Nothing but Trouble Page 4

  Lena pointed down the road. “We’re renting a house at the end of 2½ Street. The last one, actually.”

  “Oh,” said Maggie. There were a lot of ramshackle houses in Odawahaka, but 2½ Street was one of the shaggiest roads in town. It wasn’t even an actual road, just sort of a half-paved cow path that meandered off 2nd Street at an odd angle, crossed over 1st Street, and then dead-ended by the river. There were a few rusty trailer homes and a couple of abandoned houses. Maggie wondered if Lena’s house was the sagging one that sat way up at the top of a long flight of crumbling stairs. The one that kids steered clear of on Halloween night. “Well, sure, come on in. Do you want a Moxie or something?”

  “You know what?” Lena asked dramatically, her eyes growing wide. “I’ve never had a Moxie. But it’s the only drink people talk about in this town!”

  “Yeah,” said Maggie, feeling a little embarrassed. “People here really love their Moxie. It’s kind of like loving the losing home team. Or a particularly obnoxious uncle.”

  “Well, if you’re offering, then the answer is yes!” said Lena.

  They walked into the kitchen, and Maggie handed Lena a cold soda and a Keebler Vienna Fingers cookie, then grabbed a glass of milk and a cookie for herself. Lena opened the bottle and took a big swig.

  “Whoa!” she said, holding the bottle away from her.

  “I know, right?” said Maggie. “That’s everyone’s first response. But just give it a minute. And then take another sip.”

  Lena waited, swallowed another slug of soda, said nothing, and then took a third gulp. “It’s growing on me,” she admitted.

  “Yep,” said Maggie. “That’s Moxie. By the time you finish the bottle, you’ll either love it or hate it. There’s no middle ground.”

  “Can I see your room?” asked Lena, raising the bottle to her lips again.

  Um. “Okay,” said Maggie. She was running through a quick inventory of everything she’d left out. “There’s kind of a mess on the floor. . . .”

  “I don’t care!” said Lena, taking a picture of a refrigerator magnet shaped like the state of Pennsylvania.

  At the top of the stairs, Lena ran her hand along the wall in the dim hallway. “Ooh! Cool wallpaper!”

  “I hate it,” said Maggie flatly. The wallpaper was faded and dull, a repeating pattern of Little Boy Blue asleep under the haystack, the sheep in the meadow, the cow in the corn. “Pretty much, I hate everything in this house.”

  Lena gave her a strange look, as if she were thinking very seriously about what Maggie had just said. “I like old things,” she finally admitted, snapping a few close-ups of the wallpaper. “Old people. Old houses. Old photographs.” Then she followed Maggie into her room. “Wow, you weren’t kidding about a mess. You’re worse than me! Which I thought was impossible!”

  Lena took great pains to step carefully over the 127 vacuum cleaner parts that were laid out on the wooden floor of Maggie’s small bedroom. “Are you fixing it? Whatever it is?”

  “It’s a vacuum cleaner. And it wasn’t broken,” said Maggie, biting into her cookie and settling on the bed. “I’m just deconstructing it and then reconstructing it. Helps me learn. And then I know what parts I’ve got on hand in case I need to fix something else.”

  “Very cool,” said Lena. “I’m not mechanical, but I like to construct, too. And I love to tear things apart.” She took a whole series of close-ups of the small metal parts of the old vacuum cleaner. “I can use these,” she muttered to herself as she worked.

  When Lena stood up, she turned and studied Maggie’s desk. “Who’s that?” She was pointing to an old photograph taped to Maggie’s computer screen.

  Maggie paused, mid-bite.

  “That’s my dad,” she said.

  In the picture, he was standing on an endless expanse of green grass, with one hand on his hip and the other arm pretending to lean casually against a white stone building that was actually far in the background. The building looked like something out of ancient Rome or Greece, with ten massive columns stretching skyward and an enormous dome sitting on top. Her father was smiling from ear to ear, the first day of his freshman year at college.

  Lena moved in for a closer look. “No way! He’s so young!”

  “It’s an old picture. He went to MIT, which is”—Maggie waved her hand in an attempt to express the magnitude of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—“the mecca of engineering. I’m going to go there when I graduate from high school.”

  “Ooh, it’s really hard to get into, isn’t it? Super-elite East Coast school, yah?”

  “Twenty thousand kids apply every year and only fifteen hundred get in. So, yeah, pretty hard. But I’m going to do it.”

  “Good for you!” said Lena. “I know you can.”

  Maggie was surprised by this response. Her mother always reminded her not to get her hopes up. I just don’t want you to be disappointed. But here was Lena, who had only just met her, saying she believed in Maggie and her dreams.

  “You’re smart enough,” said Lena. “And your dad can help, right?”

  That brought Maggie back down to earth. “No. He’s dead. He died before I was born. That’s why it’s such an old picture. He was really young.”

  “Oh, Maggie.” Lena looked at her from across the room. “That’s so sad. I’m really sorry.”

  “It was a long time ago. I don’t even think about him anymore.” Which wasn’t even close to the truth. Maggie thought about her father every day. And she missed him with an aching that was sometimes overwhelming, which was strange since she’d never known him. But that’s how it was. She even imagined his voice speaking to her: giving advice and helping her with problems. She supposed that was weird, but it brought her comfort.

  Lena bent down and examined the photograph carefully. “It’s incredible how much you two are alike.” She snapped a picture. “Almost photographic.”

  That made Maggie smile. Her mother sometimes said that, too, You’re just like your father, but never in a good way.

  Lena’s eyes continued to travel around the room, noticing the posters. “Wait! I’m sensing a theme!” She pointed to each poster. “Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Meade. Princess Margaret. Maggie Smith.”

  Maggie smiled. Emily and Allie had been in her room hundreds of times and never made the connection between the posters and Maggie’s name. Lena, though, seemed to scoop up everything with her eyes—maybe because she was a photographer.

  “I’m going to find you a poster of Margaret Bourke-White,” said Lena. “Best photographer ever. What’s this one?” She pointed to a movie poster from the 1950s.

  Maggie felt hot and uncomfortable. “Nothing,” she said. She stood up quickly, accidentally kicking the wheel assembly of the vacuum cleaner so that it rolled under the bed.

  Don’t forget the Fifth Commandment in the Hacker’s Bible, whispered her father in her ear. “No one should ever know.”

  Maggie was frantically reaching under the bed to retrieve the wheel assembly. Her hand brushed against the box she kept hidden there.

  “I saw this movie once,” said Lena slowly, still staring at the poster. “I watched it with my dad. He likes old movies.”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with my name. It’s just a dumb old poster. I don’t even remember why I have it.” Maggie’s hand finally closed on the wheel assembly, and she placed it back where it belonged. The thought banged in her brain: she’d messed up.

  Lena read the movie title slowly out loud. “The Mouse That Roared.” She slapped her hand on her forehead. “I should have figured it out sooner!” She turned to Maggie. “‘Roar!’ On the tennis balls. On the balloons. The Mouse That Roared! Du-u-uh!”

  She smiled as if she’d just received the happiest news possible. “And the best, best, best part is that it’s you. You’re the Mouse.”

  She lifted her camera to her eye and snapped a photo of Maggie’s flabbergasted face. Later, Lena would title that picture Caught in the Act.r />
  EIGHT

  THERE WAS A LOT TO TELL. One cookie apiece wasn’t enough. The girls returned to the kitchen, where Maggie pulled down the entire package of Vienna Fingers then poured herself a glass of milk. They both sat down at the kitchen table.

  “What I want to know first,” said Lena, stacking up a pile of six cookies and then prying apart one to lick the vanilla cream inside, “is why did you do it?”

  Maggie gave her a funny look. “Why? You don’t want to know how?”

  How was where Maggie always started. How can I build a long-range remote control so that I can turn off the noisy neighbor’s TV from my bedroom? How can I add a fuel booster to the engine of Mom’s fifteen-year-old Corolla so she’ll get an extra mile to the gallon? How can I add stress supports to the front porch so the whole roof doesn’t cave in? Life was a series of questions, and for Maggie they all began with how. She was an engineer, through and through.

  “Well, yes,” said Lena, biting loudly into the crunchy cookie part. “I want to know that, too, but . . . okay, how? How did you get all the tennis balls in the locker?”

  “It’s an old hacker’s trick,” said Maggie. “You use a piece of cardboard to create a barrier, pile all the balls inside the space, close the locker door as much as possible, and then slowly slide the cardboard out and quickly latch the door. The next person who opens the door—gets buried.”

  Lena nodded seriously. “Brilliant. Simple, but brilliant.” She pried apart another cookie. “And where’d you get all the race cars?”

  “A website. Nothing clever there.”

  “But what about the balloons in the rotunda and the sheet? How did you get that to stay in place?”

  “Tension clips,” said Maggie. “Tension clips are great for suspending anything that’s light.” Maggie carried her empty glass to the sink. She was finished eating, but Lena looked like she might polish off the entire package of cookies.

  “But how did you make it so that no one noticed the balloons up there? No one saw them, until the mouse parachuted down. It’s like they were invisible and everyone was walking right under them.”

  Maggie smiled. “That is human nature. People almost never look up. Did you know that? They’ve done scientific studies. Humans tend to look mid-level or down—especially in high-stress situations like the first day of school.”

  “And what about getting into the school?” asked Lena. “When did you do that? And how?”

  Nightwork, Maggie thought. It was the term that hackers used for setting up their hacks under the cover of darkness. There was a joke in one of her father’s notebooks: Nightwork. It’s good work if you can get it. And get out.

  “I’ll just say this,” said Maggie, smiling as she thought of her father. “There’s always a way in, if you look hard enough. And I’m not a person who needs a lot of sleep.”

  Lena shook her head in admiration. “You’re incredible. Ninja incredible.” Slowly, she chewed on her cookie, then asked, “So, how did you get the mouse to drop down at exactly the right moment?”

  A sour expression came over Maggie’s face. “That was a mistake. A miscalculation.” She tapped her fingers on the countertop in irritation. “I had the mouse on a timer, and it was supposed to drop down at the end of the day. Sort of a celebration for the end of the first day of school. But timers are tricky. They’re mechanical, so just about anything can throw them off. And I don’t always have the best parts to work with.” She thought of the guts of the vacuum cleaner on the floor in her bedroom. “So it malfunctioned.”

  “But it was great the way it worked!” said Lena. “Sometimes happy accidents happen in art. And sometimes they happen with timers, too!”

  Maggie shook her head. “Not in hacking. Hacking is science. It’s meant to be precise. In hacking, timing is everything.”

  “Hacking?” asked Lena slowly. “Isn’t that like where criminals steal computer data and ruin people’s lives?”

  Maggie groaned. “That’s not what hacking is. I wish people would stop getting that wrong. Hacking means pulling off a prank with style. Something that requires intelligence and technical know-how and daring. Look: a prank is when you flatten someone’s car tires. Ha-ha. A hack is when you disassemble, transport, and then reassemble a full-size police car on the dome of a building, one hundred and fifty feet in the air. My dad did that when he was at MIT. He was a hacker. Better than anybody. Ever.”

  “Wow! A police car on top of a building? Let me guess: he didn’t need a lot of sleep, either.”

  “The first person to notice the car was a jogger, just before sunrise. The red and blue lights on top of the car were flashing, and there was a dummy dressed up like a police officer at the wheel with a half-eaten box of doughnuts. There was even a ticket on the windshield: ‘No permit for this location.’ That was a hack.”

  “I wish I could have seen it,” said Lena.

  “I have a photo. It made it into newspapers all over the world, it was that incredible.”

  “You have a photo? Where?”

  Maggie froze, her mouth slightly open. She could feel one cookie crumb still clinging to her lower lip, and she hurried to brush it off. A long chain of if-then statements ran through her mind: If she showed Lena the picture, then she would have to show her the box hidden under her bed. If she showed her the box, then Lena would see the Hacker’s Bible. If Lena saw the Hacker’s Bible, then she would enter the private world that belonged to Maggie and her father alone. She stood up from her chair and walked over to the sink to get a drink of water, turning her back on Lena.

  “Oh, I don’t even know where it is,” she said, as if it was the littlest of things, something so small it could be lost and forgotten. She gulped the water, then rinsed the glass and put it in the drying rack. When she turned back to face Lena, she hoped she had wiped every emotion from her face.

  Lena looked at her. A quiet moment passed between them. Maggie had the same uncomfortable feeling she’d had when they were in her room: that Lena saw everything. She was a sponge that soaked up everything. Nothing seemed to get by her. There was no place to hide.

  Well, maybe one place.

  “Do you want to see my secret laboratory?” asked Maggie, hoping to distract Lena and bring back the fun they’d been having.

  “Of course!” said Lena, scooping up her remaining cookies and grabbing three more from the package.

  The two girls headed downstairs.

  Maggie was lucky that Grandpop’s house even had a basement. A lot of the houses in Odawahaka didn’t because of the hard bedrock that edged up from the Susquehanna River into the surrounding hills. But more than a hundred years ago, Grandpop’s great-grandfather had blasted through the rock with dynamite and smashed out a proper basement. (Perhaps the love of a good explosion had seeped into Maggie’s bones from that first big bang.)

  Lena was impressed by the rickety staircase. “It looks like something out of a horror movie! Like it could collapse at any minute! I love it!”

  When they were finally standing on the dirt floor, Lena began to ooh and aah about the blasted rock walls of the basement. She studied one bare face of the wall. “Watch this!” she said, putting her camera on a nearby workbench. In five seconds, she had climbed up the wall, grabbing hold of the jutting rock and finding toeholds in the smallest outcroppings and crevices. She tapped the ceiling, then dropped back down. The whole stunt had taken less than ten seconds.

  “How did you do that?” asked Maggie, wondering if she’d really just seen Lena climb the wall like a spider.

  “I have freaky long arms. Totally out of proportion with the rest of my body. See!” Maggie looked. Lena’s arms were kind of long. Maggie wasn’t sure if she should compliment her or insist it wasn’t true. “I used to compete.”

  “There are contests for long arms?” Maggie’s eyes grew wide. She would never want to call attention to herself like that.

  “No!” Lena laughed. “Rock climbing, goofus! I have mad upper-body stren
gth. I’m basically an orangutan.” She reached for her camera. “Whoa! What is this?”

  Lena was staring at Grandpop’s pile of auto parts, scavenged and scrapped when he was still young and worked on muscle cars—Barracudas and Camaros and GTOs. Maggie once estimated that there were close to two thousand pieces, from gas pedals to spark plugs.

  “That,” said Maggie, making a quick calculation and deciding to take a chance, “is how I fund this whole operation.”

  Maggie took Lena back up to her room. On her computer, she called up a webpage: a classy-looking site called Vinnie’s Vintage Auto Parts, complete with photographs of the inventory, a search field with sortable results, e-commerce capability, and hundreds of positive customer reviews.

  “That’s me,” said Maggie. “I’m Vinnie. I identify the parts from the basement; clean, fix, refurbish them; take pictures; then post the photos on the website. I’ve got over five hundred parts posted right now. And no matter how many I sell, Grandpop’s pile never seems to get smaller!”

  “Who writes the reviews?” asked Lena.

  “They’re real! All of them,” said Maggie. “And I get five stars every time. I’m not kidding. There are thousands of people all over the country who rebuild muscle cars, and they love Vinnie. He never disappoints! The site is incredibly popular. And I’m not just saying that.”

  “Where does the money go?” asked Lena, scrolling through the website.

  “Directly into my bank account. Plus”—she dropped her voice, even though they were alone in the house—“I have a credit card. It wasn’t even hard to get.”

  “Maggie Gallagher, you are nothing but trouble!” said Lena, hugging her enthusiastically with her freakishly long arms. It was obvious from the look on Lena’s face that there was no higher compliment in her book. “You are the perfect partner in crime!”