Slob - Ellen Potter [58]
“Oh, I forgot to congratulate you,” I said bitterly. “President of GWAB. That’s sensational. You should be really proud of yourself.”
“I’m not their president,” she said. “I’m not even a member anymore.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “That’s why you chopped off all your hair.”
“I did that for you,” she said.
“For me?” I was so outraged that I swallowed a glob of spit and choked a little. “When did I ever tell you to chop off your hair?!”
“You didn’t, but it was for you anyway.” She sat down heavily in a clear spot of rug, hugged her knees to her chest, and put her forehead down on her knees for a moment. Then she lifted her head suddenly. “Didn’t you ever wonder how I was able to become a GWAB member and not cut my hair?”
“Yes,” I said. I had wondered about it, but not very hard.
“It’s part of the initiation, you know,” she said. “Everyone has to do it. But I wouldn’t. They were going to kick me out, but Arthur said that maybe they could find something else for me to do. So they had a meeting and they came up with an idea. I had to steal your lunch from the lunch closet for two weeks straight. That was mean. I know it was, Owen, and I told them it was, but they said it had to be something that I wouldn’t want to do or else it wouldn’t count. I talked them down to just stealing your cookies.”
My mouth fell open, just like they always describe in books, but it really did. “You stole them? You did? Not Izzy?”
“Izzy? Why would Izzy steal your cookies? And anyway, I thought you thought it was Mason Ragg.”
“I did,” I muttered, thinking about poor Izzy, trying to remember what I had said to him at lunch and wincing when I did.
“Look,” she said, “it wasn’t supposed to turn out the way it did. I even tried to get the cookies back to you. That first day I left them on the table you and Izzy usually sit at, but of course that day you didn’t and Mason did and then, oh, it just all became this huge mess. I felt awful about the whole thing, and I just wanted to make it up to you.”
“And making me think Nemesis was working when it wasn’t was supposed to make it up to me?” I said incredulously.
“It made you happy,” she said.
“Well, yeah. Maybe temporarily. But come on, Jeremy, didn’t you realize I was going to find out sooner or later that it was all a prank?”
“You said yourself that picking up signals was a long shot. When you hooked up the deli’s surveillance camera’s receiver to Nemesis and nothing happened, you wouldn’t have thought someone was playing a prank with the old Freakout shows. You just would have figured that you just couldn’t pick up those particular signals, right?”
It was so logical that I had a sudden urge to throw a satellite dish at her.
“Aren’t you smart,” I said glumly. “So how did you figure out how to bypass the Jaws of Anguish?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “It snapped shut when I put my hand in. But, you know . . .” she held up her arm and smiled. “Skinny wrists. I slipped right out. Then I set it again. It was a good trap, though. If it had been Mason, it would have got him for sure.”
I know she was mostly just trying to make me feel better, but it did.
“Did you eat the facial hair bleach?” I asked, pretending to be upset. I really was hoping that she’d had just a tiny taste.
“Facial hair bleach? Eww, no! Did you put facial hair bleach in the cookies?”
“One time.”
She thought for a minute and then said, “Maybe that was the time Izzy caught me.”
“Izzy knew?”
“Well, I was at the lunch closet and I had your lunch sack in my hands and was about to get the cookies out when I heard someone coming. So I ran away, but I was still holding the lunch sack. I ditched it in the boys’ bathroom. When I turned around, there was Izzy. He’d seen everything. I made him swear not to tell you. He was really upset. He told me all about Mason Ragg and how you thought it was him and how he carried a buck knife—”
“Switchblade,” I corrected.
“Really? I thought it was a buck knife.”
“Switchblade. And