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 herselfTODAY, 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 Icanimagine 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, gayslovethe 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
