Book Scavenger (11 page)

“This card is our lead,” Clyde said.

Barry snorted. As much as he couldn't wait to be done with this whack, he couldn't walk away. He needed the extra work—it's not like they handed out jobs on street corners—and his bookie scared him more than Clyde did.

“Fat lot of good that card does us. It's got nothing on it—no address, no name, no number. Just that picture of Earth and
Too Slow!
This book has been found by:
Surly Wombat.
What does that even mean?”

“I told you, I saw the girl put it there. After she took our book,” Clyde said.

“It's not
our
book,” Barry muttered.

“Whatever. That's just cement tactics.”

“What?” Barry wanted to jab Clyde with his stick, but he wouldn't dare. The guy was just … Three days after shooting Garrison Griswold and he still hadn't shown any emotion. Didn't talk about it, didn't seem worried about it. Almost like he didn't even remember. The way you might be if you swatted a fly, and then a couple of days later someone asked about the fly and your brain had to run a few circles to even remember that insignificant bug.

“I said: That's. Just. Ce. Ment. Tac. Tics.” Clyde drew out each syllable like molasses dripping off a spoon.

“Cement tactics? That fugly fountain is cement tactics. Bad cement tactics. What the heck is cement tactics?”

“What are you talking about?” Clyde looked at Barry like he was the one who'd lost his mind.

“What are
you
talking about? You lost me with cement tactics,” Barry said.

“
It's our book, it's their book
. It's just words, you know?”

“Oh,” Barry said. “You mean semantics, numbnut. Try reading more books instead of stealing them.”

Clyde shrugged. “I prefer cement tactics. It's poetic.”

Barry sighed and held out his palm. “Let me see the card.”

Clyde handed it over, and Barry studied it for the gazillionth time.

“I'm telling you,” Clyde butted into his thoughts, “let's look it up online.”

“Look up what? There's nothing useful here. You want to look up
Surly Wombat
? Or this picture?” The picture was a drawing of Earth and a treasure map blended together.

Clyde shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Fine, better than the nothing we've been doing. You got a phone with Internet?”

“You got a Benz?”

“Yeah, it's in the shop, wiseguy.” Barry pushed himself up from the steps. “Follow me. I know someone.”

Barry had a friend who worked as a bellhop at a hotel in the financial district. Luck was on their side, because that friend was working his shift and he let Barry and Clyde into the guests-only computer room.

“Good, it's empty,” Clyde said as they woke up the computer.

Barry looked over his shoulder, grateful for the giant glass window that made the room visible to the lobby. He may tower over Clyde, but he still didn't want to be alone in a dark alley—or a computer room—with the guy.

They typed in
Surly Wombat
but only found a bunch of stuff about the animal.

Barry flicked the logo. “That must be for a business or something. But how do you tell what business if the picture doesn't say?”

The more Barry stared at it, the more the dotted lines on the treasure map/Earth blurred together. And then, quick as a lightbulb flicking on, Barry could see a letter hidden in the drawing. “These dotted lines outline letters! See?” He traced a finger showing a
B
on one side and an
S
on the other. It was like a hide-and-seek game with letters. He was proud of himself for spotting them. “It's still not much, but maybe if we enter
BS
and then all the words we can think of that have to do with this card…”

Barry typed in
BS
,
logo
, and
book
.

Clyde tapped the screen. “Make that
hidden book
.”

“We didn't hide it. That was just luck it missed the trash.” Good or bad luck, Barry still couldn't tell.

“But when that girl pulled the book out, she yelled to her friends, ‘a hidden book.' I heard her. She thought it was hidden there on purpose. That's why she left that card. It was, like, a message for whoever she thought hid it in the first place.”

Barry frowned at Clyde. “Why didn't you say any of this before now?”

Clyde shrugged. “Didn't seem important.”

Barry changed
book
to
hidden book
, and also added the word
game
to his search list. He punched Enter and up popped a long list of hits. There was one about the game Liar's Dice, another about a game called Cheat, another about a video game, and the rest of the page of hits were about something called Book Scavenger. Barry clicked one and the Book Scavenger home page opened up. There, front and center of the screen, was the logo from the card.

 

CHAPTER

13

TUESDAY MORNING
marked Emily's second first day of school this year. In Albuquerque, she'd started school on the official first day of school in August, and now she was starting school again in San Francisco, almost two months later than the rest of the kids.

At some point, Emily hoped she'd stop getting jitters, but today seemed worse than ever. She didn't want to disappoint James or do something that made him realize he didn't want to hang out with her anymore. She couldn't remember the last time she'd started school with a friendship already made. It was hard breaking into a new school. The other kids had history—they'd been in the same class the year before, or soccer league, or Sunday school, or Girl Scouts, or had grown up on the same street. Even if two kids didn't get along, they usually opted for each other over the strange new girl. Knowing they'd be moving again soon enough helped Emily not care what people thought of her, but she still couldn't help the first-day jitters.

When she opened her front door, James was waiting to walk with her. She'd wondered if his cowlick would be slicked down with gel for school, but Steve poked up in all his glory.

“Kids wear Converse here, right?” She didn't know why she'd blurted this question. She wasn't even the type to care about what she wore. And it wasn't like she had a variety of wardrobe options anyway if for some reason her jeans and hoodie were socially unacceptable.

James pressed an index finger to his lips as he looked her up and down. “Hold on,” he said, and ran back upstairs.

If Emily felt jittery before, she was full-fledged Mountain Dew soda plus five packs of Skittles jittery now. A San Francisco middle school must have a very rigid idea of acceptable clothes if James had taken her question so seriously.

Emily heard a tinkling noise she couldn't put her finger on until James jumped back onto the porch and held out his reindeer antlers.

“I'm not wearing those!” Animal headgear couldn't be a school trend … could it? There was that group of girls in Colorado who wore knit hats with cat ears.

James shook the antlers with a shushing chime, looking amused at her alarm, and Emily laughed, finally realizing he was teasing her.

“Take them,” he insisted. “Keep them in your backpack in case you need a smile. Or something to barter with.”

Emily's front door reopened and her mom waved the camera.

“Oh good! I caught you two before you left.”

Emily stifled a groan. Her mom had already insisted on pictures with Matthew before their dad drove him to the high school. Not to mention the first-day-of-school pictures they'd taken in New Mexico. How many first-day-of-seventh-grade pictures did a person need?

“Mom—”

James grabbed the antlers back, plunked them on his head, and swung an arm around her shoulders. “Cheese!” he said. “Or what do reindeer say? Moo!”

“What?” Emily laughed. “I think it's something like this.”

She grabbed the antlers and put them on her head and made a noise like a horse neighing. They leaned their heads together and tried to make themselves a two-headed reindeer with the headband straddling them both. Her mom captured all of this, laughing along with them, and with every click of the camera, Emily's nerves eased.

Booker Middle School was a monstrous brick building that took up an entire block. It reminded her of the Newbury Public Library in Connecticut, one of her favorite libraries of all the places they'd lived. Both buildings were enormous and historic-looking and made of brick, but the Newbury library was surrounded by a hillside of dense trees on one side and a strip mall on the other, while Booker Middle School was surrounded by the high-strung wires of the city's electric buses and squatty apartment buildings.

The hallways were decorated for Halloween with orange-and-black crepe paper strung in sagging zigzags across the ceiling. Students' spiderweb art clung to a concrete brick wall. As Emily moved through the crowded hallways during passing period, she felt largely unnoticed, except for when she accidentally bumped into someone. A perk of going to such a big school was that you didn't stand out as the new girl.

One of her tactics for distracting herself from new-school nerves was to try to spot other Book Scavenger users. This was particularly tricky at Booker because the hallways were so crowded and loud—slamming lockers, high-pitched laughter, voices shouting in different languages. Her attention bounced all over the place. Not that pinpointing another Book Scavenger user was an easy thing to deduce, even in the smallest and quietest of schools. You might occasionally see someone in a T-shirt or hat with the logo on it. More common was the Book Scavenger pin, which Emily herself wore on her hoodie. But it was easy to miss a detail that small. The few times she'd actually spotted other users, she didn't have the nerve to approach them and say anything. Instead, she would rearrange her hoodie so her pin was visible and then position herself somewhere that she might be noticed, thereby leaving it up to the other person to do the approaching. So far that tactic hadn't worked.

Here at Booker, she knew there was at least one other Book Scavenger player: Babbage was prowling around somewhere. Maybe that poacher had even already been in one of her classes. Poaching was perfectly legal in the Book Scavenger world, and some users claimed the competitiveness made it more fun, but Emily didn't like to do it. She thought it was more mean-spirited than competitive. If you knew somebody had their hopes up to find a certain book, why would you want to beat them to it and squash their hopes, just because you could?

Emily slid her books into her locker, lingering longer than she needed to while slams and stomps and shouts filled the hallway.
Fort, wild, rat, home.
Having a puzzle to work through always helped distract her from all the new swirling around. She closed her locker door and found James standing right behind it. Emily yelped.

“Geez, you surprised me!” But she smiled as she said it.

“They don't call them sneakers for nothing.” James kicked up the toe of his shoe. “Ready for social studies?” It was the one class they had together all day. The bell rang, and the two fell in step.

“Any breakthroughs yet?” James asked.

They had talked about Mr. Griswold's game the entire walk to school, and during lunch they'd sat on the blacktop with their backs against the school building and
The Gold-Bug
open between them, poring over the pages to find more typos. The twins James normally sat with, Kevin and Devin, were there, too, but they were too distracted by their argument over the best way to defeat the bosses in a video game called
Rocket Cats
to pay them any attention.

Emily shook her head in response to James's question.

“Me neither,” he said.

They turned the corner and stopped in front of Room 40, their social studies class, to wait with the other students until the teacher arrived.

“Can I see
The Gold-Bug
again?” James asked.

Emily handed it over and looked up to see a girl in the crowd scowling at her. The girl was tall enough to pass for a high schooler. Her short-cropped hair puffed away from her head like a mushroom cap. James studied the pages of
The Gold-Bug
for the millionth time, oblivious to the mushroom-cap girl and everything else. Emily tried to study the pages with him but couldn't shake that feeling of being watched. Sure enough, when she looked up again, the mushroom-cap girl's glare was so intense Emily actually looked behind herself, assuming there must be someone else, but there were only lockers.

Emily studied the floor, the ceiling, anything but the mushroom-cap girl.
Fort, wild, rat, home
.
Her eyes landed on Vivian, a girl with stick-straight black hair so long it reached the tops of her khakis' pockets. She'd met Vivian in an earlier class, and Emily relaxed at seeing a familiar face besides James's. After their shared second period, Vivian had strode up to Emily, held out her hand, and said, “I'm Vivian Chu, seventh-grade class president. I make a point of knowing everyone in our class. Welcome to Booker Middle School. Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you as your class president.”

Emily had shaken Vivian's rigid hand and said nothing else. Now, in front of Room 40, she flexed her fingers in a small wave hello, to which Vivian gave a tight-lipped smile in return. It struck Emily how different it was, attending a new school with James already her friend. On her previous first days, she had always kept her head in a book, and here she was waving to almost-strangers.

Now the mushroom-cap girl gnawed on her thumbnail and glared at the linoleum. Maybe she hadn't been intensely focused on Emily after all. Maybe that was just her normal expression.