Kristy and the Middle School Vandal Read online

  During the post-dues collection lull, when the phone wasn’t ringing, I told everyone about Cary’s challenge and the Mystery War. “I accepted on behalf of the BSC,” I said. I didn’t expect anyone to say, “No way!” but my fellow members had every right to give me grief for impulsively going ahead without including them in the decision. I rushed on. “He’s going to give me the first clue tomorrow before school starts.”

  “We’ll kill him,” said Abby, to my relief. She and Jessi were sitting next to each other, doing stretches for their calf muscles. Everyone else nodded confidently.

  Jessi said, “Clue? It sounds like a treasure hunt.”

  I said, “Treasure hunt? Did you say treasure hunt?”

  “Uh-oh,” Claudia said gummily (she had a mouthful of Jujubes). “Watch out. It’s that Kristy Has an Idea look.”

  “I do have a great idea,” I announced.

  “No!” cried Stacey in mock surprise.

  I ignored them both. “Maria Kilbourne has been bouncing off the walls with summer coming …”

  Abby interrupted, “What kid we baby-sit hasn’t been? It’s only natural with the end of school almost here.”

  “Right. So, listen. Let’s give them something to do that will help burn a little energy! What about a scavenger hunt?”

  “Or a treasure hunt,” said Jessi.

  “Or that. But I think a scavenger hunt would be easier. That way we wouldn’t have to come up with a really super treasure. In a scavenger hunt, the kids will just have to find as many items as possible on the lists we give them. And we can organize the kids into teams to look for things.”

  “How is this different from my house, where I’m always trying to convince certain brothers and sisters — I won’t name names — to tell me where they’ve put my things?” demanded Mallory. But she was grinning. I could tell she liked the idea.

  Everyone else did, too. In no time at all, we were having a BSC brainstorming session, flinging ideas around at top speed. Mary Anne, who was trying to write everything down, kept saying, “Wait, wait,” as she crossed things out and added new suggestions.

  By the end of the meeting we’d decided to split up into three groups of two baby-sitters each. As the seventh person, I would be the judge. Each pair would choose one day to help a team of children search for items on the list. I would consider the items, and decide whether they were acceptable. After the third hunt, I would declare a winner.

  “Now all we have to do is round up teams, and think of themes for the scavenger hunt,” I said.

  “School,” suggested Mallory.

  “Ugh,” groaned Claudia. “Art.”

  “Dance,” said Jessi.

  “Famous writers,” said Mallory.

  “What about summer?” Abby asked. “Or sports.”

  I held up my wrist, remembered that I didn’t have my watch, then pointed to Claudia’s clock. “Time,” I said. “This meeting of the BSC is now adjourned. At the next meeting, after we have an idea of which kids want to play, we’ll choose our themes.”

  “Not,” said Claudia firmly, “school.”

  Cary was wearing my watch when I saw him at school the next morning — my watch and his watch, both on the same arm. It was a look Claudia might sport, I thought wryly. I pretended not to notice. I wasn’t going to give Cary the satisfaction of knowing that he was getting to me. But it made my resolve to beat him at this game of his even stronger.

  Cary grinned his smug grin and handed me a folded piece of paper. I unfolded it. It said:

  I stared at the paper. I looked up at Cary. This was not what I had expected. “You call this a clue?” I asked.

  He grinned again. His grin was doubly smug now.

  “This isn’t a clue,” I persisted. “Why don’t you explain what it really is?”

  “It’s a clue all right,” said Cary. “All you have to do is look beyond the obvious.”

  He walked away. I felt clueless, despite the piece of paper in my hand.

  “Hey, Cary,” I called after him.

  He turned. “It’s simple, really, Kristy. Even for you —”

  “I’ve heard Mr. Kingbridge has caught on to the Mischief Knights. He knows who you are. And if the vice principal knows who you are …”

  If I’d expected that to bug Cary, I was disappointed. Cary just smiled again, and answered, “Has he really? How interesting.” Then he disappeared into the crowd of students surging down the halls.

  I battled the tide, and found Mary Anne at her locker. She and I spoke at the same time.

  “Did Cary give you the clue?” she asked.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked.

  I held up the piece of paper, in answer to Mary Anne’s question. Mary Anne replied, “I think they’re all still out on the front steps. You know Claudia. She doesn’t think she should have to enter the school until the last minute.” I nodded, grabbed Mary Anne’s arm, and dragged her out to the steps. Sure enough, Claudia, Stacey, Jessi, Mal, and Abby were there.

  “Get Your Mother?” Mary Anne read aloud. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s the clue. HA!” I said.

  “That’s the clue?” asked Abby. “Let me see.”

  We passed the clue around. No one could make sense of it.

  “Maybe it’s half a sentence,” suggested Mallory. “Maybe you have to get your mother to do something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I wonder if we should call our moms,” said Claudia. She paused. “But if I call my mom from school, she’ll think I’m in trouble or something.”

  “So will mine,” said Stacey.

  “I’m not calling my mom at work,” said Abby firmly. “Especially not all the way in New York.”

  “Maybe it has to do with telephones,” said Jessi. “You know, you think about calling someone, you think about phones.”

  “That could be it,” I said. “Telephones. School phones! Pay phones.”

  The warning bell rang.

  Claudia groaned.

  I said, “Listen. Everybody check out the pay phones. See if you notice anything strange. We’ll meet again at lunch … except you guys.”

  Since Mal and Jessi are in sixth grade, they have a different lunch period. Mal said, “I’ll grab someone and pass along anything I find out.”

  “Me, too,” agreed Jessi.

  We split up and went to our homerooms. I spent the rest of the morning thinking about the clue. When I finally had a chance to study the pay phones, I didn’t exactly feel enlightened. Except for the usual graffiti scratched into the metal, and the general battered appearance, I couldn’t find anything that looked like a clue. I was holding a handful of change, contemplating calling my mom, when I heard about graffiti of a different kind, scratched into a different kind of metal — the cars in the teachers’ parking lot.

  Actually, I overheard the news. Cokie Mason, the Queen of Mean, was walking by with a group of kids. She was screeching at the top of her lungs, in a pleased sort of way (of course, Cokie would be pleased at bad news), “Can you believe it? I mean, to scratch that on someone’s car!”

  Someone else said, “I don’t get it, though. Why would someone write ‘The vice principal has no control’ and ‘The teachers have no control’ on a teacher’s car?”

  “Because the teachers are losing it?” suggested Cokie’s sidekick and yes-woman, Grace Blume.

  They were all so engrossed in their gossip fest that they didn’t even see me. Still, just to be safe, I picked up the phone receiver and held it to one ear, as a sort of camouflage, while I eavesdropped with all my might.

  Cokie gave a trill of laughter. (It sounded like a bird being strangled.) “That’s not all. Whoever did it misspelled ‘principal’ with an ‘le’ instead of an ‘al’ at the end. Someone also wrote in chalk, ‘Take that, Mr. Kingbridge’ in front of the car. And they signed it MK.”

  “Who’s MK?” asked Grace in a puzzled voice.

  “The Mischief Knights! Who else?” snapped C
okie.

  I almost dropped the phone. The group drifted down the hall on a tide of malicious delight.

  The Mischief Knights had vandalized Mr. Kingbridge’s car? I couldn’t believe it. That was a crime. Not even sneaky Cary Retlin would do that.

  Then I remembered what I had told Cary that morning, that Mr. Kingbridge was on to the MKs. “He knows who you are,” I had said.

  Had that driven Cary and company to go on their graffiti spree?

  As the morning wore on, I heard more about what had happened. Of course, rumors are never accurate, but what it came down to was that someone had vandalized a car in the teachers’ parking lot. It was a light green car, the same kind that the vice-principal drives, but not the same color. Someone had goofed. Whoever had scrawled the graffiti on the car had wanted to make sure it was permanent. They’d written most of it in permanent marker, and had also scratched the letters “MK” into the paint with something sharp, maybe a key.

  We’d almost forgotten about Cary’s clue by the time we met at lunch.

  “I saw the car,” Claudia announced without preamble as she set her tray down on the table. Naturally, none of us even needed to ask, “What car?”

  “You did?” asked Abby. “Where? When?”

  “Well, the art room looks out over the teachers’ parking lot,” said Claudia. “It was easy to spot, especially with that green marker all over it.”

  “Isn’t that the wrong color?” I asked, remembering the pencil mark on my erased math homework.

  “What’s wrong with green?” asked Claudia, giving me a funny look.

  “The Mischief Knights,” I said.

  Stacey jumped in. “Their trademark is red. They would have written in red marker.”

  “Maybe they wanted to throw everyone off,” Claudia suggested. “I mean, this is a serious thing, not a joke.”

  Abby said slowly (for Abby), “From what I hear, whoever messed up the car, did it during fourth period.”

  “Figures in motion,” put in Claudia. Seeing the puzzled looks, she explained, “The fourth-period art class is working on drawing figures in motion. So for the past week, they’ve been going to the track, or the football field, or the gym to draw people doing sports.”

  “So no witnesses from the art room,” said Stacey.

  “What I was trying to say,” Abby interrupted impatiently, “was that if the Mischief Knights are behind this, Cary wasn’t involved. At least, not in person. He’s in my fourth-period class.” She paused, then added, “Although at one point he did leave to go to the bathroom. But he’d have had to run even faster than I do to make it to the teachers’ parking lot and back. We’re only allowed five-minute bathroom passes.”

  “If it’s not Cary, then who is it?” demanded Claudia.

  I said, “I think it is Cary. He’s just out to confuse everybody, as usual.”

  “Clueless,” said Stacey with a grin.

  That made us all think of the enigmatic clue. Our telephone research had turned up nothing. We pondered other telephone possibilities (the phone in the principal’s office, cellular phones) and rejected them.

  I unfolded the clue and smoothed it out on the table next to my tray. “Cary said to look beyond the obvious,” I reminded everybody. “So maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with mothers. Maybe there’s another message here.”

  “It’s not grammatically correct,” observed Mary Anne. “I mean, the ‘understands’ part. It doesn’t match the ‘your.’ ”

  “Understands,” I repeated “Un … der … stands … of course! That’s it! Under stands. Under the stands. There’s a clue under the stands.”

  “The stands?” Mary Anne sounded puzzled.

  “Give me that.” Abby grabbed the clue, then smacked her head. “Of course. Look at the first letter of each word.”

  “Get Your Mother,” said Stacey. “Gym!”

  “Under the stands in the gym.” I leaped to my feet, but it was too late. The final lunch bell was ringing.

  Once again we agreed to rendezvous, this time after school.

  Under the stands.

  In the gym.

  With seven of us, including Mal and Jessi, I hoped that we would be able to find the clue pretty quickly, especially after I saw what under the stands looked like.

  Gum city. Not on the floor. The custodial staff kept that pretty clean. But generations of students had stuck gum to the underside of the bleachers.

  Ugh.

  I didn’t say anything, though. I didn’t want anybody worrying about getting gum in her hair when she was supposed to be looking for clues.

  We’d been scouting without success for about ten minutes when a couple of guys came into the gym to shoot some baskets. If they heard us under the bleachers, or thought there was anything strange about seven of their fellow students ducking in and out under the stands, they didn’t say anything. They were totally focused on their game.

  “Hey,” said Abby quietly. “I’m new here, but to me, that looks like Troy Parker — the guy who was suspended? For, like, two weeks?”

  “Yup,” I replied. It was true. One of the kids was Troy Parker.

  “No one knows what he did yet?”

  Claudia, who was nearby, joined us. “Nope. But if you ask me, he should be suspended for his fashion sense. I mean, a red belt with that outfit? Everything he wears seems to clash.”

  The others were gradually drifting toward us, empty-handed.

  Mal said, “Whatever he was suspended for, it was something majorly awful. I mean, it has to be. Two weeks? That’s just short of being expelled.”

  “Guys,” I began. I was about to suggest that we all go back to work, keep looking for clues, and stop standing around gossiping, when I saw it.

  A neatly folded envelope.

  I grabbed it. On the front were the words “A Clue.”

  Cary is so sarcastic.

  I held up the envelope. “I found it,” I announced. “Now let’s get out of here, and start solving this mystery.”

  “Let’s see,” said Jessi as soon as we were out of the gym.

  “What does it say?” demanded Claudia.

  I ripped open the envelope (carefully) and unfolded the plain white piece of paper inside. Everybody crowded around to read what looked like a poem in the middle of the page:

  “Oh, great,” Abby said in disgust. “So now he’s a poet.”

  We walked slowly toward the door. A seventh-grade teacher passed us, stopped, and said, “Don’t forget to remind your parents about tonight’s very important board of education meeting.” She handed each of us a flier. We folded them up and stuffed them into pockets and backpacks.

  Then we went back to the clue.

  As we reached the front steps, Jessi said, “The Sound of Music!”

  “The movie? The Broadway show? Or what you’re hearing?” teased Claudia.

  Jessi grinned. “The first two, I guess, although I’ve only seen the movie on video. But there’s a song in it that has a line that goes, ‘Ray, a drop of golden sun.’ ”

  “Right,” said Stacey.

  “That’s it!” I cried. “Line by line. We have to take this stupid clue line by line.”

  We sat down on the front steps of the school and thought. And thought. Was the whole thing a musical clue? In the movie, the song is to help people remember the notes in the musical scale: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do.

  We tried spelling a word with the first letters of the musical scale, but “drmfsltd” didn’t spell anything.

  “Not even,” Claudia said, grinning, “in my dictionary.”

  “ ‘A drop of golden sun.’ If Dawn were here, she’d say it had something to do with the beach,” said Mary Anne.

  But we decided that the beach didn’t hold any clues.

  Then Mallory said, “Maybe it does have to do with the sun, though. You know, like in the song a ray is a drop of golden sun. Ray equals sun. So the clue — or part of it — is ray?”

  We decided
we liked that.

  Stacey suggested that we think of each line as an equation. Each phrase equaled something else.

  Claudia groaned. “Math.”

  “Short of failing. To fall short is to not complete something,” Mallory said.

  Claudia brightened. “Well I don’t always completely fail. After all a ‘D’ is not failing.” Her voice trailed off and then she exclaimed, “That’s it! ‘D’! It equals a D.”

  “Excellent!” cried Abby.

  “A plus,” I agreed and wrote the letter “D” next to the second line of the clue.

  “A skater’s figure is usually compact,” Jessi offered. “Muscular.”

  I shook my head. “Doesn’t fit.”

  “Don’t they have practice moves?” asked Mal. “Triple axels?”

  “Yes! And practice figures. Like the figure eight. It’s basic. A skater’s figure is a figure ‘eight,’ ” Jessi said.

  “Done,” I said, writing “eight” next to the third line.

  We pondered the last line for a long time. I wasn’t exactly ready to give up, but I was growing frustrated and impatient when Abby shouted, so loudly that I jumped, “Not him, but HER!”

  “Hey,” I said, picking up my pencil.

  “Not him, you see, but HER!” Claudia shouted back, and she and Abby high-fived.

  “I see, I see.”

  “Write it down!” Mary Anne urged excitedly.

  I wrote it down:

  “Ray-d-eight-her,” I said.

  Mallory wrinkled her nose. “Radiate her? Ewww …”

  “Ray D. ate her!” cried Abby. “Only, who is Ray D. And why did he eat her?”

  Abby and her puns. I shook my head slowly. “Nooo … radiator!” I exclaimed.

  Mallory looked relieved.

  We repeated “radiator” several times with satisfaction, telling each other how smart we were and how easy this was.

  Then I said, “And where does it all come from?”

  “Where do radiators come from?” Abby grinned. “Well, first a mommy radiator and a daddy radiator have to meet …”

  I punched her in the shoulder.

  “The boiler room,” said Stacey. “That’s where the heat for the radiator comes from.”