Moxie and the Art of Rule Breaking (5 page)

“Mox,” Ollie said, and stopped walking. I almost tripped. “What’s your deal? Just spill it.”

I stared at the ground. There was so much that he didn’t know—like who Grumps really was—that I wasn’t sure where to start. “This psycho redhead showed up at my door today asking for stuff and making threats and now I’m totally stressed over Grumps’s safety” didn’t seem like the best opening.

Going for a half-truth, I said, “I’m just worried about Grumps.”

“Did something happen?” he said, eyes wide. His only grandparent—his grandmother—lives in Vietnam, so he rarely sees her, and he loves Nini and Grumps like they’re his own. He even goes with me to Alton Rivers sometimes.

“No, he’s okay,” I said quickly. “Just…you know…the usual.” My response sounded lame even to my own ears.

He sighed and pushed his rectangular black-framed glasses
up his nose. “If you aren’t going to talk to me about it, that’s cool. But your not-Moxie attitude is bringing me down.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve barely said anything, but you’re not listening to me. And you were the one who called me to meet up after you said you couldn’t. Something else is going on.”

Ollie’s words triggered both panic and relief in me. Panic, because what if it was as obvious to, say, my mom or Nini that something was bugging me? I’d gotten off easy with dinner because Mom had been distracted over Richard. I didn’t know how long I could get away with not being front and center on her radar. Since my dad isn’t in the picture—according to Mom, he couldn’t handle the truth about Grumps’s “lifestyle” and bugged out when I was just a baby, leaving me with his last name and nothing else—I’m the target of Mom’s total focus.

The relief, well, that was from someone at least knowing something was wrong. I knew I could trust Ollie with most stuff, but how would he react when he found out that I’d hid a whole other part of my life from him? If you wanted to get specific about it, I’d hidden my
real
life from him. At least, I’d hidden my family’s real life. And if that hadn’t gone over well with my own father, how would a friend, who totally wasn’t related to me, feel about the lie? Besides, was out in the open, where The Redhead might be lurking, the best place to reveal all this info?

Probably not.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “You’re right.” Coming here was a bad idea. “But I can’t tell you about it.”

I didn’t tell Ollie anything that night even though I knew he was hurt and—let’s tell the truth here—probably a little ticked off about the way I’d acted. When I got home from the Arbs, I’d checked my room, stared out the window to see if anyone had followed me home, totally stressed, wondering what The Redhead would do to Grumps (or me) when July 4 rolled around and Sully didn’t have what he wanted.

I couldn’t calm down at school the next morning either, because every time Wendy Richland passed me in the hall, I’d glimpse her bright red hair (even though hers is a straight bob and totally not the same color as the stalker’s) and jump. In second period, Mr. Crespo, my geometry teacher, caught me staring out the window at the parking lot, searching for flashes of red.

“Miss Fleece,” he chided as I snapped my head in his direction, “this is the last day of this year. And there are three people in this classroom. Although I’m sure you have big plans for your vacation and beyond, I’d like it if you kept your attention up here.”

I flushed and mumbled an apology, then slid down in my
seat. Mr. C. taught advanced math to me and Derek Choi during his free period, and Derek always paid perfect attention. Not that I spaced out all that much; hiding in a room of three people is impossible.

There was no reason that The Redhead would follow me to school. Besides, we had all kinds of security measures to get into the building—adults had to sign in, give their license, practically give blood, as my mother said.

Mr. C. resumed wrapping up geometry, and I relaxed into a world of angles and proofs. Math is consistency. Numbers, angles, equations…all of that stuff is solid. Unchanging. No matter what you do—how many plus or minus signs you add, transitive properties you include, or formulas you apply—the numbers are what they are.

Just before the bell, a kid came in with a blue office call slip that he dropped on Mr. C.’s desk.

“Moxie,” Mr. Crespo said, “please stop by the front desk on your way to your next class.”

So much for being relaxed. My first thought was actually about Grumps. Was he sick? The minutes before the bell seemed like an eternity and my focus was shot.

Class finally ended, and I pushed through the main hall to the front office. Ollie and I shared third-period Cultural Studies (our school’s version of social studies), and we usually met at his locker and walked over together. I spotted him, a bulky stack of books in his arms. I grabbed the one on top. It was about China. We’d read it back in October? November?

“I never turned these in,” he said, sheepish. I fished one more book out of his locker and took one off his pile, shaking my head at his lack of organization.

“I’ll take these, so you don’t have to lug all of them. But I got a front office slip, so I’ll meet you in class,” I said. Before he could ask any questions, I left. I caught him shaking his head as I joined the mess of students in the hall.

Mrs. Clarke, the secretary, was talking to a parent when I came in. I plopped Ollie’s books on a chair and hovered at the edge of their conversation, twisting the office slip with both hands, hoping she’d cut off her chatting and tell me what was going on.

“It seems like she started school yesterday,” the dad was saying, “and now she’s going in to eighth grade. Where does the time go?”

Mrs. Clarke nodded. “It flies,” she said, and I caught her eye. “And here’s one of our graduates now! Moxie will be leaving us to make room for your daughter’s class. Commencement is tomorrow,” she informed the dad.

I gave him what I hoped was a “your conversation is over and I need info” smile, and stepped closer to Mrs. Clarke’s desk, kind of cutting in front of the dad. Oh well.

“I was called down here?” I showed her my origami’d office slip and the dad retreated.

“Oh, yes, sweetheart. You had a delivery.” She shuffled through the papers on her desk and I shifted from foot to foot. “Ready for high school?” she chirped.

A delivery? My palms prickled.

“Uh-huh,” I said through clenched teeth. How difficult was it to find a—

“Here it is!” She held out a white envelope, my name in bubbly writing on the front. My body went cold.

Inside was a small piece of paper, and written in that same writing was:
Tell your grandfather hi next time you see him…or I will.
My breath hitched. At the bottom was scrawled:
Aunt Sally.

Very funny.

I leaned against Mrs. Clarke’s desk. Other teachers and a few kids had come in during the break, milling around the office, and the noise they made suddenly sounded like it was coming from far away.

No way
, I thought.
I will not lose it.
I took a deep breath.

“Are you okay, dear?” Mrs. Clarke said, her face clearly concerned. “Is everything all right?”

I nodded, remembering the way The Redhead looked at me when she said that if Sully didn’t get what he wanted, he’d take something of “lesser value.” This crazy note-leaving chick was serious.

“Okay then.” She was still staring.

I nodded again, and tried to smile. “Thanks, Mrs. Clarke.” The third-period bell buzzed, and she scrawled a late slip for me. I paused before I reached the door.

“Um…one question,” I asked her. “How did this get here? Was it dropped off?” I added, in response to Mrs. Clarke’s puzzled expression.

“Oh, yes. A lovely young woman with long red hair brought it
in,” she answered. I fought the urge to spin around and look for her as though she was still in the office. “Someone you know?”

I nodded, grabbed Ollie’s books, and left.

When I got to Cultural Studies, I leaned against the wall next to the door, trying to get it together. My hands tingled with fear. This loony chick was targeting me—
me!
—an eighth grader, for some creepy reason. I mean, sure, I’d been rude to her, but seriously? This was a total overreaction on her part. She was…What’s that word that they use on cop shows all the time, when the serial killer starts murdering victims even faster…?
Escalating.
She was escalating.

Or whatever Grumps hid for Sully Cupcakes was not “small-time.”

Not that that made me feel better. I thought Grumps had been honest with me about his work. Maybe I didn’t know him as well as I thought. My eyes prickled and I shook my arms a little to brush off the wave of emotion threatening me. I pushed the thoughts away.

After a few deep breaths, my head no longer felt wrapped in a blanket and my hands stopped trembling. I pushed the door open and went into Cultural Studies. Ollie turned as soon as I came in, a questioning look on his face. I shook my head slightly, left the late slip and Ollie’s books on Ms. Beman’s desk, and slid into the open seat behind him.

A few minutes later, I tore a strip of notepaper, scribbled “Talk at rehearsal?” on it, and slipped it to him.

Time to come clean.

That afternoon before graduation practice, while everyone else raced around getting yearbooks signed, Ollie and I sat at the top of the bleachers in the gym. He was waiting for me to explain what was going on. I fiddled with the record album key chain dangling off my backpack (I’d had to educate a lot of people as to what an album actually
was
, sadly) and directed my eyes anywhere but at him.

“You might get mad at me,” I started. Below us, at the bottom of the bleachers, Jolie Pearson and the other Pretties balanced books on their knees and signed them with matching purple and blue sparkly pens. The girls’ glittery shininess made me want to yurk, which I took as a good sign—no matter how stressed I was, they were still annoying.

“Why?” Ollie was drawing a map. It went with his geocaching addiction. He hid stuff, drew maps so he’d remember where he put it, and checked to see if anyone found his “treasures”—but he never told anyone what he hid or where. He just tucked random things into odd corners and hoped someone would stumble across them—like the GI Joe action figure that he’d put on the ledge next to a little-used water
fountain on the second floor. Took a month for someone to take it. Or the six bouncy balls that he claimed were behind a book on Mr. Crespo’s shelf, which Ollie said were still there. He had a ton of random stuff like that stashed all over Henry Knox Junior High. To make sure people didn’t confuse his “treasures” with junk, Ollie’d made labels for them.
Congrats!
they read.
Finder’s keepers.
There was an icon of an
O
with an
X
through it and his cache handle—Oxnfree—at the bottom.

Although I (frequently) pointed out that the people who found his stuff weren’t
looking
for it—they randomly stumbled on it—he didn’t care.

Betcha he’d care about this.

“Because I lied to you,” I said. “I’ve been lying for a long time, I guess.” I stared at my feet, noting the scuff marks and scars on the wooden bleachers.

Ollie stayed quiet, plotting points of the boys’ locker room on his graph paper.

“It’s about my family,” I began. “It’s not—we’re not—it’s not what you think it is, and I think I’m in trouble because of it. Or not in trouble, maybe, but something’s going on.”

Jolie Pearson laughed, and everyone in her group giggled, an idiot echo. Ollie slid his pencil into the spiral rings of his notebook, his brown eyes on mine.

“What are you, vampires? Werewolves?”

I couldn’t even force a smile.

“No. Not really. But kind of,” I said. “We’re both bad…or, well, I’m not bad. It’s Grumps.”

“Grumps is in a nursing home, Mox,” Ollie pointed out. “What trouble can he get into?”

I shook my head and let go of the key chain, picking at a cuticle instead. “It’s not about who he is now, it’s what he
was
—a criminal.” I felt like I’d dropped a huge weight and, at the same time, picked up another one.