Remember Dippy Read online

  No. No way. I wasn’t going to let everyone’s life get ruined.

  “Mem,” I said, “go inside and set up a video game. Any one you want. I’ll be in in a minute, okay?”

  “Okay? Okay, Johnny, but I’m gonna cream you!” he said and ran into the house.

  Without exactly thinking it through, I headed across the street. Both cars were in the Dempster’s driveway, so Mr. Dempster had to be home, and I was going to talk to him. Never mind that I didn’t know whether or not Dirk had snitched on me. No matter that I had no idea what I should say. I needed to do something, and if I couldn’t make any progress with Dirk, I’d have to go straight to the big guy.

  By the time I was halfway across the street, I started having second thoughts. Well, not second thoughts as much as outright dread and panic. What if Dirk answers the door? What if I say something to Mr. Dempster that makes things even worse? What if Mem follows me over here and does something stupid? But I couldn’t let any of that stop me from trying to fix what I’d screwed up. I walked faster so I wouldn’t have time to change my mind—across the street, past the mailbox, down the driveway, up the front steps, and onto the stoop.

  Which is where I heard the yelling. The windows must have been open because I could make out every word. A man—it had to be Mr. Dempster—was hollering that he’s had it, that this can’t go on, that this won’t go on, that things are going to change one way or another. No one spoke back to him, so I didn’t know whether he was shouting at Dirk or Mrs. Dempster or maybe someone on the phone, but it sounded a lot like the way my parents shrieked at each other before they split—ear-piercing, furious, a little berserk.

  I should have beat it as soon as I heard the fighting, but I kind of froze there on the stoop. The next thing I knew, the front door burst open and Mr. Dempster stormed out, all red in the face and sweat rolling down his bald head. He stopped just short of plowing me down.

  “What?” he snapped. “What is it?”

  Talk about a case of rotten timing. But here we were, and he’d asked me what I wanted, so I decided to give it a try. “Mr. Dempster, I was wondering if I could possibly talk to you about something. Something that’s really important to my aunt.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Johnny. My Aunt Collette lives across the street, and—”

  “Not now!” he barked, flying past me and marching over to his car. He slammed the door shut and took off down the street with the radio blaring, leaving me pressed against the porch railing with no idea what I’d walked in on.

  Now what was I going to do?

  Chapter 10

  I holed myself up the next few days, thinking about stuff—moping, really—plus we had a cold snap and there was no point going to the lake. I got a postcard my dad sent from Acapulco, the first stop on his Mexican cruise with Kim, saying he couldn’t wait for my visit over Labor Day weekend. Yeah, right. Leesha came over a couple of times, and Mr. Boots and Millie stopped by on their way downtown one day. But Mo was busy helping his father build their deck, and Reed was getting over an attack of poison ivy, so mostly it was me, Mem, Linguini and Jambalaya kicking around the house, playing video games, and watching The Weather Channel.

  Aunt Collette was working even more than usual because her best clerk was on vacation, and she still hadn’t hired the Butler girl. When she finally got a day off, TJ asked her to go see the swans over in Lake Swanton. She told me she could take Mem along if I wanted the time off, but it wasn’t like I had big plans or anything, so I told her to go ahead and leave him with me. Who knew how much longer TJ would be around anyway, if the zoning thing failed?

  TJ was wearing a wild raspberry-colored Hawaiian shirt when he came to pick up Aunt Collette, and she had on an electric-yellow sundress plastered with bright ruby poppies. You practically needed sunglasses to be in the same room with them. Leesha, who’d been hanging out with us all day, told Aunt Collette she looked nice, but I doubt she meant it. How could a girl whose favorite color is black—right down to her toenail polish—really like fluorescent rainbow-wear?

  Once TJ and Aunt Collette left, the three of us played a few hands of I Doubt It and had just taken out the Monopoly box when we heard voices on the front steps. I hopped up and found Mo and Reed at the door, each carrying a paper grocery bag in one hand and a 7-11 slushie in the other. Mo’s face and arms were seriously sunburned, and Reed’s legs were splotched with the scabs from his poison ivy rash. Both of them should’ve been home applying lotion, but I was glad they came by.

  “Hey,” I said, opening the door.

  “Hey Johnny, Mem,” they said, and then they stood there gawking at Leesha. I forgot that they’d never met her. Funny how you think your best friends automatically know everything about you, especially about who your other friends are.

  “Guys, this is Leesha,” I said. “She’s visiting from Chicago. Leesha, this is Mo and Reed.”

  Leesha, who was stretched out on the living room floor setting up the Monopoly bank, turned to Mem and said, “They need haircuts big time.” Mo and Reed shot daggers at me, but I didn’t even try to explain. You can’t really explain someone like Leesha. Instead, I asked, “What’s in the bags?”

  Mo drank the last of his slushie in a slurp loud enough to be heard back at the 7-11. “Oh,” he said, kicking an imaginary pebble on the floor, “we kinda thought maybe Mem could help us get our video games to the next level.”

  “Yeah,” Reed added. “I’m still stuck in the lagoon in Shipwreck. What do you say, Mem, can you do it?”

  “Yup,” Mem answered as he helped Leesha sort the play cash. “Right after the Monopoly game.”

  “But that could take hours,” complained Mo.

  “You wanna be the dog or the iron?” Mem asked him. “I’m the shoe and Leesha’s the battleship.”

  Mo and Reed rolled their eyes as they sat down to play. Leesha seemed amused by the whole thing. I was just glad to have my buddies back. Plus, I’m a natural at Monopoly. I bought three out of the four railroads right off the bat. Funny, all I kept thinking was how great it would be to have that money for real—so I could buy up all the state quarters and find Jo her American Samoa.

  “Is your aunt upstairs?” Mo asked at one point.

  “She’s not here,” I said. “Why?”

  “Nothing. Just, she wasn’t at the store when we got our slushies, so I figured she must be home, is all.”

  I told him she had to go out for a while, but Mem blurted out what I was trying to conceal. “She’s on a date,” he announced.

  “No kidding,” Mo said. “Who with?”

  “Who with? Who with? TJ!” Mem answered.

  “Who?”

  “Somebody she met,” I cut in. “Reed, it’s your turn.”

  Unfortunately, Mem didn’t get the hint to end this particular conversation. “Are they gonna get married?” he wanted to know.

  I wanted to know too—everyone probably did. Leave it to Mem to say out loud what the rest of us wouldn’t. “No. I mean, I don’t know,” I said. “No one knows—they only just started seeing each other.”

  “They’re cute together,” Leesha said.

  “Huh?” said Mem.

  “That means you can tell they really like each other,” she explained. “That’s a good sign.”

  “Can we get back to the game now?” I asked. I didn’t want anyone, especially Mem, getting their hopes up about this guy who, for all we knew, would be moving back to New Jersey next week. But everyone’s eyes stayed fixed on me, as if I owed them a bigger explanation about my aunt’s love life. Thankfully, the doorbell rang again.

  It was Jo. Jo was at my door. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Hi, Johnny.” She smiled her perfect smile.

  “H-hi. C’mon in.”

  “Thanks. Patsy just had to walk by Dirk’s house, and she just had to have me go with her. They’re out there in his driveway, and I’m gonna puke if I have to keep listening to—oh…” She t
railed off when she spotted Leesha, who looked up at her and then turned back to the game.

  “Jo, this is Leesha,” I said. “Holly’s her aunt. She’s here for the summer.”

  “Oh. Nice to meet you,” Jo said. But she didn’t mean it—she was all ice.

  “Hi, Jo!” Mem grinned. “We’re playing Monopoly. Johnny’s the banker!”

  “Cool. Listen, Johnny, I came by to tell you something. You know what I heard about Niko? I heard he accidentally cooked a razor blade into somebody’s pizza the other day.”

  “It was a thumbtack, not a blade,” Leesha said.

  Jo opened her mouth. No words came out, but I knew she wanted to ask Leesha what made her an instant authority on Niko. So I explained, “That was our pizza.”

  Jo shifted from one foot to the other. “Oh, you went out to lunch…together?”

  “Well, yeah. We…yeah.”

  “Hey Jo,” Mem said. “Wanna be the thimble? Johnny’s winning.”

  Still eyeing Leesha she said, “Wouldn’t want to cut in. I’m obviously interrupting.” She turned sharply toward the door.

  “Jo, wait, it’s not like that,” I said, but she was already closing the door behind her. “I like your nails,” I muttered to no one.

  “C’mon, Johnny,” Mem said. “The game’s not over yet.”

  I slumped onto the couch. “You play. I’m done.” Done with Monopoly and, from the looks of it, done with Jo. How did I let this happen?

  “Hey, I have an idea,” Mo brightened. “How about we call it quits on the Monopoly, and Mem, you can help us with our video games for a while?”

  After glancing at Leesha, Mem studied his Monopoly shoe, turning it over and over in his fingers. He sighed a long sigh, like he was having trouble making this big decision. Then he drew in a big breath and bellowed, “The game isn’t over!” He flipped over the Monopoly board and threw the bank money in the air. “We’re playing Monopoly!” he screamed. “You promised! You’re a liar! You prommmmisssssed!”

  Mo and Reed scooted back and sat there with their jaws hanging open. Leesha tried to put her arm around Mem, but he batted her away and started rocking back and forth. “We’re playing Monopoly,” he whimpered to himself. “We’re playing Monopoly.”

  Time to surrender. “That’s right,” I said, dropping back onto the floor. “The game isn’t over and we need to finish it. Right, Mo and Reed?”

  They were too stunned to do anything but nod and move back into the circle. While Leesha gathered up the money, I set the board back up…in a way that, with any luck, put me about five minutes away from winning. “Okay, I think this is how the board was when we left off,” I lied, and Mem was content again.

  Reed went bankrupt first, then Mem, who I invited to team up with me, then Mo and Leesha. “We won!” Mem whooped. “Johnny and me won! We creamed you all! Ha ha! We won!”

  “You sure did,” said Mo. “Now can we do StarBender?” “Okay,” Mem said, “but you have to clean up the Monopoly game first.”

  “No sweat,” Mo replied, happily gathering up the Community Chest cards, the money and the tokens. “I wanna get to the Orion Nebula.”

  “The Orion what?” asked Leesha.

  “Nebula,” said Mem as he set up the GameCube controllers. “That means a nursery where new stars are being born. I learned about it on The Weather Channel. Martin the Meteorologist says you can see the Orion Nebula in the night sky. He says it has 700 stars, but it looks like just one star, and it’s in a picture in the sky of someone wearing a sword. Then he wishes you starry nights.”

  This was probably supposed to be interesting, but I wasn’t in the mood for an astronomy lesson so I got up to get a drink. Leesha must not have been in the mood either because she followed me into the kitchen.

  “You want anything?” I asked, opening the ’fridge.

  “Naw.”

  I dug out a mini-carton of orange juice and straddled a kitchen chair. She took the seat across from me and started paging through one of Aunt Collette’s People magazines. I was glad she didn’t feel like talking because I needed to sit and figure out some things. Okay, I thought, tapping my fingers against the juice carton, what exactly just happened between Jo and me? Is she jealous of Leesha—and does that mean she likes me, likes me enough to get jealous? Or did she just decide she wasn’t interested—that a guy who sits at home playing board games on a Friday night isn’t worth bothering with? If only I knew what Jo was thinking, I’d know what to do—or not do. Girls are impossible to figure out. I took a long swig from the carton.

  “That Jo is wound pretty tight,” Leesha said without looking up from her magazine.

  “I guess.”

  “Pretty funny, her thinking you and I were on a date or something. Like that would ever happen.”

  “No kidding.”

  She squinted at me and raised one harsh eyebrow.

  “I mean, you know what I mean,” I said.

  “Whatever.” She rattled a couple of pages, then asked, “So, what’s this hard time Niko’s supposedly going through anyway?”

  “He lost a really important piece of jewelry—a diamond ring. It fell down the vent in his kitchen floor. That’s why he’s been so touchy.”

  “And careless.”

  “More like forgetful.”

  “Yeah, well, his forgetfulness could’ve put a hole in my tongue. Or my innards.”

  My eyes migrated to the holes in her ears. What were there—six pairs?

  “Then he’d really have a problem on his hands,” she added.

  “I think you’d have noticed it in time.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” She snapped the magazine shut and pushed her chair back. “Anyway, I’m gonna go say hi to the ferrets.” She grabbed a stack of magazines from the table and was gone. Like I said, girls are impossible to figure out.

  At least I had a little peace and quiet now. Quiet, anyway. I didn’t feel peaceful at all and didn’t know if I ever would. Everything I touched these days turned to megaflop. Maybe I would’ve been better off spending the summer with Dad and Princess Kim in Maine, where there was less disaster to get into. But no, problems found me wherever I was, and solutions dodged me. I wondered what would go wrong next.

  I didn’t get a chance to wonder for very long. Suddenly Leesha was running back into the kitchen shouting, “The ferrets!”

  I jumped up. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. We can use them.”

  “What for?”

  “To get Niko’s ring back.” She fell into a chair and tucked both legs beneath her. “My brother—I told you he had a ferret—he told me all about this. In the olden days, people used ferrets to run wires through tight spaces. They tied the wires to the ferrets’ legs and let them run through pipes and stuff. I bet Mem’s little fur balls could cruise Niko’s vent easy.”

  “I don’t know, Leesha. I mean, even if the ferrets could navigate the vents, what makes you think they’d bother picking up the ring? It’s not like it’s food or something.”

  “Shows what you know about ferrets. They love shiny things—key chains, ribbon, anything. They’ll steal it and stash it away like treasure. A piece of jewelry? Irresistible.”

  “But it’s dark in those pipes. The ring won’t shine. Nothing would.”

  Leesha’s cheeks flushed, and she bit her lip hard.

  “Nice try though,” I offered.

  “No, wait, wait. We’ll just shine a light for them, that’s all. You must have a flashlight around here.”

  I shrugged.

  “Anyway, I’ve got a penlight in my purse. Niko must have something too. It’s fine.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Why, what’ve we got to lose?”

  “Mem’s beloved ferrets, that’s what.”

  “No way. Ferrets are way too smart to get lost.”

  Leesha really knew how to apply the pressure, but I still didn’t want to get involved. After all, Niko didn’t ask us for
help, did he? It really wasn’t any of our business. But then I remembered what Mr. Boots said about everyone needing friends, and it seemed like Niko didn’t have any right now.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Okay, look,” I said. “How about we research this a little, and then if we still think it could work, I’ll ask Mem.”

  “I’ll ask Mem. Where’s the computer?”

  “Don’t have one. But Mo does.”

  “Fine. Hey everyone,” Leesha shouted into the living room. “Pack up your stuff. We’re going to Mo’s.”

  And that was that. Mo and Reed gathered up their game discs, and we all piled out the door. Jo and Patsy were still yakking with Dirk, whose dad was yelling at him through the window to quit goofing off and start washing the cars, but none of us said anything to each other.

  When we got to Mo’s, I turned on The Weather Channel for Mem, and the rest of us crowded into Mo’s room to Google ferrets and discuss Leesha’s plan. We found out some incredible stuff—like, ferrets ran the video cabling for Princess Diana and Prince Charles’ wedding in 1981. During World War II, ferrets ran wires in U.S. airplane wings. And a few years ago, a pet ferret connected the computers at a U.S. missile-warning center by threading wires through crowded 40-foot-long spaces.

  “Listen to this,” said Leesha. “It says the word ferret comes from the Latin furonem, which means thief. ‘Your ferret will happily steal anything it can get its paws on. In fact, the term ferret out means to search and discover through persistent investigation.’ ” Then she turned to me and stared.

  I thought about how happy Niko would be to get his ring back, to be able to propose to Carmelita and start sleeping at night again. But I also thought about how devastated Mem would be if Linguini or Jambalaya got hurt or stuck in the vents or if they ran away. Fists in my pockets, I paced the room, feeling my friends’ eyes on me, wishing for some Magic 8 Ball to give me the right answer.