The Invisible Enemy Read online

  “Fine. He can go first,” she said. “To show you how to do the moves.”

  Finally they decided on alphabetical order. I couldn’t resist watching. I found I could see pretty well through the middle bookshelf, between Helen Keller and Martin Luther King. Josh went first and totally flubbed. Hubert was next. He had his back to me, so I couldn’t see the actual toss, but I heard everyone gasp like in a horror movie and then there was a nasty cracking that could only be something breaking. I stood up so fast I whacked my head on the bookshelf. Kids popped out of every cranny in the library.

  Hubert’s attempt to do an Over the Falls had sent his yo-yo through the glass of the Alumni Authors display case.

  4 • Stone-Face

  Hubert was staring at his hand as if it belonged to someone else. The other boys tromped on toes stepping back as fast as they could, as though Hubert were emitting poison rays. He stood still as a book, his cheeks white as paper.

  “You’re in for it now!” muttered Alyssa, instantly forgetting that it had all been her idea.

  Oh, Hubert, I thought, coming around the stack to join the crowd. Oh, poor, dear Hubert. I wished I could sprinkle him with Vanishing Powder and let him disappear.

  The door to the Story Room swung open with a terrible force. I yanked Hubert out of his trance and pulled him over to stand next to me. My mother stalked in and scanned the library, soaking up the evidence.

  Oh, Hubert, I thought again.

  “Would anyone care to tell me what happened here?” When she’s mad, my mother has a way of talking so quietly that you have to hold your breath to hear her. It’s way worse than being yelled at.

  No one spoke. No one moved even. I wondered how Jean-Pierre had managed to position himself beside the lectern with the giant dictionary. He looked as if he’d been working there all morning.

  “No volunteers?” She crossed over to inspect the damage to the Alumni Authors display case. The glass was cracked from top to bottom but hadn’t actually shattered out of its frame. The books were untouched.

  Hubert’s yo-yo lay on the carpet, like a murder weapon left at the scene. My mother’s eyes swept back and forth.

  “Billie?” she said, hardly moving her lips.

  I nearly fainted. Oh, Mom, no! Don’t do this to me!

  “Give me the yo-yo, please.”

  No wonder I don’t have any friends! I crossed the carpet, seeing only shuffling sneakers all around me.

  I picked up Hubert’s yo-yo and dropped it into my mother’s hand like it was moldy cheese. I could never be a normal, popular girl with my mother at school every day! A person can’t be herself when her mother’s around.

  “Can you tell me what happened?” she asked.

  As if I’d snitch.

  “No.”

  Several kids exhaled.

  “I wasn’t watching.”

  “Victor?” said my mother.

  “Uh-uh,” mumbled Victor. “I was tying my shoe.”

  That roused a weak snicker, but not from me. I felt like I could have heard Hubert’s heart pounding, except that mine was too loud.

  “Hubert?”

  He trembled beside me and shook his head, not looking up.

  “Fine,” she snapped. “Since you’re all unable to see properly at the moment, I’ll take all the yo-yos for safekeeping until Monday.”

  She tapped the table. “Now.” Five yo-yos were begrudgingly dropped by her drumming fingers, though I noticed Jean-Pierre’s was not among them. Hubert’s dangled from my mother’s other hand.

  “And this particular toy? This is now mine. Unless the owner wants to speak to me directly.” She swept over us with another furious look. Alyssa was now skulking in the back row.

  “Well,” said my mother, “since you all seem to feel excess loyalty this morning, you have all assumed responsibility for this foolish accident—”

  “But—” started Alyssa.

  My mother ignored her. “—and you are all expected to appear tomorrow morning at seven-thirty for a detention. It will not interfere with the field trip. You will reshelve books and clean tables until class time.”

  A few kids had the nerve to groan. My mother raised an eyebrow in her special, chilling way, and the noise stopped.

  “You are now dismissed.”

  “Oh, Hubert,” I whispered as we filed up the stairs. “You must feel awful!”

  “You better feel awful,” moaned Alyssa, behind us.

  “Awful?” He paused. “I guess, maybe. I’m sorry about the glass. But the thing is”—Hubert turned to me with a radiant grin—“I did a perfect Over the Falls! I really did it! Only the string slipped off my finger at the last second and went flying—

  “Hey, J. P.!” Hubert called ahead, raising his voice in a way I had never heard before. “Did you see that? I did an Over the Falls!”

  “You really are whack,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, I saw, Hubert!” J. P. smiled at Hubert as if he were a good puppy. “But tell me, please, this nasty woman is for real? We must clean her library?”

  Hubert glanced at me, and a blush swept his cheeks.

  I prayed for the floor to open up and swallow me. What chance would I ever have?

  “Who?” Alyssa was eavesdropping as usual. “You mean Old Stone-Face Stoner? She’s not just nasty. She’s Billie’s mother.”

  5 • Detention

  I didn’t even get my coat off before I was yelling at my mother. Jane ran for cover as soon as I opened my mouth. The smirk on Alyssa’s face and Jean-Pierre’s flustered apology had fueled me to a stomping rage by the time I got home.

  “How do you think I feel when you single me out like that? Do you have any idea how completely humiliating it is to have my mother at school all day, sticking her nose in my life? Do you know what they call you?” I couldn’t stop myself. I jumped off the cliff. “They call you Stone-Face Stoner! How do you like that?”

  “Stone-Face?” She raised her eyebrows, but she didn’t fall apart the way I meant her to. She even almost smiled. “Stone-Face, huh?”

  “How could you do that to me?” I whined, trying to get back on track. “How could you ask me to rat in front of everybody?”

  “Billie, honey, I’m sorry.” She reached out to pat my shoulder, but I shook her off.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” she went on. “Someone spilled juice on the encyclopedia this morning, and then the copy machine was broken. It was the last straw having to deal with broken glass. Sixth-graders should know better. Sometimes your friends just get—”

  “What friends? You think I have friends? Who wants to be friends with the librarian’s daughter? Don’t you get it? I don’t have any friends!”

  She gave me a long look and then spoke in her soft, let’s-talk-this-over-I’ll-be-your-friend voice, “Billie, aren’t you being a little extreme?”

  I gave her a long look back while my brain churned. It was all Alyssa’s fault for calling the contest in the first place. Did it count as ratting if I ratted on her, since she’s such a rat herself? I’d be protecting Hubert, and Alyssa deserved the blame more than he did. I hatched a devious plot.

  “Okay,” I said. “Maybe I have a couple of friends. But you can’t try to make me rat on people that way. Because it backfires and they torment me. Especially if it was actually Alyssa’s idea—” I gasped, as if it had slipped out by accident. “I mean—she made them—I mean—I don’t really know, but the person who broke the glass was not—”

  I fumbled into silence. The dirty deed was done. I’d planted the seed of blame on Alyssa, and Hubert was off the hook. Except that he’d have to buy himself a new yo-yo.

  The next morning when I arrived to serve detention with the rest of the class, there was already a hill of backpacks just inside the door of the library. At home, I had purposely not been able to find my left boot so that I wouldn’t show up alongside my mother. I added my pack to the pile and listened to our instructions.

  She set us to work with an enti
re cart full of books to reshelve. I bet she had gone around randomly plucking books off the shelves to make more work for us. Even if everyone in the school had read a book yesterday, there wouldn’t have been that many to be reshelved today.

  The kids who arrived late for detention had to actually scrub tables. My mother had six buckets, six scrub brushes, six squirt bottles of some foul-smelling cleaning solution, and a stack of stretchy gloves like the ones doctors use. That’s how toxic the cleaning chemical was.

  I was delighted to see Alyssa show up at 7:45 and trip over my pack at the door, even though she kicked it when she realized whose it was. She had missed the cutoff time and was put straight to work scouring the tabletops, along with Victor, Renee, and Josh.

  “This is so not fair!” she whined after one minute of forced labor. My mother ignored her, and I began to hum.

  Alcott goes after Aiken…. Byars goes after Blume….

  “I don’t see why we should have to do manual labor just because certain people”—Alyssa threw a menacing glare at Hubert, who was reshelving in Nonfiction—“are too clumsy to hold on to their yo-yos!”

  “Shut up, Alyssa,” warned Josh. The boys especially have a strict, anti-rat code.

  “Well, I’m only saying—”

  “Shut up, Alyssa,” they hissed.

  “If J. P. was here, I’ll bet he’d agree with me,” whined Alyssa.

  Hey, where was J. P.?

  “Shut up, Alyssa!”

  “Alyssa,” said my mother, sticking her head around her office door, “if you’ve finished with your table, I’d like to speak to you for a moment, please.”

  The library went as quiet as—well, a library. Two pink dots burned on Alyssa’s cheeks. She shot me a look of blame as she peeled off her gloves and dropped them into a bucket. Oh, so what? I thought.

  As the door to my mother’s office closed, the door to the library opened. Jean-Pierre strolled in, his black hair blown wild by the January wind.

  “Allo! Bonjour!” he greeted us.

  “You’re a little late, J. P.,” grumbled Josh, pulling his gloves off. “We’ve done all the dirty work.”

  “I am sorry indeed,” said J. P. with a cheeky smile. “I’ve been here only four days and already you miss me?”

  Josh grunted, and the other kids laughed.

  J. P. picked up a latex glove from the table. An idea immediately sparkled in his eyes.

  “Watch this,” he said. With one hand he bunched the wrist of his glove to his mouth and blew into it. With his other hand, he pulled out his should-have-been-confiscated yo-yo. As he held the inflated glove—

  “It’s an udder!” shrieked Megan.

  —he flipped the yo-yo up and down a couple of times and then let go of the glove. It shot from his hand like an air-powered rocket and then zap! the yo-yo flew up to meet it and knock it off course, all in less than a second. It was a very deft trick.

  “Wow! Hurrah! Score!” we all cheered in admiration. How did he do that—skip detention and have nobody mad? Everyone snatched at the gloves, and we soon had a game of multi-udder volleyball going on.

  My mother’s office door clicked open. We could hear the dreaded voice. All we needed was another detention! I grabbed a balloon from midair and pushed it out of sight into a bucket. Victor and Michele scrambled for the others. I shoved my fistful of extra gloves into the pockets of my jeans just as Alyssa clomped into the room.

  Panic giggles filled my throat, but I swallowed hard at the look on Alyssa’s face.

  “You are a stinking, tattletale brat,” she ranted at me. “Running off to tell Mommy when Baby Bertie gets in trouble!” She turned on Hubert, who was lurking behind Military History. “Well, you’re in a lot more trouble now. I’m not taking the rap for a butterfinger loser like you. Stone-Face wants to see you next!” She crossed her arms across her chest and narrowed her eyes, brimming with satisfied vengeance.

  Hubert pinched his lips together and headed to his doom. I grabbed his arm as he went past and whispered, “It’s only my mother,” but he pulled away.

  “I’ll come with you,” said J. P. “It’s only fair.”

  Hubert’s grateful smile made my heart crack just a little. A stranger had thought of the right thing to say, and I hadn’t. I felt horrible. I was his best friend, and I’d let him down. My whole rescue mission had failed because Alyssa had outratted me and probably told my mother every tiny detail.

  When the boys came out, Hubert pushed right past me.

  “Hubert,” I pleaded. “Hubert, I’m sorry, I really am. Tell me what happened, please?” I tugged on his shirt all the way up the stairs, but he wouldn’t say a word.

  It wasn’t until we got to homeroom, when Mr. Donaldson was going over the rules for the field trip, that I realized I must have left my backpack in the library.

  6 • Field Trip

  I tore down to the library, but my backpack wasn’t on the floor where I’d left it.

  “Mom!” I rushed to the counter. Had she stuck it in her office?

  “Mom!” She was chatting with mothers from the Literary Committee.

  “Library voice, please, Billie.” She gave me her school smile.

  “My backpack!” I screamed in a whisper. “Where’s my backpack?”

  “Oh, Billie!” I could tell from the way she rolled her eyes that she didn’t have it. And I wasn’t sticking around for a lecture on caring for my personal belongings.

  Someone must have taken my backpack. I pretended for four seconds to think about who, but I already knew. Icy fingers of dread squeezed my neck as I climbed the stairs back to homeroom. If Alyssa had my backpack, she would waste no time looking inside. She’d find my makeup kit. And inside that kit was a film canister of what looked like shimmering face powder—

  “There you are, Billie.” Mr. Donaldson was waiting at the classroom door. “No luck? Don’t worry, it’ll turn up. We won’t let you starve on the trip. You can share my lunch.”

  Oh, great, eat lunch with the teacher?

  “Line up, people. Stay with your regular bus buddy, please. Look alive.”

  I pushed past everyone to get to Alyssa.

  “Where is it?” I said.

  “Do you see your precious backpack anywhere on my body?” She sneered.

  “That’s not exactly a denial, Alyssa.” I didn’t bother to keep my voice down. My hands were itching to shake her.

  “Let’s go, people. The bus is waiting. Billie, your buddy is up here.”

  No fair, no fair! I haven’t had a chance to pummel Alyssa yet!

  I dragged my feet to the front of the line.

  My bus buddy is Michele. She’s okay, kind of quiet. At least she wouldn’t expect me to talk. We sat about halfway back. I let her have the window so I could try to spy on Alyssa from the aisle seat. I noticed Hubert had somehow traded in his bus buddy, David, for Jean-Pierre. And I noticed Alyssa and Megan were the last kids to get on the bus.

  “Eeew, when do you think was the last time they cleaned this old rust machine?” Alyssa complained loudly.

  Mr. Donaldson climbed aboard. He was holding my backpack.

  “Billie Stoner? Is this what you were looking for?”

  I couldn’t believe it! I stumbled down the aisle and nearly snatched it from him.

  “Next time, try looking under your own desk, Billie.”

  Wait a minute! It had not been under my desk, I know it hadn’t. At least not while I was in the room. She must have gone back and stuck it there after I left. She is one prize sneak! I glared at Alyssa, but she was earnestly chipping away at her purple nail polish.

  I returned to my seat and quickly unzipped the pack. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it would all be there. It’s not as though anything looked valuable. My lunch, my binder, my calculator, my library book.

  No makeup bag. No orange-mesh-with-black-zipper-container-of-Vanishing-Powder makeup bag. She thought she was just taking a pretty cool bag. She didn’t know what she really had. Oh, plea
se let me get it back before she found out.

  I stood up to go get it from her. The bus started to move. I sat down. What did I think she would do? Say, “Oh, silly me. Here it is,” and hand it to me wrapped with a bow?

  What should I do? What could I do? Tell Mr. Donaldson that my magic Vanishing Powder was missing? March up the aisle and punch her in the nose? Oh, sure. What a dumb mess this was. I so hated Alyssa.

  I clenched and unclenched my fists, silently mouthing my tirade at her.

  Michele looked at me sideways.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No,” I blurted. “I’m crazy mad about something, and I don’t know how to fix it.” I could hear my own voice tremble.

  “Oh,” was all she said, turning back to the view outside the window.

  Get a plan, I told myself, get a plan. As soon as we get there, I’m going to—And then I stopped, baffled. My brain was empty of all ideas. I couldn’t figure out what to do.

  I stood up again and sat down. My jean pockets were bunched up, stuffed with latex gloves from the library. I transferred them to my backpack. I took my jacket off, but then I felt cold and pulled it on again.

  Alyssa turned around and sneaked a peak at me. I gave her the all-powerful Stoner Stone-Face Glare, and she dropped her eyes first. Hah. My brain started to work again.

  By the time we got to the parking lot outside the Cloisters, I grabbed my chance.

  I stepped between Alyssa and Megan. “Give me back my makeup kit,” I commanded. “Just hand it over now, and I won’t expose you for the thief that you are.”

  “You’ve already got your moldy backpack,” she said, “though why you’d want it, I’m sure I don’t—”

  “You know what I’m talking about, you snake,” I said. I realized it was a mistake to confront her with Megan there. It just made her show off.

  “Get out of my way.” She tried to brush past me and continue up the path.

  “Don’t walk away from me.” I stood my ground.

  She pretended to trip and stomped on my foot.

  “Ow! You rat!” I screamed, maybe a teeny bit louder than it hurt.