The Karma Club

  This is not happening. This is a bad dream.

  My mother persistently asks me if I’m all right and why I look so pale, but I hardly notice her. I make up some bogus excuse about having homework to finish and hightail it out of the hospital. I hop back on my bike and begin another triathlon-worthy sprint in the direction of Jade’s house.

  When I burst into her room ten minutes later, sweaty and out of breath, I say, “Do you know a flight attendant named Leanne?”

  Jade is sitting up in her bed, watching TV and chewing on ice cubes from a coffee mug. She looks me up and down, taking in my current state, and gives me a what-the-heck? type of look.

  “I’ll explain in a minute. Just do you?”

  She takes a deep breath and racks her brain. “Leanne, Leanne. Sounds familiar.”

  “Yeah, it did to me too. But why?”

  Jade snaps her fingers. “Friday, nine o’clock, Lenny’s bar.”

  “Huh?”

  “Operation Mrs. Robinson,” Jade explains. “One of our Mrs. Robinsons was a flight attendant named Leanne.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask, the dread already seeping into my voice.

  Jade shrugs. “I think so. Check the notebook.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Why?”

  I look at Jade, sitting in her bed, chewing on her ice cubes because it’s the only way she can keep down fluids, and suddenly I know what put her there.

  I did.

  Well, not me alone. All of us. The Karma Club. Everything that’s happened over the past ten days is entirely our fault. It happened because of us.

  I look Jade directly in the eye, take a deep breath, and say, “Because I think she gave you food poisoning.”

  Jade eyes me curiously. “What?”

  “She was the new employee in the cafeteria.”

  “Why was she working in our cafeteria?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe to be closer to Seth. Those women were crazy clingy desperate. And this Leanne chick was probably the most desperate of them all. She knew where Seth went to school. It’s totally plausible.”

  I can tell Jade thinks I’m insane. I’ve been getting a lot of those looks today. I’m kind of used to it by now. “I don’t follow you,” she says.

  So I launch into the retelling of my day. About the lunch lady’s story, about what Mason’s mom said, about Ryan running over my sister with his bike. And when I’m finished, Jade gawks at me, eyes wide, and says, “Oh my God, it’s the butterfly effect!”

  “The what?”

  She bites down on another ice cube and explains, “It’s this theory that a butterfly can flap his wings in China and cause a hurricane in Florida.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know the science of it, but it’s this chain-of-events thing. Like the smallest little gust of wind from a butterfly’s wings can turn into a windstorm the size of a hurricane by the time it circles the globe. And that’s exactly what happened here.”

  “We were the butterfly,” I say, dumbfounded.

  “Yes,” Jade replies. “We put up the profile on the Internet which was seen by Leanne. She met Seth because of it and decided to get a job at his school cafeteria. And then she screwed up the turkey chili that I ate and now here I am.”

  I sit in a stunned silence as the pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place. Jade is absolutely right. Every single bad thing that has happened to us in the past week and a half, we set into motion. So in the end, all of my initial suspects turned out to be innocent.

  It was us.

  But why? Why would this happen? We were doing a good deed. We were balancing out the universe. We were helping Karma out by lightening its load. Why did it have to come back and bite us in the butt?

  And the only thing I can think of is What’s next? What other hurricanes are currently forming in the distance, ready to strike down upon us?

  If we want any hope of predicting them, we have to retrace our steps. Figure out where else we flapped our wings and then do our best to try to stop the chain reaction before everything falls apart. I race home on my bike and immediately run to my room to fetch the Karma Club notebook. Suddenly, I’m very grateful that I came up with the idea to record everything in the first place. Otherwise, right now it would just be me trying to sort through a jumble of thoughts and scattered memories.

  I pull my backpack off the floor and unzip the pouch. I remove the textbooks that I brought home for the day. But when I reach back inside to grab the notebook, I find the backpack empty.

  That’s strange, I think. I always keep it in here. Then I figure it must be somewhere in my room. In all the commotion of the last week, I probably stashed it somewhere and forgot. I search in my desk drawers, under the bed, in my closet, even in my bathroom, thinking I might have hidden it under the sink among my hair products or something. But I come up short.

  My heart starts pounding in my chest. I call up Jade and ask if I left the notebook at her place. Negative. Then I call Angie and ask the same thing. No dice.

  As I dazedly fall back onto my bed and hold my head in my hands, I realize that it’s time to take shelter because I can feel another hurricane brewing in the air.

  The Karma Club notebook is gone.

  SPEN, THE SWEDISH INTERN

  Spencer calls later that night, but I don’t answer. He leaves a really sweet message on my voice mail saying that he hopes my sister is all right.

  Of course she’s not all right. I got her run over by a bike! But I don’t think I can face him right now. It would require more lying and I just don’t have it in me.

  Jade and Angie also call, but I ignore them as well. How on earth can I tell them that I lost the very thing that held our most destructive secrets? That’s like the president showing up to work in the Oval Office and saying that he lost the nuclear launch codes. If I were him, I would just pretend nothing happened and hope our country doesn’t blow up. Which is exactly what I plan to do.

  The next day at school Jade corners me at my locker and I want to say something about how she’s finally feeling well enough to leave her house, but I can tell by the look on her face that she’s in no mood to chitchat about her health. Point-blank, she asks me if I found the notebook after I called her. I lie and tell her that I did. But Jade sees right through me and pulls me off to a hidden corner. Her face gets all serious and she says, “Maddy, you cannot lose that notebook. You know that. It has everything in it. Everything that we planned, everything that we did. All of our missions. It links us to every bad thing that has happened around here.”

  “I know!” I tell her, pushing her arm off of mine. “Don’t you think I know that?”

  “Well then, where is it?” Jade’s tone is really serious and threatening, like she’s going to beat me up if I don’t produce the thing out of thin air.

  I throw my hands up. “I don’t know. Okay? I don’t know. I must have misplaced it somewhere.”

  “Well, we have to find it.” She says this as if I haven’t already thought of it. As if recovering the one thing that incriminates us never even crossed my mind until now. “Where did you last see it?”

  I sigh and cross my arms over my chest. “I don’t know,” I say, racking my brain. “I guess last week on the bus. I took it out to record Ryan Feldman’s parents taking his car away.”

  “And?” Jade prompts me. “What happened after that?”

  I rub my hand over my face and try to remember. But honestly, I’ve done my best to block out every memory from those horrid bus rides. What did happen after that? I was riding the bus and then . . . “Oh, right!” I say. “Then I got a call from Spen—” I stop myself before I finish the sentence.

  Jade shoots me a strange look. “You got a call from Spen? Who’s Spen?”

  “Um.” I stammer, trying to cover my tracks. “Yeah, Spen. He’s this Swedish intern at my dad’s office. He . . . um . . . he wanted to ask me a question about . . .”

  About what?

&
nbsp; I have no freaking idea! I just made it up!

  Fortunately, Jade says, “Never mind what he wanted, what did you do with the notebook when he called?”

  I close my eyes and try to picture the entire conversation with Spencer. Or Spen, rather. The phone rang, I put the notebook down on the seat next to me, and then . . . “Oh, no,” I say aloud.

  “Oh no, what?” Jade urges me, her face filling with apprehension.

  I cringe as I remember exactly what I did. Spencer called to ask if I wanted to hang out and I got so preoccupied with making sure that he didn’t see me get off that bus that I left the notebook on the seat next to me. “Um . . . ,” I begin, knowing that there’s no way I’m going to get out of telling her this.

  “What?” Jade presses me.

  “I think I left it on the bus.”

  As soon as the words leave my mouth, I recoil in fear and wait for the outburst. Jade quietly screams all sorts of obscenities and then asks me repeatedly how I could be so careless. But if I tell her the real reason why I was so careless now, I’ll only get myself into more trouble. So I just take it and apologize over and over until we both tire of the routine and Jade finally goes, “Well, we have to get it back. Maybe the bus driver picked it up after his route. Maybe it’s in a lost and found somewhere.”

  “Yeah,” I say, trying to sound optimistic. “It probably is. Just waiting for us to go and claim it.”

  Jade nods, and I can tell she’s already three steps ahead of me. “Okay,” she begins. “After school, you, Angie, and I will ask the office where objects left on the bus are taken and then we’ll go there and we’ll find it.”

  “Right. Good thinking.”

  Jade shakes her head at me like a mother disappointed in her child. “I can’t believe you did this,” she says in one final jab.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” I say, waving my hand in her face. “Who would want to pick up an old notebook anyway?”

  We never actually make it to the front office because the three of us are stopped in the middle of the hallway after seventh period by Jenna LeRoux.

  “Hey, Maddy,” she says, her cold eyes burning into me.

  I glance down at the floor, feeling uncomfortable under her stare. “Hi, Jenna.”

  “I’ve been looking for you all day.” She pronounces the word all like she’s expecting some kind of award for her exhausting search efforts.

  I feel my palms start to sweat and my blood runs a few degrees cooler. She probably knows about Spencer and me. And she’s not happy about it. Now she’s going to announce it to the two people I’ve worked so hard to keep it a secret from. I force down a swallow and say, “Well, I don’t have time to talk, so can I catch up with you later?”

  I attempt to step around her, but she reaches out and places her hand on my shoulder. Jade and Angie both watch, baffled by this exchange. I’m sure they’re wondering what Jenna could possibly want with me.

  For a minute I think she might actually want to fight me. I mean, isn’t this what people do when they want to beat you up? Place a menacing hand on your shoulder as if to say, “Don’t even try to move or I’ll take you down right here”?

  Now I’m wishing that I hadn’t given up on karate after only two classes when I was nine. That would have definitely come in handy right about now. I could whip out some awesome reversal pin-down maneuver and before Jenna could even figure out how she ended up on the floor, I’d already be halfway to my car.

  I clear my throat and in a pathetic voice go, “Excuse me, but we have someplace we need to be.”

  “Actually,” Jenna says, her hand sliding off of my shoulder and landing back at her side, “I think you’ll want to stick around to hear what I have to say.”

  Oh, God, I think. Please don’t say it. Not in front of them.

  I scoff, “That’s doubtful.”

  I step around her, and the three of us continue walking down the hallway. That is, until we hear Jenna call out. “I have something of yours that you might want back.”

  And we all stop dead in our tracks. I don’t dare turn around. I just stand there and wait to hear the words I’ve been dreading since yesterday. I just never guessed in a million years that they’d be coming from Jenna LeRoux’s mouth.

  “Do you happen to be missing a pink notebook?”

  HURRICANE JENNA

  It doesn’t take a science degree to understand this butterfly effect. If I hadn’t been riding the bus that day, the Karma Club notebook holding our deepest, darkest secrets would never have fallen into the hands of Jenna, who if memory serves, has a little sister who’s a freshman at Colonial High and who, as luck would have it, rides the bus home from school. But I wouldn’t have been riding the bus if I hadn’t gotten my driving privileges taken away. And I wouldn’t have lost those if I hadn’t been photographed by a traffic light camera talking on the phone while I was driving. And I wouldn’t have been talking on the phone, or driving for that matter, had I not found the e-mail in Mason’s in-box implicating him in cheating. And of course, I wouldn’t have even been in Mason’s e-mail account in the first place if it weren’t for . . .

  Yep, the Karma Club again.

  This is getting ridiculous. When will it end? How much more do we have to take? It’s not fair. We were the ones who were jerked around to begin with. This should not be coming back to haunt us. Where’s the justice in that?

  Jade takes a step toward Jenna and says, “Cut the crap, Jenna. Just give us the notebook back.” I’m somewhat relieved that Jade has taken command of this conversation, as it has already gone far beyond my capabilities.

  But Jenna just kind of stands there, with all of her weight on her left foot as she shifts her bag higher up on her shoulder. “Hmm. Let me think about that for a second. No.”

  A lump forms in my throat, and I realize that this is one of those moments when you’re staring death in the face and it’s telling you that you’re going down and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Except in this situation it’s not my death. It’s the death of my life as I know it.

  Jade appears to be much calmer about the whole thing. She rolls her eyes at Jenna and goes, “Then why even bother mentioning it to us if you’re not going to give it back?”

  Jenna pretends to contemplate her answer for a moment, but even I can recognize that she’s not actually thinking. It’s one of those patronizing moments when she knows she has complete power and she wants to milk it for all that it’s worth. “Well,” she says, “I thought the four of us should talk first.”

  “About what?” Now Angie steps forward and I’m left a foot behind everyone, looking like a total outcast. And that’s exactly how I feel right now.

  “About what’s in it,” Jenna says, like it’s the most obvious concept in the world.

  “What about it?” Jade snaps back, making me wonder if she practices encounters like this in front of the mirror on a regular basis because she’s handling it impressively well.

  Jenna fingers a strand of her hair. “I don’t know. I just thought that maybe people like Mason or Heather or even Seth might be interested in knowing what’s in there.”

  I close my eyes tight and try with all my heart to wish this entire situation away. I pray that when I open them again the hallway will be empty and everything will have returned to normal. But everything is the same. Jenna is still standing there, playing coyly with her hair like the Heather Campbell wannabe she’s always been. And I know that it’s all about to fall apart right here, right now.

  I have to do something. I have to say something. I can’t stand here and do nothing while I watch Jenna destroy my life. Finally, I take a step forward and say, “Jenna, why don’t you just tell us what you want?”

  Her lips part, and she breaks into a sly smile as she looks me up and down. “You guys are obviously the clever ones with your creative . . . initiatives,” she begins.

  I watch her intently, waiting for the magic words. The one simple request that will ge
t us out of this mess and back on track.

  And then they come.

  “I want help from your little club,” she states matter-of-factly. “I want to use your conniving brains to help me with a revenge plan of my own.”

  “And then you’ll give us the notebook back?” I ask.

  She smirks. “Of course.”

  I breathe out a sigh of relief and turn to Jade and Angie. They look comforted to hear about an escape route as well.

  Jenna looks each of us in the eye, drops the strand of hair that she’s been molesting for the past five minutes, and goes, “Just help me take down Spencer Cooper and the notebook is all yours.”

  THE ULTIMATE ULTIMATUM

  I feel like someone just punched me in the stomach. Not that I’ve ever been punched in the stomach. But I did fall off the jungle gym when I was eight, and the wind was completely knocked out of me to the point where I couldn’t even cry. I imagine that’s what being punched in the stomach feels like. And I feel exactly the same way now. Like someone knocked the wind right out of me and I can’t cry or scream. I can’t even talk.

  This is one of those situations that I’ve heard people refer to as a “pickle.” You know, as in “You’ve really gotten yourself into one heck of a pickle, haven’t you?” I still have no idea why they call it that, but I do know one thing: It’s not fun.

  Jenna gives us exactly one week to come up with a plan for Spencer’s payback. And then I suppose, if we come back to her empty-handed, she’ll simply pass the notebook along to the person who she thinks will do the most damage with it. I’m only guessing who that could be: the editor in chief of the school newspaper, Heather Campbell, the police. The possibilities are endless.

  “We can’t do it!” I insist from the backseat of Jade’s car as the three of us are on our way to her house to discuss our current predicament.

  “Why not?” Jade and Angie both ask, pretty much in unison.

  “Because it’s blackmail! It’s extortion!” Coincidentally, just ten minutes ago, these were two things I had absolutely no problem with if it meant I got to walk out of this mess free and clear.