wiped up the prints outside David’s door. Then I took a deep breath and pushed the door open.
The r
oom was still a giant mess. Mom’s philosophy was, if we kept it in our rooms and she didn’t have to see it, she wouldn’t nag us about it. But I couldn’t imagine how David ever found anything in here. Clothes were piled on chairs and the bed and the desk. Books and papers and video game controllers were scattered over the floor; the game on the TV was paused in the middle of a car chase. And in the center of the room was a cleared space where something was covered with a big white sheet.
King trotted over to this immediately. He’d worn off the flour so his paws weren’t leaving tracks anymore, but I could see the prints he’d left before. He gave me a pleased expression like he was glad we were finally co-conspirators on this important mission, and then he nosed at a corner of the sheet until he could duck underneath. His tail stuck up so I could see him wriggling around under there.
“King!” I whispered. “Get back out here! You’ll get us in so much trouble!” Of course he paid no attention to me. I bent down and wiped up the flour paw prints as fast as I could. Then I hesitated. David would be so mad if he found out I’d been nosing around his room. But I had to replace the pieces, right? And it sure looked like they went under that sheet. So it was only logical for me to take a quick peek … and besides, I was absolutely dying of curiosity.
What was David hiding in here? Would this explain the red and white paint on his hands, too? It was like finding a book that everyone said was too grown-up for you, which was the kind of thing that only made me want to read it even more.
I glanced behind me, and then with a quick tug, I threw the sheet aside.
It took a minute for my brain to catch up with what my eyes were seeing.
There was an airplane sitting on David’s floor. A real, honest-to-goodness airplane, although of course it was small — about the length of Bowser, maybe — and it wasn’t totally finished. Miniature parts were scattered around it, including some that matched the ones I was holding. And it was only half painted, in careful brushstrokes of red and white with blue star decals on the wings and tail.
The box it had come in was sitting next to the plane with the instructions neatly folded on top of it. King poked his nose at one of the wings and then looked at me like, Well, I would have brought you the whole plane, but I’m afraid it doesn’t fit in my mouth. He sat down and wagged his tail. Pretty cool thing that I found, though, huh?
I gaped at the whole scene in confusion. I mean, I’d heard of model airplanes, but there was no part of my head that could put together my lazy, mean, boring brother David with something as detailed and painstaking and kind of cool as building a remote-controlled airplane.
I was so bewildered that I didn’t hear the front door … or the jingling of dog tags … or the footsteps coming up the stairs … until it was too late.
David’s door slammed open.
“What are you doing in my room?” David shouted. “I knew it! I knew you were snooping around my stuff!”
King jumped to his paws and started barking. Behind David, Bowser started barking, too, deep gruff angry barks.
“I’m not snooping!” I cried, yelling to be heard over the dogs. “I promise — I mean — I figured out that it was King who came in and took something, so I was returning it! See?” I held out the pieces of the airplane and David snatched them from my hands.
“I should have known,” he snarled. “You keep your stupid dog out of here.”
“I was just leaving!” I grabbed King before he could scoop up another airplane piece in his mouth.
“You better!” David said. “And stay out of my room from now on! You and Mr. Meanie-Weenie both!”
“Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” Bowser growled up at the dog flopped over my arm. King growled back.
David stepped aside so I could leave, but before I’d taken two steps, Harper appeared in the doorway and squeezed by him.
“It’s loud in here,” she observed. “Dogs need to chill.” She started across the room to the paused video game, her long black cardigan flapping around her jean skirt and ripped black stockings.
David gave me a serious GET OUT face and dodged toward the sheet. Too late. Harper stopped suddenly and looked down at the uncovered airplane. Her blank face twitched like she was about to express an emotion.
“Wait. That’s the big secret?” she asked him.
“It’s nothing,” David muttered.
I couldn’t help it. I paused in the doorway. This was like going behind the scenes of a horror movie and finding out the spooky killers were actually ordinary people. David had his back to me, so he didn’t notice that I was still there.
Harper crouched down and brushed the airplane’s wings with her fingertips. “You’re building an airplane,” she said slowly.
“It’s just a stupid kit,” David said, tugging on Bowser’s ears like he wanted to take the plane and throw it out the window. “Come on, let’s get back to the game.”
“My dad used to make these,” Harper said. She sat down on the floor and picked up a wheel, spinning it between her fingers. “You know, back when he wasn’t a jerk. Sometimes he let me watch.”
David rubbed his head. “Yeah,” he said. “I found this in my dad’s stuff. I think he was planning to build it with me.”
Aha! I thought. That’s why the trunk in the attic was out of place. David must have been going through Dad’s old things.
Harper looked up at him. Behind all the black makeup, her green eyes had this faraway look. “Can I help you finish it?”
“Really?” David fidgeted with his shirt. “You don’t have to. If you think it’s lame.”
“Shut up and hand me a screwdriver,” Harper said, and then she cracked the first smile I’d seen from her since sixth grade.
I hurried away as David sat down on the floor beside her. My guess was he’d be furious if he realized I’d seen that. I wondered for the first time if there was something going on with him and Harper that was more than friends hanging out. Maybe I should have thought of that sooner, but the idea of a girl actually liking David was about as strange as finding an airplane in his bedroom.
Aidan came into our room a few minutes later, while I was lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking about this secret other David I’d just discovered.
“Did you see what David and Harper are doing?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “His door is closed.” He came over and tried to pat King, but the dachshund dodged away to the other side of me. Aidan rubbed his arms and then gave me a hopeful look. “Want to play cards? Giovanni’s been teaching me snap.”
“No thanks,” I said. I checked my watch; it was after six. “I have to go call Satoshi.” I got the phone and went into the attic with King so I could talk without Aidan overhearing me. Midori picked up the phone, too, so I told her and Satoshi about the whole thing, the airplane and Harper and everything.
“Whoa,” Midori said. “Maybe that’s why David is so grumpy all the time! Maybe he’s had this unrequited love for Harper for years but he’s been too afraid to do anything about it and it’s been eating him up inside! That’s so romantic!”
Satoshi snorted. “You watch too many shows on the CW.”
“What’s unrequited?” I asked.
“You guys are hopeless,” Midori said. “Get off the phone so I can call Michelle and talk to her about it.”
“You can’t tell her!” I said. “What if it gets back to David? He might kill me!”
“Michelle isn’t Cadence Bly,” said Midori. “She can keep a secret.”
“Midori!”
“All RIGHT,” she said. “I’ll change all the names to protect the guilty. Which is you, just to be clear.”
After we got off the phone, I stayed up in the attic playing hide-and-seek with King until dinnertime. It was totally hilarious — of course he wouldn’t sit and stay, so I had to pin his leash under my crate of books to keep him in one place while I went and hid the giraffe somewhere in the attic. Then I’d let him off the leash and tell him to “
find it!” and he’d race around the attic, sniffing under furniture and digging through piles of fabric and sticking his nose behind all the trunks until he finally popped out with the giraffe in his mouth, looking like he’d just won a Nobel Prize for Finding Giraffes.
“Charlie!” Aidan called from downstairs. “Dinner’s ready!”
As I turned off my lamp, I heard the front door slam. I peeked out the window at our front lawn.
Harper and David were walking down our drive to the sidewalk together. But that wasn’t the weird part.
The weird part was … they were holding hands.
You couldn’t tell right away that David was in a better mood than usual. He wouldn’t speak to me at dinner, and when Giovanni asked him what was up, he grumbled something about how “Mr. Meanie-Weenie” was a “nosy, snooping thief,” and when Aidan politely asked for the mashed potatoes, David practically threw the bowl at him.
But a couple of times I caught David staring down at his plate with a weird almost-smile on his face. And there were a few moments when he would normally have jumped into the conversation with something really mean, but it was like he’d spaced out and forgotten his lines. He wasn’t even all that rude about asking to be excused, and the music coming from his room when I went upstairs later actually sounded like real music, not people screaming into microphones.
I finished my homework while Aidan lay on the floor drawing dinosaurs and King snoozed on my pillows. I wondered if there was any way I could get David to show me his airplane once it was finished. I had so many questions about how he’d built it! Most of all, I really, really wanted to see it fly.
“Want to see my dinosaurs?” Aidan asked as I closed my math book. “I’ve been practicing! You can actually tell this is an allosaurus now, I think.”
“Yeah, that’s great,” I said, glancing at the sheet of paper in front of him. “Don’t forget to brush your teeth before Mom comes in to say good night.” I climbed into bed and picked up The Witches from my nightstand. King scrambled up the bed and went dig, dig, dig in the covers until he’d arranged a little nest beside me. He lay down with a happy snort and rested his chin on my lap.