Juniper Lemon's Happiness Index Page 14

  Splat.

  A pepperoni unsticks from my chin.

  “Well, then.”

  In moments the attic is a war zone: Kody dives behind some boxes, popping up to pelt us from over the top; Angela hugs an armchair and retaliates with a rain of pizza chunks; I hunker behind a desk, aiming Cheetos. Unfortunately, those only float in useless arcs to the floor, and Angela and Kody see this and gang up on me.

  “Mercy!” I cry through flecks of frosting and pizza sauce.

  “NEVER!” they rejoin together.

  In a desperate move, I empty both of my bowls at them, candy corn clattering across the floor while Cheetos crunch underfoot. Angela and Kody take up their boxes, preparing to do the same when—

  “Angela?”

  The trapdoor falls open. Angela’s mom calls up to ask what we’re doing.

  “Experimental spa treatment!” Angela calls back.

  Kody and I catch each other’s eye.

  “Could you please ‘experiment’ a little more quietly?”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Waters!”

  When she’s gone, Angela turns to us. “I . . .” Her laughter flatlines as she surveys the attic. “Am so-o-o dead.”

  Luckily, there are rags and cleaning supplies inside one of the (now bespattered) boxes, so we get to work cleaning up before any stains can set in.

  Angela sticks one of the unthrown slices of Grimaudi’s in her mouth. “Truth or dare, Juniper?”

  “Truth.”

  Angela chews, thoughtful. The sound of rain filters in through the rafters.

  “If you had the chance,” she says at last, swallowing, “if you could see Camilla again—what would you say to her?”

  I feel my body lock, a burglar caught in a spotlight. A pepper falls from the piece of pizza I’ve just rescued from the top of a wardrobe.

  “Oh god,” says Angela quickly. “I didn’t—god, sorry, Juniper. I can be so clueless sometimes—my mom says I have the social sensitivity of a seagull—”

  “It’s okay.”

  Angela closes her mouth, lips pressing together so fiercely, it looks as though they have barricaded themselves in for winter.

  “Really. All’s fair in Truth or Dare. And it’s not a rude question, you don’t have to apologize—it just, surprised me, is all.”

  Angela’s mouth remains boarded shut. She and Kody watch me, riveted.

  “I would say . . .” The rain beats around us like a thousand hands; children laugh as they splash along trick-or-treat routes below. “I love you.”

  I close my eyes again.

  “I would tell her I’m sorry.”

  So, so sorry.

  “I would ask her . . . why she didn’t tell me.”

  Thunder consumes the attic. After a pause so long and enveloping, I start to wonder if this isn’t a dream, Kody leans in and asks, gently touching my forearm, “Tell you what?”

  I look from one friend to the other in the candlelight. Both grip so tightly to whatever I’m about to say next that I might be at the height of a ghost story.

  Well.

  I guess I kind of am.

  I tell them about Camie’s letter to YOU.

  When I finish, Angela swears. “And you think this guy went to Fairfield?”

  “Goes,” I correct. “The letter said YOU was still in high school. But yeah—I’m almost positive. Sponge says Camie spent an unusual amount of time in 3 Hall after school.”

  “3 Hall?”

  Angela and Kody raise their brows at each other.

  Kody asks, “Any theories who it is?”

  I bite my lip. Their eyes widen.

  “Who?”

  I toss my hair from my face. “Okay. Don’t freak out on me, but—” I drop a hunk of maple bar in the trash and reposition. “I think it could be Brand Sayers.”

  “BRAND SAYERS?”

  I walk them through the mounting stack of evidence:

  1) He’s younger, and more importantly was at Shawn’s party the night the letter should’ve been delivered;

  2) He’s known as both unstable and concerned about his image, which might explain why neither he nor Camie would have wanted their relationship public;

  3) He’s been uncharacteristically nice to me on multiple occasions;

  4) He has a key to Band Geeks’ Paradise, which is, as Kody and Angela well know, a secluded and notorious sex haven in 3 Hall.

  And that’s before you account for Brand’s walking away when he saw me reading Auden, or his apparent interest in my Camilla print at Pippa’s.

  But Kody only shakes her head. “I just don’t see it. I feel like Camilla was too clean, too . . . ambitious for someone like Brand. Or, not ambitious—academic. Good grades, tons of clubs and activities, senior class president . . .”

  “But then,” Angela counters, “wouldn’t that just be another reason to keep it quiet? Because it would rock the social scene?”

  Kody frowns. “Maybe . . .”

  “You know what I think?” They turn to me. “I think there’s only one way to find out for sure.” And it’s long overdue.

  Angela asks me, “What?”

  I answer, “Ask him.”

  - 121 -

  When I look for Brand after school that Monday in detention—he did say he’s a glutton for punishment—he isn’t there. I try out back, thinking maybe he snuck off for a smoke break.

  Nothing. Not even an Axe cloud.

  I fold my arms. I may not know my suspect perfectly, but I can think of one other place to look for him.

  A quiet little place in 3 Hall.

  ∞

  When I climb the steps to Band Geeks’ Paradise, I hear music. It’s electric guitar, a song I don’t recognize. There’s a lot of quick notes, bending, vibrato. It’s smoky. Melancholy.

  Blues.

  I knock on the door of the storage space.

  “Lemon?” Brand looks up as I enter, but he doesn’t stop playing. “This is a surprise.”

  I cross the room, drag up a stool to sit on. “Is that a Muffin Wars song?”

  “Nah,” he says. “Just improvising.”

  “That’s improvising?”

  I think of Camie and the way, on slow afternoons when we were lazing around the house or raiding the fridge for a snack, she would suddenly start rapping out a rhythm on the countertop. After a few measures she’d add a half beat, a clap, a beatboxing vocal or a line of notes. Then she’d look at me, a cue. I would jump in with variations.

  If we were in the car, she’d ad-lib harmonies with the radio. It always blew me away. I was convinced there was some trick to it, but when I asked her how she did it, Cam just said, “You hear a song enough, you can just kind of feel it.”

  It was the skill that prompted me to join choir.

  Nowadays, thanks to that experience, I can find a harmony myself. Still, I doubt I’ll ever really feel a song like Camie could.

  Like Brand can.

  Maybe they would’ve been good together.

  “So.” Brand’s fingers scale the neck of his guitar, ending on a high bend. “I’m guessing you didn’t drop by to hear me play.” He stands, unplugs and lifts off his instrument, and takes it over to lay back in the case.

  “No,” I affirm. “I came because . . .”

  Brand is fiddling with keys at a low cupboard. On the floor beside him are an unrolled mattress pad, a pillow, and blankets.

  “Is that—?” I crane closer.

  “What?” Brand unlocks it and hurriedly stuffs the amp, then the bedding away. “Sometimes I come up here to nap.”

  “How is it that you haven’t flunked out of the district?”

  “I keep a 3.7 average, thank you.”

  “What the crap? How?”

  Brand shuts the cupboard and twi
sts the keys. Grinning, he confides, “The smarter you are, the more you can get away with.”

  My mouth bends down. Smart, too? You can bullshit a paper, but you can’t fake a GPA. He’s sounding more like Camilla’s type by the minute!

  I decide to hit him with it straight in the hopes of startling out the truth.

  “Brand, were you dating my sister?”

  He stiffens visibly. “What?”

  “If I said ‘Auden,’ you’d say . . . ?”

  “Is . . . that someone I should know?”

  “Or if I asked about Pippa’s. She said you were lurking around my Camilla print.”

  Brand scoffs. “Since when is it a crime to appreciate good art?”

  “And I’m sure it only seems like you’ve been avoiding me since I brought up Shawn’s again.”

  “That—” Brand closes his mouth and looks down, a sudden smile playing up his face. “Is not what you think.”

  “No? And just what do you think I think? What aren’t you telling me? Why are you smiling?”

  Brand crosses the room without answering, still clearly savoring my agitation. He takes his time straddling the stool he’d been sitting on to face me.

  “Actually,” he says, “until just now, I’d been under the distinct impression that you were avoiding me.”

  “What?”

  If he means that as a curveball, it’s working.

  Brand says, “Well yeah. You haven’t been coming by the dumpsters anymore. I thought that maybe you’d found what you were looking for. I was gonna ask, but then I saw you hanging out with that flannel champ and thought—I thought—” He stops short, looks away. “Never mind.”

  Is Brand . . . blushing?

  “Is that why you jumped ship at lunch that day?” Not because he’d seen me reading Auden—but because I was with Nate?

  I guess I’m not the only one who’s wondered about him.

  When Brand doesn’t answer, I clear my throat. “I got a grade for those projects I showed you. That’s why I haven’t been around the dumpsters—not trolling for materials anymore. And Nate—Nate and I started hanging out mostly because of Booster.”

  I’m not sure why I feel compelled to add this last part. But as much as I’ve questioned why he’s been such a good friend to me myself, that is all Nate’s been: a friend.

  Brand says, “Oh.”

  He looks considerably less surly.

  “Anyway,” I cover, heat rushing to my face, “don’t change the subject on me. I want answers.”

  “What answers?”

  I opt not to tell Brand about the Auden lines or 3 Hall. Instead I remind him I know Camilla’s boyfriend is still at Fairfield, I have a pretty good idea she was meeting him at the party, and that the only younger person I know was there besides myself is—

  “Me,” he finishes.

  “And your band.”

  Brand shakes his head. “Look—I’m not the guy. I don’t know how to convince you of that except to say that if I was, I would’ve told you already. I’d want to read the letter, and I wouldn’t want to mislead you or deprive you of your closure. Douche thing to do.”

  My shoulders slump.

  Yeah. I guess it would be.

  “As for the rest of Muffin Wars”—he tilts his head, frowns—“Tyler only joined this summer, and Derrick and Keegan were both dating other people. So that’s that.”

  “Did you see Camilla talking to anyone that night?”

  “We were playing. It’s not like I was watching her.”

  “You must have noticed her once she picked up the mike and said I could sing better than you.”

  A scowl.

  “Please, Brand. Anything could help.”

  Brand crosses his arms. I wait.

  “I guess . . .” At last he exhales. “I did see her talking to some guys when you were up on the deck with us.”

  My eyes spring open. “What guys? Who?”

  “Dunno, but they looked older. One of ’em had a Fullbrook sweater.”

  “Fullbrook?” What would Cam be doing talking to guys from the local university? “Anyone else? Someone younger?”

  “Jesus, Lemon, I told you. I was playing a gig, not taking a fucking census.”

  “Please.”

  Brand frowns. After a moment he sighs and drags his hand back through his hair. “Other than us and Sponge . . .”

  “Sponge?” I sit up straighter.

  “Yeah. He’s our sound and lights guy. But it isn’t him, okay. Sponge is—”

  But I don’t hear him. I am galloping down the stairs, pieces falling into place.

  Sponge is the sound and lights guy. And not just for Muffin Wars—for most of our school productions.

  Which take place almost exclusively in the auditorium in 3 Hall.

  “Where are you going?”

  I don’t answer him. There is swearing, keys, and a hustle of steps behind me as I stalk for Ms. Gilbert’s, but I hardly notice; my head is buzzing with Sponge, the theater, possibilities. The sound booth is only one place those in drama might have access to: under stage. Dressing rooms. Costume loft. Not to mention it was Sponge himself who clued me in to 3 Hall.

  How better to mislead me than with truth?

  “I found something weeks ago,” I explain when Brand catches up with me, panting, outside the studio.

  “What?”

  I jerk my head. Together we enter and clomp up the stairs to the room I used to use for independent study.

  “Here.”

  I hit the lights. When the bars flicker on, I pull the drawer with all my scavenged materials, riffle through, and find what I am looking for—a single page with Sponge’s name on it—in a folder marked “poetry.”

  I take it out and pass the sheet to Brand. “What if it’s about Camilla?”

  Brand takes the page I offer him and scans it.

  VII.

  We touched by chance one afternoon

  And neither of us was immune:

  The spark inflamed to fevered flu ’cause

  Boy, I had a crush on you.

  Your shining eyes, your golden hair

  You caught me watching from the stairs

  And waltzed right up and said you knew that

  Boy, I had a crush on you.

  We kissed, we danced, the seasons changed

  Our hopes and dreams and fears exchanged

  You were my butter, bread, and moon

  Oh boy, I had a crush on you.

  Our secret love did not deter

  A secret lover’s French whisper:

  Je vous aime, chéri, et si beaucoup

  Boy, I had a crush on you.

  But on one fateful summer night

  You vanished from my world in flight

  And didn’t even say goodbye—though knew that

  Boy, I had a crush on you.

  It even does the repeating lines like “It’s No Use Raising a Shout”!

  Sponge Torres

  “I think you’re seeing what you want to see.” Brand hands the paper back to me.

  “Maybe,” I admit. “But look at this stuff. ‘Secret love’? ‘Golden hair’? ‘One fateful summer night’? You can’t tell me that this doesn’t all line up.” And that’s not even counting the French bit.

  Brand looks at me. His chest swells and empties with a heavy breath.

  “Just don’t try to ‘fix’ things for Sponge like you did with Angela.”

  I blink at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What it sounds like,” he says.

  ∞

  I stay till five to hit the auditorium in 3 Hall. If Sponge is YOU and Camie used to meet him in the theater, she’d have surely been sighted by those in school productions. Maybe even wi
th Sponge. I never saw her around when I did Bye Bye Birdie last fall, but maybe she and YOU weren’t dating then. Maybe they only started dating after.

  Maybe someone who was in the spring play can tell me something.

  Unfortunately, when I try to question any likely informants—the cast and crew now in rehearsals for Fiddler on the Roof—a new director kicks me out faster than you can say “cast list.”

  The only other way I can think of to catch them all is to wait until full rehearsals—the last two weeks before the show. Those practices are more grueling, and the cast almost always goes out for Pippa shakes after.

  The only caveat?

  Full rehearsals won’t start until about a month from now.

  Damn it.

  It sucks I can’t just ask Sponge.

  -133 -

  By mid-November, Nate and his wintergreen charms have suckered both Angela and Kody into helping us prepare for Booster’s first real event, the annual bake sale. As the four of us mix, knead, drop, and decorate various pastries at my house the night before, he doesn’t seem to notice the way they keep getting lost in his eyes.

  Everything’s going well until, midway through biscotti, scones, and the redundant but exquisite-looking cookies ’n’ cream cookies, Angela asks about more baking soda.

  “Is there some in one of these?” She indicates Camie’s pink-and-lemon-print canisters.

  “That one’s sugar, and that one’s coffee.”

  “Up here?” Angela spot-checks a few cupboards. “Uhh . . .” she says when she gets to the one above the stove, where most people keep spices.

  Ours is full of our more unusual-looking Dala horses.

  “One sec. I’ll check the pantry.”

  I flip the light and step into the closet. All the baking stuff is up top and I have to stand on tiptoe to see, but I catch a glimpse of Arm & Hammer orange in the very back. I push aside cinnamon and vanilla and bring it down.

  “Wha—?”

  The box is feather light. I shake it, and am about to ask who put it back empty when I realize it isn’t.

  Empty.

  Something rustled inside.

  I pull the flap at the top and peer in. Wedging my hand through, I tip the box toward me and work out the two spare papers that cling to the edges.