The Dirt Diary (7 page)

Finally, Mom and I come to our last house of the day. Ms. Montelle isn’t home this time, so Caitlin silently lets us in and then goes right back to her spot on the couch. She’s watching another one of my favorite cooking shows. It’s an old episode I’ve never seen before, and I’d love to plop down on the floor and watch. But of course I have work to do. And being that close to Caitlin Schubert would probably set me on fire.

This time Mom sends me to do the bedrooms while she does the rest of the house. I start in Ms. Montelle’s room, which is a mess of business suits and blouses thrown on top of every surface. I try to hang them up so I can actually clean the dressers and nightstands underneath.

When I’m done, I head across the hall to Caitlin’s room, but she’s standing in front of the closed door with her arms crossed in front of her chest.

“You’re not allowed to come in here,” she says.

“But—but we’re supposed to clean the whole house.” I can hear my mom whistling away in the bathroom. Should I try to get her help?

“No one’s allowed in my room,” Caitlin says. Then she stomps off down the hall and back to the living room.

I stand frozen for a minute, shocked that she finally spoke to me. Is there something in her room she doesn’t want me to see? Or is she just being a jerk?

Either way, if she doesn’t want us in there, then I guess we can’t exactly kick the door down. With a shrug, I go toward the little office at the end of the hall.

As I finish dusting a beat-up desk in the far corner, I hear the front door of the house open and Ms. Montelle come in. She says something I can’t hear to Caitlin and then calls out a quick hello to my mom before she goes into her bedroom and shuts the door.

I’m about to turn on the vacuum when I hear Ms. Montelle’s muffled voice through the wall, clearly talking on the phone. I feel bad listening, but I can’t help hearing every word.

“No, she’s not doing okay. She refuses to leave the house except to go to school, and even that’s been a struggle. All she does is sit around watching TV. It’s been weeks since she saw any of her friends, even Briana. I’m afraid she’s really getting depressed, but she won’t go see the therapist the school counselor suggested. Can’t you talk to her, Mother? She always listens to you.”

Ms. Montelle falls silent, listening for a minute. I hold my breath, also listening.

“Of course I don’t blame her for still being upset. Her father died! I know that’s not something she can just get over. But Mother, she hardly knew the man. He hadn’t seen her in years. I’m just not sure what to do to help her.” There’s another stretch of silence, and finally Ms. Montelle lets out a long sigh. “Okay, I’ll call you tomorrow,” she says before hanging up the phone.

I sit there totally stunned. Clearly, she’d been talking about Caitlin. Did her father really die? I think back to how weird Caitlin has been acting the past few weeks, barely talking, not really paying attention to Briana’s usual antics. Now it all makes sense.

I can’t imagine what she’s going through. It must have been hard enough not seeing her father for years, but then to lose him all together? How totally horrible.

For the first time in my life, I actually feel bad for Caitlin Schubert. Maybe she isn’t a heartless harpy after all.

The next day, Marisol comes over to help me do some serious stress baking while Mom is at her Sunday afternoon book group. My whole body aches from yesterday’s cleaning marathon. Even my toes hurt. But a batch of comfort brownies will fix everything.

I decide to go all-out chocolate this time: chocolate chips, chocolate icing, and a sprinkle of M&M’s. If that doesn’t make me feel better, nothing will.

This would be the perfect time to tell Marisol about Steve Mueller paying me to spy on Briana, but I can’t even imagine how she’ll react. Instead, I fill her in on the previous day’s events while we wait for the brownies to bake.

“I still can’t believe it about Caitlin’s father,” says Marisol, carefully sorting through the M&M’s to find all the red ones (her favorite).

“I never thought I’d feel bad for her, but I can’t imagine what she’s going through.” I shake my head. What would I do if I never saw my dad again?

I flip open my journal and turn to the last entry of the Dirt Diary. Writing Caitlin’s secret down had felt wrong, but seeing it in writing also helped me process what had happened.

The timer goes off, and I jump up to pull the brownies out of the oven. As the hot air hits my face and mingles with the smell of chocolate, I don’t feel quite so miserable anymore. Baking always has that effect on me.

After we let the brownies cool, Marisol and I start icing and sprinkling them with M&M’s. When we’re finished, the brownies look like cavities on a plate. I turn to the recipe section of my journal and make some notes about my latest creation. These days I barely use other people’s recipes anymore. It’s more fun to make up my own.

Finally, the brownies are cool enough to eat. I take a gooey bite, and the intense rush of chocolate and sugar warms me all the way down to my toes.

“Whoa,” says Marisol. “I think I might have just gotten diabetes.”

I laugh, realizing she’s right. I might be in the mood for death by chocolate, but maybe it’s a little much. Yet another recipe that won’t be making the bake sale cut.

“What’s this?” says Marisol. She pulls over an old photo album that’s sitting on the kitchen table.

“My mom found it during her latest cleaning tirade.” I swallow a bite of brownie before adding, “She’s been emptying out all the closets in case we can’t keep the house.”

Marisol’s mouth falls open. “You guys wouldn’t move out of town, would you?”

Oh my goldfish. I hadn’t even thought of that. I assumed if we had to move, we’d stay in town. “I’d die if I had to start over at a new school,” I say. “All those new people. I don’t think I could handle it.”

It took six whole years of school before Marisol saw through my shyness and wanted to be friends with me. I can’t be an outcast like that again. I must’ve been delusional when I tried to convince Dad to let me move to Florida with him. It hadn’t occurred to me that moving would have meant starting my whole life over.

“It’ll be okay,” Marisol says, giving me a sympathetic smile. “If you had to move, I’d find a way to come over every day.”

“Thanks.” I don’t know what I’d do without Marisol. She’s the only person keeping me sane most of the time.

“Oh my gosh!” Marisol squeals, looking through the pictures from when I was little. “I love this one.”

She points to a photo of me and Dad wearing matching reindeer ears and holding ice cubes on our outstretched tongues. It was taken at Mom’s company holiday party when I was in third grade. I was too afraid to talk to anyone, so Dad made up all kinds of funny games for the two of us to play while Mom spent the evening schmoozing with coworkers.

So many other memories of Dad and me come rushing back that I have to look away.

“You were so cute,” says Marisol. She looks up. “And you still are. That’s why I’m sure there’s someone much better out there for you than stupid Steve Mueller. Briana Riley can have him.”

I bite into my brownie again, trying to distract myself from the thought buzzing around in my head: now that I’ve taken Steve up on his offer, maybe he’ll ditch the Evil Queen and finally notice me.

As I’m making curry tuna casserole that night—Dad’s favorite—my cell phone rings. I grab it just as the oven finishes preheating.

“Hello?” I say, shoving the pan into the oven at the same time.

“Is this Rachel?” a guy’s voice asks.

“Um, yes?”

“Hey, it’s Steve. Steve Mueller.”

I almost fall into the oven. Steve Mueller is calling me! On the phone!

“Listen,” he goes on. “I was wondering if you’d had a chance to look around Briana’s room. You know, for what we talked about?”

“Um. Uh-huh.” I shut the oven door and stumble over to the kitchen table, feeling slightly dizzy.

“So, did you find anything?” he asks.

“Er.” If I tell him the truth, then it’ll all be over. No extra money to put back in my college fund. And, more importantly, no Steve Mueller calling me! “Well,” I squeak. “I did find…a note.” Did I really just say that? Of course, it sounded totally unconvincing. There’s no way in Helena, Montana, he’ll believe it.

“Who was it from?”

“It—it wasn’t signed. But it was in…her math book.”

“What did it say?”

“Uh, something like, ‘I can’t wait to see you again.’ It looked like a guy’s handwriting.” Whoa, what am I doing?

I can hear Steve breathing into the phone. This is it. He’ll get mad and decide to confront Briana about it. She’ll deny the whole thing, and they’ll have a huge fight, and the two of them will break up. She deserves it, I remind myself. She’s the one who’s gone out of her way to make my life miserable. Once Steve dumps her, he’ll come running into my arms while cheesy music plays in the background. Maybe he’ll even ask me to the Spring Dance. Or…he’ll realize that I lied to him and never speak to me again.

“Oh,” Steve says finally. The weird thing is, he doesn’t sound mad. He just sounds kind of hurt. Is it possible he has real feelings for Briana? “Well, thanks for telling me. I’ll make sure to pay you tomorrow in school.”

“Wait. Are you going to tell Briana what I told you?”

“No. I don’t think an unsigned note is much to go on. If you don’t mind, I’ll still have you keep an eye out.”

“Oh, okay.” I can’t help it. Even though I feel like rat dandruff for lying, I’m still excited that I’ll get to talk to him again, have a chance to earn more money, and get back at Briana, all at the same time. Still, he sounds so miserable. “I wouldn’t worry about the note,” I say. “It probably doesn’t mean anything.”

Steve lets out a sad little laugh. “It’s funny. I kept telling myself that I wanted to find out she was cheating on me because that would explain the way she’s been acting. But I guess I’d really been hoping it was something else.” Then, before I can confess that I made it all up, he hangs up the phone, and I’m alone to face my guilty conscience. I have a feeling it’s going to punch me right in the face.

At school on Monday morning, I find a crisp twenty-dollar bill in my locker. As I put it in my bag, I can’t help feeling slimy. But the thought that the money was once in Steve Mueller’s pocket makes my insides tingle. Yes, I’m totally pathetic.

The money puts me at just about $100, and I still have two weeks until Mom finds out what I’ve done. If I save every cent between now and then, and if I manage to win the bake-sale competition this year, my whole crazy plan just might work.

As I flip through my cooking journal in homeroom, I watch Caitlin out of the corner of my eye. How did I not notice before how terrible she looks? Her skin is pale and gray, her hair looks like it’s never seen a brush, and she’s wearing sweatpants to school. Sweatpants! She and Briana used to be identical rich twins, but now next to Briana, Caitlin looks like a bag lady.

I want to go over and tell her how sorry I am about her dad, to ask if there’s anything I can do to make her feel better, but that would mean admitting that I’d been eavesdropping on her mom’s phone conversation. And anyway, I’m probably the last person she wants sympathy from.

Briana, however, doesn’t seem to notice anything different about Caitlin. She’s talking to her just like she always does. Or
at
her.

“So since I’m head of the Spring Dance committee this year, I think we need to go all out. I mean we only have two weeks left to plan, and it has to be really special. It’s like our last chance to leave our middle-school legacy,” Briana is saying before Social Studies class. Meanwhile, Caitlin is just doodling in her notebook, not doing a very good job of pretending to pay attention. At one point she glances over at Steve Mueller, and they exchange something like a knowing smile, like they both see how ridiculous Briana is. Steve might be upset about the possibility of Briana cheating on him, but maybe he isn’t blind to her faults after all.

“What are you staring at?” Briana snaps, whirling toward me. I practically jump out of my seat. “Do I have a piece of dirt on my face or something? You want to clean it, don’t you? You just can’t help yourself.”

I imagine what it would feel like to cut her ponytail off with garden shears. I can almost hear that satisfying
snip
.

Angela Bareli giggles in the row next to us. “Briana,” she says in her high, nasally voice, “did I tell you I saw a vacuum cleaner in Rachel’s locker?”

Briana clicks her tongue. “Doesn’t surprise me. That thing’s her new boyfriend. She dumped Troy to date it.” She laughs and so does almost everyone else in the class. I don’t dare look to see if Steve is one of them.

When I’m at my locker after lunch, I spot Marisol charging toward me, her eyes narrowed and her cheeks flushed. Uh-oh. She must have found out about my deal with Steve Mueller somehow.

“Hi, Marisol,” I say over my shoulder as I open my locker and pretend to look for something.

“I was talking to Angela Bareli on the bus this morning.”

“Since when do you talk to her? I thought you said she’s a total follower.” I’m stalling, and we both know it.

“She’s not so bad once you get to know her, but that’s not important,” says Marisol. “What matters is what she told me. She said she saw you—”

I close my eyes, ready for Marisol to start lecturing me on my lack of morality. But she suddenly falls quiet. When I open my eyes, I see she’s facing away from me, looking at someone in the middle of the hallway. It’s Andrew Ivanoff. His ears, as usual, are burning with embarrassment.

“Hello, Rachel,” he half-whispers, his eyes just barely meeting mine.

“Hi, Andrew,” I answer. “Um, what’s up?”

“I just wanted to thank you. For your suggestion. About putting people in my movie. It helped.”

“Oh. Good.” I don’t think the idea of putting people in a zombie movie is that revolutionary, but I’m glad it helped him get unstuck with his screenplay. “How’s the movie going?”

“Very well, in fact. I’ve been scouting locations and found the perfect field for the final battle scene. The grass is so tall, it’ll almost swallow up the toys. I think it’ll look very dramatic.” His voice is more animated than I’ve ever heard it.

Marisol is looking back and forth between us like we’re a ping-pong match.

“Oh,” I say. “Andrew, this is my friend Marisol. She lives down the street from you.”

“I know,” he answers, giving Marisol the briefest of smiles. “We ride the same bus. You always sit in the left row of seats.”

“I guess I do. Well, it’s nice to officially meet you,” says Marisol. But Andrew is already rushing away like he might explode from mortification at any moment. “See ya,” Marisol calls after him. She turns back to me. “What a strange guy.”

“Yup. But now you can say you’ve met a filmmaker, right?”

She smiles. Then her face falls like she’s remembered why she stormed over to me in the first place. But at that moment the bell rings.

“Sorry, gotta go!” I say, slamming my locker shut.

Marisol catches my arm. “We have to talk. My house tonight, okay?”

I sigh. So much for making a getaway. “Fine. See you tonight.”