A Month of Mondays Page 15

  Chapter 24

  Jessica had waited for me in the library while I met with Farbinger. When I showed up, one look at my face told her not to ask what had happened. Now we sat together on the city bus, Jess reading, me staring out the window and scowling at the buildings as we crept past in traffic that barely moved.

  At first, she’d been really nervous about taking the bus all the way across town because her mom and dad had never let her take public transportation alone. But I’d assured her that Tracie and I had been riding it by ourselves for years, and I knew exactly how to get to Oak Bay. We decided not to mention it to her parents, though. They might think she was too young to be on the bus without an adult, even though she wasn’t.

  After twenty minutes or so Jess seemed to realize I was right and relaxed. Now she was reading a play. Every once in a while she’d laugh, or I’d hear her whisper a line of dialogue like she was testing it out, but mostly she left me alone to sulk.

  My brain said if they were going to call me a cheater then I should dump the whole janitor thing too, just in case. Forget the school board. Let the custodians fight their own battles. I could return to Lame-o English, get some reading in, and enjoy my average life. If I didn’t do the presentation, Caroline wouldn’t have to come and pretend she was interested in me either. And Dad could work his full shift without losing any pay. Amanda would get her A without me, regardless.

  The problem was my heart. I tried to ignore the idea that people were counting on me, but like a splotch of red ink on a white shirt, it wouldn’t go away. No matter what I told people, I did want to be in Honors English. And I liked how it felt getting a perfect score on the French test. At least until they called me a cheater.

  Also, there was the whole Yoda thing. On my way to Farbinger’s office, I’d seen him scrubbing graffiti off some lockers, and he was singing and smiling while he did it. He might be all right financially if they let him go, but what would he do every day? You got the feeling that the only reason he got up in the morning was because he loved his job. How could I let the school board take that away from him without a fight?

  And if that wasn’t enough, there was also this sort of stupid hope I could keep Caroline interested in me if I was more of a model daughter—one who got As and could do presentations without choking. If a school project would make her stick around, well…maybe it was worth it.

  “Suze?” Jessica said.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Are we almost there?”

  I’d been staring out the window but not really seeing anything, and now I looked around, getting my bearings. Oak trees overhung the streets, some with branches low enough to scrape the top of the bus. Cars lined every available inch of curb space, and scaffolding blocked the cracked sidewalk as workers painted a Victorian house with a fresh coat of paint. I took the card Caroline had given me out of my purse and checked the address. “Next stop,” I said.

  “Are we going to her office?” Jess asked.

  “Nope. Her house.”

  She looked surprised. “Does she know we’re coming?”

  I rang the bell. “She’s at work. Come on.”

  Once we were safely off the bus and I’d pulled Jessica to the sidewalk, I checked the street signs and figured out which way to go. It was one of those cold, windy, blue-sky, super-sunny, early December days. The slicing wind off the ocean bit our cheeks, turning them pink. I took a deep breath, expecting fresh air, and inhaled exhaust from an SUV, instead. Blech.

  “Okay. Three blocks up this way,” I said between coughing fits. I peered around some parked cars, and we dashed across the street.

  “Suze?” Jessica said. “Why are we going to her house if she’s at work?”

  “Huh?” I scanned the house on my right for an address.

  “Why are we going there?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Just to check it out.”

  I wanted to see what kind of money this woman had. Living in Oak Bay is pretty expensive, and I needed to know if Caroline lived in some dinky apartment or what. And all those diamonds. Were they real or cubic zirconia? It wasn’t like I hoped to cash in on them or anything. But it was almost like I needed to know if Caroline was sincere or not, and if she actually had all the money she appeared to have, then that made her more real.

  Jessica stopped walking. “You mean we’re spying on her?”

  “It’s no big deal,” I said, tugging on her arm. “I just want to get a look at the house. You know, see what it looks like. Find out if she’s got a cat. That sort of thing.”

  “A cat?”

  “Well, I could never get close to someone who doesn’t love cats,” I said.

  Duh.

  Jessica shook her head and laughed a deep belly laugh like she thought I was crazy. I’m glad she could let go so easily, because my stomach was tightening with every step. For one thing, the closer we got to Caroline’s street, the bigger the houses were. And they weren’t apartments either. BMWs and other fancy cars sat in the driveways. The large front lawns were immaculate, planted with exotic grasses and climbing flowers too, like these people either had gardeners, or lots of leisure time. Maybe I didn’t want to know how rich Caroline was. Maybe it would be intimidating. Maybe it would make me mad. After all, what did she need a big house for?

  “That’s it.” I pointed.

  “Egad!” Jessica said.

  My thoughts exactly. Well, maybe not exactly, Jessica does have a weird way with words. But wow.

  A large porch wrapped around a three-story yellow Victorian. Deep purple and lavender shutters framed millions of ornate windows. Some of them were even round like a ship’s porthole.

  “Do you think she owns that house?” Jessica asked.

  “Maybe she rents it,” I said. “Either way, it’s got to cost a fortune.”

  “So, what are we going to do now?”

  “I want to get a closer look.”

  “How close?” she asked, giving me a squinty, suspicious look.

  “I’m not going to break in,” I said. “I want to see the backyard, and then we can go get a slice of pizza. I need to know if there’s a cat.”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “I just thought of it on the way over. But it’s important.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You’re really weird.”

  Maybe, but I knew from experience that cat people got along. Tracie might even like Caroline some day if she was feline-friendly. “Come on,” I said. “Nobody will notice us.” Jessica still looked worried, and I grabbed her arm again and dragged her along. “I’m just going to look in the backyard. Besides, I am her daughter. If anyone asks I could say that.” But I hoped no one did, because the last thing I wanted was for Caroline to get wind of the fact that I was sneaking around her house, checking it out.

  We passed under a vine-covered trellis into the backyard. “Unbelievable,” I said.

  A little round summerhouse, painted to match the big house, sat smack in the middle of the grass. I had always wanted one of those. I let my imagination wander for a second…me reading out there in a wrought-iron lounge chair with a rose print cushion. I was immersed in a tale of romance, the summer winds whispering around me…no one named Tracie within shouting distance….

  “That’s pretty cool,” Jessica said. “Okay. Can we go now?”

  “Jess, you’re acting like Amanda.” I made chicken noises at her.

  “I can’t help it,” she said, laughing.

  “Just one minute. I’m gonna look in the kitchen window and then we’re outta here, okay?”

  “Suze,” she said, sounding exactly like AJ.

  “I’m not doing anything wrong. Relax.”

  I figured if Caroline did have a cat, it might be in the kitchen. Or at least there’d be a food dish or a litter b
ox or something. Maybe a cat bed. I climbed up some narrow, rickety stairs to the back door, and I really did try to hurry because it looked like Jessica was about to keel over from heart failure. All the pink had drained from her face, and she was white, white, white. She was definitely losing Best Friend Forever points with me. We weren’t even doing anything—yet.

  “Suze,” she said, “I don’t think you should be up there.”

  “It’s okay. I’m just looking. Calm down.”

  The steps led to a glass-paned door, but Caroline had hung some lacey curtains over the window so there was nothing to see. I leaned off the edge of the little stoop and peered in the window over what was probably the kitchen sink.

  “Hey, I think I see something that looks like a cat dish,” I said.

  “Great. Let’s go,” Jessica whispered.

  “I can’t tell for sure, though.” I stretched out as far as I could, holding onto the windowsill for support.

  “You’re crazy, Suze.”

  Standing on my tiptoes, I balanced on one leg, stretching, reaching. A bottle of dishwashing soap sat on the counter blocking my view. If only I could lean a tiny…bit…farther.

  In a sudden flash my reflection disappeared and something black-and-white lunged at me from inside the house. I screamed, lost my balance, and crash-landed onto the rhododendron below. I flapped around uselessly, trying to untangle myself from the girl-eating bush, but like in that Harry Potter book, the more I struggled the faster I stuck.

  The door opened. “Is someone out there?” asked Caroline’s voice from above me.

  “Help?” I said, grinning up at her in a way that I hoped looked sweet and innocent.

  “Susan? Is that you?” She came down the stairs and yanked me hard out of the bush. And let’s just say she didn’t use any motherly tenderness when she pulled.

  “Ow!”

  “What are you doing here?” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing…I wasn’t doing anything. I just…” I brushed myself off and scanned the yard for Jessica. Clearly, she’d bailed on me.

  “Well?” Caroline asked.

  “I was looking around,” I explained, “and then something flew at me from inside the house, and I lost my balance.”

  “Do you generally go peeking into other people’s windows?”

  “No,” I said, keeping my eyes on the ground. “Really. I don’t. I swear.” What could I say in my defense? And where the heck was Jessica? “I just…we were just…”

  Caroline looked around the yard. “We?”

  “Jessica’s here somewhere.”

  “Well, perhaps you better go find her,” Caroline suggested. “And then come in, and we’ll have some tea and discuss it.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  Caroline went back inside, and I limped around to the front of the house looking for Jessica. She was standing on the corner a block away, doubled over. When I caught up to her, the tears were spilling from her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “Don’t worry. Caroline’s not mad. At least not at you. She wants us to come in for tea.” Jessica didn’t say anything. Why was she crying? “Jess?” I asked, touching her shoulder.

  She looked up at me, and that’s when I saw she was laughing—uncontrollably hard, tears streaming down her face, one of those silent, hurt-your-gut kind of laughs. “Cat,” she spluttered between giggles.

  “What?” I asked, confused. “What’s so funny?”

  “It was a cat that jumped at you and made you fall,” she gasped, breaking into another burst of giggles.

  “A cat?” The black-and-white shadow suddenly made sense.

  “Yeah. Caroline’s attack-cat.”

  I stood there, shaking my head, laughing a little but nothing like Jessica. It was pretty funny, though—the whole cat thing—but still…she was really laughing hard. I wondered if she was maybe a little hysterical. Should I slap her? Before I could decide, a sharp, stinging sensation made me examine my leg. Oh, great. I’d torn a hole in my best tights. Blood oozed out of a scrape below my knee and I dabbed at it with my thumb, making it hurt worse.

  When I looked up at Jess, the tears were still running down her cheeks and I knew I didn’t want to go back to Caroline’s. We were a mess. “You know what?” I said. “Let’s get out of here.” I grabbed her hand and led her back toward the shops and the best pizza place in town, Escape From New York.

  “Wait,” she said. “I thought we had to go in for tea.”

  “I hate tea,” I said. “It tastes like hot water poured over gym socks.”

  “But what about Caroline?”

  “I’ll explain it to her later,” I said. “She’ll understand.”

  She’d have to. If anyone understood running away, it would be Caroline. I figured she owed me one.

  Chapter 25

  We were in the thick of doing our presentation for the Honors English Class, and I don’t think I’d taken a single deep breath the whole time. My heart was pounding, and I had that hot, prickly feeling under my arms.

  Amanda pushed a key on the computer and the next chart came up on the big screen. I was glad she was doing the tech stuff because all I was good at was surfing the Web. “If you’ll look at this chart of the survey we took at Mission Elementary,” I said, “one hundred percent of the kids knew the names of all the janitors in their school.

  “Of those kids,” I continued, “ninety-four percent were very sure their custodians knew their first names. Four percent thought the janitors might know their names. And the other two percent were confused by the question, so we let them go to lunch.”

  The class laughed. All right! A little laughter. Don’t think about the audience, I reminded myself. And breathe.

  “The results at Maywood Junior and Senior High were similar to the grade school results, except we got a lot more smart-ass—I mean smart-alecky comments.” Oh, that was great. Beautiful. Wonderful job, Suze. I hoped Baker didn’t flunk us. Amanda was gonna kill me for that later.

  “You may be wondering,” I said, “why it’s important for the janitors to know the kids. I’ll tell you why. Safety.”

  I explained about all the custodians who had caught street kids dealing drugs, and I gave examples of ones who had foiled abductions. “One custodian even took a bullet for a student in Texas. Luckily he lived to talk about it. And just a few weeks ago, at our very own high school, a streaker ran across the basketball court during gym class, and it was the janitor who helped drag him into the locker room.”

  Even though everyone had already heard about it, they burst out laughing, which made me feel really great. This presentation was actually going okay. Maybe Honors English wasn’t so hard, after all. When I finished, I sat down at our table while Amanda covered the budget. The way we figured it, a sub-contractor would save the school some money up front, but our custodians would be out of work. The school district would be responsible for unemployment for the younger workers and probably force retirement on the older ones.

  “Plus,” Amanda said, “when workers get lower wages, it weakens the economy, which isn’t good for anyone because then the budgets keep getting cut.”

  We wrapped up our presentation with a slideshow of the custodians at Maywood doing what they do best. Sweeping, changing light bulbs, emptying garbage cans, raking leaves, helping a kid pick up his scattered books, and even plunging a toilet. We had added the music from that really ancient movie, Chariots of Fire, so it looked and sounded really pro.

  We rocked!

  ^^^

  “Why are you running?” I asked, chasing Amanda up the street.

  “I’m not running. You’re just short.”

  She had a point there, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of point I like to hear. “What’s your problem?”

  She finally stopped. “Well, let me see…the visuals
were out of order, and I don’t know how that happened because it’s on a computer. The music didn’t match the slideshow the way I wanted it to, even though I was up half the night trying to make it work. The figures might not be accurate because apparently the stupid company they want to sub-contract with does do some minor maintenance after all, not just cleaning. You called them janitors instead of custodians four times. You said smart-ass. And I still don’t think you should tell the story about Whitey streaking across the gym at the high school.”

  “Is that all?”

  She speed-walked toward her house.

  Okay. So I was being sarcastic. But we’d done an excellent presentation. Even Baker had told us we’d done a good job. I didn’t know why Amanda had to get so bent out of shape over everything.

  “No, Suze, that’s not all,” she yelled over her shoulder at me. “You need to learn how to work the computer. I can’t be responsible for everything.”

  “Come on, Amanda. I know how to work a computer.” I trotted after her. “But I don’t want to wreck it. It’s so expensive.”

  “That’s just an excuse.”

  Maybe. Maybe not. If she was this particular about everything else, then the last thing I wanted to do was mess up her new laptop. Besides, why did we both need to know how it worked? Sometimes Amanda created things to worry about.

  “Fine. I’ll practice doing it,” I said, finally catching up. “But you’re still going to run it for the presentation.”

  If she wanted to waste our time, then whatever. I had bigger things on my mind. Like how Tracie was going to react when she found out Caroline was going to the school- board meeting.

  Chapter 26