Nothing but Trouble

  Maggie held her breath. Was her mother about to tell her something about her father? She had waited so many years to hear something, anything about him.

  There was the sound of a van pulling up in front of the house, and the mechanical sigh of a hydraulic lift lowering itself.

  “Your grandfather is home. I’m going out.”

  “Out where?” asked Maggie. She imagined her mother returning from the liquor store on Route 42 and then hiding in her room.

  “A meeting.” Maggie’s mother had already retrieved her cell phone from her pocket and was speed-dialing a number. Her hands shook, but the call went through. She spoke quietly into the phone before hanging up and then heading for the door. She stopped with one hand on the doorknob.

  “Principal Shute said he’s one step away from bringing criminal charges. If he does that, you won’t be going to MIT. So think, Maggie. Think about what you do next and why. I know it isn’t brilliant to be cautious. There isn’t any genius to being the one who follows the rules. And there’s no glory in getting up every day and going to work and then coming home each night. But in the end, ask yourself: who’s left standing?” She tapped the photograph on Maggie’s computer. “And whether that means anything to you.”

  Maggie listened as her mother walked out the back door, got in her car, and drove away.

  Your mother—, whispered her father.

  “Shh,” said Maggie quietly. “I’m thinking.” She felt her father’s annoyance and disapproval. Usually, they were in complete agreement about her mother.

  In a minute, Maggie went downstairs and found her grandfather browning ground meat and onions in a heavy skillet, the sizzle and pop of the beef fat seeming to match the dark mood he was in. On the counter, there was an open package of Hamburger Helper.

  “I went to the library today!” he announced, scraping the bottom of the pan with a wooden spatula.

  “Really?” asked Maggie. “What for?”

  “To see if I could find that website I told you about.”

  “Oh,” said Maggie. Vinnie’s Vintage Auto Parts had been off-line for a week. She could hardly bear to think of her hard work lost.

  “And I learned a few things,” said Grandpop. “There was a very helpful librarian—a young gal not much older than you—whose job it is to get old people like me squared away with the internet. She got me an email account!”

  “Wow, Grandpop,” said Maggie. “That’s great.” But inside, she was thinking, Uh-oh. Here comes trouble.

  “Now, do you know how to do a search on the internet?” he asked.

  “Yes, Grandpop, I do.”

  “Well, good, because there’s really a lot going on in the world outside of this house.” He poured water into the skillet, then added the contents of the box. “The librarian was able to find other people who’ve been asking about Vinnie’s Vintage Auto Parts, too. You know, wondering where the website went. Past customers, and such.”

  Maggie felt like a giant headache was literally landing on top of her head—a Death Star–sized headache brought on by the thought of discussing the internet with her grandfather.

  “And they sent me photos of parts they bought from the website.” Grandpop turned up the flame beneath the pan to bring the whole thing to a boil. He seemed almost angry at the food on the stove, the way he pushed it around with the spoon. “Vinnie’s Vintage Auto Parts. Can you imagine that? Photographs of the actual parts that have been sold from that website.”

  The contents of the skillet had begun to boil, and he turned the heat down to a simmer. “Some of the parts were truly unique. One of a kind. Unforgettable.”

  The smell of ground meat and onions hung heavily in the small kitchen, and the air between Maggie and her grandfather seemed thick with the weight of the odor and grease.

  “I’m sorry, Grandpop,” said Maggie.

  “You should be,” he said, looking her straight in the eye. “You don’t rob a man in his own home. And you don’t steal from family. Ever. Family, Maggie. Family, in the end, is the only thing that matters.”

  Maggie hung her head. She had been selfish—taking what she wanted and convincing herself it didn’t hurt others. And she had been cowardly—afraid to stand up to Principal Shute even though she knew he was wrong.

  “I’ll pay you back,” said Maggie.

  “Yes, you will,” said Grandpop grimly. “Now off with you. Bed without supper.”

  Maggie walked slowly upstairs and into the darkness of her room. She lay down on her bed. How had everything come to this? She hadn’t meant to hurt Grandpop, but she had. She hadn’t meant to give Principal Shute the power to destroy her dreams, but she had. She hadn’t meant to drive her mother out of the house—and away from her—but she had.

  Come on! Don’t lose focus now, said her father. You’ve got bigger problems to solve.

  Maggie lay in the quiet of the house—no TV, no clink of ice cubes, no arguing—allowing the bad, dark thoughts to circle in her head. They swirled and swooped, around and around, but never seemed to land anywhere. These weren’t the thoughts Maggie liked to have. She liked the straight-line kind of thoughts that marched in order. The ones on the ground that carried her from Point A to Point B.

  After a few minutes, a new thought entered her head. Maybe I should stop taking advice from a dead guy.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “WE SHOULD GO TO THE GAME in costume,” said Lena the next day as she and Maggie walked home from school. “Don’t you think? It would give us something new to work on.”

  In two days it would be Halloween, a Friday, and the whole town would be at the final football game of the season, when the Odawahaka Wildcats would face off against the Danville Ironmen in the hopes of having their first undefeated season.

  When they arrived at Maggie’s front gate, Lena gasped and Maggie looked up to see a bizarre sight on the front of her house: There was a knife, long handled and gleaming, stabbed into the metal frame of the front screen door. An envelope was pinned by the blade, and rivers of blood dripped from its shiny metal surface, as if the heart of the house itself had been stabbed and was in the act of dying. Maggie’s thoughts jumped to her grandfather. Was he inside? Had he been hurt? Her eyes darted to the driveway. Her mother’s car wasn’t there.

  “There’s writing on the envelope,” whispered Lena. It was too hard to make out the words from the front gate. The writing was scribbled, written in haste, using a thin ballpoint pen.

  “Isn’t that one of the envelopes from school?” asked Maggie. “You know, the kind that gets passed around with teachers’ names on it?” Maggie and Lena approached the door.

  “The blood! It’s fake!” said Lena, but Maggie had already figured that out. Even a sharp blade wouldn’t go through metal, and besides, the “river” of blood was flapping in the breeze. It was just a ghoulish Halloween decoration—a half knife with a really strong magnet on one end so that it looked like it was plunged into the door. The blood was red, gummy plastic.

  “Not a bad hack!” said Maggie, her spirits lifting. Effective, inexpensive, and it didn’t leave a trace of damage. She plucked the knife off the door and read the scribbled note on the outside of the envelope: It’s in your hands now. —I.C.

  “Who’s I.C.?” asked Lena.

  “I don’t know,” said Maggie, holding the envelope. “Let’s open it in my room.”

  They hurried through the door, but a voice shouted at them from the back of the house.

  “I’m stuck on the toilet!”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake!” groaned Maggie. “Grandpop! Just . . . sit tight.” Which even she could tell was an unnecessary directive. “I’ll be there in a minute.” She and her grandfather hadn’t spoken since yesterday, and she didn’t want to have their first conversation in front of Lena. She turned to her friend. “C’mon. We’ll open the envelope in my room and then . . . I’ll come down and . . . figure something out with him.”

  “Maggie,” whispered Lena. “We have to he
lp him now.”

  “He can wait,” said Maggie, shaking the envelope urgently.

  Grandpop shouted from the bathroom: “I’m not getting any younger!”

  “I’ll be there in a couple of minutes!” Maggie yelled back. She put her foot on the first step, but Lena rested a hand on her arm.

  “Maggie, he’s scared,” said Lena.

  Huh! Right! said her father’s voice. That man doesn’t get scared. He just makes life scary for everyone else.

  Maggie paused. She looked at Lena. “You’re right,” she said slowly. “This”—she held up the envelope—“can wait.”

  “Maggie!” barked her grandfather in a hoarse voice. “Get your monkey butt in here!” But the door to the small bathroom wouldn’t open. “It’s my stinking wheelchair,” said Grandpop. “It got wedged under the sink somehow, and now I can’t move it. So I can’t get into the chair, and I can’t get the door open to get out.”

  Maggie pushed against the door, but it opened only an inch. She pushed harder. Her father’s voice scolded her: Brute force is the last resort of the incompetent. It was one of his favorite sayings, scrawled in several places in his notebooks.

  “I’m not incompetent,” she muttered.

  “No one said you were,” whispered Lena. “Just think.”

  In the end, they got the door off its hinges, though it took some clever maneuvering and a solid understanding of stress points and the application of force at an angle. Maggie’s grandfather wrangled himself back into his wheelchair, and the girls pushed him to the couch. Once there, he rolled himself out of the chair—knocking it over—and landed on the sofa like a giant tuna hauled onto the deck of a fishing boat.

  Maggie bent down to pick up the wheelchair, but her grandfather said, “Leave it! I hate that chair. I hate it,” and he kicked it with his good leg, over and over until one of the wheels fell off.

  Maggie didn’t know what to say. Grandpop couldn’t get around without his wheelchair. That was just a fact of life.

  “Grandpop . . .”

  “I need rest,” he said. “Just leave it, Mags. Leave it and let me rest.”

  “Okay,” said Maggie. Her mother would be home soon. Maybe she would know what to do.

  Maggie and Lena walked slowly upstairs, the mysterious envelope in Maggie’s hand. “That was sad,” whispered Lena once they’d closed the door to Maggie’s bedroom.

  Maggie didn’t want to talk about it. She wasn’t used to seeing her grandfather this way. It was easier to deal with his usual snarl and bark. Maybe that was why he was so demanding and difficult. It made it easier for her, easier than seeing him sad and sick.

  The envelope called to her.

  Maggie dumped the contents onto her bed: a pile of papers that looked like the votes that had been cast in yesterday’s election. Maggie and Lena began to sift through them, trying to make sense of what they were looking at.

  “They could be fakes,” said Maggie.

  “They’re not fakes,” said Lena.

  “But they’re photocopies,” pointed out Maggie, as if this might be a reason to doubt them. Seventy-one of them.

  “You look for yours,” said Lena. “I’ll look for mine.” The girls split the pile in half, each flipping through page after page.

  “Here’s mine,” said Lena, holding up one of the photocopies. “I know because I started to write a checkmark, then changed it to an X.”

  “Here’s mine.” It was easy to spot. Maggie had marked her ballot with a small mouse paw print in the lower left corner.

  They were holding proof that the Mouse had won the election for class president. Or were they?

  “Who did this?” asked Maggie suspiciously. “Who photocopied the ballots?”

  “Maybe Shute did it.”

  “No. He wouldn’t stick them to my door. Who’s ‘I.C.’?”

  “Okay. Names that begin with the letter I,” said Lena. “Irene?”

  “Isabel?”

  “Ivy?”

  A memory from the first day of school popped into Maggie’s head. Not Mary. Not Molly. Not Martha . . . “It’s not a name!” shouted Maggie. “It’s an avowal.”

  “A vowel?”

  “No! An avowal. A confession. It’s a battle cry!”

  Maggie poked each letter on the envelope. “I. Care.” She looked at Lena and smiled. “She cares! She actually cares!”

  “I knew it!” shouted Lena, her long legs shooting out from under her as she jumped to her feet. “I knew it all along. Under those baggy sweatshirts, behind those frozen eyes—she cares!” Lena started to whirl and lift her arms up to the sky, as though she’d been praying for rain through a long, hot drought and the deluge had finally arrived.

  The Dungeon Dragon. The Queen of the Countdown. The woman who claimed she couldn’t remember Maggie’s name but somehow knew where she lived.

  “Wait!” said Maggie. She reached out and grabbed hold of Lena’s arm, halting her in mid-twirl. “The note says, ‘It’s in your hands now.’”

  “Yes!” said Lena, holding up a handful of the papers. “The proof is in our hands now.”

  “But what are we going to do with it? We need to think this through. There are so many ways this could go wrong.”

  “We show the ballots to someone.”

  “Mr. Shute would say they’re fake. He would say the real ballots were thrown out. Trashed. Or maybe he even made fake ballots, in case anyone asked to see? It wouldn’t be hard to do. Anyone could make fake ballots.”

  “But we know these are ours. We remember our own ballots,” said Lena.

  “So we need to get everyone at school to identify a ballot. Same as we did.”

  “No,” said Lena. “The Mouse needs to do it. Because that’s what the Mouse is all about. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.”

  The girls heard the front door open and then close downstairs, followed by, “What . . . happened?”

  “My mom’s home,” said Maggie. Her mother did not sound like she’d had a good day. Maggie hoped Lena would leave before her mom started . . .

  Lena seemed to understand. “We can figure out the details later,” she said. “Give me the ballots. I’ve got some scanning to do.”

  When Maggie and Lena arrived at Oda M the next morning, they both noticed that Principal Shute’s reserved parking space was empty. Lena carried the poster she’d made, and Maggie, of course, had extra-strength double-sided tape. They weren’t going to ask anyone else to handle this task. They would do it on their own. No sneaking around. They had come out of the walls for good.

  They hung the poster on the wall right next to the main office so that any student who walked in the front door would see it. It didn’t take long before a crowd of students had gathered around.

  “That one’s mine,” said Emily. She nodded at Allie, who had already found her ballot.

  “There’s mine,” said Becky.

  “I don’t see mine,” said Tyler, worried. He kept scanning the poster. “Oh, there it is!”

  The poster was simple: all seventy-one ballots displayed in neat rows. Anonymous. Complete. Authentic. Every student could identify his or her own ballot, even if some didn’t declare ownership out loud. For those who chose to remain silent, the message was the same: the ballots were real because each person could see that his or her ballot was real.

  “Nine!” said Kayla. “Nine votes! What is wrong with you people?”

  “It’s actually not bad,” said Lyle philosophically. “You were the first runner-up.”

  “I lost to a rodent!” she shouted. Her face turned bright red, something that Maggie had never seen happen to Kayla in all the years she’d known her. Kayla walked stiffly in the direction of the girls’ bathroom. Maggie felt bad for her. Truly bad. The first bell would ring in a minute, but it looked like Kayla would be in the bathroom for a while.

  “Incoming,” warned Max, facing the front door.

  Maggie turned to see Principal Shute standing in the doorway, his bri
efcase in one hand and his baseball bat in the other. He surveyed the assembled sixth-grade class, then his eyes rested on the poster.

  “Mrs. McDermott,” shouted Mr. Shute. “Make an announcement. Immediately. Every student and teacher is to report to the auditorium at once. No one is excused for any reason.” He then tucked his bat under his arm, marched forward, and ripped the poster down the middle, leaving just the edges, like broken limbs, hanging from the wall. “All of you. Fall in. Single file. March!”

  The students did as they were told, but was it Maggie’s imagination or was there a hint of defiance in the way they walked? They entered the auditorium and sat down in the first few rows of seats. Only the aisle lights were turned on, the ones that glowed with a pinprick of yellow light to prevent anyone from tripping once a show had begun. Otherwise, the enormous room was dark, the stage empty, the soaring ceiling swallowed up in blackness.

  Mr. Shute stood on the floor in front of the seated students, holding his bat at his side. He stared ahead, ramrod straight, and waited. No one made a sound.

  Usually, during assemblies, the teachers joined the principal on stage. But today, Principal Shute was on the ground, and as each teacher entered the auditorium one by one, they sat with the students. Mr. Platt smiled at the sixth graders as if to say, It’s not so bad! Mrs. Matlaw looked at the students fiercely, letting them know that she would throw herself on a live grenade to protect each and every one of them if she had to. Mr. Esposito sat still, not even fussing with his tie, and Mr. Peebles simply seemed confused.

  Mr. Shute continued to wait. Maggie counted the students. Seventy. The only one missing was Kayla. Chances were that she hadn’t even heard the announcement, and if she had, she was in no condition to face her classmates.

  There was one conspicuous absence. Mrs. Dornbusch.

  A low murmur began, a whispering sound that was like leaves on a dry night. The Mouse is in the house. The Mouse is in the house. It was so quiet, you could hardly make out the words.