West Meadows Detectives Page 2

  “What about you?” Hajrah zoomed back. She had her arms out wide and made a noise like an airplane. She circled around me.

  “Come on, Myron! If we’re going to be detective partners, we have to know each other. Why are you in room 15?”

  Hajrah made another airplane circle and stopped in front of me. She smiled with her arms still open wide, just like Sofia when she wakes up from a long nap. Hajrah was not my sister, but she seemed nice.

  “I’m autistic,” I said. “My brain works differently.”

  Hajrah wiggled her fingers. Her smile grew bigger. “That will make you a really good detective!”

  “My mom says that, too.” I matched Hajrah’s smile with my own.

  Hajrah shrugged and zoomed away down the hallway, still buzzing like an airplane.

  We turned a corner and saw the main office right in front of us.

  Principal Rainer stood outside the office. She was talking to a tall girl with short curly hair. The girl wore a black jacket, orange jeans, and a backpack covered tiny metal buttons. Hajrah dove behind the trophy case. She pulled me in beside her.

  “That’s Danielle!” she whispered.

  I leaned around the trophy case to get a better look. The buttons on her backpack had pictures of flying robots and spaceships.

  “Everyone calls her Glitch because she’s really good with computers,” Hajrah said.

  I did not understand this. A glitch is when something does not work. When my dad cannot get our computer to work, he says there is a “glitch” and tells me to go outside and play, even if I don’t want to.

  I wondered if Danielle liked being called Glitch. I was going to ask, but Hajrah told me to be quiet. We could hear Principal Rainer speaking.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time, Danielle. I expect the truth,” Principal Rainer said. “Did you take the snacks from the kitchen?”

  “No!” Glitch said. “I just got here.”

  Hajrah whispered, “Last year, Glitch was caught taking stuff from people’s backpacks.”

  “Principal Rainer said she had an idea who was behind the thefts,” I said.

  I flipped open my notebook and wrote down Danielle’s name and her nickname.

  Principal Rainer and Glitch were done talking. Glitch walked toward us. Her face was scrunched up as if she’d just eaten a lemon.

  Hajrah held up the attendance folder so it blocked our faces. “Don’t let her see us!”

  I peered over the attendance folder. Glitch walked right by us and turned the corner. She didn’t even look in our direction.

  “That was close!” Hajrah said. “She looked mad enough to shoot lasers from her eyes. You don’t want to be near Glitch when she gets mad. Trust me.”

  I wrote the word “angry” beside Glitch’s name in my notebook. Then I put a question mark beside that. Why was she so mad? Did she take the snacks from the kitchen? I had a lot of questions. But now I had something else, too.

  I had my first suspect.

  Chapter 5

  The rest of the morning my brain was stuck on my first suspect: Glitch.

  Even if the stories about her were true, it didn’t mean she took the morning snacks. I planned on talking to her, but Mr. Harpel kept us pretty busy all morning with activities.

  Glitch didn’t join us for any of them. She sat in her corner of the room, poking at a little metal box with a screwdriver. She didn’t say a word to anyone.

  Mr. Harpel said we all needed our own space sometimes. That’s why we each had our own area in room 15.

  Hajrah had a big ball to sit on and a bunch of toys she could squeeze when she got too “bouncy.” Jordan’s corner had a regular desk, but Mr. Harpel also gave him a bunch of cool markers and colored pens so he could draw cars and sports and all the other stuff that he liked. Glitch’s space had a wide table instead of a desk. On the table were little drawers filled with wires, plugs, and other bits of electronics. My area of the room had a small desk with shelves for my mystery books and schoolbooks. There were already a few mystery stories on the shelves. Mr. Harpel had taken them from the library for me.

  I was reading about a detective called Encyclopedia Brown. An encyclopedia is a book filled with information. This detective got his nickname because he was smart and knew so much. I was on my second mystery when the lunch bell rang.

  “That’s it for today, folks!” Mr. Harpel said. “After lunch, you’ll go to your regular classes.”

  Hajrah groaned. “Not Ms. Chu! The chairs in her class are so hard. And she makes me sit still for a million hours!”

  “Hajrah, that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” Mr. Harpel said. “Ms. Chu is a nice teacher. And Myron is in your class. I’m sure she’ll let you work together. I teach the older students upstairs in the afternoon, so I’ll still be in the school. Maybe you will see me in the hall. If not, I will see you here in room 15 tomorrow morning.”

  The lunchroom was crowded and loud. I do not like crowded and loud. But I do like lunch. My dad says that sometimes you have to take a bit of what you don’t like to get a bit of what you do like. He calls it a compromise. I don’t like compromise.

  Hajrah had been through all this before. She led me to the far corner of the room, where it wasn’t so busy. A few kids sat quietly eating their lunches.

  “Nobody likes eating this far from the exit,” she said. “They like to sit close to the doors. Anything to cut down on the time it takes to get outside for recess.”

  Hajrah started eating her lunch. I pulled out mine, too. It was Monday, so it was a raspberry jam sandwich. I chewed my sandwich and thought about the mystery of the Snack Snatcher.

  “Okay, so Glitch is totally the snack thief,” Hajrah said.

  “We don’t know that,” I said.

  “Who else could it be? Glitch has taken stuff before, and Principal Rainer thinks it was her.”

  “You were hiding in the cupboard,” I pointed out. I had met my detective partner only a few hours ago. For all I knew, she could be the Snack Snatcher.

  “I always hide in the cupboard,” she said with a shrug. “I got there before Mrs. Peterson arrived. I was supposed to be at the daycare. You know, the one down the hall from the school kitchen? My mom starts work early in the morning, so she drops me off there before school. But the daycare doesn’t have cupboards. Cupboards are dark, cozy, and private. They’re perfect for eating licorice.”

  “Then you were there when the Snack Snatcher struck,” I said. “Did you see anything?”

  “Nope. I was too busy enjoying my delicious candy. But I did hear a whole bunch of crashing and banging.”

  “And you didn’t open the door to look?”

  “No way,” Hajrah said. “I thought it was Lindsay looking for me. She works in the daycare and doesn’t like it when I sneak off.”

  “So you hid in the closet the whole time?”

  “I was eating licorice. Nothing disturbs me when I’m eating licorice. Remember that, Myron.”

  I didn’t see why I had to remember the eating habits of my detective partner. At that moment, I was more worried about the person staring at me from across the lunchroom.

  “Oh no,” I said through a mouthful of sandwich.

  “Oh no, what?” Hajrah said.

  A red-haired girl walked straight up to us and stopped.

  “Myron Matthews,” the red-haired girl said. “It is you! I heard there was some little kid snooping around the lunchroom.”

  I tried to speak, but no words came out. The raspberry jam in my mouth had turned to glue.

  Sarah “Smasher” McGintley stood in front of me.

  “Why are you snooping around West Meadows Elementary?” Smasher stepped close to our lunch table. She towered over me. “You’re far from your detective hero, Max Finder.”

  Smasher McGintley was cousin to Basher McGintley, the biggest bully back at Central Meadows. The McGintleys liked doing one thing and one thing only: punching. The goal when dealing with bullies, especially the McGintleys, was to avoid the punching.

  “Are you snooping around where you shouldn’t be snooping?” Smasher asked.

  “Four,” I said. “You said the word ‘snooping’ four times.”

  Smasher looked like someone had smashed her. “I’ll say it four million times if I want to!”

  Two kids behind Smasher laughed. They were twins with big ears, flat noses, and small eyes. In detective stories, those are called shifty eyes. Characters with shifty eyes cannot be trusted. Ever.

  Smasher smacked her fist on our lunch table. “I’ll say this, too, Myron Matthews, kid detective: keep your snooping away from me. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” I said. “You are standing very close and you spoke very loudly. How could I not hear you?”

  Smasher growled.

  “No problem, Smasher.” Hajrah stuffed the rest of her lunch into her bag. “We were just talking about dropping the whole case.”

  “No, we weren’t,” I said, watching her stuff my lunch into my bag. “I said that we—”

  “You said we have better things to do, like go outside and play!” said Hajrah, even though I was speaking. She hopped up from the table and yanked me by my collar. I got up and followed her out of the lunchroom.

  She didn’t slow down until we were outside.

  “Why did you lie to Smasher?” I said. “I’m not stopping the investigation!”

  “I know that. And you know that,” Hajrah said. “But we don’t want Smasher to know that. She seemed pretty upset you were investigating the mystery of the stolen snacks.”

/>   “You think she’s involved?”

  Hajrah tugged on a loose strand of hair. “If there’s sneaky stuff happening at school, you can bet Smasher McGintley is behind it.”

  “I know,” I said. “I met Smasher in my old neighborhood. Her cousin is Basher. He’s a bully.”

  “Yep, stay clear of the McGintleys! That’s my rule.”

  “Is that why you told her we were dropping the case? Just so we could investigate the case?”

  “Exactly!” Hajrah said. “Speaking of investigating, what is Mr. V. doing by that tree?”

  Hajrah jogged to the far side of the schoolyard. A large tree lay on its side on the muddy ground, with broken branches scattered about.

  A man with a bushy mustache popped up from behind the tree’s thick trunk.

  “Watch yourself, kids!” he said. “Go play somewhere else.”

  “We’re not playing, Mr. V.,” Hajrah said. “We’re investigating.”

  Mr. V. is the school caretaker. I met him last Tuesday, when I visited the school for the first time. He wore a thick blue jacket with the crest of the school on the front. He held a small saw in his hand and had flecks of wood stuck in his mustache.

  “Why are you cutting the tree?” I said.

  Mr. V. chuckled. “Is that what you’re investigating? It’s Myron, isn’t it?”

  “We’re actually investigating the stolen snacks, Mr. V.,” said Hajrah.

  Mr. V. shook his head at the mention of the crime.

  “A real shame. And on the first day of school. Who would do such a thing?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” I said.

  “Hey!” Hajrah suddenly sounded very worried. “This is Smoky’s tree!”

  “Who’s Smoky?”

  “She’s a raccoon who lives in this tree,” Hajrah said. “When the weather is nice, my dad and I come here to play soccer after dinner. Sometimes we see Smoky coming down from her tree to look for food.”

  “And now someone has cut down her tree,” I said.

  “It wasn’t cut down,” Mr. V. said. “It fell in last night’s storm.”

  A big thunderstorm started just as I was going to bed last night. Alicia said she hoped the storm would blow away the school. That way, we wouldn’t have to go in the morning. I told her it was impossible for a school to blow away. A building like a school can be blown down if the winds are strong enough, but it will never blow away. A building is not like a leaf on a breeze.

  I tried to explain this to Alicia, but she just closed her bedroom door. That’s sisters for you.

  “Poor thing,” Hajrah said. “I hope Smoky is okay.”

  “The storm took down this tree and ripped a big hole in the roof of the school.” Mr. V. pointed to a part of the school covered with a large plastic sheet.

  “That’s near room 15,” I said.

  “You got that right, Myron,” Mr. V. said. “The wind pulled away some of the roof over the kitchen. I just got it covered this morning before school started.”

  The recess bell rang.

  Hajrah ran toward the school. She stopped when she saw that I wasn’t following her.

  “Come on, Myron,” she said. “Recess is over. Time for our afternoon class in our new room!”

  A new new classroom with a new new teacher and new new students.

  I still did not like new things.

  Chapter 6

  My afternoon classroom smelled like vanilla cupcakes. I do not like vanilla. I like chocolate. No one was eating cupcakes. Hajrah said the smell came from Ms. Chu’s perfume. I don’t know why someone would want to wear perfume that made her smell like a dessert.

  I tried to not to think about Ms. Chu’s perfume. It was hard. My mom says that when something gets in my head, I can’t let go of it. This is true. If something is bothering me, I think and think and think about it until my brain feels like it’s going to explode. That would never happen, though. Exploding brains happen only in movies, on TV, and in video games.

  Getting things stuck in your head is not always bad. It’s a good skill for a detective. I could not stop thinking about who could be the Snack Snatcher. This is a good thing because I knew I would solve the mystery. It would stay stuck in my head until I caught the thief.

  There were nineteen kids in my afternoon class. Ten boys and nine girls. And one teacher, Ms. Chu. She was a girl, too, but not really. She was a grown-up, so she was a woman.

  Ms. Chu was nice, but she looked tired. I wondered why she would be so tired on the first day of school.

  This classroom had more stuff in it. Desks, tables, books, and a few computers. Ms. Chu even let me and Hajrah sit together.

  “Boys and girls,” Ms. Chu said when we were all at our desks, “this afternoon we will be doing math.”

  “Is it a test?” a boy with spiky hair said. “We can’t have a math test on first day of school, can we?”

  “Relax, Hamid. It’s not a test. It’s just a few questions so I know where we all are on our math journey.”

  I didn’t groan. I like math. Numbers will always tell you what they mean. They’re like a reliable witness in a mystery. A reliable witness is someone who saw the crime and tells you the truth. I needed a reliable witness to this morning’s snack theft. Hajrah didn’t see anything because she was in the closet. I could not call her a reliable witness. I needed someone else.

  Ms. Chu handed out a piece of paper with math questions on it. She put one on my desk.

  “If you need help with these questions, Myron, just let me know,” she said.

  When Ms. Chu stood close, it felt like I was inside a vanilla cupcake. I did not want to breathe or I might be sick from the smell. But if I didn’t breathe, I would die. Dying is worse than being sick. But if I was sick, I could not solve the mystery of the Snack Snatcher. I breathed through my mouth. Thankfully, Ms. Chu’s perfume didn’t taste like vanilla cupcakes.

  The math questions were not hard, but I still had a hard time answering them. I couldn’t concentrate on the numbers on the page. I had too many other questions to answer. Questions about the Snack Snatcher.

  What had the thief done with the morning snack? Were there any witnesses? Who else was in the kitchen this morning? Why are two boys standing in front of my desk?

  Smasher’s two friends from the lunchroom stared down at me with their shifty eyes. I’d heard Ms. Chu call their names during attendance: Cameron and Carter.

  “Working hard, Snoop?” said Cameron.

  “My name is not Snoop,” I said. “Please don’t call me that.”

  “We’ll call you whatever we like, Snoop,” said Carter.

  Hajrah stopped working on her math questions.

  “Get lost, guys,” she said. “We’re busy.”

  Cameron leaned in close to me. Very close. He brought his face into my personal space. My brain began to buzz.

  “You two better not be thinking about those missing snacks,” Cameron said. “If Smasher finds out you’ve been snooping, she won’t be happy.”

  My brain buzzed louder. That was not good. The buzzing was a warning to my body that I was getting upset. Sometimes when I get upset, I cannot control what I say or do. I tried to tell Cameron and Carter to go away, but the words would not come out.

  But Hajrah had no trouble with words. “We’re not snooping!” she said, loud enough for the class to hear. She jumped to her feet. “We’re doing our math. Now go away!”

  “Boys,” Ms. Chu called from her desk. Carter and Cameron jumped at the sound of the teacher’s voice. “Back to your seats.”

  Carter and Cameron looked at me the whole way back to their desks. It was the same look bad guys in movies have when they want to tell the good guys, I’ll get you.

  “Don’t worry about those two,” Hajrah said. “They’ve been bullies since kindergarten.”