Book Scavenger (5 page)

Matthew repetitively plucked a guitar string, thinking.

“Fine,” he said.

They joined James on the porch, and the three walked up the hill. Matthew held out his smartphone, taking a video as they walked. He panned a faded striped sofa on the sidewalk with a
FREE
sign, a Giants pennant fluttering on a rooftop deck. About a block away from the peak of the hill, a hum like a massive swarm of bees rose above the distant sounds of traffic.

“What is that?” Emily asked.

Before James could answer, they reached the top and Emily could see for herself. Tracks ran down the intersecting street, vibrating with cables even though no trolley was in sight.

“This is where we'll board,” James said. “There should be a cable car any minute now.”

The street they'd walked up dipped downhill after the cable car tracks. A cluster of tourists on motorized, standing scooters approached. Matthew recorded the Segway riders rounding past them in a single-file line.

“They're doing a tour of Lombard Street,” James explained. “A famous curvy street that's up that way.”

“'Frisco is sweet,” Matthew said.

“Don't call it 'Frisco,” James said with a shake of his head. “Locals hate that.”

“Noted.” Matthew zoomed in on an old-fashioned light-up sign jutting out from an ice cream shop across the street.

“I can use some of this footage for my Flush videos.”

“Flush?” James raised his eyebrows.

Emily rolled her eyes. “He means
fan
videos. My brother thinks the members of Flush actually know him and pay attention to what he does.”

“Oh, they do. They know me as FiveSpade.” Matthew tapped his screen, and his recording stopped with a ding. “Trevor—that's the drummer,” he explained for James's benefit, “once commented on a video I posted on the Swirlies site. And then he shared it on his own blog. It was stop-motion animation with LEGOs—pretty sweet, if I do say so myself.”

“But none of that means Trevor or any of Flush actually
know
you.
You talk about them like they're your best friends.”

James, who was standing between Emily and Matthew, had been swinging his head back and forth between brother and sister as their debate went on. Before Matthew could retort, James blurted, “Steve likes your hair.”

Matthew tucked his chin down, considering James. “Oh yeah?” He smoothed his lopsided Mohawk with one hand. That morning he'd added three shaved lines over his left ear. “Who's Steve?”

James pointed to the tuft of hair standing up on the back of his head.

Matthew studied the cowlick, then nodded.

“Steve's got good taste,” he said.

A bell clanged, and a red-and-tan trolley crested the hill, stopping at the intersection with another clang of the bell. Emily was unsure where to board or who to pay, but James led the way, stepping up at the front and showing a pass to the conductor. They sat on the wooden benches that ran along the outside of the cable car, facing the sidewalk. Matthew wanted a good video of the ride, so he stood next to them rather than sat, with one arm hugging a pole.

When the cable car jerked into motion, Emily curled her fingers around the edge of the bench. There was no seat belt or anything. Once they'd rolled down a couple of blocks, she relaxed and realized she wasn't going to fall off.

Everything James pointed out had a story attached to it. A dry cleaner's run by his uncle who pretended to sneeze quarters. A gigantic cathedral with a labyrinth but not the cool kind made out of hedges. A market where his grandmother buys oysters for Chinese New Year.

“How long have you lived here?” Emily asked James.

“My whole life.”

“You've never lived anywhere else?”

“Not even a different home. My family has lived in our building forever. I think my grandfather bought it in the sixties. My bedroom was my mom's when she was a kid. Even before that building, my family has been here since my great-grandparents came from China.”

Emily tried to imagine that—year after year in one house, one neighborhood, one school, with memories that went back for generations. She couldn't wrap her head around that. All she came up with was a crazy patchwork mishmash of all the different places she'd lived: their sunny tiled kitchen in New Mexico, their fireplace in Colorado that you could flip on with a switch, the slanted hallways in their Connecticut house, the carpeted staircase in their South Dakota house that she and Matthew bumped down on their rear ends.

“The longest I've lived in one place was almost three years,” Emily said. “And I don't even remember that. It was right after I was born.”

“Seriously?” There wasn't a jeering tone to James's question, but Emily bristled anyway. Sometimes she forgot how weird her family seemed to other people. Matthew had been listening, his arm looped casually around the post as if he were waiting for a bus instead of hurtling down a steep hill. Well, the cable car didn't exactly hurtle; it was more like clattering down a hill.

Her brother jumped in, eager to give the rundown of their moving history. He loved doing this—he almost sounded braggish about their family's oddballness.

“I was born in Arizona, Phlegmily was born in Washington. Then it was Massachusetts, and about the time we lived in New York, our parents realized—thanks to a few states they lived in before the Phlegm and I existed—they'd already lived in a fifth of the US. So they thought,
Why not live once in every state?
After New York, we did South Dakota, Illinois, Connecticut, Colorado, New Mexico, and now we're, like, totally vibin' Cali, brah.” Matthew shook a fist with his thumb and pinkie raised. “Shaka-brah, brah.”

“That's Hawaii, doofus,” Emily muttered.

“Our parents both do freelance work, so they can work from anywhere,” Matthew said. “They're total dorks about this moving stuff.”

Emily waited for James to double over in laughter or compare her family to a traveling circus, but all he did was shrug and say, “That sounds cool. My dad travels a lot, too.”

“You don't think it's weird?” Emily couldn't help asking.

“Not any weirder than having your dad live out of hotels on business trips while you're at home with a mom and grandma who are obsessed with their catering company. Our couch is usually covered in sheets of soup dumplings.”

“How often do you see your dad?” Emily asked.

“A couple of times a month, maybe. It varies.” James looked away, up the hill they'd traveled down.

Emily couldn't imagine her parents traveling without
her and Matthew, let alone by themselves. They liked to say they were the Swiss Family Robinson minus the shipwreck, or the Partridge Family minus the music.

They got off the cable car, and James led Emily and Matthew through a nearly deserted outdoor mall, then a palm-tree-lined plaza. The Ferry Building sat across a busy street, perched on the edge of the bay. It was a simple but stately building. Long, two stories high, and crowned with a giant clock tower at its center. White tented booths for a farmers' market lined the sidewalk in front and wrapped around the corner.

They had made it halfway across the plaza when Matthew stopped in front of a man setting up a half circle of buckets, some overturned with a pot on top, some buckets right-side up with an upside-down, empty water jug tucked inside. The man pulled drumsticks from his vest pocket and gave a practice
rat-a-tat
run before readjusting some buckets.

“Matthew, come on,” Emily said. “We're almost to the Ferry Building.”

Matthew refused to leave, so Emily and James agreed to meet him by the bucket man after they found their book. They crossed the busy street and followed the white tents around the side of the building to the pier, where a maze of additional tents stretched ahead of them.

They wove through the crowds, and Emily felt a trill of anticipation. This was her favorite part of book hunting. The puzzles and riddles were fun, and she devoured the books, but the actual seeking was what brought her back to this game again and again. She could check out books from the library or she could buy puzzle books from the grocery store if that was all she was interested in. But combining those things with a hunt was like living a real-life board game, with a book as the prize.

“What do we do now?” James asked once they stood in front of the third bench down the pier. Gray-green water lapped softly on the other side of the railing.

“We look for the book. It should be hidden somewhere around here. We're looking for
Tom Sawyer.”

Emily crouched next to the bench on her hands and knees, her ponytail dipping to the ground. There was a small piece of paper taped to the underside of the bench.

“No!” She slapped the ground in frustration.

“What's wrong?” James asked.

Emily pulled the calling card loose and stood up. It had the Book Scavenger logo on the front, and the back said:

“This Babbage guy poached our book, that rat,” Emily said. “He knew I was hunting it, and so he got to it first.” And her double points, too, while he was at it, she thought glumly.

“Who's Babbage?”

“I don't actually know him. It's a username for another Book Scavenger player. He could be anyone. Babbage could even be a she.”

Emily dug a card from her small backpack pocket. “See? This is my card. You leave them when you hide or find a book, so people know you were there.”

Her card was nearly identical to the one they'd found, but instead of
Babbage
it said
Surly Wombat
.

“‘Surly Wombat'? How'd you come up with that?”

“It's an old joke with my brother. When we were living in Connecticut, we were hunting
The Golly-whopper Games
and the clue told us to go down this path through a bunch of trees. I don't know why, but the path creeped me out, and I didn't want to go. Matthew said, ‘Don't be a surly wombat,' and went tromping down the path. It was such a random name to call me that it cracked me up. I mean, they're these cute, pudgy animals, and picturing one with an attitude, all surly…” Emily smiled at the memory. “So that got me over my nerves, and I followed him down the path to find the book. Later that day, I logged onto Book Scavenger but had to leave the computer for some reason, and Matthew changed my username to Surly Wombat. My first username was something generic, like booknut123. I never changed it back.”

“Surly Wombat. I like it.” James compared her Surly Wombat card and the Babbage card for a second more before handing them back to her. “How did this Babbage person know you were hunting
Tom Sawyer
?”

“I declared it
before I downloaded the clue. Doing it that way, you get double points if you find the book. But declaring a book means it's flagged on the website, so every other Book Scavenger user knows it's worth twice the points if they find it first. But it's only been a couple of days since I declared it, and there are a bunch of flagged books, so I thought there was no way someone else would solve the cipher and get to it first. I guess I thought wrong.”

They made their way back to Matthew, stopping a couple of times for James to pick up some produce and other items from the farmers' market for his mom and grandmother. They had to pry Matthew from the crowd watching the bucket man
rat-a-tat
around his makeshift drum set, and then they headed back to the cable car stop by a different route than the way they'd come. They walked in between the same gray corridor of office buildings Emily's family had driven through the day before. It was a ghost town on the weekend, with only a few cars and the occasional passersby. A colorful bouquet of flowers abandoned on the sidewalk stopped Emily in her tracks. There was another one just ahead, and then another. A staggered trail of bouquets, like Hansel and Gretel's bread crumbs, led to an iron railing surrounding an underground staircase.