Sammy Keyes and the Dead Giveaway (13 page)

“Yes!” Cassie cries, and a lot of people in the classroom nod like, We would! Honest, we would!

Then some clown from the back of the class calls, “Hey, she finally clipped his wing!”

Cassie spins around and snaps, “That's not funny!” in the general direction of Derrick Stern and Rudy Folksmeir.

Mrs. Ambler levels a look at Derrick and Rudy, too, but doesn't say a thing. Then she moves her gaze around the room, and when it lands on Heather, Heather snaps, “Don't look at me like that.”

“Like what?” Mrs. Ambler asks.

“Like you're looking at me! I didn't kill your bird, and I think it's sick that you've got him hanging up there like that. I can smell him from here!”

Mrs. Ambler moves closer to Tango and sniffs the air. “Hmmm,” she says with a little nod. “He is a bit ripe, isn't he?”

“Eeew,” a lot of the girls say, but some of the boys are looking at each other like, Whoa, dude! Extreme!

When we were finally free of homeroom, Holly intersected my beeline toward Marissa and said, “Was that intense, or what? I've never seen a teacher act like that!”

Now, I couldn't exactly say, Please. Not now. I have to talk to Marissa! I mean, Holly and I have been through a lot together, and I felt bad that she was totally in the dark about what was going on.

Then Marissa says, “Holly, uh, we've gotta deal with something right now. We'll catch you up at lunch, okay?”

Holly tries to hide it, but she's a little hurt. And she says, “Sure,” and starts to walk off, but I hate the way that's making me feel. So I grab her by the arm, yank her to the side, and whisper, “It's about Tango and Heather and…and…and I can't say any more right now.”

“Do you have proof?” Holly asks me, all wide-eyed.

I scowl and say, “Yeah, but it's proof that Heather didn't have anything to do with it.”

Holly gasps, then whispers, “Well…so you know who did?”

I look her in the eye and
keep
looking her in the eye until finally she blinks, drops her jaw, and whispers, “No!”

Marissa's there, too, and she whispers, “It was an accident!”

I can see the wheels spinning in Holly's head. “Who else knows?” she asks.

“Nobody,” Marissa and I say together. Then I add, “I'll explain the whole mess later, okay? I was planning to confess today, but—”

“
Confess?
Are you crazy? Everyone thinks it's Heather!”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “I can't live with it anymore. If it was anyone but Heather, I would have confessed a long time ago.”

“There's more,” Marissa whispers. “Sammy saw Heather steal Class Personality ballots.”

“To cheat?”

“Of course,” Marissa says.

“Well,
that
you've
got
to tell Mrs. Ambler!”

The next class was starting to file into Mrs. Ambler's room, so I said, “Look, just don't breathe a word of anything to anyone, okay? We'll regroup at lunch.”

So off we raced to our classes, only I couldn't concentrate on anything. In English Miss Pilson gave us a busy-work assignment while she graded essays. “See how many words you can form out of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,” she said, writing it out on the board, 'cause after a full year with the Bard most of us still can't spell his name. “One hundred words minimum, contractions don't count, plurals don't count, no talking or working in groups. More than one hundred words earns you an extra credit point
each
.” She turned from the board. “Some of you desperately need points, so get to it!”

Normally, I would have loved this assignment. And I sure could've used the extra credit points. But after I whipped past the basics like
I
and
a
and
am
, I started finding words like
ill
and
kill
and
shame
and
liar.
And pretty soon I was obsessing about Tango again, seeing him crunched in the door, rotting under old clothes, dangling from the wall by a wing. I tried to shake it off, but
the images kept coming back, and pretty soon I was sick to my stomach again.

At the end of class Miss Pilson told us, “How many of you would like more time to work on these at home?”

Instantly all hands went up as kids glanced at each other slyly like, You wanna share answers?

Then Miss Pilson said, “Fine. And any word that nobody else has is
three
extra credit points.”

The glancing suddenly stopped.

So I packed up my twelve words and went to math, where Mr. Tiller gave us a sheet of brainteasers to solve while he called us up individually to discuss our grades and what we could do in the next week and a half to raise them. And of course, I couldn't care less what the Roman numeral LMXI is equal to if CXV is six and CMLMI is seven. Or what number in a series of numbers is least like the others, or what
ABCD
is when
ABCD
times nine equals
DCBA.
All I could hear was the clock.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

The more I listened to it, the louder it seemed to get. And maybe it was the combination of nausea, fear, anxiety, and dread, I don't know, but pretty soon the ticking started sounding like the clicking of a roller coaster. You know, when they're pulling you up the incline. You're pressed flat against your seat. You can't really see the top, just the seats in front of you. And you're click-click-clicking up, up, up. Then there's that moment of balance at the tippy-top where a scream starts to gather in your throat, and then
wham
you're off.

Only the tick-tick-ticking didn't stop. So it felt like I
was click-click-clicking up, up, up in torturous slow motion. There didn't seem to be a top. I just kept going higher and higher.

“Sammy!”

“Huh?”

Mr. Tiller smiled at me. “Your turn. Come on up.”

I was all light-headed. Shaky. Ultrapukey. And that's when it hit me that the longer I let the ticking go on, the steeper, harder, and faster I was going to drop.

So I decided. Right then, I decided.

It was time to make the clicking stop. “It's not that bad!” Mr. Tiller joked as I stumbled to his desk. But then he looked at me better and lowered his voice. “Are you all right?”

I shook my head. “May I use the restroom?” It came out all breathy. All chalky-mouthed.

He nodded. “Of course. Go!”

So I escaped the ticking, skipped the bathroom, and went straight to Mrs. Ambler's room.

I don't know what I was expecting. She's a teacher. She's supposed to have students. What was I planning to do? Barge in in the middle of class and ask her to step outside?

I guess I was hoping she'd be alone. You know, having her prep period or whatever they call it. But when I looked in the window, there was
nobody
there. And Tango was down from the wall.

I kind of tisked and whined and stomped a foot all at once.

And then around the corner from the service alley comes Cisco, the school's head custodian.

“Sammy!” he says to me, 'cause Cisco's cool that way. He knows everybody. “You forget something again?”

“Uh, no. I'm just looking for Mrs. Ambler. Do you happen to know where she is?”

“Sure. She's in the special-needs room.” I guess I was looking pretty clueless because he says, “You know, next to the cafeteria?” I still must've been looking out of it because he scoops a hand through the air and says, “Come on. I'll show you.”

So he leads me across campus, around the cafeteria, to the ramp of a propped-open door and says, “Right here.”

Now, before I just barge in, I've got to check the situation out. So I head up the ramp and hang back a bit from the door as I look inside.

There's a woman I've never seen before working at a table with a girl in a wheelchair, plus three or four other kids and Mrs. Ambler, who's trying to calm down a gangly boy with jabby black hair.

“It's mine!” the boy is shouting. “It's mine and he took it from me!” His voice sounds like it's coming through foam. Like when you're in the middle of brushing your teeth and have to shout, I'll be there in a minute!

“It's okay, Josh,” Mrs. Ambler tells him in a soothing voice. “Calm down and I'll get it back for you.”

“But it's mine! It's mine and he took it from me!”

“I know, Josh, but first you must sit down and calm down.”

“But it's mine! It's mine and he took it from me!”

“I know, Josh. Sit down and calm down.”

“But it's mine! It's mine and he took it from me!”

“I know. And how do you get your spaceman back?”

“It's mine! It's mine and he took it from me!”

“You get your spaceman back when you sit down and calm down.”

Less than a minute of this and I was ready to shout, Sit down! Shut up! She'll get you your stupid spaceman! But Mrs. Ambler just kept at it, calmly, patiently, saying it over and over again, “Sit down, calm down. That's how you get your spaceman back.”

Finally,
finally
, he sat down.

And, thank God, he shut up.

Thirty seconds later Mrs. Ambler had gotten the space-man from another kid and had it back in Josh's hands. “See?” she said. “You got your spaceman back. You got it back because you were calm and sat down.”

“I got my spaceman back!” Josh shouted at the other kid. “You took it but I got it back.”

The other kid just stood near a wall, sort of swaying, rocking side to side.

“I got my spaceman back! You took it but I got it back!”

“That's enough, Josh,” Mrs. Ambler said, but it wasn't the way I would have said it—it was soothing. Calming.

Then the other woman noticed me and said, “May I help you?”

“Oh, uh, no. I'll talk to her later.”

But Mrs. Ambler looked over, and I could see her eyes light up as she realized that I was there for a reason.

“Sammy!” she said, hurrying over to me.

I could feel my knees start to wobble, and I had that
light-headed, dizzy feeling again. The clicking had stopped. Sheer panic set in. But there was no turning back. No getting off this ride. I was strapped in by my own conscience, about to catapult over the edge, hard and fast.

I held my breath, closed my eyes, and prayed the drop wouldn't kill me.

“Is this about Tango?” Mrs. Ambler asked.

Like it had a life of its own, my head bobbed up and down.

“Come in,” she says, grabbing me by the arm, looking both ways outside to make sure no one's watching. Then she says to the other woman, “I'm going to be in the office for a few minutes,” and leads me through the special-needs room to a little cubicle, where she sits me down in a chair. “Talk to me,” she says.

“It's a … it's a really long story,” I tell her. “And I can't just jump to the end.”

She looks at the clock on the wall, and just then the passing bell rings. I look at the clock, too, not believing what I'm seeing.

“It's okay,” she tells me. “I've got special-needs kids for another period and I'll write you a pass.” She pulls up a chair so that our knees are practically touching and says it again, “Talk to me.”

So I take a deep, choppy breath and say, “You know what you told me before about Heather being vicious, right?”

“Is she threatening you? Because if she is …”

I shake my head real fast. “But she does have a certain
power
on campus. I don't really
get
it, but she does.”

“So you're afraid of her.”

I kind of look to the side and take another deep breath, trying to figure out how to word what I want to say. Finally, I decide on, “I'm afraid of what might happen if she finds out.”

She leans back a little and says, “Oh, Sammy, you have nothing to worry about! No one has to know you've told me anything.”

I hesitate again, then say, “It's not just that. I mean, I want to tell you, but
only
you. Will you promise that you won't tell anyone else?”

“But … why?” She leans forward. “And how will we ever get rid of Heather if I can't share what you know with the administration?”

“Please, Mrs. Ambler?”

She looks at me a minute, then finally shrugs and says, “If it's that important, okay. You have my word.”

So I take another deep breath and say, “You know that Heather has tried to sabotage me all year, right?”

She nods.

“You know that she's a vicious gossip who can somehow work people into believing that she's turned over a new leaf when what she's really doing is angling for Friendliest Seventh Grader, right?”

She cringes.

“You also know that if she had the opportunity to pin something on me, she would, right?”

Mrs. Ambler gives a little shrug. “Impossible with Tango, seeing how you were absent that day.”

Now it's my turn to cringe. “But I wasn't absent, Mrs. Ambler.”

“You … weren't?”

“No. I was hiding from Heather.” I look down. “In the closet.”

Her face goes slack. Her color sort of drains away, then comes flooding back. But before she can say anything, I blurt out, “I came in to drop off my skateboard and I saw Tango flying free, making a beeline for the door. So I hurried to close the door, only the hydraulic closer wouldn't budge, and then when it finally did, it
slammed
shut and poor Tango got caught in the jamb. And I had just picked him up off the floor when I saw Heather through the window and panicked. So I hid in the closet from
her
, only then Brandy and Tawnee came in, and then
you
came in, and pretty soon the whole class was there, and you were accusing Heather, and I was … I was trapped! It would have been suicide to step out! Heather would have crucified me! And then when everyone was gone, I ditched school and came in late, and I thought I could live with what I'd done because nobody,
nobody
knew it was me, but I started lying to everyone that matters to me, and my heart felt like it was just rotting away inside my chest, and then the God of Dead Birds started sending around agents, and I, and I, and I just can't take it! I feel horrible about Tango and about being such a coward and upsetting you so much and letting you down. After all the nice things you said about me, I turn out to be a liar and a sneak, and I wouldn't blame you if you hate me forever! But it was an accident, and I'm so, so, sorry…!”