Front Page Face-Off Read online

  I gave her a strange look. “I think I’d be more concerned for the safety of the student body.”

  “Right. That, too. Now you really have to find out her deep, dark secret.” She smiled. “And that gives us more dish for your progress report tonight.” She checked her cell phone. “Which it’s about time for. You ready to face the world?”

  I took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “I’m ready to face anything.”

  As it turned out, I wasn’t.

  When I’d fled for the ladies’ room earlier, the foyer had been empty except for the thousand-year-old woman and Ben. It had also been quiet. Now it was crowded with students who were yelling and standing in a semicircle around two figures engaged in a serious smackdown.

  “Oh, no,” I whispered.

  Ben and Marcus had their upper bodies completely entwined, pushing at each other inside the half circle, while Ava stomped around them, shouting, “Stop this! You are acting like children!”

  “Marcus, don’t!” I added my voice to the chaos, regretting it seconds later.

  Marcus glanced up at me, and while he was distracted, Ben seized the chance to kick a leg behind him and knock him to the ground.

  “Stop!” I ran toward them, and Paige groaned.

  “Poise, Delilah! Poise!”

  I ignored her and reached into my purse for the cinnamon spray Major had forced on me. “Stop or I’ll spray!” I threatened.

  Ben and Marcus froze for half a second, looked at my tiny canister, and got to their feet to resume their country club brawl. I darted into the center of the semicircle and raised the cinnamon spray. As I held down the trigger, however, Ava ran forward from the opposite side, waving her purse wildly in the air, as if she planned to knock both guys senseless.

  They moved to avoid her and me, which placed Ava directly into the cinnamon spray firing range, and I shot her square in the eyes.

  No threats or yelling could have broken up the fight, but Ava’s shrieks of pain and rage quieted the entire room. She collapsed and flailed on the carpet, clutching at her face.

  “Ava, I’m sorry!” I threw the spray aside and dropped to the floor beside her. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Liar!!” Ava pulled her hands down just long enough for me to see that the whites of her eyes were bright red and that tears were streaming down her face. “You kiss my boyfriend and attack me? You want to do nothing but hurt me, you—” She launched a slew of words at me in French and kicked in my direction. I dodged the pointed end of her shoe and reached for her arm.

  “Come on, you have to rinse it off with water.”

  A hand gripped my arm firmly and tugged me back. “I’ll take care of her,” said Paige. “You guys should go.” Her gaze included Ben and Marcus.

  “I’m really sorry,” I told her, and I meant it. My plan to bring Marcus hadn’t included soap opera drama.

  “Don’t be. You didn’t start this fight.” Paige helped Ava to her feet. “I mean, technically you did, because it was about you, but you didn’t physically start the fight.” She paused. “Unless you count kissing Ben as physical.” She waved me away. “Just go before I change my mind.”

  I walked out the front entrance, not giving either Ben or Marcus a single look, and sat on the sidewalk to call Major.

  “Your cinnamon spray really works,” I told him. “Would you come get me?”

  He freaked out for a moment until I told him I’d used it on Ava, not on my imaginary date.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. “And we can talk about it if you want.”

  “Thanks, Major.” I hung up and brought my knees to my chest, resting my chin on them.

  Marcus walked up and sat down beside me. “You sure know how to show a guy a good time.”

  “Sorry,” I said, staring into space. “You were right. The social was a bad idea.”

  He patted me on the back. “At least you got to kiss a guy. Not your date, but—”

  I glared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean? You and I weren’t on a date, remember? I was interviewing you for a story.”

  “You didn’t tell anyone besides Ava and Ben that. For all they knew, we were dating, and you wandered off to make out with someone else.” He gave me a thumbs-up. “That makes me look really good.”

  “Oh … my … God!” I got to my feet and kicked him in the thigh. “You can’t possibly be turning this into something about you.”

  Marcus got to his feet too. “You’re right. I forgot everything is always about Delilah.”

  “It is not!” I could feel my stupid, stupid tears threatening to make their reappearance. “If I’d known you were going to get upset, I wouldn’t have kissed him!”

  I froze the moment the words left my mouth. Marcus froze too and just stared at me. “What do you mean?”

  I had no idea what I’d meant. I had no idea why I’d said it. All I knew was that I really wouldn’t have kissed Ben if Marcus had a problem with it.

  At that moment, I realized something that made me want to run and hide in the ladies’ room all over again.

  I sort of liked Marcus.

  And he was sort of waiting for me to answer.

  “What I meant was … you were nice enough to … uh … do the interview,” I ad-libbed. “And you’re right. It was rude of me to just leave like that.”

  “Oh.” Marcus nodded. “Okay.”

  I cleared my throat. “What … um … were you and Ben fighting about, anyway?”

  “Well, after you wandered off, I decided to find out what was up. When I got to the lobby, you were running away, crying, so I asked Ben what had happened. He got all defensive, one thing led to another, and then he sucker punched me.”

  I frowned. “He what?”

  “He hit me when I wasn’t ready.” Marcus bent and held back the hair above his right ear, revealing a large welt.

  “Whoa. Does it hurt?” I pushed on it, and he winced. “Sorry. And sorry he hit you.” Over the past few hours I’d become a pro at dishing out apologies.

  “It’s not a big deal.” He grinned. “I guess Ben and I are even now.”

  I had to agree with him, but I started to wonder about my own situation. I had hurt and humiliated Ava. We definitely weren’t even, and I knew she’d want to settle the score.

  How she would do it was the question.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Here. You need these more than I do.” Jenner handed me a bag of jelly beans from her beach tote. It was Sunday morning, and I’d joined her at the surf shop to interview her for the paper and to fill her in on the disaster that was the Little Debbies’ social.

  “Thanks.” I ripped the bag open and searched for the purple ones. “Any chance these are magic beans? With the power to erase people’s memories?”

  She gave me a sympathetic look. “You can always change schools. That’s what Marcus did.”

  I shook my head and crunched through the sugary shell of a purple bean. “I can’t let Ava have the newspaper. I mean, I feel bad for what happened, but if I give up, she wins.”

  “Then let her!” Jenner groaned. “You have to stop this obsession. It isn’t healthy.”

  Even though Jenner was my best friend, sometimes it felt like she didn’t know me at all. Competition was what I loved, and being the best was all I wanted.

  “If I let Ava win,” I said, “she becomes the lead reporter, which means I’m stuck writing articles about Halloween safety and which lunch lady bought a new hairnet. Those kinds of stories don’t get Junior Global Journalist Awards.”

  “Yes, but you avoid the embarrassment of kissing guys who don’t like you.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “How many more times do you honestly think I’ll do that?”

  “I don’t know.” She grinned. “I never thought you’d do it a first time.”

  I shoved her. “Let’s just get started on your interview.”

  We spent the next half hour talking about her surfing and
her views on gender stereotypes, and then we wandered down to the beach so she could show me her new maneuvers. The longer she practiced, the warmer the sun felt, and after a while I fled toward the boardwalk for shade.

  To my surprise, Katie Glenn was already there, resting against a large boulder and wearing a hooded sweater. When she saw me, she stiffened.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t come to bug you. I didn’t know anyone was even down here.”

  Her shoulders relaxed into a bored shrug. “I don’t own the beach. You can go wherever you want.” She twisted her lips into a leer. “Just don’t try to steal my boyfriend.”

  Thankfully, it was too dark under the boardwalk for her to see me blush. “Oh … ha! So, you heard about that?” At least she wasn’t making smooching sounds, like the kid down my street, or saying she’d accept payment in kisses, like the jerk at the hot dog stand.

  “Who hasn’t?”

  I actually wondered the same thing. “Well, in case you cared—”

  “I don’t.” Katie leaned back against the rock, wiping her forehead on her sweater sleeve.

  “You’re not going to get sunburned under here,” I said. “I think it’s safe to at least roll up your sleeves.”

  For some reason, this earned me a sour look from Katie. “I’m fine. Mind your own business.”

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t. Even if I hadn’t been pledging the Little Debbies, I still had an insane curiosity about this girl and her fire extinguisher and sweaters and obsession with sea turtles.

  “Why do you like sea turtles so much?” I asked.

  In my opinion, the question was harmless enough that Katie couldn’t say the answer would destroy her reputation … unless her father was a sea turtle or something.

  Luckily, she seemed to agree. “The sea turtle is the mascot for my old school. I guess I just think they’re kind of cool.”

  “Oh,” I said, but Katie’s words triggered a strange tingling sensation in my brain.

  When I’d interviewed her before, she’d said her previous school was Fowler, home of Panther Pride. There were no sea turtle fans at Fowler.

  But there were at Sheldon Academy.

  “Well, bye. I hope you see some.” I hurried back to my towel, signaling Jenner, but she was too busy paddling out to another wave, so I pulled out my cell phone and called Paige.

  “Yes, you’re still eligible to pledge the Debutantes,” she answered.

  “Huh?” I’d been so focused on the whole embarrassment factor that the thought had never crossed my mind. “I mean, oh, right. Phew!” I wiped imaginary sweat off my brow, even though she couldn’t see it.

  “I know you probably stayed up all night worrying,” said Paige, “which means you have hideous bags under your eyes. Cucumber slices can help with that. … And you can use the leftovers to make a really healthy salad.”

  Before she could babble on with a list of ingredients, I interrupted. “Actually, I wanted to tell you that I caught Katie in another lie. This time, it’s about her old school.”

  Paige was silent for a moment. “This girl gets stranger and stranger. Her secret must be stellar !”

  “Listen, I have to call someone else. Do you have the school directory?”

  “Somewhere.” I heard her rummaging around. “Who are you looking for?”

  “Marcus Taylor.”

  Paige made a cooing sound into the phone. “You already miss your new boyfriend?”

  My cheeks warmed. “He’s not my boyfriend, but he did go to the same school as Katie last year.”

  Paige gasped. “Brilliant!” She recited the number and I wrote it on my spiral notepad. “Now, when you call him, don’t act like you want to talk to him,” she advised.

  I frowned. “But I do want to talk to him.”

  “No, you don’t. Act like you dialed his number by mistake.”

  She was rapidly slipping into the void of insanity. “But he knows I don’t know his number,” I said. “How could I accidentally call it by mistake?”

  “Tell him you were dialing some other number and missed it by a digit. Let’s see. What place has a phone number almost like his? Let me get my other phone book.”

  I flipped my phone shut while she was still talking and looked at Marcus’s number. Even though I had a legitimate reason to call him, my palms were damp with sweat. After one deep breath I took the plunge and punched in his digits.

  “Hello?” Marcus answered.

  At that moment, my throat chose to fill with phlegm, so that I gurgled “Hey” in a voice that sounded like I’d been gargling Jell-O.

  “Who is this?” I could hear mild annoyance in his voice and tried to think of a clever explanation. I must have been quiet longer than I thought, because Marcus hung up.

  “Argh!” I snapped the phone shut, and a minute later, it rang back with Marcus’s phone number. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Hey, Marcus.”

  “Hey, Delilah.” This time he didn’t sound grossed out. I might have been imagining it, but he even sounded kind

  of … pleased. “I thought it was you.”

  “Oh, you speak Phlegm?”

  “My caller ID does.” He laughed. “I was wondering how you were doing, but it sounds like you’re back to your old self.”

  I dug my foot into the sand and blushed. “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. “Not always.”

  I wanted to ask him what he meant by “not always,” but I had something else to take care of first. “I was actually calling about Katie Glenn.”

  “Oookay. Why?”

  “There’s something strange about her, and I know you went to her old school, so I have a feeling you know what it is. I want you to tell me.”

  “Oh.” Marcus quieted for a beat. “In that case, no. Next subject.”

  My jaw dropped, and I just sat there, stupefied.

  “Hello?”

  “Why … why won’t you tell me?” I managed.

  “Because.”

  I was getting really tired of everyone being so vague. “‘Because’ is not an answer. Why not, Marcus?”

  “Because I know whatever I tell you, you’ll use it against her, and I also know what it feels like to have someone call you out and make you feel stupid, Delilah.”

  Pleasant Marcus had apparently handed the phone over to Bitter Marcus. Still, he had made a good point, and I recovered nicely with a fail-proof argument of my own.

  “So?”

  Marcus seemed baffled by this. “So … I’m not going to help you hurt her.”

  I flopped back on my towel. “Why do you care what happens to Katie, anyway? Was she your girlfriend or something?”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to me before, but it made me sit up straight. “That’s it, isn’t it? She was your girlfriend. Your partner in some crime you both committed at Sheldon.”

  “No!” Marcus groaned. “I’ve never had a girlfriend, and I’m starting to think I don’t really ever want one.”

  “But you’re not saying the two of you didn’t commit a crime.”

  “I didn’t commit any crime!” he practically yelled.

  My heart started beating faster, and I shifted on my towel with nervous energy. “You’re still not saying she didn’t commit a crime, Marcus. She did, didn’t she? She committed a crime, and that’s why she changed schools!”

  Marcus made a few grunting noises and said, “Just call me back when you’re done playing reporter.” And he hung up.

  But he never denied that Katie had committed a crime.

  I grinned.

  And he wanted me to call him back.

  I grinned a little wider.

  Jenner plopped down beside me. “Those jelly beans did the trick, huh?”

  ***

  An hour later, Jenner and I were wandering through the archives section of the public library.

  “Why are we looking at old newspapers and not searching the Internet?” asked Jenner.

  “Beca
use whatever Katie did was big, but it wasn’t big enough to make front page news. If it wasn’t big news, it won’t pop up on the Internet, and the county daily doesn’t archive on their website beyond the current season.”

  I opened one of the cabinets of microfilm and pulled out six canisters labeled “September–December” of the previous year. “Katie’s crime had to have happened during her fall semester of sixth grade, because she transferred to Brighton this past spring, so if we look through the local news on each of these, we should find something.”

  I loaded the earliest-dated microfiche into the reader and advanced through the images until I reached the local news, giving each page a quick scan for mention of Sheldon Academy.

  Jenner grabbed another reel and eyed it suspiciously. “How many newspapers are on each of these?”

  “I think the librarian said twenty.”

  “Which means we have to go through”—she noted the number of canisters on the table—“a hundred and twenty papers?”

  “Um …” I looked up at her and smiled. “I love you? You’re pretty and smart and have nice hair?”

  She sighed and sat at a microfiche reader beside me. “Save it for Paige.”

  We skimmed through newspaper pages for two hours, our necks starting to cramp and our eyes blurring from watching the words whiz by. Finally, when I was beginning to feel as if my body had frozen into a hunched shell, Jenner bumped my arm.

  “Check this out.”

  I leaned over to her screen and smiled at what I saw:

  investigators still baffled by sheldon fire

  “Bingo.” I printed out the article and read it while Jenner went in search of a vending machine.

  According to the article, the fire at Sheldon Academy had happened over the weekend of November 15 in the science lab. There were no signs of forced entry into the school and no indication as to what had caused the fire. The entire lab had been damaged except for a special tank containing a juvenile green sea turtle brought in by the local marine center for students to discuss that week. The tank had been found on the front lawn of the school with the turtle still safely housed inside.

  I read the article several times until Jenner reappeared with a package of Skittles for both of us.