Minerva Clark Gets a Clue (3 page)

“Thanks for coming in, Evelyn. I'll let you know when your order arrives,” Dwight said to the lady. After she
left, he straightened a stack of small books on the counter near the cash register, lining up the corners. The book was called
Bad Hair
. Dwight's hair wasn't so great itself, which made me like him. It was kind of spongy and brownish green, like something you might find growing in a forest. He wore little round glasses like Harry Potter.

“Go check out the Children's section, Minerva, why don't you?” said Jordan. “Where's the Children's section, Dwight?”

Under the Covers was so small, I could see the kids' books from where I was standing. I sighed loudly. A feeling of pure annoyance rolled over me like the chill from a sudden fear. Jordan wasn't my parent or even that day's BIC, and here she was trying to get rid of me by sending me to the kids' section.

I went over to the back wall and stared at a bunch of books I already owned. Why were Dwight and Jordan acting so nervous? Behind me I heard them whispering. For one long horrible second I thought maybe I had started my period and it was all over the back of my cargo pants. I swept my hand back there, nonchalantly, but there was nothing.

Maybe they were laughing at my Gigantor butt. I felt the campfire in my cheeks again. I was always embarrassed. Then I'd get embarrassed about being embarrassed. What was wrong with me?

I turned to look at the calender rack so my butt would face the shelves. I twirled the creaky wire rack, half full of old calendars, which mostly featured puppies. I glanced over to see Dwight hand Jordan something over the counter. She quickly tucked it into the front of her knapsack and zipped it closed.

Dwight said, “Stay out of trouble, all right?” He was half smiling. It could have been a joke, or one of those jokes that's only a joke if the other person laughs.

Jordan nodded her head once. She looked uncomfortable, like they were breaking up or something.

Suddenly, a high-pitched girl's voice said, “Hey, Jordan.”

I put the basset hound calendar I was flipping through back into the wire rack and joined Jordan where she stood next to the counter. The girl with the high-pitched voice—it was almost like that of a cartoon character—was short, with kinky strawberry hair caught up in two pigtails. She wore saggy bell-bottoms that dragged on the ground, the hems crusty with mud. Where had she come from? I hadn't seen anyone enter the store.

“Did you see the story in the school paper?” the girl was saying. “I tried to get in all your great lines about how, like, our opinions should be respected even though we're still in high school. That just because we're, like, seventeen, that doesn't mean we don't know anything.
But Ms. Graham, you know the journalism teacher? She said I needed to stay on topic.”

Jordan smiled—this time a real one—and collected her hair at the top of her head with one hand, then let it fall back into place. “Pansy Burrows, what are you doing here?”

Pansy Burrows drew her pale eyebrows together. “Jordan, I see you here every afternoon.”

“Anyway,” said Jordan, smiling her popular girl smile.

“Anyway,” Pansy Burrows continued, “I said, Ms. Graham! Hel-lo! This is Jordan Parrish. She's not just anyone. She's a Rose Festival princess. I mean, ambassador. Ambassador's, like, the new word, right? Even though you still do all that kind of princessy stuff?”

Jordan was semifamous. Portland puts on the Rose Festival every June. There's the Grand Floral Parade for people who like eating blue cotton candy while watching high school marching bands play the theme song from
Gladiator
. There's also a Fun Zone down at Waterfront Park, with all those excellent rides that go upside down and backward at about ninety miles an hour.

Every high school in the city elects a Rose Festival prin—ah,
ambassador
. That's the new name. “Princess” sounds too lame and old-timey. It's always a senior girl who is smart and plays something like lacrosse and is
girly but not in an obnoxious way. She is also always pretty hot. Like my cousin Jordan.

Pansy Burrows was talking nonstop about some dress that Jordan wore to the assembly where they named her Montgomery High Ambassador. I noticed sweat had popped out on the bridge of her nose. Clearly Pansy was a cling-on, high school division. I thought they only had cling-ons in middle school.

Dwight drummed the top of the cash register. Then he rearranged a collection of glittery sea-blue eyeglass cases that sat on the counter in a clear plastic tub. Some of the eyeglass cases had lemon-yellow happy faces on them, some pink peace symbols. They shone deeply, like a collection of well-polished cars.

My heart was going to stop beating out of boredom if Pansy Burrows did not stop nattering. The glittery eyeglass cases gave me an idea. I reached inside the pocket of my hoodie and gave Jupiter a nudge.

You may not know this about ferrets, but they love anything that gleams and sparkles. Jupiter could have the best time with a balled-up piece of aluminum foil. The other thing about ferrets is that they're either dead asleep or wide awake and in need of immediate entertainment.

Suddenly, his little white face poked out from the other side of my pocket and in a split second he jumped out, scooted across the counter, jumped over the stack of
Bad Hair
books, and dove straight for the plastic tub of glittery eyeglass cases.

“Ack!” shrieked Pansy Burrows. “It's a rat!”

“You still got that thing?” asked Jordan, rolling her eyes.

Fast as could be Jupiter tugged the top eyeglass case out of the plastic tub and commenced to give it a good gnawing. For some reason, I noticed that this case was more purple than sea blue. Jupiter held the case between his two white paws and chewed like a little ferret maniac. But Dwight was quick. He scooped up Jupiter by his middle and looked him in the eye. “I used to have one of these guys!”

“Sorry about the case,” I said. I really hadn't expected him to chew on it.

“That's okay,” said Dwight. He stuck the case behind the counter. “My guy was named Toob Sock. Spelled T-O-O-B. He was black-footed, looked like a little raccoon. I miss ol' Toobie.”

“I love the black-footed ones! They're so cute. I wouldn't even have a white one, except Jupiter's a dark-eyed white. I would never have, like, an albino white. They creep me out a little.” I felt the campfire blaze in my cheeks. Yammer yammer yammer. I was as bad as this Pansy Burrows person.

But Dwight just nodded, as if he'd had the same
thought. “Have you seen the panda ferrets? Those are cool. Half white, half black.”

“Cool,” I said, making an effort to just
shut up
.

“Did you know ferret is from the old Latin? ‘Fur' is thief. ‘Furet' is the diminutive. It means little thief. Toobie used to steal things all the time.”

He petted the top of Jupiter's head for a minute or two. I took Jupiter back and threaded him inside my pocket again. Dwight was an okay guy in my book. I bet he would like my rebuses.

Jordan and I drove up Broadway in the rain. A boy dragged a skateboard across the street in front of us and Jordan slammed on the brakes, even though it was obvious that if she'd continued driving at the same speed he would have passed safely in front of us.

“Jeez! People are insane!” She turned on the CD player. Then she turned it off. Looking back, I realize that Jordan was jittery and upset, but at the time I thought she was just irritated from having run into Cling-On Pansy Burrows.

I don't know much about driving except the basics, like stopping at a red light. You can also turn right at a red light, but only after you stop. You can't just slow down and glide around the corner, which is exactly what Jordan did at the corner of 39th and Halsey.

“Like I freaking need
this
,” she said, looking in the rearview mirror. She drove old-lady slow around the corner, stopping at the curb next to a bowling alley.

Actually, she said the real F word.

I turned around to see a white police car behind us, the red and blue lights twirling on the roof. There was a long line of traffic backed up behind us. The cars slowed as they steered around us. The drivers stared at us. What if someone I knew drove by? Someone from school, or someone's mom?

I thought about ducking, but there was really nowhere to duck.

The officer got out of the patrol car, adjusted his holster, and strolled up to Jordan's window. He was so tall he needed to bend nearly in half to look in the window. He had white hair even though he didn't look very old. His eyes were pale, like the color of water in a glass.

“Do you know why I stopped you?” he asked.

“For not stopping fully at the corner?” Jordan looked up at him nervously from under her long bangs.

“Well, there's that. You also got yourself a smashed taillight. You back into a phone pole or something?”

Jordan wrinkled her nose, confused. “A smashed taillight? How?”

The officer asked for her license and registration. She
rummaged around in her backpack for her wallet, then reached over my bowling-ball knees to the glove box to find the registration. After she handed them over, the policeman strolled back to his white patrol car.

We sat. Jordan sniffed a little. I think she may have been crying, but I didn't dare look over.

“Quills gets pulled over a lot,” I said. “The speedometer doesn't work and he never knows how fast he's going. This doesn't sound like any big deal.”

“Did you notice my taillight smashed out? I just washed this two days ago.”

“No,” I said.

“When I picked you up, you didn't see the taillight out?”

“I don't think so,” I said. There was a bad feeling cooking in my stomach. We sat there for what felt like forever. Jordan kept glancing in her side-view mirror. She then did a funny, major off-topic thing. She reached over and gave my hand a little squeeze. “Things okay at home?” she asked.

“Huh? Sure, I guess.”

“Good. I'm glad.” Jordan had been there the day my mom, Deedee, told her mom, my aunt Susie, that she was leaving us and moving to Santa Fe to become a yoga instructor.

Before I could say anything else, the cop returned and
instead of giving Jordan back her papers, he opened her car door. “Would you please step out, miss?”

Jordan got out without looking over at me. The officer walked behind her, leading her back to his patrol car. All I could see was his wide back, his black belt with the gun in its holster on one hip and a billy club in its holder on the other. What was going on? Where was he taking her? With a sickening jolt I realized that the worst day of my life was also probably going to be the worst day of my cousin Jordan's life.

Through the back window I watched my cousin put her hands on the roof of the car. She was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and low-rise jeans with a thick brown leather belt. He patted her sides, then actually pulled out a pair of real handcuffs. To tell you the truth, I thought they used these only on TV. I thought they saved them for murderers and businessmen.

Then, suddenly, there was a sharp knock at my window. For the second time in about a minute and a half I jumped.

It was another officer, the first one's partner. This policewoman wore a French braid and braces. Maybe I would be a cop when I grew up. Especially if I could wear a French braid.

“Your friend needs to come with us. Do you have someone who could come and pick you up?” She
seemed pretty friendly. It was hard to remember that it was Jordan in trouble and not me. Then I remembered, I wasn't in trouble with the police, but Quills would kill me for leaving Tilt without telling anyone.

“She's not my friend, she's my cousin,” I said.

“Do you have someone you can call?” the policewoman asked again.

This was a good question. I dug in my backpack for my Emergencies Only cell phone. I wanted one with red flames on the faceplate, but because it was for
emergencies only
, it was plain silver and serious. It was prepaid, with only a certain number of minutes on it. I couldn't call my dad, since he was out of town on business, like always. I couldn't call my mom, because she was divorced from my dad and living in Santa Fe, where she taught yoga.

I tried to call my oldest older brother, Mark Clark. I always call him by both names. When I was a baby I liked how they rhymed and it stuck. Plus, even though he's only twenty-four, he's really dadlike. More dadlike than my dad, actually.

The call went to voice mail. I started to get nervous. What was the point of having an Emergencies Only cell phone if in an emergency no one was around to answer it? What would they do to me if I couldn't find someone to pick me up? Would I have to go to jail, too?

Crap.

My only choice was to try flaky Morgan, my youngest older brother. I caught him between classes. He's a philosophy major at college and can't decide whether he wants to be a lawyer, like our dad, or a spoken word poet, whatever that was. At the moment, he was a junk food vegetarian, living on mostly Doritos, Mountain Dew, garden burgers, and the occasional banana, which is the junk food of the fruit kingdom.

“I need you to come get me,” I squeaked into the phone. I tried to explain what had happened, that Jordan had been pulled over for rolling through a stop sign and having a smashed taillight, and now she was sitting in the back of the patrol car, waiting to be taken I didn't know where, jail or somewhere.

“They arrested her for running a stop sign?” asked Morgan. “I don't think that's legal.”

“It was the stupid taillight. Or something. I don't know! I just know that someone needs to come get me! Quills is going to be so mad I left the arcade. I'm so busted!” I felt a twirl of fear in my stomach.

“They're arresting you, too? I know
that's
not legal.”