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. “Afterwe bought it, of course. I saw theAbsolutely No Photossign. 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 amnot!” Julia says, face turning red. “We were buyingit.”
“Ivywas 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,thatescalated 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.”
Chapter Ten
Gabriel nods like Sunny’s given him an order. He pushes over to his own computer.
“AbeBooks and ThriftBooks,” Sunny mutters.
“Etsy and eBay,” Gabriel replies.
This is Yearbook Club convention. If there’s a big task that needs to be done, a school activity to write up, or an event from the archives to research, we all call out what we’re doing so we won’t overlap.
Julia sets her laptop aside and parks herself at her usual desktop computer.
“Title and author search on Google?” she asks me, eyebrows tilting.
“Go into ‘Images’ for results,” I suggest. “We don’t have to find the whole book if we can find digital scans. Do a deep dive; go in twenty or so pages.”
Julia nods. I sit down at my own computer and pull open the browser.
“Reddit and Quora,” I call out. Gabriel looks at me questioningly for a moment but quickly disappears back into his own monitor’s results.
