Alice in Wonderland High (6 page)

Miniature replicas of bigger cakes waited inside the box, each one covered with pastel fondant and white frosting that spelled out
Eat me!

“Why'd you splurge on the cakes?” I reached in and took the light-blue one. It fit my mood.

“I have something to celebrate.” Lorina's finger hovered over the cakes, dangling back and forth as she tried to decide which one to choose.

I smiled. My lips seemed slippery, like they might slide right off my face. “Oooh. What?”

“Are you okay? You look a little weird.”

“Pretty tired.” I hated to lie, but I had no idea how to explain the green liquid, not without getting in trouble or hiring a chemist. “So what are we celebrating?”

She reached over and stroked my knuckles. “Alice, you don't have to keep things from me. I'm here for you. If you're sick, I want to take care of you.” Her words made me feel shittier than the manure Whitney probably used to make her plants grow.

Of course Lorina would drop everything to take care of me. That was what she did. My twenty-one-year-old sister had put most of the inheritance we'd received into a college fund for me, trading her own education for the role of pseudo-mom. She wouldn't let me get a job, claiming she wanted me to enjoy my childhood like she had done, before she had to abandon it to raise me.

“Really, I'm fine. Tell me about your news.” I sat up straighter even though my head felt fuzzy, too stuffed with cotton to operate regularly. “Cute guy?”

She blushed. “No, nothing like that.” She wiped her fingers over her brow in a dismissive gesture that clearly showed she wished it were
exactly
like that. “It's work stuff.” Lorina administrated the crap out of her administrative-assistant position at the Department of Public Health and Safety for the town. In fact, I sometimes suspected she did all her boss's work on top of hers. “Apparently Wonderland isn't so wonderful lately.”

“That's an understatement.” We lived in Wonderland, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago where they tore out trees and then named streets after them. Everything pretty and picturesque, like the rolling hills and cornfields my school bus used to pass by in elementary school, had melted into a haze of gray, like someone had zapped all the color with a Photoshop ray gun. Monstrous warehouses squatted on the now-barren lots, and it was only a matter of time before gas masks became fashionable to combat the exhaust fumes being spit out from clogged highways.

“There've been some shady eco-demonstrations going on.”

The blood drained from my face. Did this have anything to do with Whitney's group and whatever was going on at the warehouse or the message at school? I shook that thought away. They seemed to be doing good things, not bad. Planting a garden in an unused space was the kind of project elementary schools would force their students to do during an agriculture lesson. Of course, they never did this under the cover of night in absolute secrecy.

“Like what Mom and Dad used to do? With the farmers' market?”

“No, what they did was all in the public eye. This isn't. It's illegal.” She chomped down on a tiny cake.

“Illegal how?” My breath waited in my throat. Is this what Chess meant about getting in trouble? With the
law
? I was hoping he meant in trouble with, you know, thorny rosebush stems.

“A lot of vandalism. Nothing dangerous yet, but it's only a matter of time.”

The word
ecotage
flashed like a neon light in my mind.

“My boss is getting a committee together to investigate.” Her entire face lit up, erasing the dark circles.

“Not the police?”

She shrugged. “My boss was adamant against it. Guess they want to keep it in the department for now. I thought that was a little weird, but—”

“Wait, so are you on it?” I couldn't keep the caution out of my voice.

“My boss is letting me spearhead it. This is my chance to show them I can handle more responsibility. Bigger cases.” Usually she investigated claims from citizens about rusty water fountains or garbage men slacking on their trash-removal duties.

I stopped chewing. “Bigger how?”

She pursed her lips. “You don't seem excited.”

I studied my clasped hands in my lap. “It reminds me too much of Mom and Dad.” It wasn't a lie, but Lorina didn't need to know I thought that was a good thing. Though I made every effort to finish what they started in the privacy of my own room, Lorina had vowed to let their dreams rest with them. If she found out about Whitney's group, she'd try to stop me from joining just like my parents would have if they were still around. They had believed protests should lead to change, not vandalism.

“That's exactly why I want to do this.” She bussed her plate to the kitchen.

“Why? If they were still alive, you'd be on opposite sides. You'd be the one trying to investigate them!”

I thought back to a few days before they died, when Mom had barged into my bedroom in the middle of the night. I was in a deep sleep, and I remember thinking for a moment that I was being attacked by ghosts. Mom sank onto my bed and brushed the hair from my face until I sat up. “Alice, I need you to promise me something.”

“This better not be about waiting until marriage to have sex.” I wasn't even a teenager yet but I loved getting a reaction out of my parents. It made the good things I did seem even more angelic.

“If Dad and I . . . ” She tilted her head toward my wall. “If we go away for a while, will you continue for us? With the protests. We need someone we can trust and—”

“No!”

The word ripped through the house, but it didn't come from my lips. Lorina wrenched open the door to my room, arms crossed, the blue streak she used to wear in her hair striking against her light locks. Dad rushed in behind her. She angled her body to speak to both of them. “There's no way I'm helping. If you get arrested again—that's it. It has to stop.” She slammed the door on the way out, drowning out my whispered, “I promise,” to my mom.

Back in the kitchen, Lorina spun the faucet fast and thrust her hands under the water. She looked so different, so grown up, without the blue streak in her hair. “Alice, it's not like that. They never did stuff that hurt people.”

I hopped from my seat. “How is this hurting people?”

She scrubbed her hands vigorously. “It hasn't yet. But trust me, it will. My boss showed us studies. What's happening here started the same way as what happened in Neverland, and several people lost their lives during those stunts. If this continues—” Something clanged against the metal of the sink. Her high school–class ring slipped off her finger from the soapy water and skidded down the drain.

“Damn it!” she cried. I moved to help her, bending underneath the sink to stop the water flow. After I turned the valve, my fingers froze.
Damn it
. Running water.

I thought of Whitney's words to me, the riddle I didn't understand. “
Damn. Once the floodgates open, things will grow.”

Did she mean
dam
?

And suddenly I knew what I had to do to impress her. Too bad it might make me the prime suspect in Lorina's investigation.

My head stopped buzzing from the weird green liquid about an hour after dinner a.k.a. dessert—one of the advantages of having a twenty-one-year-old for a guardian. When the clock blinked a set of numbers I usually only saw during the school day, I paused at the doorway, listening. The silence was eerie at night, each tiny creak of the house settling magnified, ominous enough for a horror movie. I tiptoed down the hallway so quietly, even ghosts would be envious.

It took forever to get down the stairs, and I readied an excuse just in case.
I was still hungry from my lack of dinner
. That would play into her guilt. But of course it wouldn't explain going through her workbag.

The zipper sounded louder than my morning alarm. I cringed, shaky fingers hovering over the contents.

I dragged all the documents out of the bag and placed them flat on the entryway table. They were reports but not the kind that appear in the newspaper police blotter. These were photocopied versions that had originally been written longhand on ruled paper. Antiquated in the technology age, but that was probably the point. Paper trails could be destroyed with a quick flip of a lighter or a trip to the paper shredder. Computer files were backed up and archived, making it difficult to get rid of all traces.

I flipped through the pages, skimming the headlines. Several documents had similar headings like
Warehouse vandalized
or
Parking lot vandalized
. But then there were others:
Grocery store robbed
,
Supermarket defaced
,
Water tainted
. There was a giant, stapled packet labeled
Greenhouse incident
that seemed important.

I went back to the document about the warehouse. I figured that would be the easiest way to check if Lorina was investigating Whitney and Chess.

Warehouse covered with plants and flowers . . .

The metronome of my pulse shifted from whole to eighth notes. I had to set the paper down because it suddenly became too heavy to hold.

A few deep breaths gave me the courage to try again. Who needed pep talks when you were committing robbery?

The parking-lot incidents were nearly identical. I shuffled those pages to the back and pulled up the grocery-store stuff. This one looked different, only because it contained a single sentence.

Reports of missing produce inventory—no connection yet, but keep eye out.

I flipped the page . . .
all
Shoptown food chains in a twenty-mile radius were covered with feathers
.

A giggle burst out of my mouth, betraying my oath of silence. I clapped a cold palm over my face, accidentally knocking the papers off the table in the process. They fluttered to the ground.

The curse word I wanted to say waited in my throat ineffectively. I squatted down and shuffled the papers into a pile in random order.

Lorina's door creaked open.

I froze, body rigid, and then survival mode kicked in. The papers were all turned every which way; I couldn't put them in her bag like this. I slapped the edge of the pile against the table a few times until the pages settled into a single direction just as the footsteps started in the upstairs hallway. I didn't have time to zip the bag, so I left it and dashed with the grace of an elephant into the kitchen.

I thrust open the fridge right as Lorina appeared in the doorway, squinting. “I thought I heard something.”

I pointed to the undeniable evidence of the fridge. “I got hungry.”

She nodded. “Me too.”

My brain was too busy trying to sort out what I'd read to make idle conversation, so I stuffed a cake in my mouth followed immediately by another one before I'd even finished chewing. Lorina grabbed a few cookies from the cabinet and walked with me back upstairs, forcing me to leave her open bag and unread files behind. Besides, I'd come to a decision and the other files probably wouldn't sway me anyway.

I wanted to be part of Whitney's group, whatever it entailed. Committing to this, I nudged my laptop awake on my desk. A few keystrokes later, a new email window popped open. I rifled through the school address book until I found her email address.

My fingers paused on the keys. I was about to type a long explanation of my plans, but something felt off about that. Like maybe I shouldn't leave behind such an obvious trail of evidence.

Whitney embraced spontaneity and mystery; I would, too.
Tomorrow
, was all I wrote. I hit send before I could second-guess myself. Buffalo stampeded into my stomach. I had to do this. No time for planning, no backing out.

The next morning, I left for school before the sun started its daily routine. I wore ugly, yellow rain boots and the jeans I'd accidentally changed the color of from blue to spotted brown with my klutziness—seriously, drinking and driving should be illegal with all beverages, including coffee. Only an oversized men's flannel shirt could make my outfit sexier.

Behind the school, the air smelled like wet towel, and my hair frizzed in a direct betrayal of my blow dryer. I amped my pace, determined to get this part over with before any teachers arrived. My yellow boots and terrible fashion sense wouldn't keep me incognito for long.

And the only thing I could be sure of about Whitney's group was that they operated in secret.

The creek ran parallel to the back of the school, only a few feet separating them. The creek held only about an inch of murky, brown water instead of the five-or-so feet it had the capacity for. A vast field of dead grass stretched beyond it, sucked dry without water. The weather seemed to be conspiring with the township to keep our town from producing crops. Rain at this time of year was rare, and when it showed up, it was underwhelming. Today's forecast called for disappointment and sporadic mist.

Hoisting the backpack over my shoulder, I followed the creek in the direction of the lake that sat a few hundred feet away. My flashlight beamed a circle of light along my path, and the heavy flirting of crickets kept me company.

A snapped branch in the woods drew my attention. I squinted into the distance but only spotted trees swaying in the growing wind. I shook my head and forced myself to keep going.
Stop being paranoid.

Several hundred feet along the creek, the sound of rushing water made my ears perk up. Large rocks, piled higher than my head, blocked the flow of the water. But that was no surprise; there were some dollhouses taller than me. Twigs and dead leaves stuck out between the rocks, water seeping through the crevasses. It looked massive, but I hoped I could redirect at least a trickle of water back to the field.

After I set my bag down, I stepped into the creek and braced one hand on the dam. The rocks wobbled beneath my fingers. I smiled. “Easy peasy, mac and cheesy.”