Chapter Nine
From the second I step out from the Portals of the Past, it’s like a stopwatch instantly goes off in my head.
If I had an ounce of athleticism, I would be running back toward my house. As it is, I’m already gassed from chasing Cam this far into the park in the first place.
He stashed the flyer, I tell myself for the umpteenth time. He stashed it somewhere on the way here, and so far he hasn’t scrambled out of his tree and raced past me to get to it. He’s playing it cool. I can play it cool too. There’s time. It’s not a sprint.
The mental stopwatch keeps ticking.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I take it out and look at the screen. Texts are coming in from Julia and Sunny.
Julia: Heeeeeey, how did it go with Cam? Everything okay
Sunny: Did you get the book or not.
I wince and click out of the thread. There’s this strange feeling in my belly, a total clash between what’s happening in my personal world and what’s happening all around me.
People keep playing baseball and stretching out under the sun.
Dogs are pulling leashes taut as their owners laugh and fish out treats from their pockets.
It doesn’t make any sense for everyone to be this calm.
I steal a glance behind me every so often, but there’s no sign of Cam. I try to think about where he put the flyer on his way over.
I’m actually really good at finding things, in a general sense.
The trick, I’ve learned, is to be logical.
If you’re missing an AirPod and you start to look in every place an AirPod could possibly be, you’re in grave danger of having to search forever.
Instead, you have to be strategic. When do I last remember taking the AirPod out?
Where are my usual listening spots? And then, instead of doing a half-assed job tearing your whole house apart, you home in on the two or three most likely places for it to be and search meticulously.
I try this technique with the flyer. Of course, the entire path from Cam’s porch to the Portals is full of places a flyer could be. But where would Cam specifically think to put it?
I lost him at the intersection on Judah and Nineteenth.
Maybe he dipped into a shop and bribed an employee to hold on to the flyer for an hour.
Maybe he found a bulletin board and tacked up Harvey’s birthday announcement, camouflaging it among all the other notices for book clubs, CrossFit gyms, and pet sitter ads.
No. I shake my head. Both those options are way too dangerous—if you let go of the flyer once, you could lose it completely. And maybe Cam doesn’t want me to do this treasure hunt, but I don’t think he wants to destroy it either. That hunt was everything to him a few years ago. Which means…
I pause on the sidewalk. “Damn it,” I mutter.
It’s with him.
It has to be with him. He must’ve rolled it up and stuck it into a knothole in the tree trunk. Actually, knowing Cam, he probably just stuck it straight into his waistband. If I had really wanted to get the flyer back, I would have had to climb the tree and goose him.
Just the idea of doing that sends a tingly, unpleasant shock wave over my whole body. I take out my phone and pull up the group thread before I lose the nerve.
Me: No book. Flyer’s gone. Cam swiped it and took off.
Sunny immediately starts typing.
Sunny: WTF?!?!?! REPORT HIM!
Me: To who, the treasure police? He knew exactly what we were up to.
Gabriel: Dang. Does this mean the mission’s over, then?
Before I can answer, text dots appear next to Julia’s name. They blink and disappear, blink and disappear again. I hold my breath for almost two minutes. It seems like she’s writing us a manifesto. Except, when she finally does hit send, the text isn’t a manifesto at all. She simply writes:
Julia: …not quite.
Despite Sunny, Gabriel, and I piling on Julia in a barrage of messages, Julia refuses to clarify what a smiley face could possibly mean in this context.
She tells us to get every school assignment we know of out of the way tonight and to meet her in the Bat Cave tomorrow at four p.m. After Sunny threatens to burn all of Julia’s completed assignments if she doesn’t explain herself TODAY, Julia finally relents that she might have thought up a plan B for our mission.
Whatever that means.
I end up blowing the rest of the evening fantasizing about scenarios wherein I break into Cam’s room and steal both the book and the flyer while he’s sleeping.
I can’t imagine that he’s already working on the hunt.
Or maybe the real problem is that I can imagine it.
It feels insane to have to sit and wait around when he’s probably already out somewhere digging with a shovel.
I keep creeping back onto the local news website, refreshing the headlines over and over in case one particular title comes up:
ANNOYINGLY CHARISMATIC BLOND TEEN FINDS LOCAL TREASURE
Even the specter of the words is enough to haunt me all night long.
“Woof,” Sunny says when she sees me after school the next day. “Did you join a raccoon posse last night?”
I scowl and rub my eyes. “It’s called a gaze.”
“What?”
“A group of raccoons,” I say impatiently, “is called a gaze.”
“I didn’t know raccoons were queer!” Gabriel strides up to my locker, both his thumbs hooked in his backpack straps.
“ ‘Gaze’ like the look,” I say.
“Oh, gays love the look,” he says, wiggling his eyebrows. Sunny smirks.
I let out an aggravated sigh. “Has anyone seen Julia yet?” I ask impatiently.
“HI!”
I crash backward into my locker as Julia hops seemingly from NOWHERE into the middle of our circle.
“What. The. Heck!” I choke out. I grab on to the locker door and hoist myself up.
Gabriel folds his arms. “Treasure is waiting, Julia. Why couldn’t we meet this morning?”
“Because Sunny’s not a morning person,” Julia replies, like this is a perfectly acceptable reason.
“Ah, but little did you know,” Sunny says, “I’m not an afternoon person either.”
Gabriel raises his eyebrows. “Evening? Nighttime?”
“Witching hour only,” she says with a sniff.
I roll my eyes and turn to Julia. “So, what’s the plan B? We figure out how to steal the book and flyer from Cam?”
Who’s looked suspiciously smug all day, I think to myself bitterly. If I were remotely religious, I’d probably be off crafting and passing out strings of prayer beads to every student at school as if the strands were friendship bracelets, each one with the same beaded letters:
HE-WONT-FIND-IT
HE-WONT-FIND-IT
HE-WONT-FIND-IT
Julia waves off my suggestion as she turns down the hall. “We don’t need the flyer. Now, come on. To the Bat Cave!”
She dips out of view into the stairwell. Gabriel grins and points a finger in the air. “To the Bat Cave!” he echoes. He runs down the hall after Julia, his backpack thumping with each stride.
Sunny and I trade looks, then shuffle behind them. By the time we reach the basement lab, Julia already has our machines logged in and whirring. She pops the projector cable into her laptop and queues up the front screen. As the screen warms up, Julia does a drumroll on her lap.
“Bum bada dum…Ta-da!”
There, filling the entire back wall, is the complete flyer from Harvey’s birthday party in 1979.
I let out a gasp. Sunny makes a tiny squeak.
Gabriel speaks first. “How did you…?”
“I took a photo at Bolerium,” Julia said. “After we bought it, of course. I saw the Absolutely No Photos sign. Okay, maybe I took it while we were checking out, but Ivy was already handing the money over! It was fine!”
Sunny tuts and smiles at Julia. “You broke the rules. You’re a rule breaker.”
“I am not!” Julia says, face turning red. “We were buying it.”
“Ivy was buying it.”
“And I should have taken a photo first thing,” I say, standing. I seriously do not know what’s come over me as I cross in front of Sunny and Gabriel’s chairs and wrap Julia into something that must be the equivalent of a hug.
“Thank you,” I say into Julia’s hair, though her hair muffles the words so much that it probably sounds like I’m whispering, which is weird. Actually, everything about this is weird. I gently press myself away. “Thank you,” I say again, at a normal volume this time.
“You’re welcome,” Julia says, grinning. She’s not acting like the hug was weird at all, bless her. I’m going to make all the prayer beads/friendship bracelets for this girl. She looks over at the others.
“So. No book, but we still have the flyer.” Julia glances at me nervously. “Is Cam looking for the treasure now too?”
“Maybe. Probably. Yeah, I’m pretty sure he is.”
“Well, that escalated fast,” Sunny says.
She presses her feet into the thin gray carpet, then wheels herself over to her computer. She clicks open a link in her web browser and starts typing.
“Guess that means we’d better get this damn book.”