As it happened, Nia was the first to break the silence. “Actually, I have no idea why I’m here.” She swept her long brown hair over her shoulder, not flirtatiously, like an I-Girl would have, but impatiently, like it was annoying to have hair.
I was really surprised by how confident she sounded, as if she wasn’t afraid of the vice principal at all, and for a second I was reminded of the fact that she is Cisco Rivera’s sister. Cisco is the coolest, most popular guy in the junior class. It’s hard to believe two people who are such polar opposites could be even distantly related, much less siblings. It makes you think their parents performed some kind of social experiment on them when they were young.
Mr. Thornhill slammed his hand down on the desk so hard I jumped slightly, but I noticed Nia did not flinch. “Nia, I really don’t have time for lies right now. This is potentially a very serious situation.”
Like I said, I don’t exactly spend a lot of time getting called into the vice principal’s office, but I had heard him get mad before. Actually, the person I’d heard him getting mad at was Amanda—many times since she arrived in October, and most recently about a month ago. I’d come to the office to drop off the day’s attendance slip for Mrs. Peabody, and his door was open and he was yelling at her. It was the day after the President’s Day holiday, and the vice principal had opened the door to his office to discover a huge stuffed raven wearing a stovepipe hat sitting on his chair. I don’t know how Thornhill figured out that Amanda had done it, and she’d never told me if he’d been right to accuse her or, if he had, how she’d gotten into the vice principal’s office in the first place, but he was furious. And that was far from the only time, either. After the master clock in the office was rigged to run fast so that school got out early two Fridays in a row, I could hear him yelling at her in his office while I was walking by in the hallway.
Now he sounded that mad. Mad like Nia had done something really, really terrible.
Whatever it was, I definitely didn’t want to be associated with it. Or her. I cleared my throat. “Um, Mr. Thornhill, I think there’s been some mistake. We don’t even know one another.” Sometimes the cluelessness of adults is nothing short of shocking. I mean, not to be snotty, but I’m an I-Girl and Nia’s a social leper. Did Mr. Thornhill think we were friends or something?
“Callie, you’ve always been an excellent student with spotless behavior.” Mr. Thornhill tapped the folders on his desk and I wondered if one of them had something to do with me. “I highly doubt you want to ruin such a stellar record by failing to tell me what you know.” Was it my imagination, or did Mr. Thornhill emphasize the word stellar? Once again, I thought of my mother.
“Look, Mr. Thornhill, they’re not lying,” said Hal. “We really don’t hang together.” As he leaned forward, the small gold loop in his ear caught the light, and I remembered Traci had said something about his supposedly getting a tattoo somewhere on his body over the summer.
“No, you look, Hal. I am talking about a serious act of vandalism. I want you to tell me what you know and I want you to tell me now."
Mr. Thornhill was so angry a vein bulged on his neck. I
actually felt a little afraid of him. This time, when I glanced over at Nia, she was looking at me, and I knew the What the hell? look on her face was mirrored on my own.
“Why don’t you tell us what you know?” said Hal. His voice was calm, soothing. Like he thought Mr. Thornhill was crazy or something.
Which, given the circumstances, didn’t seem so impossible.
Mr. Thornhill leaned forward and jabbed his finger in Hal’s direction. “Don’t you condescend to me, Hal Bennett. You all know what Amanda Valentino did this morning. What I want to know is, why has she implicated the three of you in her crime?”
Okay, this was so weird. I mean, I’d just been thinking of Amanda when Mrs. Leong called me into Thornhill’s office, and now he was mad at me for something she’d done. But still, what he was saying made no sense. I mean, Amanda and I were friends, but Amanda and Nia and Hal weren’t. Nobody was friends with Nia, except maybe some of the other weirdos in Model Congress or Mock Trial or whatever lame clubs she belonged to. And as hot as Hal may have been, he still only hung out with a few other dorky guys whose names escaped me. But not Amanda.
“Look, obviously you’re not going to believe us if we say we’re innocent. So why don’t you just ask her yourself? She’ll tell you,” said Nia, and the crazy thing was that now her confidence didn’t remind me of Cisco so much as of Amanda, the only other person I knew who never backed down in the face of authority.
Vice Principal Thornhill got up and walked around to the front of his desk. Then he leaned back on it and crossed his arms, staring at each of us in turn.
“That’s a lovely idea, Nia, and I’d be happy to comply. There’s just one problem with your plan. As the three of you know perfectly well, Amanda Valentino has disappeared.”
I felt as if Mr. Thornhill hadn’t spoken so much as he’d just slammed me in the head with a piece of wood from my dad’s workshop. Amanda had disappeared?
“But—” I was about to say that Amanda hadn’t disappeared, that she’d just been over at my house yesterday, but before I could finish my sentence, Nia cut me off.
“But you don’t seem to understand, Mr. Thornhill. None of us is even friends with Amanda Valentino.”
I jerked my head to stare at her. On the one hand, I knew Nia was telling the truth. I knew it. How could Amanda have been friends with someone so … well, so weird? And she’d never even mentioned Nia, not once. Of course they weren’t friends.
But there was something about the way Nia’s face was whiter than the school mascot and how tightly she was clutching the arms of her chair that made it seem as if she were lying. Which would mean she and Amanda were friends. Only that was …
“Impossible, Nia,” said Vice Principal Thornhill, and now he sounded almost tired. “That is simply not possible.” He walked over to the window and opened the blind. “First of all: look.”
The sky had cleared after last night’s rain, and the bright sun on the wet pavement of the parking lot was nearly blinding. I squinted against its rays as the three of us stood up and went over to the window.
“What are we looking at?” asked Hal, and I realized I was so lost in my own thoughts I hadn’t been looking for anything to look at.
“My car,” said the vice principal.
As soon as he said it, I saw which car was his. Which car had to be his. Parked slightly off to one side of the faculty parking lot, it was the brightest thing in sight. Actually, it could have been the brightest thing in the entire world. Even from a distance, it seemed to throb with color—I couldn’t decipher all the designs,
but there was a gigantic rainbow that extended from the front wheel to the back wheel and a huge peace sign covering most of the driver’s side door. I could just make out what looked like a group of stars on the back door and a bright yellow sun on the hubcap below it.
The whole thing was so outrageous that I suddenly burst out laughing. I couldn’t help myself—it was like the car was some huge joke of Amanda’s. Only, once I started laughing, I couldn’t stop. I was sure everyone else was going to laugh, too, but they didn’t, and I started to get freaked out, like maybe I was getting hysterical or something. I almost wished someone would throw a glass of cold water in my face.
“I’m glad you find this funny, Callista,” said Mr. Thornhill.
It