Death of the Mad Hatter (5 page)

“Well, I suppose a visit to Miss Genevine is of the utmost importance,” M.H. said, inspecting his backside.

“Who’s Genevine?” I asked, handing him his hat that had fallen when he was distracted by his fiery pants.

He dusted off the hat, which had no dirt on it, but paid no attention to the charred edges. After shoving it on his head, he bent down to my level. “Genevine is a nasty old lady with the long
est ear hair you’d ever imagine. But, such thin hair is essential for what she does, especially since her spiders are on strike. Oh! Never mention her oversized anklet.”

“That makes positively no sense.”

“It will, my dear girl. One day our ways will be of the complete absolution, and your ways will become positively senseless.” He gently took my hand. “The Jack of Diamonds wrote to me before my existence ever came into being.”

“Who is the Jack
of Diamonds?”

“Once he was a
very rich man but that was before Hearts demoted him to a glorified butler,” M.H. said scornfully. “And his great-great-grandson, the Joker, is a poor substitution as a forecaster… Jack had made mistakes in his predictions before, but not as often as the Joker. Conversely, the old man was known to be missing a few cards in his deck, which is probably because the Joker constantly steals his playing cards to practice his demented magic.”

“So the Jack was a
rich prophet before he became butler?” I asked, thinking of the only logical way a man could write another before being born. “Did the Jack say anything about me?”

M.H. pulled the 10/6 price tag from his hat. Taped to the back was a yellowed note. After carefully unfolding it, he handed it to me. Written in r
ed ink was the Jack’s prophecy.

BackWards
Wanderer Prophecy: A strong-Willed child shall set the time-stalemate into motion, but only if a tWo-eyed hare can lure her to the Wonderful World of Wonderland. She Will be given a choice to live Wondrously forever or be banished to Weep in her homeland. Seconds Will tick forWard and backWards until her decision no longer Wavers. HoWever, she Will choose Wrong.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

(
Ryley: Present Time)

The
crazy ones have the most fun.
That was the reasoning of most warm-blooded males. Well, it was my friend Mick’s, logic anyway. He was the one who’d brought it up.

“
I thought it was blondes who had the most fun,” Dax chimed in innocently, looking at Mick’s light colored hair. But, I knew better than to think that Dax’s sideways glance was purely innocent. So would anyone, if they took two seconds to see how he looked at Mick.

“
Well, then it’s a double whammy!” Mick laughed, and put his arm over my shoulder like we were going to have a version of a father/son pep talk. “Alice Mae is nutty
and
a natural blonde. I would know—I sat behind Becky and Courtney during second period algebra. For the entire hour, they had a heated discussion about hair. Hair! I didn’t realize there was so much to discuss. Anyway, by the time the bell rang they agreed—no,
swore
to high-holy-heaven—that Alice Mae’s hair was indeed a natural blonde, but Becky was sure she saw extensions, whatever that means.”

“
Maybe you should go for her,” I said, shrugging off Mick’s arm.

Dax metaphorically kick
ed me in the shin.

We walked through the halls to our sixth period class.
Weight Training. It filled the physical education requirement and freed up an hour after school. Just because it was baseball’s off-season didn’t mean we got a free pass for the school year. Our coach required us to train year-round if we had any shot at state next summer. After changing in the locker rooms, we headed to the school’s basement; a glorified storage closet where all the old sports uniforms and band suits went to die. Before my time, the school council agreed to put up a false wall in the middle so there would be somewhere to put the new weights.

It’d been decades since anyone could call the weights new, but the old metal fulfilled its purpose.
Dax lay down on the old, red pad that had been donated a decade ago by the aerobics instructor when her gym went out of business. He began knocking out the second set of our pyramid workout.

“You hear anything about what Alice Mae and
Becky were talking about?” I asked, nonchalantly.

“No,” Mick said, crossing his arms. “Why are you so interested in what Alice Mae does and
who she talks to? You interested in shackin’ up with the new girl?”

“I have my eye on Courtney.”

Pushing the bar up, Dax grunted. “Maybe the both of you should leave the poor girl alone.”

“
Let the poor girl be?” Mick said. “And rob her of the experience of dating a good looking guy like me? Besides, someone’s got to show her around Rockingham.”

I guided the bar to the rack when Dax
completed his eighth repetition. “You act like it’s your civic duty to—”

“
Scar the girl for life,” Dax interrupted as he sat upright. “When was the last time you dated a girl for longer than a month?”

Not wanting to get in the middle of Dax and Mick’s nonexistent love affair I bailed. “I’m going to grab a drink.”

On my way to the drinking fountain upstairs, I overheard Alice Mae’s voice. I froze. While Alice Mae might be bat-crazy, I had to admit she had a mesmerizing voice. So when I was able to convince my legs to move, I took on the role of a creeper. I’d never admit it to another soul, but I peered around the freshman hallway and searched for her. I rationalized it; if she had some sort of scoop on my dad, I needed to prepare for a possible retaliation. Everyone had dirt—I just had to figure out hers.

Sh
e leaned against the furthest locker, next to the girls’ bathroom, and pulled on the ruffles of her skirt while Mrs. Dotson, the music director, bragged about the Raven swing choir. She’d taught at Rockingham for twenty four years and hadn’t lost her spirited enthusiasm.

“
Of course, you can use the classroom during your free period! And, I think you should really consider joining the choir,” Mrs. Dotson said eagerly and handed her a stack of papers. “You have the natural octave for All-State soprano.”

Alice Mae
shoved the papers into her locker. It was the second day of school, and her locker was already crammed full with random junk—plastic soldiers, dozens of torn folders, a monocle, fingernail polish, one striped sock, two empty water bottles, a bungee cord, sparklers, and a vintage camera... A ball of purple yarn bounced out before she was able to shut the door. It rolled on the floor, zigzagging sporadically, as if an invisible cat was pouncing on it.

Whil
e Mrs. Dotson chatted on and on about the glory of the Rockingham choir, Alice Mae stopped the ball with her foot. I was ninety-nine percent sure that Alice Mae sneered at the ball, but I was too far away to know with
absolute
clarity. While Mrs. Dotson talked about Alice Mae’s future music career, the girl looked straight at me; like someone had tipped her off that I was creeping from around the corner.

Possible
reaction strategies included: tiptoeing backwards, playing the total stalker role and stare back, or manning-up.

Alice Mae was clearly up to something; she had admitted it; we were playing a game. Who’s
Who—whatever that meant. And she confessed to being a liar, in passing anyway. If she wanted to play games, I’d give it a go.

Wearing a smug grin
, she bent over and picked up the ball. While she slowly twirled the string back around the ball, she never took her eyes off of me. I pretended not to be unnerved by her glaring stare as I approached her.

“
What’s up, Mrs. D?” I asked.

“
It’s Mrs. Dotson,” she corrected. Her hands were on her hips like my mom would do when she was scolding me, but there were the makings of a smile on her face. “I was just trying to convince Alice to join—”

“
I prefer to go by
Alice
Mae
.”

“
My apology, I’ll give you a few days to mull it over, but I think you could really be phenomenal in the choir. Maybe you’d consider singing the National Anthem before one of the football games.”

“
I’ll ponder it,” Alice Mae said.

I
’ll ponder it?
Who talked like that nowadays?

Mrs. Dotson
said, “Keep on her, won’t you, Ryley? Alice Mae has a charismatic voice, wouldn’t you agree?”

What was I supposed to say? Yeah, she sound
ed enchanting, but then again sirens lured unsuspecting sailors to their watery deaths with their alluring song. Thus, I shrugged my shoulders. “She sounds like a girl.”

“
A girl?” Alice Mae repeated. “Was it my hair or my makeup that tipped you off that I am a female? Or possibly you noticed my dress when you were staring at my arse? Shall I give you a sticker for identifying me as a girl by the sound of my voice?”

“
Ummm,” I said and then turned my embarrassing, audible response into a cough.

Mrs. Dotson fell for Alice Mae
’s infectious smile. The teacher beamed. “Your vocabulary amazes me as well, Ryley. For someone who’s gunning for a highly coveted physics scholarship, one would think that you’d have more well-rounded language skills,” Mrs. Dotson said with just the right amount of professionalism mixed with motherly assertiveness.

“
I’ll work on it,” I said.

“
Good,” Mrs. Dotson said, looking at her wristwatch. After commenting that she had to get to class before the freshmen staged a heist, she walked away.

“
A physics scholarship?” Alice Mae asked when Mrs. Dotson was out of hearing range. She squeezed the yarn ball into her locker. A few of the music papers slipped halfway through the bottom crack of her locker. Instead of opening the door, she shoved them back through the crack.

Since she only cracked the door, I highly suspected that there was more in her
“Misfit Locker of Random Crapola” that she didn’t want me to see. A racecar fell out of her locker and scooted across the floor like someone had pushed it. When I stopped it with my foot, some invisible thing smacked into my shoe as well—or I was losing it too.

Alice Mae glared at my foot like I
’d somehow lured the toy car from her locker. I lifted my foot just enough so she could retrieve the vehicle. She picked up the car, careful not to touch me as she pulled the car out from under my foot.

“
So what’s it like being a brainiac?” she asked.

S
he fiddled with the car. If I had a vivid imagination, I’d have said it was a miniature replica of my dad’s old beater. With her fingernail, she scratched the side, directly under the right fender. I didn’t get a good look at it, but it looked like a top hat crest.

“
I’m not that smart, just one of the only students who comprehends theoretical physics,” I said and leaned against a random locker in an attempt to look casual. “What about you? I don’t consider you to be very stupid, even though you’d like me to believe it.”

“
My stupidity…” she trailed off, losing herself in her thoughts. The blue in her eyes turned frosty, and she pressed her lips into a thin line. Her baby-blue eyes made her look naive, but I wasn’t going to fall for it. She wasn’t a moron. “My level of intelligence is dependent on who you ask. I’m not known for my remarkable noggin’.”

“
So you have a reputation of being dense,” I said, more than asked. “I’m not really into labels, especially intellectual ones that stem from rumors.”

I looked her up and down, searching for any clues that would give me a reason
to how and why she knew my dad. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, eyeing the particularly outlandish girl. She definitely wasn’t trying to blend in, which had to mean she wasn’t trying to hide. It exemplified her confidence, prancing around in a chic clown getup.

“
I noticed your vintage camera was being crushed by a bungee cord, take any pictures lately? I mean, other than the ones of me?”

She gave me a knowing smile.
“I am a sightseer.”

“
And a risk taker if you bungee jump,” I said.

She smirked. It was a subtle gesture, only the very corners of her mouth twitched, but it was
screamed
evil
, thus it was noteworthy. “You understand theoretical physics. A man who comprehends theories would be apt to make a few said theories himself. So, my question to you, Ryley, is what theories have you made about me, other than that I’m an adrenaline junkie and an amateur photographer?”

“
They’re inconclusive.”

Alice Mae pushed the car through a vented slot in her locker. It fell to the bottom with a clang.
How did the toy miss all the junk in her locker and hit bottom? There had been a solid layer of junk on the bottom of her locker.

After looking me up and down, she rolled her eyes and sighed heavily.
“Did you need something, or were you only spying on me?”

“We’re overdue for a chat.”

“
What topic would you like to have a little heart-to-heart about?” She asked while she reached into her pocket and retrieved a tiny pop bottle. She bit the top off and poured a blue substance into her mouth and took a bite of the bottle. It smelled like cherries. Instead of swallowing it, she chewed the bottle like it was gum.

“
You know.”

“
How in the world would I possibly know what you want to discuss? I’m not a mind reader.”

“
What do you know about my dad?”

“
You made it perfectly clear we weren’t to discuss
that
person,
ever
,” Alice Mae said. “It’s really difficult to follow your thought process. First, you don’t want to discuss family matters, and now, you seek me out like some scoundrel and demand that we discuss him.”

I
wanted to shake the answers out of this girl. “What do you know about him?”

“
Who?”

“
My dad!” My fists were balled up by my sides.

She covered her eyes and shook her head.
“So I’m privileged enough to speak his name now? Oh dear, Vida Maude was right. You people change your minds more often than not! I’ve only talked to you once, twice if you count the very rude, interrupted conversation we had in literature class, and yet you’ve changed your mind in the matter of a single day.”

“
How do you know him?”

“
He lit Zola Maude’s hair on fire,” Alice Mae said as a matter-of-fact. And then her expression changed from Miss Smarty Pants to a halfway-scared look. “I swear to the Queen of Hearts that if you come at me with a match, I’ll kick you in your man bits.”

“
I’m not going to light your hair on fire,” I said, even though the idea sounded appealing. “Why would I set you on fire?”