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“Yes, she is!” Spencer cried. She rushed over to the closet and peeked inside, worried her bags were booby-trapped to fall on her head. Then she held her bottle of allergy pills to the light. Were they the same blue shape as before? What if Naomi had replaced them with something else—something dangerous?
Reefer placed his hands on her shoulders. “You’ve got to calm down. You can’t go around blaming bad luck on someone else. Everything that has happened to you is because you made it happen, okay?”
A lump formed in Spencer’s throat. Reefer was right—but not for the reasons he thought. Maybe she had made her bad luck happen—maybe this was a karmic revenge for all the terrible things she’d done. Framing Kelsey. Helping Hanna with Madison. Tabitha. This was the universe’s way of punishing her.
Then she blinked hard, reality snapping back into focus. This wasn’t karma—this was A! And A wouldn’t stop until she got what she wanted.
And just like that, Spencer knew what she had to do. She looked up at Reefer, a lump in her throat. “We have to break up,” she said.
Reefer’s jaw dropped. “What?”
“I’m sorry,” she said in monotone. She knew she’d crumble if she looked Reefer in the eye, so she stared at her hands. “This just doesn’t feel right.”
“You really think she’s torturing you, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you let me talk to her?”
Spencer looked away. “Can you just do what I ask?”
Reefer stepped back as if she’d shoved him. His eyes glistened with tears for a moment, but then he steeled his jaw, breathed in, and turned around. “Fine,” he said in a defeated voice.
“I’m sorry,” Spencer called weakly. But he had already slammed the door.
23
THE WRONG IDEA
That afternoon, Aria and Graham stood outside the theater on the bottom level of the boat. The bright-blue walls featured photos of the Cirque du Soleil performers, who all looked freakish and possessed with their buggy eyes, weirdly tight leotards, and absurdly long limbs. Another wall was devoted to signs for that night’s talent show—it started at seven, and there was a pre- and post-party.
The rest of the wall space, though, was covered with strange hieroglyphs relating to Cirque du Soleil. Aria and Graham were here because the final Eco Scavenger Hunt clue, which they’d found in a compost pail in the ship’s kitchen, required them to decipher the hieroglyphs. But to Aria, the characters just looked like nonsensical squiggles.
“Any ideas?” Aria stepped aside as one of the acrobats, who had a single ostrich plume sprouting from her head, strutted through the theater door. That morning, when he and Aria had reported to Gretchen, she’d told them they were in the lead. “If we figure out this clue, those Apple Store gift cards are ours.” Even though Aria hadn’t been into the idea in the beginning, she’d mentally browsed through the Apple Store, contemplating whether to buy a white iPad with tons of memory or a MacBook Air.
“That’s probably why they made it so impossible.” Graham’s forehead wrinkled as he studied the wall. “That one looks like a cloud.” He pointed to a puffy-looking image. “And that one looks like a falling girl.”
Aria flinched. If she turned her head a certain way, it did look like a body descending through space. The photo of Tabitha’s tumbling form appeared in Aria’s mind, followed by A’s latest note. Will Aria’s boyfriend visit her in jail?
The door to the theater swung open, and another acrobat strutted out. She glanced at them and smiled. “Want a clue?”
Aria and Graham nodded eagerly.
The acrobat edged closer. “See that picture there, the one that sort of looks like a dinner fork? It stands for an E. And the image that looks like a carrot stands for the letter S.”
Aria looked at the wall again. “So it’s like a cryptogram?”
“Precisely,” the acrobat said, then pirouetted away.
Aria peered at the symbols. She and her father, Byron, used to do the cryptogram puzzle in the Philadelphia Sentinel every morning. The puzzle always featured a scrambled quote. The trick was to figure out the cipher so it made sense.
When she reached into her purse for a pencil, her fingers brushed against a golf tee from the mini golf course she and Graham had visited the other day. She smacked her forehead. “Graham, I’m so rude! How did it go with Tori last night?” Graham had sent her a text the afternoon before saying that he and Tori had made dinner plans. She’d written him back with a list of things to talk about, adding that he should pull out Tori’s chair when she sat down and never, ever order for her. She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten to ask.
Graham pushed a lock of hair off his forehead. “It was fine.” Then he pointed at a three-letter word with a dinner fork icon in it. “If that stands for E, then that word is the. And so are those two.”
“Oh. Right.” Aria wrote it in, then filled in the Ts and Hs elsewhere in the puzzle, too. She cleared her throat. “So it was just fine? Not amazing?”
“And maybe that’s to.” Graham pointed to a two-letter word starting with T. It was like he didn’t hear her.
“Yep,” Aria said, writing it in. Her stomach sank. Had the date been a disaster? Maybe Graham had talked nonstop about SCA or his dead ex-girlfriend. Maybe Tori had left after the appetizers.
She was dying to ask, but all of a sudden the hall felt too quiet and exposed. They stared at the puzzle for a few minutes longer, writing in more words. Within a few minutes, they had the whole message: Protect the seas. Save the planet. Live life to the fullest.
