The Quick Fix (20 page)

Nicole looked up slowly, as if she were expecting someone to hit her with a pie. When she saw Katie, her expression changed from fear to confusion. There was Katie Kondo, former chief of the hall monitors, former scourge of the underworld, the girl who would not rest until she brought Nikki down, asking Nicole for permission to sit across from her. Nicole nodded yes.

Katie sat down. Her facial expression wasn't exactly friendly, but it wasn't hostile, either. There was a look that I had never seen on her face before: empathy. They ate in silence, but something changed in Nicole, almost instantaneously. She still looked disheveled … but now she looked a little less disoriented, as if Katie's presence had made her a little less crazy somehow. Her whole body seemed to relax.

Randy Sloan, one of the least-funny class clowns in history, approached their table. He made some remark that I couldn't hear, but I knew it wasn't funny. Of course, Randy started laughing hysterically. The two tables nearby
started laughing, too. Randy beamed like the gap-toothed idiot that he was. One problem: Katie and Nicole didn't react.

It wasn't that they didn't notice him. They both turned their heads to look at him, their expressions blank and bland, as if Randy had just told them that the temperature in the cafeteria was a comfortable 71 degrees. This was not the reaction that Randy was expecting, and it ticked him off. “Skanks!” he shouted.

Katie looked at Nicole and rolled her eyes. Nicole smirked back. It was tiny, and if I hadn't been standing there studying them, I might have missed it. It made me think about the precariously balanced set of conditions that made the Outs effective, and wonder what would happen if those conditions started to tip toward one end.

I stopped wondering when Randy grabbed Katie's lunch, threw it on the floor, and stepped on it. Actually, he didn't just step on it; he ground it into the floor. Then he reached over and gave her a condescending pat on the cheek. I was out of my seat and moving.

Before Randy could pull his hand away, Katie grabbed his wrist. In a half-heartbeat, almost every kid in the lunch room stood up and fixed a cold stare at Katie. They were
united in making sure that someone in the Outs didn't forget their place.

Katie's eyes went wide. She hadn't expected this, but she was too pigheaded to back down. Randy was sneering at her. He was about to say something mean when I buried my shoulder into his stomach. “Guuuuf!” he said, as I knocked the air out of his lungs. Of all the things Randy's ever said, “Guuuuf!” was the closest to actually being funny.

He landed on the floor with another “Guuuuf!” I was really starting to like that sound.

Katie leaned toward me. “I could've handled it,” she said quietly.

“Shut up and sit down,” I said, just as quietly. “Slowly. Now's not the time to make a stand.”

She looked around the cafeteria. Every kids' eyes were on her. She sat down, but didn't look happy about it. Everyone else in the caf sat down, too. After a moment they went back to their business, as if they had never been interrupted.

“You owe me,” I said, “and here's how I want to get paid. It may not happen today, or tomorrow, or the day after that, but one day soon, I want you two to remind
yourselves who you were before you were put in the Outs. And if you can't remind yourselves, remind each other. The revolution starts with the two of you.”

Nicole and Katie looked up at me, and for a moment I saw the girls as they were just a few short weeks ago: the brains, the ferocity. Their sly grins told me all I needed to know. I grinned back at them, then checked the clock on the wall. Ten minutes left to talk to Jimmy Mac. I gave them both a quick and casual salute, then headed for the exit.

Jimmy Mac's office was a small room off the gym that used to be a supply closet. There were piles of newspapers everywhere. It felt like it would be a fire hazard to just say the word “match.”

Jimmy didn't seem pleased to see me. “What do you want?” he said.

“I need your help with something.”

“I'm busy.”

“This is important.”

“And what? What I do isn't important?”

“I didn't mean it like that.”

“Yes, you did,” he said. “You're Mr. Important Matt
Stevens. Mr. Big Shot. So, am I supposed to be honored that you need my help?”

“What's gotten into you?”

“What do you mean? Just because I'm not falling all over myself to do your job for you?”

My first instinct was to grab him and slam him into one of his piles of paper. But this was Mac, the one kid in school I trusted. I took a deep breath, and told my temper to take a hike.

“This is about Cynthia,” I asked, “isn't it?”

He was itching for a fight, but my change in tone took the wind out of his sails. He hid his face from me. I heard a definite sniffle.

“You had to take her, didn't you?” he asked.

“I didn't ‘take' anyone, Mac, and you know it. I can't control Cynthia any more than you can.”

He sighed and looked at the floor. “I know, Matt. I know. It's just—” He looked at me as if he wanted me to finish his sentence for him. When I didn't, he continued. “It's just that I've had a thing for her forever … I mean, who wouldn't? And then you swoop in. How'm I supposed to compete with you?”

“Compete with me? Mac, I'm a mess.”

“Yeah, well, Cynthia doesn't think so.”

“I didn't lead her on, really. In fact, I told her I wasn't interested.”

“It doesn't matter. She wants you. You've got everything she's looking for,” he said, “and I'm just some pathetic little kid, too weak to be of any use to her.”

“That's a load of crap,” I said. “Listen, Mac, you're the only kid in this godforsaken place that I'd trust with my life.”

He looked surprised and pleased, in spite of himself. “You mean that?”

“No. In fact, on the way over here, I told six other kids the exact same thing,” I said sarcastically. “Yes, of course I mean it!”

“You know what? Look … forget it, okay? You got something you need help with, and I'm jawing on and on about my love life,” he said.

I didn't say anything.

“Come on,” he said. “Seriously, I feel like a fool already.”

I nodded, but made a mental note to revisit this topic. I liked Jimmy a lot, and I didn't want something like this to come between us. I held out the cell phone that was
put in my locker. “There's one photo on this. I need you to enlarge it.”

He took the phone out of my hand. “Yeah, okay.”

“It doesn't have a lot of juice left,” I said, “and I don't have the charger, so you'll have to work quickly.”

“Got it. Anything I should be looking for?”

“From what I understand, whatever's in that photo is going to be hard to miss. But it needs to be enlarged. The screen on the phone is too small.”

His eyes lit up with the fire I was so familiar with. “How big we talking here?”

“The picture or the story?” I asked.

“Both.”

“First, I think you better get a heavier lock for that door,” I said, and pointed toward the entrance of his office.

“That big?” He smiled.

“I think so, yeah. How large can you make the picture and still have it look clear?” I asked.

He thought about it for a second. “I had a story last year about some kid skimming money off his holiday wrapping paper sales. The evidence was a photo of something else—two little kids playing in the park, I think. The kid skimming money was a tiny image in the left corner of
the picture. When we blew that sucker up, it was clear as day.”

“Can I see it?”

“Sure, yeah! Hold on … ” He pulled out a large book and started skimming through it. “Here it is …
The Franklin Gazette
, issue twenty-eight, page one. March of last year.”

I suddenly felt dizzy. My vision blurred. A moment of inspiration was hitting me square between the eyes.

“You okay, Matt?”

“Yeah …” I shook my head and tried to regain my composure. “Yeah, I'm okay. Say that again.”

“Say what again?”

“Wait, hold on … do you have a pen?”

“Yeah. Here.”

I took the pen, then reached into my back pocket and pulled out the little piece of paper. “Now, say that again.”

“What?”

“The issue … of the newspaper … that the photo was in.”

“Ohhhh! One of the March issues, the date was—”

“No, not the date. Say it like you said it before. Exactly like you said it before.”

I must've looked pretty crazed, because Jimmy gave me a look. I couldn't tell if he was scared
for
me, or
of
me.

“
The Franklin Gazette
, issue twenty-eight, page one.”

As he spoke, I wrote it down.

“Are you sure you're okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Does this look right to you?” I showed him the piece of paper that I'd just written on. At the top was my father's clue: TMS136P15. Right below it was what Jimmy Mac had just told me: TFG28P1.

“Yeah,” he said, but he looked confused. “What's that top one?”

I took a deep breath. My hand was shaking. “I think I'm about to find out.”

public library was pretty empty at that time of day. Just a few older people sitting in the quiet room across from the main desk, reading newspapers, and a couple of moms with toddlers in the children's room. The man behind the desk eyed me suspiciously. “Shouldn't you be in school?” he asked.

“School project,” I said, putting on the most innocent face I could manage under the circumstances.

He studied me for a moment, but he looked more amused than annoyed. “If you say so,” he said.

I put the piece of paper on the desk and tapped it. “TMS,” I said. “Is there a newspaper or magazine that has a title—”

“With words beginning with the letters
T, M
, and
S
?” he asked. “Let's find out. Follow me.”

He walked out from behind the desk and headed for a doorway to the right, into a large room with about twelve rows of metal racks. Each rack was full of cardboard boxes, stacked high; each of the boxes was filled with newspapers.

“We're trying to scan all these into the computer so we can get rid of the hard copies, but it's slow work,” he said. We walked over to a table against the wall. There was a computer there that looked almost as old as me. He sat down in front of it. “Let me see that thing again.”

I showed it to him.

“So, where do you think we should start?” he asked.

I looked at the clue, and at Jimmy Mac's version below it. “I think we should look for something small and local,” I said, not sure where my theory was coming from but feeling it was true somehow. “I feel like something big like
The New York Times
or
The Boston Globe
wouldn't be classified by issue number; it would be referred to by date.”

The librarian nodded. “Makes sense.”

“The newspaper in town is called
The Daily Review
,” I said, thinking out loud.

“And of the other ones nearby, none of them have the initials
TMS
in the title.”

“That means it could be a local newspaper from anywhere,” I said. My hopes of this being easy were quickly evaporating. “Was
The Daily Review
ever called anything else? Was there another newspaper that used to—”

The expression on the librarian's face made me stop. He looked as if a bolt of lightning had struck him in the head. “There was a small local paper that my mom used to pick up at the grocery store,” he said. “It's not like she'd make a special trip to get it or anything. It was just, if we were out and she saw it and remembered to pick it up, she would. It had a lot of ads from local businesses in it.”

“What was it called?”