Finding the Forger (4 page)

Showering had not straightened it, or relaxed it, or done anything to it except, if this was possible, to make it look even frizzier. I thought maybe sleeping on it would have helped as well—kind of mashing it down so it didn’t look so fierce. All sleeping on it did, though, was create a dent on the right side. Very attractive.

I pulled out a bandana and tied it on. Frizzy ends still poked out from underneath, but the blue-print triangle of cloth contained some of the damage.

When I went downstairs for breakfast, Tony gave me a weird look, as if he wasn’t sure what was different about me, then went
back to snarfing down his cornflakes. Mom had already left for her office, and Connie was in the shower.

“Weird” must have been in my horoscope because when I went to grab some milk from the refrigerator, I came face to face with yet another strange occurrence.

About a week before Thanksgiving, I’d received in the mail some promotional thing for a girl’s magazine. Included in it were poetry magnets. I didn’t order the magazine, but I did keep the magnets. Before going to bed the night before, I’d put up this hopeful message on the fridge: “geek girl turns glam/crush is real man.” Hey, with so few words, there weren’t that many possible arrangements, okay? And besides, it had made me feel better after my thermonuclear hair day.

But when I checked the fridge in the morning, someone had rearranged the little rectangles and used other words to spell out: “chill glam girl/real groove is messy.”

“Who changed my poem?” I asked Tony as I drank a glass of Instant Breakfast. I’m not much of a breakfast person. I’m lucky if I can tolerate a bowl of Frosted Flakes in the morning, while Connie consumes healthy stuff like granola and fruit slushes, and Tony sometimes grabs a McMuffin on the way into class.

“Huh? I dunno. Probably Connie.” He didn’t even look at me but kept his eyes on the morning newspaper.

Connie came in a few seconds later, opened the fridge, and poured herself some orange juice. She sniffed at the open refrigerator.

“Something stinks in here. We need to clean it out.”

Oh, man. It was my hair. I was getting used to the smell, but others could detect its killer odors from across a room.

Connie looked at me, tilted her head, drank her juice, then
issued her verdict. “Wow. Bad perm, huh?”

I shrugged my shoulders, which in Balducci language means “Yeah. Kerrie did it. What could I do? I’m mortified, so leave me alone.”

“You ready?” Tony asked. He was driving me into school. He placed his bowl in the sink.

I slurped the last of my chocolate drink, and reached down for my backpack.

“Just a sec.” I turned to Connie. “Why did you change the poem?”

“Huh? What poem?” Connie stared at me like I was a lunatic. Come to think of it, she often stared at me that way.

“On the refrigerator door. My poem.”

She turned to face the door, which was covered with newspaper clippings, coupons, and menus for Chinese and Italian carry-outs. The competing messages were too much for her. She said nothing.

“C’mon. Let’s get going,” Tony said. “You’re going to make me late again.”

I sometimes wonder what Tony will do when he doesn’t have me or Connie to blame things on any more. Ignoring his impatience, I raced back up to my room, pulled down the bandana, and spritzed Heaven cologne on my hair. Maybe that would mask the odor, I thought. One could only hope.

Back downstairs, the front door was open, which meant Tony was already outside revving up the car. I yelled a goodbye to Connie and she returned the affectionate farewell with her own chipper “Don’t forget, you’re fixing dinner tonight since you messed up last night!” and I was off to school.

Tony gave me a few sideways glances en-route, like he was still
trying to figure out what was different about me. My guess was he didn’t even remember what color hair I had, let alone whether it was curly or straight. Tony’s goal in life was to become a millionaire. I got the distinct impression he saw his family members solely as obstacles to that goal.

After he dropped me at school, I rushed into the locker hall to dump my stuff and get ready for first period—Western Civ. Kerrie was nowhere to be seen, which was odd, because we usually hooked up in the locker hall before school, especially on days like this one, when we didn’t have many classes together. Sarah was there, though, and that meant Kerrie was someplace nearby since they usually came in together. Sarah had her own car.

“Wow,” Sarah said, looking at my hair. “What happened to
you
?”

“An unfortunate incident involving my hair and a permanent wave set.”

“What made you do that?” she asked, twirling her combination lock. “Nobody does perms any more.”

“Call me a rugged individualist, I guess.” I didn’t see any point in laying the blame at Kerrie’s feet. She’d only been trying to help.

Trying to help or not, Kerrie was probably avoiding me because she felt guilty. Now, I could forgive her for the perm disaster, but I was annoyed that she’d stay out of my way because of the guilts.

“Where’s Kerrie?” I asked as I stashed my lunch bag and grabbed some books.

“Don’t know. She had her dad drive her in.”

Uh-oh. If Kerrie had her father give her a ride, that meant she was miffed at Sarah big-time. This was getting tiresome. I might need to fly in a negotiator and work out a truce.

“Did you get hold of Connie?” I said as casually as I could. “I didn’t get a chance to talk to her last night.”

“No,” Sarah said. “I didn’t. But I did give her number to Ms. Dexter.”

“I thought you said they already had a private investigator working on something.”

“I don’t think she signed anything with him. I think she’s shopping around.”

“Well, thanks. Connie’ll be happy to get the work.” I leaned against the locker. “But what’s it for, anyway?”

“I’m still not sure.”

“Why’d the alarm go off yesterday—is it connected to that?”

“I don’t know. Everybody’s being cagey. Even Hector.” She grimaced.

“You said you overheard your boss mentioning him. Are you afraid he’s in trouble?”

Sarah shook her head. “No! I’m just afraid if something’s wrong, they’ll point fingers at him because . . . well, because he’s a Latino . . .”

“Yeah, but what’s wrong? What’s going on there?” This was getting frustrating. I took a deep breath. “Just tell me what you know, what you’ve seen.”

She frowned and looked around again as if afraid someone would overhear.

“They seem to be doing a lot of ‘restoration’ work lately. On new stuff, modern stuff, that doesn’t need restoration, okay?”

How was I supposed to know? I was lucky if I could draw a stick figure without giving it three eyes. Come to think of it, that might qualify as modern art, so maybe I wasn’t out of my league after all.

“If it’s really new, I can’t imagine why they’d need to—what do you mean by restoration work, anyway?” Frustration gave way to curiosity. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Or, actually, frizz up.

“They have a room where they touch up old paintings. Artists do it, with some art students helping out. It’s neat. I’ve seen them work.”

“So that’s why your boss is looking into hiring a private investigator—because the new stuff is deteriorating too fast?” Maybe they didn’t need Connie. Maybe they needed an environmental protection agent. It sounded like something was toxic in that museum.

“No. Well, yeah. I mean . . . I think Ms. Dexter is having stuff restored to check it out. To make sure it’s real.”

I felt like hitting my head with my hand. “Forgery! That’s what you think has happened. Someone has forged some new works and they’re privately checking it out!”

“That’s why I thought she should call Connie. The guy she’s been talking to—well, every time she gets off the phone with him, she goes looking for Hector and starts asking him questions.”

Sarah’s convoluted explanation left me hankering for more information, but just then, just as the sands of time had almost finished drifting through the time-before-class hourglass, Kerrie rolled in—with Doug! With Doug’s arm around her shoulder! Hey, this wasn’t fair! Her eyes were red and her face streaked, which meant she’d been crying.

“Kerrie, what’s the matter?” I asked, rushing to her side. Sarah hung back.

“She had a fight with her dad,” Doug said.

I got the picture—they both arrived at school at the same time,
Doug saw her crying, and Doug, being a good guy, tried to comfort her. Good old Doug. So why did this make me uneasy?

Kerrie thanked Doug and went to her locker, but the look Doug threw her way was enough to send up alarm bells. Doug was a softie. And I was beginning to get impatient with Kerrie.

“What happened this time?” I asked, maybe a tad too snappily.

Doug looked at my hair, probably for the first time, and I could have sworn he curled his lip. “Kerrie told me about your hair, Bianca. It
will
grow out.”

I felt my face grow warm from an angry blush. Kerrie told Doug about my hair? And not only that, she must have told him about it in such a way that he was predisposed to dislike it! She stole my comfort! Doug was supposed to console
me,
not her! This was a gyp! I wanted a refund. I was the one who had first dibs on Doug’s comfort!

“It’s not that bad,” I said defensively.

“I think it’s kind of cute,” Sarah said, lightly fingering the frizzy ends sticking out from under my bandana. Some fell off in her hand, and she wiped them on her skirt.

Doug said nothing. Kerrie sniffled.

“What happened with your dad?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing,” she said, turning her lock.

The buzzer screeched, signaling we were supposed to be in our homerooms. To heck with that—they always gave us a few minutes grace time, and I was not leaving until I got some information, or at least a kind word from Doug.

“It had to be something. You were crying.” I moved in closer to Kerrie.

“It’s nothing, really!” Kerrie grabbed her books and slammed
the locker door shut. “I have to go. I’m going to be late. That’s the last thing I need today!”

After she left, I looked at Doug and raised my eyebrows, which in Balducci language meant, “What the hey is going on here?”

Sarah seemed to be thinking the same thing, because she hovered nearby, awaiting Doug’s explanation. He disappointed us both.

“I don’t know. You better get it from her,” he said, then ran off to class with a quick “later” in my direction and an affectionate punch to my arm.

Sarah and I shrugged, and she ran off to class, too.

I felt like sitting down and crying. I’d wanted more information from Sarah about the ruckus at the museum, but got sidetracked by Kerrie’s mysterious crying jag, and Doug’s touching but misdirected sympathy.

And, oh yes, it
was
misdirected. I was supposed to be soaking up the sympathy because of my hair. When I hadn’t been able to reach Doug last night, I had worked myself into a buzz thinking about how darned sympathetic he’d be when I rested my head on his shoulder and sobbed out the story of the misguided perm. But Kerrie had sucked his sympathy dry! There was none left for me.

Feeling sad, annoyed, and curious, I stomped off to class.

M
Y DAY WENT from bad to worse. First, in Western Civ, I found out I had written a deadline in my notebook wrong, which meant that while all the other students handed in their papers on the causes of World War II, I was left sitting as unprepared as the French had been at the Maginot line because I’d thought the paper was due the week before Christmas. Then, when I told the teacher about my mistake after class, he just shrugged and said, “if you get it in by the end of the week, I’ll take just one grade level off.”
One grade level?
Great. That meant I’d have to write an A-plus paper just to get a B-plus. That’s a real motivation spiker, let me tell ya.

Later, in chorus, Mr. Baker spent virtually the entire session lecturing us in a “how could you?” tone of voice about the number of “please excuse my son/daughter . . .” notes he was receiving from kids who wanted out of the Christmas concert. Hey, it was scheduled on the last day of classes and a bunch of kids were taking off for their grandparents. Families are spread all over the country now, but I guess in ol’ Baker’s day, they’d stayed close to the central hearth.