Answers in the Pages Read online

  But that wasn’t what she was angry about.

  The thing is, my mom doesn’t read books like I read books. I like to be surprised, so I try to avoid even the summary on the back. My mom, though, doesn’t like to be surprised. So she’ll read a few pages at the start, to get a sense of what the book is about, and then she’ll read the last page, so she knows where it’s going. If she’s happy with that, she’ll return to the beginning and keep reading.

  It wasn’t until right before dinner, when my dad got home and she asked him if they could talk for a second in private, that I remembered the last-page-first thing. That’s when I knew: It wasn’t the start of the book that had made her take the book away from me. It must have been something about the ending. But I didn’t have the book anymore, so I wasn’t able to read the ending myself to see if I was right.

  It wasn’t until the next day, when I was back in Mr. Howe’s class, that I’d read the sentence the whole town would soon be arguing about.

  Gideon didn’t tell his turtle Samson about the new kid, because for the first few days, he didn’t find out much about him.

  It wasn’t that Roberto was quiet, exactly. He answered whenever Ms. June called on him. At lunch, he fit right into the boy table, and since the boys around him didn’t ask many questions, there weren’t many answers provided. Gideon had heard him say the word Florida, so that could have been where he was from. Or maybe that was just where his grandparents lived. Or he was talking with the boys at the boy table about a Florida sports team. (*Gideon assumed there were sports teams in Florida even if he couldn’t name one himself.)

  Gideon, Tucker, and Joelle always sat at the boy-girl table so they could be together. If Gideon’s curiosity about Roberto was brimming, Joelle’s was about halfway to the top and Tucker’s hadn’t been poured at all.

  “What do you think about the new kid?” Gideon asked them at the end of Roberto’s first week.

  “He seems nice,” Joelle said.

  “I haven’t really noticed,” Tucker mumbled before turning his attention back to his potato chips.

  “He likes to wear green,” Gideon observed. (*It was true. Four out of five days, Roberto had either worn a green shirt or a shirt with green stripes.)

  “That’s weird,” Tucker said.

  “Why?” Joelle asked. “Maybe he likes green.”

  “No,” Tucker said. “I mean it’s weird that Gideon noticed. Do you keep track of everyone’s clothes?”

  The answer was no, but only because Tucker had said everyone’s. Meaning, the whole class. Gideon did not keep track of the whole class’s clothes. He kept track of Ms. June’s because he was forced to look at her so often and he had to make the most of the time spent eyes-forward. And sometimes he still kept track of what Tucker wore. He used to do it much more often, back when their best-friend group was a duo instead of a trio. He’d even try to guess what Tucker would be wearing before he got to school.

  He never told Tucker about this. But maybe this curiosity about Roberto was a little bit like it had been at first with Tucker. Maybe this was start-of-friendship curiosity. With Tucker, it had lasted until Joelle. Then, once the three of them were the three of them, Gideon had felt the curiosity subside, like how when you move into a new house and get a new bedroom at first it’s really intense and you spend a lot of time thinking about it, but then after a while it just becomes…your room.

  It made a little more sense to Gideon then, to think that his curiosity was coming from friendship. Or wanting to be friends, since he and Roberto hadn’t really talked to each other yet, and Gideon knew that friends needed to talk to each other to be friends (*with an exception when one of the friends is a turtle).

  “He’s been sitting next to Carrie on the bus home,” Joelle told Gideon and Tucker, keeping her voice low. “He told her he likes movies, and when she asked him some of his favorites, he mentioned a few she didn’t know. But he said Lion King was the best Disney movie. She said her favorite was Beauty and the Beast and he said he liked that one, too.”

  Gideon tried to absorb these facts. And then, when he was back in class and Roberto was sitting down in front of him, he tried to keep these facts to himself, because if he suddenly blurted out, “Why do you like The Lion King more than Beauty and the Beast?” he’d have to explain to Roberto how he knew that Roberto preferred The Lion King, and then he’d have to explain why he and Joelle had been talking about Roberto in the first place.

  So Gideon kept quiet. He studied the back of Roberto’s neck. The nape, he thought, pleased to know the word for it but also confused about why the back of the neck had its own word but the side of the neck didn’t. (*The front, he figured, was the throat, which wasn’t nearly as exciting a word as nape. Which could be rearranged into pane, like a window you could stare at to try to figure out what was on the other side.)

  To distract himself from this distraction, Gideon tried to rearrange all the letters in Alexander Hamilton’s name into phrases.

  All hen exit and roam

  A tiller exam on hand

  Lion, relax and math

  After a few minutes of this, frustrated by his meager results, he moved on to Roberto’s name, to find the words inside it.

  Root

  Bet

  Too

  Boot

  Ore

  Robe

  “Gideon?”

  Roberto was staring at him. Well, not really staring. But he had turned around and was passing a worksheet back.

  “Thank you!” Gideon hastily exclaimed. In the whole classroom, he was the only kid who said thank you when handed this particular worksheet, with an enthusiasm usually reserved for large presents.

  Roberto smiled and said, “You’re welcome.” Then he kept looking-not-staring as Gideon took the paper out of his hand and set it on his desk.

  It wasn’t a big interaction. It didn’t last more than ten seconds—twenty seconds, tops.

  But in this interaction, Gideon had learned two important things:

  (1) Roberto had dimples when he smiled.

  and

  (2) Roberto knew Gideon’s name.

  Melody Tam was bright and resourceful enough to be an Adventurer…she just chose not to be one.

  “Maybe I want to have adventures on my own,” she told Rick and Oliver. “Adventures you’ll never know about.”

  Rick wasn’t sure how he felt about that. But he wasn’t about to pick a fight with Melody. Whenever he picked a fight with Melody, Melody won. It wasn’t even close.

  The three of them were sitting in the RV that acted as their Adventurers headquarters, parked in an unobtrusive underground warren beneath Rick’s grandparents’ property. As Rick lounged on the sofa and Melody perched on a chair, Oliver hung in the background, cleaning counters and straightening books on shelves. There was something about Melody’s presence that made Oliver want the trailer to be a little less messy than it ordinarily was.

  “You know you’re not safe here, right?” Melody was saying. “McAllister isn’t going to stop until you hand over the Doomsday Code.”

  Rick’s expression became a storm cloud. “My parents died for that Code. McAllister is never going to get it.”

  Oliver tried to fade even further into the background, his pale skin getting even paler. Even though Melody was often their partner in adventure, she still hadn’t picked up on the fact that Rick’s memory was lousy, a cage with bars set too far apart. He would never have been able to remember a monumentally long sequence like the Doomsday Code. Most people couldn’t.

  So Oliver had memorized it instead, because Oliver’s memory didn’t have bars—it had walls.

  The storm cloud passed, and Rick beamed again, sitting up proudly, his dark skin glowing with sudden excitement.

  “We’re headed to Yellowstone,” he said. “We’ll blend in well there.
And we can put together our plan to take down McAllister once and for all.”

  It was clear to Oliver that Rick wanted to impress Melody. Her refusal to be enchanted by Rick was paradoxically enchanting to Rick. And Oliver had to imagine that there was some interest on Melody’s part as well. Otherwise, why would she keep coming back?

  A sly smile now insinuated itself onto her face. “I’ve always wanted to see El Capitan,” she said, leaning forward.

  “Well, why don’t you come climb it with us?” Rick replied, leaning forward as well.

  “That’s Yosemite,” Oliver mumbled from the kitchen area. “Yellowstone has Old Faithful. And…bears.”

  Suddenly, the air was cut by a klaxon coming from the security console. Oliver was standing closest, so he was the one who imparted the information to his friends:

  “We have a truck approaching the gates.”

  Rick was behind him now, studying the camera’s footage.

  “Looks like it’s just UPS.”

  Oliver went to touch the screen for a heat scan, but Melody beat him to it.

  The heat scan showed that there were at least ten armed adults in the back of the truck.

  “That’s one heck of a delivery,” Melody quipped.

  Rick grinned at her, his dimples giving every word he said natural quotation marks.

  “Guess you’re along for the ride,” he told her.

  “Seat belts!” Oliver called out, jumping into the driver’s seat and activating the hologram that would make it look like a middle-aged woman was driving.

  Aboveground, there was an explosion as McAllister’s forces blew up the front gate.

  “Must be an urgent delivery,” Rick mused.

  “Well,” Oliver said, “I hope they don’t require a signature.”

  Melody laughed, and when Oliver looked in the rearview mirror, he could see the friendly look she was giving him. Then he broke their glance, because there were more important things to think about, like escape. Without another word, he gunned the engine and sped them through the escape tunnel. A mile later, they broke out into the sunlight. On the security monitors they could see McAllister’s forces shooting at lawn decorations out of frustration. They knew nobody was home.

  “To Yosemite!” Rick called out.

  “Yellowstone!” Melody and Oliver corrected at the same time. It was almost as if their voices were holding hands.

  “Yes, el capitan,” Rick said lightly in response.

  My mother drove me to school the next day. She was in a pretty good mood, and even let me put on music instead of listening to her morning talk guy. She commented on what nice weather it was and suggested I see if some friends wanted to go to the park after school. It was all very friendly, but I was still a little scared. Mom had a very determined look in her eye, and both my father and I knew that when Mom had a very determined look in her eye, it was better to ride the wave than try to stand against it.

  There was the time when I was in second grade when she’d convinced the PTA that bake sales were really just a way to get kids hooked on processed sugar, so instead of a usual bake sale they had a “make sale” where parents sold healthy dinners to raise money for a new roof for the school gymnasium. Then, when I was in third grade and they wanted to name the gymnasium after a local businessman who’d donated a lot of money to the roof, she’d led the petition drive to name it after “a good American historical figure” instead, because she said it sent the wrong message to us kids to say that all it took was wealth to get recognition, and also the local businessman had made a lot of his money from a chain of liquor stores. Which is how we ended up playing dodgeball in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Gymnasium.

  Normally Mom would drop me off at the front door, but today she parked the car and walked in with me. She didn’t tell me what she planned to do, but she didn’t really need to. I could guess. While I went off to my classroom, she would head to the principal’s office.

  The truth was, my mother had spent far more time in the principal’s office than I had. Sometimes it was just for meetings—whenever there was a committee or a task force for parents, Mom would volunteer. But other times, she went to the principal’s office because she felt it was her job to tell her what the school could be doing better. The cafeteria food could be more nutritious. The holiday concert could contain some holiday music instead of songs from the radio. A committee could be formed to fundraise for a new jungle gym because the one we climbed on at recess looked like it was about to topple.

  I never knew about these conversations when they were happening. I only heard about them when my mom complained to my dad over dinner.

  The big difference this time was that Mom had brought a prop—my copy of The Adventurers, which she was holding like a stone she was about to put in a slingshot.

  “Have a great day, sweetie,” she said to me when we got to the point in the hall where I’d go left and she’d go straight.

  I smiled at her and even gave her a little wave. But it was definitely hard to feel like I was having a great day when I walked into Mr. Howe’s class.

  Mr. Howe must have noticed the dread on my face. “Is there something wrong, Donovan?” he asked.

  I shook my head and sat down.

  My friend Kira sat in front of me, and when I saw The Adventurers poking out of her backpack, I asked if I could borrow it for a few minutes.

  “Don’t you have yours?” she asked back.

  “I left it at home,” I lied.

  She handed it over. Her bookmark was at the start of the second chapter, where we’d left off. Even though I knew it would spoil the story, I turned to the very end.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect—there were many possibilities for what could have made my mother take the book away from me. Violence, definitely. But even worse, the characters could have started cursing. There were some words that Mom thought were curse words but nobody else really thought were curse words—while she wouldn’t have liked finding one of those, I wasn’t sure that would have set off her alarms. So that meant it had to be a BIG curse word. Or maybe…a lot of them.

  I started looking on the last page, but couldn’t find any. Then I turned to the start of the last chapter and scanned through.

  Nothing.

  It wasn’t a very violent scene, either. And there weren’t any signs of blasphemy that I could find. It was after the adventure was over, and Rick and Oliver seemed to be ready to go off on another adventure.

  I went to the second-to-last chapter and couldn’t find any curse words there. I was very confused.

  Kira was also confused. I hadn’t realized she was looking at me. But now she asked, “Do you always read books like that?”

  “Uh, no,” I said. I almost added, My mom does, but I was worried that mentioning my mom would actually summon her to the doorway of the classroom. So I kept my mouth shut, except to say thank you as I handed the book back.

  The bell rang and everyone sat down at their desks. We didn’t have language arts until the afternoon, so there wasn’t any mention of The Adventurers. Instead we had to take out our math homework.

  As Mr. Howe walked us through equations on the board, I kept looking to the door, expecting my mother or Principal Woodson or—worst of all—both of them to show up. It was only after about an hour had passed that I started to relax. Maybe my mother had thought she’d read a curse word in the book and Principal Woodson had pointed out there wasn’t actually one there.

  Now the big problem was that I didn’t have the book with me and I was going to have to tell Mr. Howe that I’d left it at home. Which shouldn’t have been a big problem—kids left books at home all the time. The problem was that I wasn’t usually one of those kids. I never left my book or my homework behind. I was very proud of that. So it felt wrong to be caught out on something that wasn’t my fault.

  At recess I
asked permission to go to the library, which meant I was leaving our basketball game one player short…but I figured if I was quick, maybe I’d get ten minutes on the court at the end.

  With a wave to Ms. Guy when I walked in, I went straight to the fiction section and found my way to Bright, G. R. The only book of his that was there was The Adventurers, and there were two hardcover copies. I flipped to the back of one and saw that only one person had signed it out in the past year. I was about to make that two.

  Ms. Guy looked at me funny when she saw what I was checking out.

  “Aren’t you reading this in Mr. Howe’s class?” she asked.

  “I don’t have my copy today,” I told her. I didn’t say that I’d forgotten it or left it at home. I didn’t want Ms. Guy to think I’d do that, either.

  She scanned the book and gave it to me.

  “Well, return it when you get your copy back. And no taking notes in the margins!”

  I was deeply offended that she would think I’d even consider writing in a book. But since I was in a hurry to get back to recess, I just said, “I won’t!” and ran back out.

  I didn’t notice anything unusual at first when we returned from recess. It wasn’t until we got to language arts that I saw Mr. Howe was looking at me a little more than he usually did. He asked everyone to take out their books…and then looked surprised when I took out a copy. I could tell he was about to ask me how I’d gotten it, but then he must have seen that it was a hardcover and had the clear library wrapping over it.

  Before asking us to read aloud, he wrote the word Adventure on the board and asked us what we thought it meant. Different kids said “It’s when you’re running for your life” and “It’s when you’re out of your normal life and doing things you never thought you’d do” and “It’s a really exciting trip you take that’s also full of danger.” Then Mr. Howe said we were right on target, telling us the dictionary definition was “an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity.” I liked the phrase typically hazardous. It definitely seemed to apply to what was happening in the book.