Open If You Dare Read online

  I want to know what it’s all been for.

  While slipping the old picture inside my copy of James and the Giant Peach, I whisper a small good-bye to Anne Shirley. As I turn to go, I hear the words form in my head:

  Girl Detective, I’m coming for you.

  PART 5

  A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT

  30

  “STRIKE THREE!” the umpire calls out and everyone in our bleachers cheers. That’s where Rose and I are sitting watching Ally strike out another Condor.

  “Way to go, Ally!” Joey calls from the dugout. It’s already the sixth inning and the Broncos are leading 2–0. The sun is blazing and I don’t know how Ally’s doing it. When I called her last night, she said she’d had a stomachache all day. And this morning, when Rose and I met her at the concession stand before the game, she still wasn’t feeling so great. But there she is, like some kind of mythical warrior, battling the Condors and the midday sun.

  We’re at the big baseball field at our park—the one with the tallest bleachers, the biggest scoreboard, and the most official announcer. Broncos fans crowd the bleachers on the third-base side, Condors on the first-base side. On the field, Romeo’s behind Ally at third base and Connor’s at first. They’ve got her back today.

  The General, Mark, Zora, and my parents sit on the row behind us. Simon and Ashley are a few bleachers up.

  I’m wearing a white shirt and rainbow shorts, and Rose is in her yellow overall shorts and a tee. It’s so hot, I feel like my sweat is sweating. Rose leans into me and whispers, “This is my last baseball game. Maybe ever.”

  I hate to be reminded of that. There are so many lasts this summer and they’re tumbling over like dominoes. And my mom has already started packing us for Chicago.

  Another batter walks up to the plate. “Come on, Ally,” my dad calls out. Her eyes peek our way before turning back to business. She pulls down the front of her Broncos hat, winds up, and throws. Whoa.

  “Strike!”

  “She’s doing so great, Jill,” my mom says to the General.

  The General puts her finger to her lips. “Let’s not jinx it.”

  My mom gives me the look. The one that says there is no scientific basis for “jinxing” things and I’m not to believe such nonsense. Honestly, I’m not sure which mother is actually right.

  “Strike two!”

  My eyes wander to the announcer’s booth. We saw the middle school coach go up there at the start of the game. He’s been watching Ally this whole time. I wonder what Joey thinks of this. Ally doing this great in front of Coach Rodriguez might change his chances in the coming year with the old middle school team. He’s being pretty cool, though. For Joey.

  Crack. The batter makes contact and hits the ball hard. “Line drive,” the announcer cries. Everyone stands as a collective “ooh” erupts from our bleachers. Romeo dives and makes the catch. The ump calls the out and the announcer shouts, “What a catch by third baseman, Romeo Dawson!”

  “Yay, Romeo!” Rose yells, and claps. I clap, too. It was pretty incredible.

  The next batter approaches the plate. One more out and the inning is over. One more inning and Ally has won the game. Ally throws and, “Strike!” It’s all going her way. Until Rose elbows me in the arm—hard.

  “What?!” I turn, ready to elbow her back. But Rose is not looking at me. She’s staring at Ally, in a very weird way.

  “Look,” she whispers. “When she throws.”

  I watch as Ally pitches but don’t see anything. The umpire calls a ball and our entire bleachers boo him. Except for Rose. She can’t keep her eyes off Ally.

  “Maybe I’m seeing things,” she whispers again. “I hope I’m seeing things. Just look. When she steps forward. Look at the inside of her pants.”

  Ally winds up and throws, her left leg coming forward off the mound as she releases her fast ball.

  “Oh no,” I say quietly, and squeeze Rose’s knee. Whipping around, I wave the General toward me. She leans down and I whisper in her ear, “Ally’s got her period!”

  The General’s eyes seek out the red spot of blood trickling down the inside of Ally’s white baseball pant leg. “Oh no,” she echoes, and grabs my shoulder. “As soon as she gets off the field, you girls get her to the bathroom.” She doesn’t wait for a response.

  “Where’s she going? What’s wrong?” Mom asks, and I whisper what’s happened in her ear.

  As soon as we hear “Strike three!” from the field, my mom says, “Come on.” The inning ends and the players are leaving the field. We pass Mark on the way to the stairs.

  “What’s up?” he calls out.

  “Later!” Rose answers as Ally sees us heading her way.

  * * *

  I close the door to the bathroom with a loud clunk and lock it.

  “What’s up?” Ally cries. “I can’t be goofing around!”

  “We’re not goofing,” Rose says.

  “We’re not, Al,” I say, shaking my head and looking down at her pants.

  “What are you looking at?” Ally asks and looks, too. Like it’s no big deal. Until it’s a humongous deal. “OH MY GOD!” she cries. “WHAT’S HAPPENING?”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I say, trying to calm her.

  “It’s your period,” Rose tells her.

  “My period?” she says in total disbelief, even though we learned all about it when they gave us the talk in school last year. “But I’m only eleven.”

  “I know. But—”

  “I can’t have my period today! I’ve got to finish the game!” Ally grabs my arm like a lifeline. “Did anybody see it? Do the boys know?”

  “I don’t think so.” I look to Rose.

  “Nah. Boys are too dumb to notice something like that. We caught it in time.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely,” Rose says and I nod, having no idea whether they saw it or not.

  There’s a knock on the door and Ally freezes like it’s the police.

  “It’s your mom.” I open the door, and the General and my mom slip inside.

  The General drops a backpack on the floor and starts unzipping it. “I was afraid something like this might happen,” she says. “But why today?” She pulls out a pair of underwear, blue jeans, and a box of maxi pads and hands them to my mom.

  “What is this?” Ally asks, her eyes bugging out.

  “I got my period when I was eleven,” the General says. “Before all of my older friends. Happened at school and I didn’t know what was going on. I know we’ve talked about it, but we probably should have talked more. I packed a bag and hid it in the car, just in case. But I really didn’t think it would happen so soon.”

  Dumbstruck, Ally stares at her mom.

  “Are you okay, sweetie?” the General asks in the gentlest tone I have ever heard come out of her mouth.

  “Yeah,” Ally croaks quietly.

  “Okay.” The General turns toward us. “Give us a few minutes. Okay?”

  “Yes,” my mom answers. “Let’s go, girls. Mrs. Lorenz has got this.”

  The bathroom door closes behind us, and my mom, Rose, and I stand awkwardly outside.

  “Wow,” Rose finally says.

  “It’s going to be all right,” says my mom.

  “Yeah, but why did it have to happen today?” I ask. Mom puts her arm around me and pulls us out of the sun. I look up at her. “When is it going to happen to us?”

  “Sooner than I’m ready.”

  I remember Ally’s phone call from the night before and say, “So that’s why Ally wasn’t feeling good.”

  “Yeah,” Rose says.

  “Sometimes it doesn’t make you feel good,” Mom says. “But it’s part of becoming a woman and all that. Biological. Scientifically sound.” She gives us a motherly look. “It’ll be okay. I didn’t have mine until thirteen, so you probably have a little time. We’ll get prepared.” She looks at Rose. “You should ask your mom about it. So you can be ready, too.”

&n
bsp; Rose nods but I can tell she’s a little freaked-out inside.

  The bathroom door opens slightly. “Glad you’re still here.” The General leans through the crack. “Birdie, we need you.”

  I slip into the bathroom and look at Ally, who’s standing in her Broncos shirt and new underwear. “What’s up?”

  “She can’t pitch in jeans. It’s too hot. And that’s all we’ve got,” the General says, eyeballing my rainbow shorts.

  “Oh.” I look down at my shorts. “Oh!”

  By the time we’re walking back to the bleachers, me wearing Ally’s jeans on the hottest day of the year, the Broncos coach is going nuts. Joey runs up to us and yells, “Where’s Blond—I mean Ally?!”

  “She’s coming,” my mom answers. “Slight wardrobe malfunction. That’s all.”

  “Yeah, cool your jets,” says Rose.

  “Here she comes,” I say as Ally and her mom turn the corner heading our way.

  The General marches over to the agitated coach, and I hear her say, “Her pants ripped.” A real and true Greater-Good lie. Way to go, Gen.

  Ally grabs her glove from the dugout and heads back toward the pitcher’s mound, my rainbow shorts hanging out from under her Broncos jersey. There are murmurs all around, especially from the other players.

  “What’s with the shorts, Al?” Romeo calls out from third base.

  “It’s too hot out here,” she answers, all relaxed-like. “Needed to cool down.”

  And just like that, Ally settles in.

  She strikes out every Condor who comes to the plate.

  She wins the inning. And wins the game.

  After the ball game, the boys, led by Joey, lift Ally up on their shoulders and everything. Riding high, she throws off her hat and pulls the tie out of her hair. With her long blond hair flowing, there is no doubt that a girl just won the big game.

  31

  THE PLAN had been to go swimming after the game, and the boys wanted us to come, but it starts to look like rain. And with Ally’s new development, we decide to hang out at my house. The General drops her off after being sure Ally wasn’t too traumatized.

  “It’s like a mouse mattress. No joke,” Ally says, adjusting how she sits on my bed. “Weird, you know.”

  “No, I don’t,” Rose says.

  “I’m just glad it happened at the end of the game, not the beginning,” Ally says. “Pitching seven innings with this thing between my legs would have been murder!”

  “TMI, Al!” Rose exclaims.

  “No such thing as TMI on this topic,” I say. “This is real girl stuff that we’ve got to share. Let’s commemorate.” I pick up my Polaroid camera.

  “What? Getting my period or winning the game?”

  “Both,” I say and squeeze in between Rose and Ally on the bed. “Smile.” Instead, we make funny faces as I click the button. As soon as the undeveloped photo shoots out of the camera, Rose pulls it off and starts blowing on it.

  “Why are you doing that?” I ask.

  “On the Internet, it says if you blow on a Polaroid picture, it develops faster.”

  “Is that where you learn everything?” I ask.

  Rose nods. “Pretty much.”

  “Does this mean I’m more mature than you guys?” Ally asks, her face absolutely serious. “Now, I mean?”

  Rose and I look at each other and bust up laughing. “No!” I say.

  “Absolutely not!” declares Rose.

  Ally’s face falls. “Oh. I just thought…”

  “You’re definitely more mature than yesterday,” I say because she suddenly looks so sad.

  “Oh, good.” And Ally’s smiling again, her mood changing at the rate of a golden retriever’s.

  “Speaking of pictures…” I grab my library copy of James and the Giant Peach and pull out the photo I found yesterday in A Wrinkle in Time. I told them about my whole adventure before the game but they have yet to see the actual picture of the house. “What do you think?” I hold up the black-and-white photo and watch them study it.

  “It’s a house,” Rose says.

  “An old one,” adds Ally.

  “It’s the house where Girl Detective lived.”

  They examine it more closely. “Have you ever seen that house before?” Ally asks me.

  “Maybe,” I say, unconvincingly.

  “You know it could be anywhere,” Rose says and flips onto her back, looking up at the ceiling.

  “Yeah, but it could be around here,” I say. “Why would she bury the box on our island if she didn’t live in our neighborhood?”

  “Good point,” Ally says.

  “And I feel like the final clue is just waiting for us under a creaky floorboard by a bookshelf in her bedroom. Just like the clue said. Rose, look at it again.” I hand her the picture. “If this is what Girl Detective’s house looked like back then, what do you think it looks like now?”

  Rose gives it serious attention, then hands the photo back to me. “Old.”

  I gaze down at the black-and-white image in my hand and silently agree. It would definitely look old by now.

  “Popcorn!” My mom’s voice calls up from downstairs. “And Zora’s putting on a movie. You girls want to come watch?”

  None of us moves until we hear a burst of thunder and Rose says, “I’ll go.”

  “It’s not even raining yet!” I say.

  “It’s not the rain I’m scared of,” she says and heads toward the stairs.

  “Chicken,” Ally jokes and pulls a book from my shelf. She plops back on my bed. “I want popcorn!”

  “She’s not coming back,” I say.

  “And I’m not watching Frozen.”

  I look down on my bedspread and see that our Polaroid selfie has developed nicely. Rose is doing moose ears with her hands, Ally is sticking out her tongue, and I’ve got my eyes crossed. I take the picture to my corkboard and pin it to an open spot near the center. Only a few more selfies and my corkboard will be completely full.

  “What’s this?”

  “What’s what?” I ask.

  “This,” Ally says and I turn around. She’s sitting up, holding my copy of When You Reach Me in one hand and a little card in the other. A Valentine’s card.

  “No, give me that!” I rush over but Ally springs to the other side of the bed, putting the mattress between us.

  She reads from the card: “Roses are red, Violets are blue, Didn’t want a girlfriend, Until I met you.”

  “Come on, Al.”

  “Romeo likes you?!”

  “Not so loud.” I stare at her, wishing desperately that I had destroyed Romeo’s card on the day I got it. “Yeah,” I finally say. “He does.”

  “Since Valentine’s Day and you never told me!”

  It thunders loudly and I close the bedroom door. “How could I? If I told you, you’d say we have to tell Rose and—”

  “We have to tell Rose.”

  “We can’t tell her. She’ll hate me.”

  “Do you like him back?” Ally asks.

  “I don’t know. No! He’s a nice guy but I don’t want a boyfriend.” I look at the book that was supposed to guard my secret and want to strangle it. “Ugh! Since when do you read?”

  “Funny.”

  “She’s going to feel like an idiot. I’ve let her make a fool of herself with Romeo when I knew he didn’t like her.”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “But I didn’t want to hurt her,” I say. “You get that, right? You know, for the greater good.”

  Ally shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. There’s no greater good with us.”

  I sit beside her on the bed. I know she’s right but … “She’s moving, Al. In a couple of weeks. Maybe she never has to find out. Maybe we can just let it go.”

  “Let it go, let it go,” she sings, like Elsa from Frozen. Then looks at me. “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re friends! We don’t keep secrets. Not from each other.”

  I tra
ce the line of a big purple bedspread-flower with my finger. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “If she finds out and you don’t tell her and she moves away, we’ll lose her forever. She won’t trust us anymore.”

  “Us?”

  “We come in a package, Birdie. We’ll be her American friends who lied to her.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t lie.”

  “I know. But I’ll be lying now.” She pauses. “You want me to tell her?”

  “No! I’ll do it. Just let me find the right time, okay?” I look at Ally pleadingly. “Okay?”

  She hands me Romeo’s Valentine’s card and gets off the bed. “But soon. Really soon. You don’t have much time left. This time next week you’ll be in Chicago!”

  “I know,” I say, my eyes dropping.

  It’s silent for too long and I can feel Ally’s eyes on me. “Okay,” she says. “Come on. Let’s go watch Frozen.”

  As Ally leaves the room, I pick up When You Reach Me, which is lying guiltily on the bed. “Traitor,” I say and put the book back on my shelf. The mood ring on my finger has turned green but it might as well be black. I’ve been so focused on the mystery of Girl Detective this summer that I’ve completely avoided the case of Rose and Romeo.

  Because once I tell her the truth, who knows what will happen next.

  32

  “HELP ME, Birdie,” Zora whines. “Let’s go get my bike.”

  “No,” I say with my sternest big sister voice. “You are not bike racing!”

  “Come on. Please!”

  We’re standing on our street, up the hill by Connor’s house. It seems like all the neighborhood kids have gathered here this morning to race their bikes. Gainsborough Drive is pretty steep at this part but flattens out at the bottom in front of my house. Most of the racing kids are wearing helmets, and the boys are taking turns looking out for cars, but still, it’s pretty dumb. And even if she were an excellent rider, Zora is way too young.

  “Go play.” I point to some of the younger kids playing in Connor’s front yard. Zora crosses her arms against her chest stubbornly. “Come on. Just be a kid for once.” I know I sound exasperated, but I so don’t want to be on Zora duty right now.