The Vanishing Violin (21 page)

You’ll see.

I call Raf later that night to give him an update on the case. His favorite part is when Becca and I were locked in the closet together.

“You really do stink at being the bad seed,” he says.

“Tell me about it. I’m just going to have to accept that it’s my lot in life to be a good girl—I mean, I even have ‘Saint’ in my last name. Except, well, for the scooter rides. Margaret found out, and we had a big fight. I’m surprised she didn’t come over to the West Side to sock you.”

“Why did you tell her?”

“I didn’t. Leigh Ann is the only person I told. Elizabeth saw us that day. I denied it, but Margaret can read me like a cereal box. She always knows when I’m lying.”

“That probably explains how my mom found out.”

“What!”

“Uh-huh. Boy, is she ticked off at my uncle.”

“Well, I don’t think Margaret or Elizabeth would have told her. Maybe you’re not as sneaky as you think. You probably walked in your apartment with the helmet on. So, how much trouble are you in?”

“Keep your phone charged, because you’re not gonna see me for a while. I’m grounded.”

“For how long?”

“Depends. How long do you think it will be till man lands on the sun?”

“Oy. But, Raf …”

“Yeah?”

“It was fun.”

“Sure was.”

Oh, like your gym clothes smell like Chanel No. 5

Margaret is waiting impatiently for me to finish my breakfast, which I am trying to enjoy for once, rather than stuffing my face and running out the door. She’s sitting across from me, drumming her fingers on the table and sighing loudly every few seconds.

“Are you sure you won’t have some orange juice?” Mom asks her. “It’s fresh-squeezed.”

“You may as well,” I say. “I’m gonna be a while.”

“Thank you. I guess I will have some orange juice, Kate,” Margaret says.

“Sophie, what did you do with my grabber?” Mom asks, reaching into the cabinet for another glass.

“Grabber? Oh, that thing. It’s in my room. I needed it to get something off the top of a bookcase.”

The ceiling in our kitchen is pretty high, and Dad installed full-length cabinets to store all his cooking gadgets and pots and pans. In order to reach the tip-top shelves, Mom needs this metal contraption with a handle
that’s about three feet long, with rubber-coated “fingers” that can grab hold of things.

Mom comes back from my room with the grabber and pulls down a little pitcher from the top shelf.

“I should get one of those for my mom,” Margaret says. “It reminds me of that thing Jaz used to change the lightbulb.”

“We use it all the time,” Mom says. “I may need it later today to put Sophie’s dirty gym clothes into a laundry basket. Lord knows I don’t want to make actual contact with those.”

“Mom. Please.”

She holds up her hands. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I offend the princess by suggesting that her gym clothes stink?”

Margaret is enjoying this a little too much. “Ewww. Sophie, you brought those home a week ago.”

“Excuse me for being too busy to clean my room. Somebody keeps dragging me all over the city after school every day.”

“And yet, my room is clean.”

“That’s because you’re obsessive-compulsive.”

“Well, you’re both going to be late for school if you don’t hurry,” Mom says. She kisses me on the cheek. “I love you, Stinky.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

We make it to school with a few minutes to spare. Leigh Ann and Becca are waiting for us upstairs by the seventh-grade lockers.

“Lookie at what we have!” says Leigh Ann.

“Yeah, while you two losers were sleeping in this morning, Leigh Ann and I wrote a masterpiece,” Rebecca adds. “Livvy is going to totally fall for it. It’s as good as one of those Harvard things you’re always yapping about, Margaret.”

Margaret looks stunned. One does not joke about the Harvard Classics with her. “Let me see it.”

Leigh Ann hands her the note, which alternates between Becca’s and Leigh Ann’s writing. It is supposed to look like something they wrote in class, passing it back and forth. I lean in to read it over Margaret’s shoulder.

“This is good,” I admit. “I think Livvy’ll buy it. I especially like the creative misspellings.”

Becca pretends not to know what I’m talking about. “There are misspelled words?”

Margaret agrees with my assessment and hands the note back to Becca. “So, how do you get this into her sneaky little hands without her being suspicious?”

“We’ve got it under control,” Becca answers. “L.A. and I sit right in front of Livvy in social studies. We’re going to pass this back and forth a few times, making sure that Livvy sees us. After class, I’m going to situate myself right in front of her, and it’s going to ‘accidentally’ fall out of my notebook. She’ll never be able to resist reading it.”

“Not bad, you two,” Margaret says admiringly. “In the CIA, they call this kind of thing disinformation. Leigh Ann, I have to admit, I find this devious side of you most interesting. You definitely have a future in espionage.”

At lunch, future spy Leigh Ann Jaimes reports that phase 1 of the plan went perfectly. After Becca dropped the note, Livvy pretended not to see it and covered it with her foot. When she thought no one was looking, she reached down and slipped it into her blazer pocket.

“And she had this smirky-jerky smile on her face,” says Leigh Ann.

“Like the one you have now?” I ask. “Where is Livvy, anyway?”

Leigh Ann points with her eyes at a table on the opposite side of the cafeteria. “She’s at her usual table, with the usual adoring crowd. They’re all whispering about something. I swear, it looks like she’s already told them. I can’t believe that. I thought for sure she would keep it to herself.”

Margaret shakes her head. “Not her style. This way, if she gives everyone the answers, she’ll be the big hero. Don’t forget, it’s always all about Livvy.”

“I hope Becca put the fake answer key in your locker,” I say. “Because she is definitely going after it. I wouldn’t be surprised if she makes her move today.”

“It’s there,” Leigh Ann replies. “And the locker’s unlocked. We always just leave the lock hanging.”

“Speaking of leaving things hanging, Margaret,” I begin, “when does the plan to catch Sergei go into effect?”

“Tomorrow,” she answers. “Jaz says that Sergei shows up at Perkatory at about eight, so guess what? You and I are going to be there when he arrives.”

“On a Saturday morning?” I whine. “How come they don’t have to come?”

“Because they are busy doing other things on Saturday mornings. Important things. You would just be sleeping in.”

“Sleep is good. Sleep is important. Doctors are always saying people don’t get enough of it.”

“Then go to bed early. Get all you want. But don’t plan on getting much on Saturday night. We’re all sleeping over at your apartment.”

“We are?” Becca, Leigh Ann, and I say in unison.

“Uh-huh. Don’t worry, I’ll explain everything.”

Sometimes having a genius for a best friend can be so exhausting.

“Um, Margaret, do I have any plans next March twenty-seventh, around three o’clock?”

“Well, actually, we do need to—” She stops, a big smile on her face. “Oh, all right, you’ve made your point. I’ll go over to Mr. C.’s for the daily check-in.”

“Awesome. That means we rehearse today,” I say to Leigh Ann and Becca. “Let’s go over to Elizabeth’s right after school. Maybe we can actually learn a whole song.”

An entire song. A short song.

Dare to dream.

When the dust from the dismissal-bell stampede of girls settles, Becca announces that phase 2 is complete. The Klack-Hack has taken the bait.

“I had my books arranged so that I’d be able to see if anyone touched them, and they have definitely been moved. The answer sheet is still there, but I’ll bet you she made a copy and brought the original back so that I wouldn’t know.” She laughs her evil-genius laugh. “Hwaa-ha-ha! Livvy Klack is going down.”

“Don’t count your chickens, Bec,” I say. “A lot can happen between now and Tuesday. And didn’t you say the same thing about your supersecret anti-Vatican organization?”

“Don’t be a buzz kill, St. Pierre. And for your information, I’m not done with the SAVO yet. You just wait and see.”

“Oh, I’ll wait, Chen.”

Leigh Ann looks to Margaret, palms up, for help dealing with Becca and me. “Have fun practicing. I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” Margaret says.

Having the basement in Elizabeth’s house all to ourselves for a couple of hours is just what we need. We crank the amplifiers up to a respectable-for-rock level, and Becca and I start to get the hang of playing together. About an hour into the practice, we make it through all of “Twist and Shout” without any (cringeworthy) mistakes and then congratulate ourselves with high fives and ear-to-ear smiles.

“Man, we should have recorded that,” I say. “Margaret will never believe us.”

“That was awesome!” Leigh Ann agrees. “We totally rocked it.”

“Ready to do it again?” Rebecca asks. “When we can play it like that twenty times in a row without mistakes, then we’ll be ready to play it in front of other people.”

“Hello, girls,” Elizabeth says, coming down the stairs. “Sorry to interrupt when you’re practicing. You
sound wonderful, by the way—now, that’s my kind of music! There’s someone here who says she was supposed to meet you—”

“Mbingu!” shouts Rebecca, who runs over to greet her tall, striking friend, who is wearing, appropriately enough, a bright red coat. “You made it! Everybody, this is the girl I was telling you about, from the art program. I didn’t say anything ’cause I wasn’t sure she’d come. This is Leigh Ann, and this is Sophie. She’s the one who was totally rude to you on the phone.”

“Becca! Jeez! I am so sorry about that,” I say. “Rebecca dearest, you were going to explain that to her, remember?”

“Oh yeah.”

Mbingu doesn’t seem to know what to make of us, but Elizabeth helps things out by inviting everyone upstairs for a short snack break. “You girls need to get to know each other a little if you’re going to play together. What better way to do that than over Oreos and milk?”

For all her wackiness, Elizabeth is very wise. By the time we polish off a package of Oreos and half a gallon of milk, we are bandmates.

“I do have one little problem with being in the band,” Mbingu says, pulling a pair of drumsticks from her backpack. “These are all I have. No drums.”

“Maybe we can borrow some for a while, until we get enough money to buy or rent used ones,” I say. “We must know somebody with a drum set.”

“My brother has some drums,” Leigh Ann says. “He
doesn’t have time to play anymore. I’ll ask him if we can borrow them.”

“Problem solved,” Becca announces. “For today, you get to play on a plastic bucket, Mbingu. Kind of like those guys on the street. Elizabeth, you got one of those we could use?”

Back in the basement, we let Mbingu watch and listen as we play “Twist and Shout.” By the time we’re halfway through, she knows the beat and is pounding it out on the top of the bucket. And suddenly we sound much better.

Leigh Ann notices the difference, too. “Mbingu, that was amazing. Where did you learn to do that?”

“I don’t know—I listen to a lot of music and just imitate what I hear,” she says with a shrug.

“Well, keep doing it,” I say.

We hammer through “Twist and Shout” five or six more times, until Leigh Ann has finally had it. “Okay, I need a break from that one. I’m going to lose my voice. Sophie, why don’t we try your song for a while?”

Rebecca strums her bass. “You have a song?”

“Well, it’s not really done, and I’m not too sure about the key, and—”

She cuts me off with another riff, louder this time. “Lemme see it.”

I take a notebook out of my bag and flip through the pages until I find it. “The chorus is done, but I think it needs one more verse. I don’t even have a title—I just
call it ‘The Apostrophe Song.’ That dumb project of Mr. Eliot’s was the inspiration.”

“Play a little bit for us,” Leigh Ann says.

“It has a punky, Ramonesy kind of beat,” I say as I find my way through the first few notes. Mbingu is tapping out a rhythm right along with me. “Yeah. Something like that. And the chorus has a much quicker tempo. More like this.”

Leigh Ann takes the notebook from me. “Play that part again so I can sing. Ready?”

“Ready, two, three …”