Has Anyone Seen Jessica Jenkins? (14 page)

I filled Izzy in at lunchtime. We agreed that, since I’d as good as followed Heather around with a sign saying,
I’M A WEIRDO. PLEASE BE MY FRIEND
, and since we’d disturbed Tom so much that he’d avoided us all morning, we’d probably done everything we could, for the time being.

“I’ll talk to Tom in physics,” Izzy suggested. “See if he’s gotten over it yet.”

“Why don’t you tell him about Heather? See if he’ll join us on Wednesday, too?”

“Good idea. Plus, that gives him another couple of days to get his head around it all.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I agreed.

It also gave
us
two days to figure out what in the world we were going to say, on the off chance that either of them actually turned up.

And, in the meantime, there was this evening to worry about — the real stakeout.

On Monday evening, I discovered something that I imagine is one of the biggest secrets in the world of undercover policing. A stakeout is not actually all that much fun. It is certainly neither cool nor glamorous, and is possibly the most boring way you could spend a couple of hours.

My back was aching from crouching behind a hedge, my neck was hurting from craning to look down the road, and I was getting cold. Plus, it was a little creepy. It was starting to get dark, and coming up with a plan that involved two girls hiding behind a bush on a quiet street at night suddenly didn’t feel like our cleverest moment ever.

Then Izzy grabbed me.

“Jess!” she hissed. She was pointing through a gap in the hedge toward the lab. “Look!”

I peered through the hedge and saw what she was pointing at. Someone was going into the lab! Nancy was right — they
did
have a burglar!

Izzy shoved me. “You need to go. Quickly!”

Suddenly the little-creepy thing became a totally-flipping-crazy-and-terrifying thing instead.

“Wait — what if this person’s legitimate? What if it’s the doctor?” I pointed out.

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.” Izzy thought for a moment. “Look, if it is someone who’s supposed to be there, then it won’t do any harm to check, and if it isn’t, then we’ll have caught the burglar. Win-win!”

“But what if they see me?”

“They won’t! You’ll be invisible! Go on, quick. They’re fiddling with the keypad already. You can follow them in.”

There was no time to spare, so rather than hang around panicking and fretting and putting it off — which was what I suddenly realized I mostly wanted to do — I closed my eyes, emptied my mind so I could turn invisible, and stood up.

“Wish me luck,” I whispered.

Izzy reached out to touch my arm. She missed it — as I was already invisible and had started moving away. “Good luck. You’ll be fine. I’ll be right here,” she told me.

“OK. You be careful, too,” I said. And then I hurried away from the hedge, crossed the road, and crept up behind the person heading into the lab.

I sneaked through the front door and followed through the sci-fi door into the lab. It was only when the figure turned and pulled down his hood that I saw his face for the first time.

I nearly gasped out loud. I knew him!

It was a boy from my school. From my year! He was in the other class, so I didn’t know him well. In fact, I’d never spoken to him, but I’d seen him around — Max Something-or-Other.

What on earth was
he
doing here?

I know that, scientifically speaking, it almost certainly isn’t possible, but I could swear I didn’t breathe for the next thirty minutes. Didn’t breathe, didn’t think, didn’t move. Didn’t do anything except watch Max wandering around in the lab.

I didn’t know much about him. To be honest, the only reason I’d noticed him at all was that he was kind of a big-mouth. One of those boys who seem to think it’s a weakness to smile or be nice to anyone and who always make sure their stupidest comments are said loud enough for everyone to hear.

Not a bully, exactly, just not pleasant, and I’d heard him get into arguments with a few of the other boys after school. I couldn’t tell you what they argued about. I’d never hung around long enough to find out, but I’d seen enough to know that this boy wasn’t someone I wanted as my best friend. And if he was as unpleasant as he seemed, the thought of him finding out about my secret was not on my list of top things I would love to happen next.

Which was why I held my breath for approximately half an hour, crouched down below a stool — even though I was invisible — and prayed he would leave soon.

Unfortunately, he didn’t. He kept wandering around the lab as if he had all the time in the world. He didn’t seem to be looking for anything in particular. Every now and then, he’d lean over a table, study something on it, put the occasional thing in his pocket, and move on.

From my hiding place, I couldn’t see exactly what he was picking up. I was fairly sure he’d taken a few crystals, as they were all over the place. But what did a boy like him want with rubies and moonstones?

At one point he went to the far wall and opened a cupboard. There were loads of tiny bottles on a shelf inside. They looked like those perfume samples Mom sometimes gets in magazines. Max reached into his pocket and pulled out an identical bottle. He looked at it for a second, his hand hovering in front of the cupboard as if he were about to put it in, then changed his mind and put the bottle back in his pocket.

Eventually, Max seemed to have had enough and headed out into the hall. I silently crept across the lab behind him.

He opened the front door, then left it open as he did his coat up. Time to make a run for it. I shuffled toward him. Was there enough space to get past without touching him? I pondered for a moment, then decided I didn’t have any option. I squeezed through the space between Max and the door. Two seconds later, I was out of there!

I was halfway down the path when I heard him.

“Hey, is someone there?” he called.

I froze on the spot. I looked down at myself. Invisible. Totally. He couldn’t see me.

I didn’t wait any longer. As silently as I could, I crept to the bushes, hissed at Izzy to follow, and ran all the way to the bus stop.

The next day at school, I could hardly believe who I bumped into on the way into assembly. And I mean actually, literally, bumped into — I bashed my face on the back of his shoulder while I was walking along talking to Izzy and not looking where I was going.

Max turned to scowl at me. I stopped breathing, gaped openmouthed at him, and waited for him to recognize me.

“What are you staring at?” he asked in his normal rude way.

Phew! He didn’t recognize me. Well, of
course
he didn’t recognize me. He hadn’t seen me. I’d been invisible!

I’d told Izzy everything when we’d gotten back to her house the night before, and she could see that I’d been thrown by bumping into him.

“She doesn’t know,” Izzy said. “It hasn’t got a label on it.” And with that, she grabbed my arm and pulled me in the opposite direction.

I risked a glance in Max’s direction before Izzy pulled me away. He had a strange expression on his face. Our eyes met, and for a millisecond, I thought I saw something different in them. Something I’d never seen before. A kind of recognition. What was he seeing? What did
I
recognize?

Izzy whispered to me as we walked down the corridor, “I still don’t see what he would want with a bunch of crystals.”

“I know,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense, does it?” Just like it didn’t make any sense that I’d felt a strange kind of connection when our eyes had met. I didn’t tell Izzy that, though. She’d only tease me.

“I mean, could he be involved with the lab, somehow?” she went on.

“I doubt it. I think he’s too young to be a lab technician, don’t you?”

We fell quiet while we both thought.

“So what are you going to do?” Izzy asked eventually.

“I don’t know.”

“You want to tell Nancy? I mean, he probably
is
the intruder she was worried about.”

“Yeah. He probably is,” I agreed. “But I don’t want to tell her. Not yet.” I wasn’t sure why. It was probably either the fact that we’d have to explain our unauthorized stakeout or not wanting to turn Max in before I knew exactly what he was up to — or perhaps a combination of the two. There was something stopping me; that was all I knew. “I’ve got an idea, though.”

“Spill,” Izzy said.

“How about I just find out from him?”

“From Max? What, like, ask him?”

I laughed. “Er, no. I can’t see him happily sitting down and opening up about breaking into a strange lab in the middle of the night to some girl he’s barely spoken to, can you?”

“What, then?”

“I follow him home after school. See what I can find out. If he really is the culprit, what does he want the crystals for? What’s he doing with them?”

Izzy’s eyes crinkled at the corners as she understood what I was saying. “And he won’t even know you’re there . . .”

“Because I’ll be invisible!”

“Brilliant plan!”

And, yeah, OK, it
was
perhaps a brilliant plan. It felt bonkers and possibly risky, too, though. He wasn’t exactly the kind of boy you wanted to annoy.

But it was the best option. I didn’t want to tell Nancy about him until I knew what he was up to. She was expecting a full-on burglar, but Max was just a kid my own age. For whatever reason, I felt that I owed it to him to find out more before potentially landing him in a whole heap of trouble. I also wanted to figure out more about the way he’d looked at me. There’d been something in his eyes — as if we had something in common — and I needed to find out exactly what that was.

“All right, that’s that, then,” I said. “I’ll follow him home today.”

I sat on the bus, five rows behind Max, and studied the back of his head. A messy, curly brown mop. It didn’t really give much away. I looked out the window instead.

Just before the fourth stop, Max rang the bell and stood up. I followed him off the bus and walked along the streets behind him, keeping a respectful distance.

I felt like someone in a spy movie, trailing their mark without being spotted. Although, to be fair, it was a lot easier for me to do the not-being-spotted thing, given that I kept myself invisible for the entire time.