Dedication
For everyone who is smarter than they sound
and deeper than they look.
Contents
Dedication
Chapter One: In which the heroine (me!) practices the power of positive thinking
Chapter Two: In which I make a momentulous decision
Chapter Three: In which several important questions are answered and asked
Chapter Four: Where I keep a secret and maybe discover one, too
Chapter Five: In which our heroine (still me) remembers that most secrets are bad
Chapter Six: In which a character makes an unexpected reappearance, and our heroine is like whaa??
Chapter Number Whatever We’re Up to Now: In which Cassius makes my grandmother cry
Chapter Okay I Went Back and Counted and It’s Eight: In which our heroine experiences a memory
Chapter Nine: In which the heroine’s friends come to her aid (sort of)
Chapter Ten: In which the heroine eats some soup, which only leads to questions
Chapter Eleven: In which I realize my evil geniusness
Interlude: In which there is talking on the phone
Chapter Twelve: In which I learn to critique art stuffs
Chapter Thirteen: In which some stuff happens that I barely even understand
Chapter Fourteen: In which: bullies; ugh!
Chapter Fifteen: In which I make a mess
Chapter Whatever: In which blah, blah, blah. I can’t even think of a synopsis right now—just read it yourself, okay?
Chapter Seventeen, I Think?: In which I wonder, “Who Let in the Rain”
Chapter Eighteen: Frick
Chapter Nineteen: In which . . . enlightenmentation
Chapter Twenty: In which our heroine makes a decision
Chapter Five Thousand, Four Hundred, and Seventy-Six, or That’s What It Feels Like: In which someone goes to beat-down school
Chapter Twenty-Two: In which our heroine learns to prioritize
Chapter Twenty-Three: In which the heroine reaches for the sky, but ends up in space
Chapter Twenty-Four: In which the heroine realizes that she really doesn’t know anything at all
Chapter Twenty-Five: In which I am a SUPERSLEUTH
Chapter Twenty-Six: In which everything goes bananas
Chapter Twenty-Seven: In which: soup
Chapter Twenty-Eight: In which my dad comes clean
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic
About the Author
Books by Lisa Papademetriou
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
In which the heroine (me!) practices the power of positive thinking
I AM BEGINNING TO think that maybe I will be a philosopher when I grow up. That is what my mother always says, “Our Callie is such a philosopher,” and I am really beginning to believe her. I am always having important thoughts all of the time, and let me tell you, they can be Very Deep. Sometimes, they are so deep that I barely understand them! Like this one: a journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step, but it also ends with one.
I mean—BOOM! I just blew your mind, right? I know it doesn’t exactly make sense yet, but I think if I keep working on it, I can at least put it on a mug.
Because that is the problem with philosophizing—my father says that it does not pay very well, and I think we all know that it is very hard to make a living these days. That is why I have decided that my kind of philosophy is the kind that will make money. I will become what’s known as a guru, like Althea Orris.
Althea has a mega–bestselling book, a late-night show on the Positivity Power Network, and a YouTube channel. I love her because her philosophy is based on both positive thinking and economics. She believes in the law of inertia and in gravity and in quantum mechanics, but also the basic idea is that if you think happy thoughts, you can make happy things happen. If you have sad thoughts, sad things happen. And Althea herself is the proof of this, because she thought happy things and now she is a bestselling author and guru. That is why it is so important to think happy thoughts as much as possible. If you start to feel sad, you must SNAP OUT OF IT. RIGHT AWAY! Because bad thoughts are like poison.
Althea’s personal motto is: Keep It Happy! She sells all kinds of T-shirts and water bottles that say Keep It Happy! on them, and that is another thing that has made her superrich. I want my philosophy to be like that.
Right now, I am trying to have totally positive thoughts about the fact that I am about to spend ninety minutes in detention. It’s held in the library and we are allowed to do our homework, so it is actually quite educational and convenient. (Positive!) The Haverton library is small, but it is a very nice place and there are a lot of plants in it and a few comfortable chairs, which makes the whole place seem very homelike. (Positive!) It is my second-favorite place in the school, so that is also positive. (Positive!)
Ms. Thumb is in charge of detention because she is the librarian and detention is part of her job. I like her because she always knows what I should read and she understands that a girl likes drama when it’s romantic, but maybe not so much when it’s all about depressed people and their parents dying and whatnot. In my opinion, books and art should be mostly happy because of Keep It Happy!
When Ms. Thumb sees me, she just says, “Hello, Callie,” kind of like she’s glad to see me but knows that she should not be because I am in detention. She is young, for a librarian, because everyone knows that librarians are supposed to be older than gravel, and I know that Ms. Thumb is special because she is pretty and knows about Twitter and stuff, even though my friend Min says nobody uses that anymore, and everyone is on PicBomb.
We interrupt this fascinating bulletin to announce that a Special Guest Star has just walked in through the door!
I lift my eyebrows at Zelda Waverly, my best new friend, who just shakes her head and slips into a chair. Sometimes, I even wonder if I am telepathological, because between our two looks, I swear, we have just had this conversation:
Me: What are you doing in here? You never have detention!
Zelda: I can’t even. My mom is going to kill me if she finds out!
She puts her forehead down and her blond hair spills across the glossy oak in a very tragic cascade. I try not to feel envious that Zelda manages to look beautiful and compelling even when overdramatically serving a detention in the school library. (Hmm . . . jealousy is negative. Fix that!)
So I take out my book and start working on my math problems, which are supereasy because we are studying fractions and my teacher, Mr. Ziller, is excellent at explaining math things, unlike Ms. Way at my old school. She never used to let us ask questions because she said that if we asked questions she would never get through the lesson. But Mr. Ziller gets really happy if you ask a question, like you have absolutely made his day and he sometimes gets so excited to explain the answer that he has to breathe slowly into his fists for a minute to calm down. Of course, Ms. Way had thirty-four students in a class and Mr. Ziller only has eight, so maybe his job is easier. It’s hard to tell.
My old school is in an “underserved community” in Jersey City, and my new school is in what I guess you would call an “overserved community” called the Upper East Side of New York City. We moved here over the summer because my dad got a new job as an accountant for some financial firm where they were paying him basically more money than God’s deejay, and we got this really fancy apartment, and I got accepted to this really fancy school, and everything was completely too good to be true until somebody must have had a really bad thought, because the firm collapsed three weeks ago.
I have been trying
to help my dad stay positive, though. It’s like I always say, “Whenever God closes a door, he opens a window, so you can totally still climb out as long as you are on the first floor.”
Think about it.
Ms. Thumb comes and stands beside my table. “This is the big one. You know that, right?”
I nod. I have a lot of tardy slips. Three tardy slips equals a detention. This is my third detention, because of nine tardies, and from here on out things escalate quickly. One more, and it’s Principal Conference time. Like my parents aren’t both having mental breakdowns already.
I am not in detention because I am a bad kid and break a lot of rules. I am a good kid and I only break one rule, which is that I like to go up to the roof of the school and look at the sky during lunch sometimes. Look, there are moments when a girl just needs a breath of air, and you can’t get it inside this stuffy school or anywhere in Manhattan when you are down on the street. The air down there isn’t air, it’s basically 80 percent exhaust fumes and 25 percent heat and 25 percent dirt, which most of the time gets caught in your lip gloss which is ew. So if you want to breathe and maybe look at a few clouds, you have to get someplace up high. This is part of my philosophy: you can’t have your head in the clouds unless your feet are firmly on the roof.
If you ask me, it shouldn’t even be against the rules to go and get a breath of fresh air, but it is because technically the door to the roof is supposed to be locked but sometimes it isn’t locked and by that I mean that it’s always a smart idea to be nice to Selena who is on the janitorial crew because she might just have an extra key to the roof as long as I don’t tell anyone where I got it.
Selena is the only person in authority at this school who understands that a girl sometimes needs to take a breath.
Anyway, the technical technical truth is that I am not really in trouble for being on the roof because nobody knows that I was on the roof. I am in trouble for being late to class, which happens sometimes because I cannot hear the bell ring while I am on the roof.
So.
“Don’t blow it,” Ms. Thumb says, and I give her this nod that means, “I hopefully won’t.”
I spend the rest of my detention doing social studies and then finally Ms. Thumb says that we can go. I walk over to Zelda and ask, “What’s up?”
“Uniform infraction,” she says. She sounds totally miserable. “Ms. Blount got me. She screamed at me in the hallway after lunch.”
I make a sympathetic noise because I understand that it is very difficult to think positive thoughts when one is being yelled at.
“I’m going to be in so much trouble.” Zelda shoves her little purple notebook into her bag. “I was supposed to have a meeting with Janice this afternoon.”
“Oooooooh.” Janice is this world-famous private college guidance counselor. Yes, Zelda has a college guidance counselor, even though we are in the seventh grade. She meets with her once a month so that they can analyze “gaps” in Zelda’s “experience and progress” and “seize opportunities for personal growth” when they “arise.” My mom tried to get me to see Janice, but she has a seven-year waiting list, so I will hopefully be in college or at least far away by the time she is available.
“My mom has already texted me twenty times.” Zelda looks at her phone like she is afraid of it. “What am I going to tell her?” Zelda asks.
I do not know what to say to this. “Um, could you tell her that you were doing extracurricular work helping orphaned dolphins, or something educational and extra-credity?”
Zelda laughs. “Callie, you’re so hilarious.”
That’s hilarious? Because that’s what I told my mother all the other times I was in detention. Mom was born in Ohio, and she is so confused by my new school that she pretty much believes anything I say about it. Like, if I told her they served space rocks for lunch, she would probably be like, “Wow, were they crunchy?” Because my mother is convinced that Haverton is chock-full of first-rate learning opportunities that you simply cannot have at a public institution, or whatever it says on the brochure.
Zelda sighs and texts her mom back, and then we both walk down three flights of stairs and out the front doors together. She lives a block uptown from the school, and I live five blocks downtown, but before we walk off in opposite directions, she says, “So—you’re coming Friday, right?”
“Right,” I say. “Of course.”
“Because Mom is kind of bugging me. I hate to be—”
“No, no . . . I’ll get you the check! Sorry; I just forgot.” Ugggh. My stomach is swimming in stress acid. Why did I ever say I would go to this thing? The tickets are two hundred and fifty dollars, and Zelda’s mom already bought one for me, oh my god.
I’m sure Dad has forgotten all about this plan, which he agreed to almost two months ago, back when he still had a job. I don’t even know how to bring it up anymore. How can I ask him for two hundred and fifty dollars? I am being perfectly serious when I say that I would rather ask him for a kidney right now.
I don’t even like Lucas Zev, but all the other girls think he’s basically a musical genius and also really hot, even though his hair looks like it got stuck in a Roomba. But I was like whatever I’ll go because my dad has been bugging me to get to know Zelda ever since he found out that her father is president of a giant music company business conglobberate thing.
“Text me later,” Zelda says.
“Okay,” I say, but then I am afraid that she will ask me about Lucas Zev if I text her later, so I add, “But I might be at a party thing tonight.”
“What party?” Zelda asks. Because, let’s face it, nobody throws a party at our school without inviting Zelda.
“Uh, it’s a fund-raiser . . . for . . .” I look around for inspiration and see a woman walking a dog in a small plaid coat. “Chihuahua awareness.” OMG, what? Thanks, mouth!
“Oh, that’s great,” Zelda says. “That region has so many challenges right now.”
And that makes me happy, because: a) I did not even know that Chihuahua was a region, but apparently it is and now what I just said made sense, and b) it is nice to have smart friends.
Zelda blows me a kiss, and I feel a bit guilty for lying to her and about the whole ticket situation. I turn to go and find I am thinking about people who just disappear, you know, vanish without a trace, and I wonder if I could do that. You know you are stressed out when you are looking around Madison Avenue and kind of maybe hoping that you will fall down an open manhole and disappear in some very Manhattanesque way and then everyone could just forget about the money you owe them and just feel sort of sad and solemn when they think about you until they stop thinking about you (and the money) at all.
But this is not positive! So I tell myself to snap out of it.
Okay, just think: how would Althea handle this?
That’s easy. She would say that if you truly believe that the money will appear, then it will. This is one of my favorite inspirational quotes: Positive Power is about being positive that what you want is right around the corner!
So I begin to concentrate on making two hundred and fifty dollars appear. First, I visualize a bunch of one-dollar bills, but then I realize it is easier to visualize two one-hundred-dollar bills and a fifty, and then I decide the easiest thing is to just picture three one-hundred-dollar bills, so I have enough money to get a concert T-shirt and everything—so that’s what I do.
As I walk along, I think maybe I will find those crisp bills on the sidewalk. Like, maybe some really rich person dropped a big wad of cash when they stepped out of their limo! This is a very cheerful idea, and the longer I walk, the more certain I am that the money is out there, just waiting for me to find it!
And then, JUST AT THAT MOMENT, I spot a flash of green. It’s—it is! It’s money! It’s a FIFTY-DOLLAR BILL!
I pick it up thinking, Althea, thank you! And then I see that my fifty-dollar bill is smaller than normal, and instead of an old president, there’s a picture of a naked lady on it
and ew, I realize this is just a flyer for a “gentlemen’s club” and ew it was on the ground and EW, I touched it and I’M STILL TOUCHING IT! EW!
And so I let it go and it flutters away down the street and lands beside a fire hydrant.
Hm. That wasn’t exactly a success . . .
. . . but I am pretty sure it was close!
I walk over to Fifth Avenue, where the food carts—coffee, gyros, pretzels, ice cream—are all lined up. I’ve got one earbud in, so the jumble of Manhattan noise blends with “Change of Heart” by Cyndi Lauper (I like old-school music), which works pretty well together. The sun is warm, so I decide that I have earned a smoothie and I stop at a new-looking cart with a giant pineapple painted on the side. And I am staring and staring at the list of smoothies, all of which have supercute names: Kale to the Chief, Strawberry the Hatchet, Singin’ the Bluesberry, and I start to think about my old best friend, Anna, because her dad owns a food truck and makes the best enchiladas on earth, and I really wish that I could have one of those right now instead of some dumb kale drink.
And then I feel kind of sad, because Anna was, like, my best friend for eight years, and now I haven’t spoken to her in months. Well, technically, she hasn’t spoken to me. But that is another story that I am having Not One Drop of.
I order an Acai You Later smoothie and while I am waiting for it to blend, I hit Anna’s number. She doesn’t pick up, of course, so I leave a voice mail. “Hey, Anna! Hope you’re good. I’m just thinking of you because I’m getting a smoothie and, uh, I hope you’re good. Well, maybe we can talk sometime. Call me. Hope you’re good. Bye.”
Uggh. That voice mail was not my best work. I wish there were someone else I could call—someone who would answer the phone—but there really isn’t.
Even though I like Zelda and my other best new friend, Min, I’ve only known them for eight months. And there is a big difference between a friend you have had for eight months and a friend you have had for eight years, even if you haven’t spoken to the Eight-Year Friend for a while.
Okay, a long while.