Ben Winters: The Mystery of the Missing Everything

Principal Van Vreeland wasn’t listening. She’d already flung open the door to the next room and charged inside, hands cupped around her mouth like a megaphone. “Who stole my trophy?!”

As it happened, this next room was Mr. Darlington’s. When the door slammed open, with a loud BAM !, it so rattled the mild-mannered science teacher that he dropped his sample weather-system diorama, a flood-plain ecosystem, requiring fifteen minutes and a significant deployment of paper towels before class could resume.

By the time the floor was dry and the principal was gone, the period was almost over, and Mr. Darlington was struggling to regain his students’ attention. “Children? I know there’s a lot going on around here this week. But there’s also a lot going on in the swirling eddies of a sandstorm. Like, for example—”

BAM! The door swung open and cracked against the wall again. Mr. Darlington jumped and brought a hand up to his chest, while all eyes turned to the doorway.

There stood Suzie Schwartz, Shelly’s identical twin sister, clutching a bathroom pass. Suzie’s eyes were wide with excitement behind the neon pink, non-prescription glasses she had recently started wearing to distinguish herself from Shelly. “It was Chester ! Chester Hu stole the trophy! He’s going to the principal to confess right now! Can you believe it? I can’t even believe it. Hey, Shelly! Got to go. ’Bye!”

She slammed the door shut behind her.

“Chester?” said Rory.

“Chester Hu ?” said Carmine Lopez.

The ensuing chaos was far too much for Mr. Darlington to even try to control. A confession! The punishment was over! Taproot Valley was back!

Only Bethesda remained quiet, her brow furrowed pensively behind her glasses. Something wasn’t right. Chester? Really? An idea began to flash in her mind, blinking on and off like a neon exclamation point. For a long minute she tuned out the babble of the room, nodding her head rhythmically, connecting dots, tapping her sneaker on the floor beneath her desk.

“Right,” Bethesda said to herself. “That’s right.”

Then she raised her hand and, speaking loudly to cut through the noise, asked Mr. Darlington if she could go to the bathroom.

“That’s fine, Bethesda,” he answered as she pushed back her chair and jumped out of her seat. “Although, you know, class is—”

BAM! The door slammed against the wall again, and Bethesda raced out. Mr. Darlington exhaled weakly.

“Class is nearly over anyway.”

Bethesda raced down Hallway B, rounded the corner, and sighed with relief: There he was.

“Skabimple,” Bethesda whispered, borrowing a favorite made-up expression of her father’s. (“Skabimple” meant “this could have been bad, but it’s good.” It was Bethesda’s dad’s second-most-used made-up expression, after the perennial favorite for expressing sudden shock or pain, “argle bargle.”) There was Chester, standing alone at the big wooden office door with its pane of frosted glass, one hand hovering at the knob, eyes closed, psyching himself up to go inside. She had arrived just in time, and now it was up to Bethesda to save Chester from certain doom.

She walked toward Chester slowly, gingerly, almost on tippy-toes, like a nature documentarian approaching a herd of easily spooked zebra. “I have a confession to make,” Chester was muttering to himself. “I have a confession to make.”

He’s practicing, Bethesda thought.

Edging closer, she spoke softly but firmly. “Don’t do it, Chester.”

“What?” He jerked suddenly and wheeled around. “Oh, Bethesda. Hey.”

Chester Hu was a thin, wiry kid with choppy black hair that went off in every direction. His default facial expression was a kind of nervous goofiness, but today the proportions were out of whack: He looked about 80 percent nervous, 20 percent goofy. A little bead of sweat sat on the bridge of Chester’s nose.

“Don’t open that door,” Bethesda commanded, taking another step closer.

A halfhearted grin quickly appeared and disappeared on Chester’s face. “I just have to talk to Principal Van Vreeland about Pam’s trophy.” Chester leaned with comically fake casualness against the door frame.

“But why? You didn’t steal it.”

“Actually, yeah. I did. So, you know. Gotta confess or whatever.” Chester’s nervousness/goofiness proportion turned itself up to about ninety/ten.

“Oh yeah?” she asked. “So where is it?”

“I, uh.” He looked around helplessly. “I sold it. To some guys.”

“Oh yeah?” Bethesda said again. “What did they look like?”

“Um… one of them was missing an arm. And the other one was really tall. I think, like, nine feet tall.” Bethesda felt like she could actually see Chester’s brain working. “I mean, eight feet tall. Seven and a half?”

“Come on, Chester,” Bethesda said. “It’s really sweet that you want to save the Taproot Valley trip for Marisol Pierce. But you didn’t do it.”

Chester turned red, as quickly and as completely as if someone had splashed paint on him. “What?!” he protested. “For Marisol? What? That’s crazy talk, Bethesda.”

He turned away, developing a sudden and consuming interest in the flyers posted outside the office door. “Wow, look at that,” said Chester, pointing randomly at an ad for a community theater production of The Mikado, featuring Assistant Principal Ferrars in the role of Ko-ko. “Performances at four and seven every day! How ’bout that?”

Bethesda shot a look at her watch. Pete Townshend’s windmilling hands informed Bethesda she only had a couple minutes left before the hallway flooded with kids and Chester got spooked and bolted into the office… toward certain doom.

“Look,” she said. “Chester, if you confess to this crime, you are going to be in Big Trouble. Serious, Permanent-Record Big Trouble. And Principal Van Vreeland might not give us back the Taproot Valley trip, anyway! You know her. She might leave it canceled, to teach us all a lesson or something. Then what?”

Chester considered this, nodding, his eyes darting worriedly from The Mikado flyer to Bethesda and back again.

“And look, if you want to show Marisol you like her…” Bethesda paused. Now she was the one blushing; she could feel the warmth creeping up her neck toward her face. This was so not her area of expertise. “Just write her a note or something.”

“A note?” Chester barked a high, embarrassed laugh. “Have you seen my handwriting? Dr. Capshaw says it’s like an orangutan’s. Who wants to get a crush note from an orangutan? Besides another orangutan, I mean.”

By now, Chester was moving away from the office door. Very carefully, making no sudden movements, Bethesda guided him back toward Hallway B, and Chester allowed himself to be guided, even as he continued his embarrassed denials. “I mean, even if I did have a crush. Which I don’t. Seriously. Orangutans are so funny, don’t you think?”

Bethesda had saved the day, and just in time. The bell rang, ending fourth period and sending a torrent of rambunctious kids spilling into the halls, diving for their lockers, grabbing lunch bags, loudly discussing the day so far. As Bethesda and Chester made their way up the back stairs to the eighth-grade lockers, she felt a warm, prideful glow in her chest. It wasn’t so long ago that she’d faced serious, Permanent-Record Big Trouble of her own, after the debacle with Mr. Melville’s Floating Midterm and the Choral Corral. She knew how it felt to sit on that long bench outside Principal Van Vreeland’s office, knew the nauseating gut-terror of impending doom. And now she had rescued Chester from the same fate, and for something he didn’t even do!