Alice in Wonderland High (20 page)

As much as I enjoyed the make-out sessions—mine, not Kingston's, just to be clear—my body itched to keep investigating, find out more about the murder, defeat the township. Stop lying low. I experienced all the symptoms of addiction withdrawal: insomnia, paranoia, and preoccupation.

I couldn't even search my sister's bag for answers because Lorina was never at home anymore. She'd started practically living at the office, ever since the break-in occurred.

I was poring over the files one more time, for lack of any better source of information, when my doorbell rang one Saturday afternoon. My parents had always told me not to open the door to strangers, but I needed my rebellion fix. I dashed downstairs, expecting a telemarketer. But Chess stood on the front porch, hands in pockets, next to Whitney. She wore a terrible brunette wig.

“Do your hair in pigtails and put this on.” Whitney thrust a baseball cap into my hands as she brushed past me. Embroidered lacy ribbons circled the mirror appliqués against the gaudy pink fabric.

“Are we dressing up as Kingston for Halloween?” I let Chess inside and followed behind.

“Ha ha,” she deadpanned. “It's a disguise. You're my little sister. And sorry, but Chess is my boyfriend for the day.”

“I haven't agreed to that yet!” Chess kissed me hello, then grabbed my hand and led me down the long hallway. He peered into the rooms of my house as we passed them. “Not until you tell me what we're doing.”

“I second that motion,” I said. Inside, though, I squealed. Another mission!

“Surprises are best left unspoiled.”

“I still think it's too soon.” Chess squeezed my hand.

Whitney rolled her eyes. “I told you, it's an emergency.”

Despite my excitement over the mission, my lips slipped into a frown. If Whitney had planned this, it couldn't be related to my parents' potential murder. She didn't know about it.

“I'm hoping it involves something with the old nuclear-power plant.” Chess let me go ahead of him into the kitchen. “We've left that alone for too long.”

“But isn't that a good thing?” I spun around to see Whitney dawdling behind. “I mean, they destroyed the nuclear plant, so it's not doing any harm anymore.” Unless you counted the night vision the entire town had had to acquire to adjust to the lack of lights.

Whitney cleared her throat. Chess covered by dropping my hand, wrenching open a cabinet, and studying the contents. “Got anything to eat?”

I wasn't letting him change the subject that easily. “Is there something I should know about the power plant?”

“No,” Whitney said. “Because our mission today has nothing to do with that. Your job is to cure Chess's hunger so he stops bitching.”

“Tell me what it is, or you drive.” Chess pulled the keys out of his pocket and dangled them in front of Whitney's face. “Oh wait, that's right. You can't.” He cupped the keys and turned back to the cabinet. I joined him by the counter.

“Hey, I had more important things to do than practice for my driver's test.”

“She failed,” Chess told me. “Three times!”

I reached into the cabinet, pulled out a can of soup, and held it out for Chess's approval.

“Perfect. Thanks.”

I dumped the contents into a pot and set it to boil. If Lorina hadn't packed up the good china and hidden it from me, I would have served it in that. Instead, I had to settle for a cheap bowl, which I set on the counter. Chess and Whitney sat at the table and continued to argue about her annoying love of secrets and riddles. I wanted so badly to impress Chess with my cooking, but canned chicken soup? Not exactly gourmet, the-way-to-a-man's-heart-is-through-his-stomach memorable. I twirled the spice rack and chose a few seasonings to add, hoping it might make the soup more exotic.

I was twisting open the pepper when Chess said after a minute of silence, “Okay, please tell me why we didn't load the car with plants?”

His abrupt question startled me. My hand, slick from the steam, slipped and I dropped the entire contents of pepper into the soup.

“People expect the expected,” Whitney said.

I bolted for the silverware drawer and yanked out a spoon.

“These disguises better not be your solution to spying on Kingston.” Chess tapped his fingers on the table.

I frantically scooped out as much black pepper as I could before it dissolved. Most dots sailed right off the spoon back into the pot. I transported each spoonful to the sink carefully, like the old egg-on-spoon relay race we used to do in elementary school. The aroma of the pepper seeped into the air. In the middle of carrying my fourth spoonful, I sneezed. The contents went flying, dousing my clean shirt.

I raced to get a paper towel off the counter. Another sneeze forced my eyes shut as I was reaching for it. My arm knocked over the bowl I'd set out and it crashed to the floor, shattering into pieces.

Chess hopped up from the table. “Are you okay?”

I couldn't answer because it was difficult to speak while being attacked by sneezes. I went back over to the cabinet, hoping I could salvage Chess's lunch by starting over. But that was the last can of soup. We weren't exactly stocked for the apocalypse here. Fighting sneezes, I headed back to the soup and continued excavating the pepper.

My nose tingled. I stepped away from the stove and the cause of my newfound allergies before I could taint the soup even more. “I'm sorry. I was trying to make it taste better, but . . . let's just say culinary school is not in my future. Apparently klutziness is.”

As if on cue, Chess let out a monstrous sneeze.

I wiped a hand over my sweaty brow. “Maybe I shouldn't go with you guys. I keep messing everything up.” Soon I'd need an abacus to tally my mistakes, because I was running out of fingers to count on.

Chess placed his hands on my shoulders. “We're not doing the mission without you.”

“But I screwed up your lunch.”

“No, you didn't.” Whitney pushed herself away from the table. “Do you have any lemon?”

“We have lemonade, does that work?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Whitney grabbed it from the fridge and sidestepped the mess on the floor in order to add a cupful to the soup. “That should counteract the pepper.”

“I'll help you clean this.” Chess scooped a few pieces of broken porcelain into his palm.

I bent down next to him and plucked a large piece. “I hope this doesn't bring me seven years bad luck, like breaking a mirror.”

“Hey, you know what? This is totally good luck!” He grinned. “Like breaking a glass at the end of a Jewish wedding.”

I stood up. “In that case, you should break something, too. We can use all the luck we can get.” I reached into the cabinet and took down all the cheap bowls. “Besides, I never liked these dishes anyway.” I threw a bowl to the floor, making sure it didn't land anywhere near his legs.

Chess held out his hands and I laid a bowl in them. He did a little twirl, brought his arm behind his back, then slammed the bowl to the ground.

“Fancy! We're going for style points, huh?” I took a bowl off the stack and brought it to my chest like I was gearing up to throw a bowling ball, then I sprinted forward a few steps, dropped one arm, and let the bowl dangle at my side before I sent it flying toward the wall.

“I give that a nine-point-five.” Chess took another bowl off the stack. “Would have been a ten, but you didn't stick the landing.”

Whitney casually stood up, left the room, and pulled an umbrella from the holder by the front door. She sat back down at the table and opened the umbrella, all without saying a word.

Chess and I attempted to show each other up with the next four bowls, until the entire kitchen floor was littered with the remains of our war against ugly dinnerware. “Now Lorina will be forced to use the good china!” I said. If I'd learned one thing in the last few weeks, it was that you only got results with extreme measures.

Chess and I got to work scooping up the mess. “Now that recess is over, I found out where Chapera Farms sold the pigs.” Whitney shut the umbrella and headed to check on the soup.

“Where? How?” Chess looked so happy, I thought he might do a Herkie right there in the kitchen. Then he set down the broken pieces he'd been holding and stood up. “Wait, please say they're alive.”

“Sorry, only one is. The rest of his friends are bacon.”

My stomach dropped.

Chess closed his eyes for a second, burying his face in his hands. “I was afraid of that. We should have made this a priority! Ever since we found out they were shutting down Chapera Farms, too!”

“Chess . . . ” Whitney bent down and picked up the broken pieces he had discarded. “There was nothing we could do until we could do something, you know that. It took me forever to track the pigs down. Eat your soup.”

“Okay.” He carried the pot over to the table and sat down. “Tell me what you know.”

Whitney scooped the rest of the broken dishes and threw them out. “The farmer got more money selling him to the university.”

“What about another farm?”

She leaned against the counter. “Everyone's scared, Chess. Saving money just in case.”

My head volleyed back and forth between the two of them. I felt like I was watching a foreign film without subtitles.

“Why the universi—Oh God.” He ate a spoonful and then cringed, swallowing hard.

“Yep, so we've got a rescue mission before he becomes some kid's science project.”

“You don't have to eat that.” I stepped closer to the stove where they both stood.

“It's really good.” Chess forced another scoop into his mouth and gave me a strained smile.

As Chess ate his terrible soup, trying very hard not to make sour faces, and I aged myself down a few years with pigtails, Whitney filled me in on the details. The farm we'd been doing all the protests for hadn't just lost its land. It had lost its animals. The farmers had kept them until the very last moment but eventually couldn't anymore. They sold them to another farm over a hundred miles away. Except that farm suffered the same fate as the first one.

“How'd you find this info out?” Chess washed the pot.

“Everyone has their price,” Whitney told him. “Kingston still helps with the missions, even if he doesn't know it.” She rubbed her thumb against her index and middle fingers in the universal sign for “money.”

It didn't take a valedictorian to know Kingston might not be so gracious to learn that.

On the half-hour drive over, Whitney briefed me on the mission. No fancy flowers; we'd only have our wits to work with. Based on my brilliant break-in attempt the other night, my wits weren't exactly something I was confident in. Especially when the mission relied on, well, me. I wished I'd had the foresight to realize that in the real world I'd need acting more than calculus, back when I loaded my schedule with academics. My guidance counselor had deceived me.

As we stepped onto the grassy quad, buildings made of gray stone tried to appear old and gothic, but their sleek shapes confessed their modernity. Students milled about, and no one paid attention to us. I'd always thought I'd need a fake ID to fit in on a college campus, not pigtails. Who knew invisibility was a perk of childhood?

We waited until a tour group of prospective students headed our way. “Right on time,” Whitney said. She and Chess slipped into the middle of the group. I pushed my way to the front of the crowd, secretly praying my acting wasn't as bad as my gardening. Or my cooking.

“This is the science lab,” the college-age guide explained, using her arm like a pointer. Not hard to miss, in her hideous orange-and-navy-striped shirt. “It was donated in—”

“What kind of experiments do they do here?” I tried my best to sound enthusiastic and play the part right, even though my voice quivered. I shot a big smile at the tour guide.

“All kinds. As I was saying, this building was donated in—”

“Do they study time travel?”

“Yes, and after this tour I'm going to travel to the future so I can get paid more.” The guide waved us around the building and into a field, with several fences confining animals inside.

“This is the animal-science department.” She gestured to the pens. “I'm partial to the pigs, but they don't let us tour them anymore.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “Swine flu.”

I made a big show of laughing at her terrible joke.

The guide led the rest of the tour back to the quad. I hung back so I could tie my shoe, and Whitney bent down to help me. Chess lingered with us.

With our cover established—
What? We were on the tour! Ask the tour guide!—
we slipped out in the opposite direction to rescue a pig from experimentation.

The three of us raced through the field, checking the various pens for pigs. The cold air stung my face, turning my cheeks a rosy pink. Adrenaline kept me warm.

“How will you know which pig it is?” I asked.

“He'll be wearing a ‘My name is . . . stolen pig' sign.” Chess grinned. “Really, though, I'll know.”

We rounded a corner where a whole other set of wooden fences segregated the animals.

“There.” Whitney nodded to a fenced-in pen where several pigs fought for prime position at a water bucket. Even in nature, it was cutthroat to get a front-row spot.

We headed that way until a student wearing a college sweatshirt and carrying a feed bucket stepped in our path. His thick eyebrows looked like a crop of their own. “Whoa, where do you think you're going?”

Whitney pushed me forward.

“I . . . uh . . . ” Crap, how to distract him? “Wanted to see the other animals.”

His eyes swept over me. “Are you part of the tour? You can't be here. Come on, I'll take you back—”

So much for our alibi. He stepped back in the direction we had come from, waving us toward him with both palms like an air traffic controller. Whitney shifted her eyes from the guide to the pen. Then I realized. He was looking at the pen; I had to turn him around. I jogged, circling him until he had no choice but to spin on his heels and face me.