The Karma Club (22 page)

“I know!” I tell her, pushing her arm off of mine. “Don’t you think I know that?”

“Well then,
where
is it?” Jade’s tone is really serious and threatening, like she’s going to beat me up if I don’t produce the thing out of thin air.

I throw my hands up. “I don’t know. Okay? I don’t know. I must have misplaced it somewhere.”

“Well, we have to find it.” She says this as if I haven’t already thought of it. As if recovering the one thing that incriminates us never even crossed my mind until now. “Where did you last see it?”

I sigh and cross my arms over my chest. “I don’t know,” I say, racking my brain. “I guess last week on the bus. I took it out to record Ryan Feldman’s parents taking his car away.”

“And?” Jade prompts me. “What happened after that?”

I rub my hand over my face and try to remember. But honestly, I’ve done my best to block out every memory from those horrid bus rides. What
did
happen after that? I was riding the bus and then . . . “Oh, right!” I say. “Then I got a call from Spen—” I stop myself before I finish the sentence.

Jade shoots me a strange look. “You got a call from Spen? Who’s Spen?”

“Um.” I stammer, trying to cover my tracks. “Yeah, Spen. He’s this Swedish intern at my dad’s office. He . . . um . . . he wanted to ask me a question about . . .”

About what?

I have no freaking idea! I just made it up!

Fortunately, Jade says, “Never mind what he wanted, what did you do with the notebook when he called?”

I close my eyes and try to picture the entire conversation with Spencer. Or Spen, rather. The phone rang, I put the notebook down on the seat next to me, and then . . . “Oh, no,” I say aloud.

“Oh no, what?” Jade urges me, her face filling with apprehension.

I cringe as I remember exactly what I did. Spencer called to ask if I wanted to hang out and I got so preoccupied with making sure that he didn’t see me get off that bus that I left the notebook on the seat next to me. “Um . . . ,” I begin, knowing that there’s no way I’m going to get out of telling her this.

“What?”
Jade presses me.

“I think I left it on the bus.”

As soon as the words leave my mouth, I recoil in fear and wait for the outburst. Jade quietly screams all sorts of obscenities and then asks me repeatedly how I could be so careless. But if I tell her the real reason why I was so careless now, I’ll only get myself into more trouble. So I just take it and apologize over and over until we both tire of the routine and Jade finally goes, “Well, we have to get it back. Maybe the bus driver picked it up after his route. Maybe it’s in a lost and found somewhere.”

“Yeah,” I say, trying to sound optimistic. “It probably is. Just waiting for us to go and claim it.”

Jade nods, and I can tell she’s already three steps ahead of me. “Okay,” she begins. “After school, you, Angie, and I will ask the office where objects left on the bus are taken and then we’ll go there and we’ll find it.”

“Right. Good thinking.”

Jade shakes her head at me like a mother disappointed in her child. “I can’t
believe
you did this,” she says in one final jab.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” I say, waving my hand in her face. “Who would want to pick up an old notebook anyway?”

We never actually make it to the front office because the three of us are stopped in the middle of the hallway after seventh period by Jenna LeRoux.

“Hey, Maddy,” she says, her cold eyes burning into me.

I glance down at the floor, feeling uncomfortable under her stare. “Hi, Jenna.”

“I’ve been looking for you
all
day.” She pronounces the word
all
like she’s expecting some kind of award for her exhausting search efforts.

I feel my palms start to sweat and my blood runs a few degrees cooler. She probably knows about Spencer and me. And she’s not happy about it. Now she’s going to announce it to the two people I’ve worked so hard to keep it a secret from. I force down a swallow and say, “Well, I don’t have time to talk, so can I catch up with you later?”

I attempt to step around her, but she reaches out and places her hand on my shoulder. Jade and Angie both watch, baffled by this exchange. I’m sure they’re wondering what Jenna could possibly want with me.

For a minute I think she might actually want to fight me. I mean, isn’t this what people do when they want to beat you up? Place a menacing hand on your shoulder as if to say, “Don’t even try to move or I’ll take you down right here”?

Now I’m wishing that I hadn’t given up on karate after only two classes when I was nine. That would have definitely come in handy right about now. I could whip out some awesome reversal pin-down maneuver and before Jenna could even figure out how she ended up on the floor, I’d already be halfway to my car.

I clear my throat and in a pathetic voice go, “Excuse me, but we have someplace we need to be.”

“Actually,” Jenna says, her hand sliding off of my shoulder and landing back at her side, “I think you’ll want to stick around to hear what I have to say.”

Oh, God,
I think.
Please don’t say it. Not in front of them.

I scoff, “That’s doubtful.”

I step around her, and the three of us continue walking down the hallway. That is, until we hear Jenna call out. “I have something of yours that you might want back.”

And we all stop dead in our tracks. I don’t dare turn around. I just stand there and wait to hear the words I’ve been dreading since yesterday. I just never guessed in a million years that they’d be coming from Jenna LeRoux’s mouth.

“Do you happen to be missing a pink notebook?”

It doesn’t take
a science degree to understand
this
butterfly effect. If I hadn’t been riding the bus that day, the Karma Club notebook holding our deepest, darkest secrets would never have fallen into the hands of Jenna, who if memory serves, has a little sister who’s a freshman at Colonial High and who, as luck would have it, rides the bus home from school. But I wouldn’t have been riding the bus if I hadn’t gotten my driving privileges taken away. And I wouldn’t have lost those if I hadn’t been photographed by a traffic light camera talking on the phone while I was driving. And I wouldn’t have been talking on the phone,
or
driving for that matter, had I not found the e-mail in Mason’s in-box implicating him in cheating. And of course, I wouldn’t have even been in Mason’s e-mail account in the first place if it weren’t for . . .

Yep, the Karma Club again.

This is getting ridiculous. When will it end? How much more do we have to take? It’s not fair. We were the ones who were
jerked around to begin with. This should not be coming back to haunt us. Where’s the justice in that?

Jade takes a step toward Jenna and says, “Cut the crap, Jenna. Just give us the notebook back.” I’m somewhat relieved that Jade has taken command of this conversation, as it has already gone far beyond my capabilities.

But Jenna just kind of stands there, with all of her weight on her left foot as she shifts her bag higher up on her shoulder. “Hmm. Let me think about that for a second. No.”

A lump forms in my throat, and I realize that this is one of those moments when you’re staring death in the face and it’s telling you that you’re going down and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Except in this situation it’s not
my
death. It’s the death of my life as I know it.

Jade appears to be much calmer about the whole thing. She rolls her eyes at Jenna and goes, “Then why even bother mentioning it to us if you’re not going to give it back?”

Jenna pretends to contemplate her answer for a moment, but even I can recognize that she’s not actually thinking. It’s one of those patronizing moments when she knows she has complete power and she wants to milk it for all that it’s worth. “Well,” she says, “I thought the four of us should talk first.”

“About what?” Now Angie steps forward and I’m left a foot behind everyone, looking like a total outcast. And that’s exactly how I feel right now.

“About what’s in it,” Jenna says, like it’s the most obvious concept in the world.

“What about it?” Jade snaps back, making me wonder if she practices encounters like this in front of the mirror on a regular basis because she’s handling it impressively well.

Jenna fingers a strand of her hair. “I don’t know. I just thought that maybe people like Mason or Heather or even Seth might be interested in knowing what’s in there.”

I close my eyes tight and try with all my heart to wish this entire situation away. I pray that when I open them again the hallway will be empty and everything will have returned to normal. But everything is the same. Jenna is still standing there, playing coyly with her hair like the Heather Campbell wannabe she’s always been. And I know that it’s all about to fall apart right here, right now.

I have to do something. I have to say something. I can’t stand here and do nothing while I watch Jenna destroy my life. Finally, I take a step forward and say, “Jenna, why don’t you just tell us what you want?”

Her lips part, and she breaks into a sly smile as she looks me up and down. “You guys are obviously the clever ones with your creative . . .
initiatives
,” she begins.

I watch her intently, waiting for the magic words. The one simple request that will get us out of this mess and back on track.

And then they come.

“I want help from your little club,” she states matter-of-factly. “I want to use your conniving brains to help me with a revenge plan of my own.”

“And then you’ll give us the notebook back?” I ask.

She smirks. “Of course.”

I breathe out a sigh of relief and turn to Jade and Angie. They look comforted to hear about an escape route as well.

Jenna looks each of us in the eye, drops the strand of hair that she’s been molesting for the past five minutes, and goes, “Just help me take down Spencer Cooper and the notebook is all yours.”

I feel like
someone just punched me in the stomach. Not that I’ve ever been punched in the stomach. But I did fall off the jungle gym when I was eight, and the wind was completely knocked out of me to the point where I couldn’t even cry. I imagine that’s what being punched in the stomach feels like. And I feel exactly the same way now. Like someone knocked the wind right out of me and I can’t cry or scream. I can’t even talk.

This is one of those situations that I’ve heard people refer to as a “pickle.” You know, as in “You’ve really gotten yourself into one heck of a pickle, haven’t you?” I still have no idea why they call it that, but I do know one thing: It’s not fun.

Jenna gives us exactly one week to come up with a plan for Spencer’s payback. And then I suppose, if we come back to her empty-handed, she’ll simply pass the notebook along to the person who she thinks will do the most damage with it. I’m only guessing who that could be: the editor in chief of the school newspaper, Heather Campbell, the police. The possibilities are endless.

“We can’t do it!” I insist from the backseat of Jade’s car as the three of us are on our way to her house to discuss our current predicament.

“Why not?” Jade and Angie both ask, pretty much in unison.

“Because it’s blackmail! It’s extortion!” Coincidentally, just ten minutes ago, these were two things I had absolutely no problem with if it meant I got to walk out of this mess free and clear.

“So?” Jade says. “It gets us the notebook back and saves us a lot of explanations.”

“But we can’t do that to Spencer,” I argue.

“Who cares about
Spencer
?” Angie says. “After what he wrote on Jenna’s locker, the guy deserves some payback of his own.”

Oh, God, why are you doing this to me? It’s because I lied, right? This is my punishment for lying to my friends. Bravo, then. Well played. Touché, God.

“But . . . ,” I stammer. “But . . . what if he didn’t write it? What if someone else did? Then we’d be punishing him for no reason.”

“What are you, Spencer Cooper’s new best friend or something?” Angie shoots back. “Do you not remember what happened to you at his parents’ loft?”

“But that wasn’t
his
fault,” I argue, realizing that I’m probably just sinking farther into this dark hole of deception, but at this point, I don’t really have a choice, do I?

“Maddy,” Jade says more calmly. “We don’t even
know
Spencer Cooper. And from what I’ve heard, he’s a spoiled rich kid whose daddy can buy him out of any problem that we could ever create for him, so I think the wise choice here is to start thinking about Operation Spencer Annihilation and concentrate on getting our lives out of the hands of Jenna LeRoux.”

Just like that, I’m silenced in the backseat.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Angie immediately chimes in. “How about we put Nair in his shampoo so his hair falls out in weird patches.”

“Ooh, that’s good,” Jade says. “Or send flowers and love letters to Mrs. Chandler, the principal, and sign his name.”

“No, I got it,” Angie says, giggling a little and having far too much fun with this for my comfort level. “Let’s send a male stripper to the Loft party next weekend and have him ask for Spencer.”

Jade cracks up laughing, and I watch in horror as the two monsters that I’ve created plot the downfall of my secret boyfriend. I feel even more ashamed when I think that only a few weeks ago I would have been just as happy to join in on this conversation and throw out some hilarious revenge schemes of my own. Now all I want to do is cry.

“Or . . . or . . . ,” Jade says in between fits of laughter. “We could put up a Web site with—”

“Stop!” I shout from the backseat. I feel like I’m having one of those out-of-body experiences where you lose full control of everything you do or say.

“What’s your problem?” Angie says, turning her head around to give me a dirty look.

“We can’t do that. We can’t do any of those things.”

And now the tears are falling. Another thing I can’t seem to control. They fall by themselves. As if each little teardrop has a mind of its own and is triumphantly defying what little ounce of strength I have left.