Book Scavenger Read online

  “Fine, better than the nothing we’ve been doing. You got a phone with Internet?”

  “You got a Benz?”

  “Yeah, it’s in the shop, wiseguy.” Barry pushed himself up from the steps. “Follow me. I know someone.”

  Barry had a friend who worked as a bellhop at a hotel in the financial district. Luck was on their side, because that friend was working his shift and he let Barry and Clyde into the guests-only computer room.

  “Good, it’s empty,” Clyde said as they woke up the computer.

  Barry looked over his shoulder, grateful for the giant glass window that made the room visible to the lobby. He may tower over Clyde, but he still didn’t want to be alone in a dark alley—or a computer room—with the guy.

  They typed in Surly Wombat but only found a bunch of stuff about the animal.

  Barry flicked the logo. “That must be for a business or something. But how do you tell what business if the picture doesn’t say?”

  The more Barry stared at it, the more the dotted lines on the treasure map/Earth blurred together. And then, quick as a lightbulb flicking on, Barry could see a letter hidden in the drawing. “These dotted lines outline letters! See?” He traced a finger showing a B on one side and an S on the other. It was like a hide-and-seek game with letters. He was proud of himself for spotting them. “It’s still not much, but maybe if we enter BS and then all the words we can think of that have to do with this card…”

  Barry typed in BS, logo, and book.

  Clyde tapped the screen. “Make that hidden book.”

  “We didn’t hide it. That was just luck it missed the trash.” Good or bad luck, Barry still couldn’t tell.

  “But when that girl pulled the book out, she yelled to her friends, ‘a hidden book.’ I heard her. She thought it was hidden there on purpose. That’s why she left that card. It was, like, a message for whoever she thought hid it in the first place.”

  Barry frowned at Clyde. “Why didn’t you say any of this before now?”

  Clyde shrugged. “Didn’t seem important.”

  Barry changed book to hidden book, and also added the word game to his search list. He punched Enter and up popped a long list of hits. There was one about the game Liar’s Dice, another about a game called Cheat, another about a video game, and the rest of the page of hits were about something called Book Scavenger. Barry clicked one and the Book Scavenger home page opened up. There, front and center of the screen, was the logo from the card.

  CHAPTER

  13

  TUESDAY MORNING marked Emily’s second first day of school this year. In Albuquerque, she’d started school on the official first day of school in August, and now she was starting school again in San Francisco, almost two months later than the rest of the kids.

  At some point, Emily hoped she’d stop getting jitters, but today seemed worse than ever. She didn’t want to disappoint James or do something that made him realize he didn’t want to hang out with her anymore. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d started school with a friendship already made. It was hard breaking into a new school. The other kids had history—they’d been in the same class the year before, or soccer league, or Sunday school, or Girl Scouts, or had grown up on the same street. Even if two kids didn’t get along, they usually opted for each other over the strange new girl. Knowing they’d be moving again soon enough helped Emily not care what people thought of her, but she still couldn’t help the first-day jitters.

  When she opened her front door, James was waiting to walk with her. She’d wondered if his cowlick would be slicked down with gel for school, but Steve poked up in all his glory.

  “Kids wear Converse here, right?” She didn’t know why she’d blurted this question. She wasn’t even the type to care about what she wore. And it wasn’t like she had a variety of wardrobe options anyway if for some reason her jeans and hoodie were socially unacceptable.

  James pressed an index finger to his lips as he looked her up and down. “Hold on,” he said, and ran back upstairs.

  If Emily felt jittery before, she was full-fledged Mountain Dew soda plus five packs of Skittles jittery now. A San Francisco middle school must have a very rigid idea of acceptable clothes if James had taken her question so seriously.

  Emily heard a tinkling noise she couldn’t put her finger on until James jumped back onto the porch and held out his reindeer antlers.

  “I’m not wearing those!” Animal headgear couldn’t be a school trend … could it? There was that group of girls in Colorado who wore knit hats with cat ears.

  James shook the antlers with a shushing chime, looking amused at her alarm, and Emily laughed, finally realizing he was teasing her.

  “Take them,” he insisted. “Keep them in your backpack in case you need a smile. Or something to barter with.”

  Emily’s front door reopened and her mom waved the camera.

  “Oh good! I caught you two before you left.”

  Emily stifled a groan. Her mom had already insisted on pictures with Matthew before their dad drove him to the high school. Not to mention the first-day-of-school pictures they’d taken in New Mexico. How many first-day-of-seventh-grade pictures did a person need?

  “Mom—”

  James grabbed the antlers back, plunked them on his head, and swung an arm around her shoulders. “Cheese!” he said. “Or what do reindeer say? Moo!”

  “What?” Emily laughed. “I think it’s something like this.”

  She grabbed the antlers and put them on her head and made a noise like a horse neighing. They leaned their heads together and tried to make themselves a two-headed reindeer with the headband straddling them both. Her mom captured all of this, laughing along with them, and with every click of the camera, Emily’s nerves eased.

  Booker Middle School was a monstrous brick building that took up an entire block. It reminded her of the Newbury Public Library in Connecticut, one of her favorite libraries of all the places they’d lived. Both buildings were enormous and historic-looking and made of brick, but the Newbury library was surrounded by a hillside of dense trees on one side and a strip mall on the other, while Booker Middle School was surrounded by the high-strung wires of the city’s electric buses and squatty apartment buildings.

  The hallways were decorated for Halloween with orange-and-black crepe paper strung in sagging zigzags across the ceiling. Students’ spiderweb art clung to a concrete brick wall. As Emily moved through the crowded hallways during passing period, she felt largely unnoticed, except for when she accidentally bumped into someone. A perk of going to such a big school was that you didn’t stand out as the new girl.

  One of her tactics for distracting herself from new-school nerves was to try to spot other Book Scavenger users. This was particularly tricky at Booker because the hallways were so crowded and loud—slamming lockers, high-pitched laughter, voices shouting in different languages. Her attention bounced all over the place. Not that pinpointing another Book Scavenger user was an easy thing to deduce, even in the smallest and quietest of schools. You might occasionally see someone in a T-shirt or hat with the logo on it. More common was the Book Scavenger pin, which Emily herself wore on her hoodie. But it was easy to miss a detail that small. The few times she’d actually spotted other users, she didn’t have the nerve to approach them and say anything. Instead, she would rearrange her hoodie so her pin was visible and then position herself somewhere that she might be noticed, thereby leaving it up to the other person to do the approaching. So far that tactic hadn’t worked.

  Here at Booker, she knew there was at least one other Book Scavenger player: Babbage was prowling around somewhere. Maybe that poacher had even already been in one of her classes. Poaching was perfectly legal in the Book Scavenger world, and some users claimed the competitiveness made it more fun, but Emily didn’t like to do it. She thought it was more mean-spirited than competitive. If you knew somebody had their hopes up to find a certain book, why would you want to beat them to it and s
quash their hopes, just because you could?

  Emily slid her books into her locker, lingering longer than she needed to while slams and stomps and shouts filled the hallway. Fort, wild, rat, home. Having a puzzle to work through always helped distract her from all the new swirling around. She closed her locker door and found James standing right behind it. Emily yelped.

  “Geez, you surprised me!” But she smiled as she said it.

  “They don’t call them sneakers for nothing.” James kicked up the toe of his shoe. “Ready for social studies?” It was the one class they had together all day. The bell rang, and the two fell in step.

  “Any breakthroughs yet?” James asked.

  They had talked about Mr. Griswold’s game the entire walk to school, and during lunch they’d sat on the blacktop with their backs against the school building and The Gold-Bug open between them, poring over the pages to find more typos. The twins James normally sat with, Kevin and Devin, were there, too, but they were too distracted by their argument over the best way to defeat the bosses in a video game called Rocket Cats to pay them any attention.

  Emily shook her head in response to James’s question.

  “Me neither,” he said.

  They turned the corner and stopped in front of Room 40, their social studies class, to wait with the other students until the teacher arrived.

  “Can I see The Gold-Bug again?” James asked.

  Emily handed it over and looked up to see a girl in the crowd scowling at her. The girl was tall enough to pass for a high schooler. Her short-cropped hair puffed away from her head like a mushroom cap. James studied the pages of The Gold-Bug for the millionth time, oblivious to the mushroom-cap girl and everything else. Emily tried to study the pages with him but couldn’t shake that feeling of being watched. Sure enough, when she looked up again, the mushroom-cap girl’s glare was so intense Emily actually looked behind herself, assuming there must be someone else, but there were only lockers.

  Emily studied the floor, the ceiling, anything but the mushroom-cap girl. Fort, wild, rat, home. Her eyes landed on Vivian, a girl with stick-straight black hair so long it reached the tops of her khakis’ pockets. She’d met Vivian in an earlier class, and Emily relaxed at seeing a familiar face besides James’s. After their shared second period, Vivian had strode up to Emily, held out her hand, and said, “I’m Vivian Chu, seventh-grade class president. I make a point of knowing everyone in our class. Welcome to Booker Middle School. Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you as your class president.”

  Emily had shaken Vivian’s rigid hand and said nothing else. Now, in front of Room 40, she flexed her fingers in a small wave hello, to which Vivian gave a tight-lipped smile in return. It struck Emily how different it was, attending a new school with James already her friend. On her previous first days, she had always kept her head in a book, and here she was waving to almost-strangers.

  Now the mushroom-cap girl gnawed on her thumbnail and glared at the linoleum. Maybe she hadn’t been intensely focused on Emily after all. Maybe that was just her normal expression.

  A man strode toward the cluster of students, keys jangling in his hand. The crowd parted as he boomed, “Let’s go, people. We’ve got dead men to discuss.”

  Their teacher, Mr. Quisling, planted himself at the front of the room, legs apart, arms crossed. Muscles bulged from beneath the short sleeves of his red T-shirt. His silvery-gray hair was cropped close to his skull, and icy-blue eyes watched each student enter and take a seat. He held up a hand like a traffic cop, stopping Emily.

  “New face,” he barked.

  Emily didn’t know what to say to that, so she just stood there.

  “Emily Crane?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled.

  “Grab a textbook from the bookshelf. I hope you’ve been learning about the Roman Empire; otherwise you will have a lot of catching up to do.”

  Emily pulled a textbook from the shelf Mr. Quisling had indicated and slid into the seat James had saved for her.

  “So, Emily Crane,” Mr. Quisling said. “Where are you from?”

  A simple question, but it always threw her. She wasn’t from anywhere. She never knew if she should say where she was born or the last place she lived. If she said something vague like “all over,” a teacher like Mr. Quisling might interpret that as attitude. The rest of her teachers had just welcomed her to the school and left it at that.

  “Um…”

  There were snickers behind her. Emily looked back to see the mushroom-cap girl with her mouth covered and taunting in her eyes. So much for thinking she’d imagined her negative attention earlier.

  “I’m not grading you on your response, Ms. Crane,” Mr. Quisling said.

  “I moved here from New Mexico,” Emily finally replied as the tardy bell rang.

  Mr. Quisling clapped his hands twice to get everyone’s attention.

  “Excellent. A-plus for that. Just kidding, no grade.” Mr. Quisling rubbed his hands together. “Let’s get to work. Open your books to chapter eight.”

  Emily’s pen was poised over her open binder, ready to take notes. She copied the words Mr. Quisling wrote on the whiteboard, but her mind wandered back to Mr. Griswold’s game. Fort wild home rat …

  “Psst.”

  The Gold-Bug perched on the edge of James’s desk with an origami frog peeking from the pages. Making sure Mr. Quisling still faced the board, James held the book out to Emily.

  She grabbed it and slid out the frog-shaped note. Placing the note in her lap, she unfolded each section as Mr. Quisling spoke so he wouldn’t hear the rustling. The note was a garbled mixture of letters, but Emily recognized it immediately as their secret code.

  When Mr. Quisling looked down to read aloud from his textbook, Emily eased the note from under the desk. At the same moment, something hit the ground with a loud boom.

  Mr. Quisling’s head snapped up. Emily tucked the note inside The Gold-Bug.

  “Is there a problem?” Mr. Quisling said sharply. “Maddie?” Maddie, it turned out, was the name of the mushroom-cap girl.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Quisling,” Maddie said. “I accidentally knocked my book off my desk.”

  Emily did her best to discreetly slide The Gold-Bug inside her binder as Mr. Quisling walked down her aisle. He picked up Maddie’s textbook and handed it back. Emily’s heart thundered so loud she was sure he’d hear it.

  Instead of returning to the front of the room, Mr. Quisling hovered over Emily’s desk. With his index finger he flipped open her binder and revealed The Gold-Bug.

  “I don’t recognize this,” Mr. Quisling said. “You’re not doing homework for another class on my time, are you, Ms. Crane?”

  Emily jerked her head back and forth so emphatically her pencil flew out of her ponytail and clattered to the floor. Mr. Quisling picked up The Gold-Bug, flipped through it, and pulled out the unfolded note. She couldn’t bring herself to peek at James. Mr. Quisling studied the paper a bit before saying, “Interesting form of note-taking you have. Is this how they did it in your previous school?”

  He returned The Gold-Bug to her desktop with no additional attention. Emily would have felt relief about that except that he carried James’s note with him as he strode back to the front of the class.

  “So you’re an Edgar Allan Poe fan and you take encrypted notes.”

  Someone returned her pencil to her desktop, but Emily was too mortified to move or say thanks. Mr. Quisling gestured to his lecture outline about the Roman Empire and said, “Then surely you know what Edgar Allan Poe and Julius Caesar have in common?”

  She had no idea other than they were both dead and had been for a long time.

  “Anyone?” Mr. Quisling asked the class.

  A chair squeaked and someone coughed, but other than that the classroom was silent.

  “Who knows what a cipher is?” Mr. Quisling asked. He sounded genuinely interested, not like he was merely torturing a student. He turned to the whiteboard and wrote ci
pher.

  “A cipher,” he underlined the word, “is when you substitute individual letters with other letters, numbers, or symbols.”

  “Like a code,” someone said.

  “A code is similar: It’s a way to conceal a message. But a code can be more expansive, with word or phrase substitutions rather than individual letters.”

  Some of the students looked uncomfortable, like they might be embarrassed for Emily; others were writing in their notebooks, possibly copying Mr. Quisling’s board work.

  “Will we be tested on this?” asked a boy slumped in his desk in the far row next to the wall.

  Mr. Quisling blinked with lizard-like slowness. “You can consider anything we discuss in this class possible fodder for an exam, José.”

  And then, to Emily’s great horror, Mr. Quisling began copying James’s note onto the whiteboard.

  CHAPTER

  14

  “THIS IS WHAT Edgar Allan Poe and Julius Caesar had in common. They were both fans of the monoalphabetic substitution cipher.”

  Emily desperately hoped the bell would ring or someone would pull the fire alarm as she watched Mr. Quisling transcribe the note. She couldn’t even bring herself to look at James.

  “Julius Caesar developed one of the earliest substitution ciphers,” Mr. Quisling said. “Today we call it the Caesar Shift. Edgar Allan Poe was not only a famous writer but also a cipher enthusiast. So enthusiastic, in fact, he organized a cipher challenge when he was the editor of a literary magazine. He claimed he could solve any cipher submitted.”

  Despite herself, Emily found this interesting. It made sense, really, since his story “The Gold-Bug” included ciphers. She resumed cringing in horror once Mr. Quisling finished copying James’s note:

  NTDHU VKU OUD BS IXPV.

  B ETF VKBFO XI VKPUU.

  Mr. Quisling tapped the whiteboard. “What we have here is called a ciphertext. When decoding a secret message like this, letter frequency analysis is a good place to start.”

  Starting on the far left of the whiteboard, Mr. Quisling wrote out the standard alphabet. He was almost jogging as he scribbled his stubby capital letters. He’s enjoying this, Emily thought. He is, he’s enjoying humiliating her! James intently studied the pencil he rolled back and forth under his fingertips.