The Sleepover (6 page)

I pause. There's something else that isn't quite adding up. Well, obviously, there is way,
way
more about this morning that isn't adding up, but there's something big I'm missing. It's
pushing its way into my brain except I can't quite grasp it.

And then I do.

I yank open the bathroom door.

I ignore Paige and Veronica, who are staring at me in pity, and march straight to Paige's sleeping bag where I reach in and grab the sweatshirt that had been right next to me when I woke up this morning. The one I'd thrown at Paige when she aimed the flashlight app at my face. I hold it up and gulp. The air in the basement chokes me, and there's a slight tilt to the room.

“Whoa,” says Paige in an awestruck voice. “Is that . . . ?”

“Jake Ribano's sweatshirt,” I say breathlessly, with a combination of wonder and fear. This is big. This is, quite possibly, bigger than a trashed basement. Bigger than a flock of chicks in the bathtub. Maybe,
maybe
, even bigger than a missing eyebrow.

Jake Ribano is never, ever,
ever
seen without his trademark black sweatshirt with the giant white skull and crossbones across the front. It lets all the kids know Jake Ribano is Trouble with a capital
T
.

And now I'm holding it?
The
sweatshirt!

I have to figure all this out. I watched a movie once where everyone woke up in an alternate universe and had to find their way back. Maybe that's it! If I could just quiet
the buzzing in my brain . . .
You're smart. You can make sense out of this, Meghan.

“Wow. Who do you guys think this belongs to?” Paige is holding up this weird, superfuzzy, supertall hat that looks like someone wrapped it in a carpet remnant. It has a maroon ribbon along the bottom and a hideous tassel on the top part. Paige plops it onto her head, and it wobbles there until she slides the chin strap on. “Is this the best, or what? Next year's Halloween costume, ya think?”

“Where did that come from?” I ask.

Paige shrugs. “Dunno. It was right at the end of my sleeping bag.”

“Um, guys?” Veronica's voice is nasally and grating and cuts through the quiet I'm trying to find. I so badly want to be nice for my best friend's sake, but I seriously wonder how anyone could expect me to process what is happening
and
deal with Veronica politely.

Paige is clearly not concerned with being sweet. “Not now, Veronica.”

Veronica sniffles once and then says in a tiny voice, “But, um, this is kinda important.”

I stare numbly at the sweatshirt I have clenched in my fist and try to tune out their exchange.
Think, Meghan, think.

“What?” Paige snaps.

Veronica makes a harrumph sound and turns her back on
us. She bends over her cot and begins letting the air out of her mattress. “Forget it then! I just thought you might also be noticing, or I guess the word would be more like
wondering
. . . . I mean—”

“Spit it out!” Paige orders, and I cringe. Veronica falls onto the half-filled mattress, which hisses air angrily.

“Well, it's just . . . ,” she says, her arms spreading wide to take in the whole room. “Where is Anna Marie?”

I
let my eyes rest on the empty sleeping bag I could have sworn had been filled with my best friend's warm body at bedtime last night. Or this morning. I can't actually remember what time we finally went to bed, but it had most definitely, positively been in the a.m. hours. Come to think of it, though, I can't be totally sure, because I can't remember much of last night.

I've been trying so hard to clear my head so I can figure this all out, but why hadn't I started with the basics? Like
what really happened
last night? I remember Madame Mesmer telling me to lie down on the floor, and each of us staking out a space on the rug to follow her directions. I remember breathing deeply and trying not to laugh when she told us to relax our bums, but after that . . . ? Nothing. I can almost believe I'd just fallen asleep for the night then and there, but if so—how can we explain any of
this
?

I look around the room again. Everywhere my eyes rest, I see disaster. The tower of Mountain Dew cans on the coffee table reaches far above my head like a giant game of Jenga. The ceiling fan spins a long, slow trail of Silly String around and around, around and around. The floor is covered in Doritos crumbs, popped popcorn kernels, and the spilled contents of an entire bowl of M&M's, just waiting to be ground into the thick carpet.

There is no way I could have slept through all
this
mess being made.
No. Possible. Way.
And yet I don't remember even one second of the night in which this kind of disaster zone could have been created. I take a tentative step onto my sleeping bag to avoid the booby-trapped carpet of stains-waiting-to-happen.

“Take me to New York. I'd like to see LA. I really want to . . .”

I drop to the ground, frantically tossing my sleeping bag until I uncover the remote. I jam my finger on the off button again and again.

Quiet.

I crouch and take a deep breath. Veronica and Paige are frozen in place, clearly having the exact same thoughts, and the three of us stare at one another before I finally whisper, “What's happening, you guys?”

Almost as if my words snap her out of a trance, Veronica flings a leg over the back of the sofa and kind of half climbs,
half rolls onto the cushions and down to the floor, landing between me and Paige. She brushes her hands off, shrugs at us, and then crawls over to Anna Marie's sleeping bag and puts her hand inside, patting around.

“She's obviously not hiding in there, Veronica. She's small, but she's not that small,” Paige says, clearly biting back a sigh.

“Clue number one! It's cold!” Veronica proclaims.

“Huh?” I ask.

“This sleeping bag is cold. No one's been inside here for a long time. Maybe even hours.” Veronica sounds pretty sure of herself, even under the weight of Paige's squinty stare.

“She probably got uncomfortable on the floor and remembered she has a comfy, cozy bed right upstairs. So let's go find her!” Paige, who is always confident, sounds even more sure of herself than normal, and right away I realize,
of course
, that has to be exactly what happened. It's beyond logical. A swarm of insects with wings had taken up residence in my belly the second Veronica made the comment about Anna Marie being missing, but now they die out, as though an exterminator showed up inside my stomach. Anna Marie is fine. One problem solved. Maybe the mystery of the basement mess will be just as obvious once we're all back together again and can piece together what happened after Madame Mesmer left last night.

Paige stands and holds out a hand to help me up. Once
on my feet, I take a step toward Paige, then stop, reach back down, and grab Jake's sweatshirt. I slip it on and zip it over my hot pink
KEEP CALM AND BAKE CUPCAKES
T-shirt. It's just . . . I have the thing now, so I might as well wear it while I—oh wow—it smells like boy too. The good kind of soap-and-mint boy smell, not the sweaty-socks-and-soccer-practice kind of boy smell.

“Wha-
at
?” I ask, all fake innocence, when I notice Paige's raised eyebrows. Then I moan because I can't do raised eyebrow
sssss
anymore. Just raised eye
brow
. Singular. I slap a hand above my eye and rub at the ridge of smooth skin again. Somehow with all the bigger mysteries of the last few minutes, I'd managed to forget, but now all I can picture is my image in the bathroom mirror. My mother is going to have a complete and total conniption. She won't even let me try
bangs
because she feels strongly that long layers suit my face shape better. She'll never, ever let me spend the night out of the house again. And I was
just
getting good at it. Sort of. I didn't freak out and demand to go home at bedtime, but I'm not sure it counts if I can't actually remember lights-out.

If I want any prayer at all of ever being allowed to leave the house again, we need to move fast. Step one: wake up Anna Marie pronto and get her down here. Step two: find a way to get this place cleaned up before Anna Marie's mom sees it, because if she does . . . disaster. I mean, she's usually
pretty chill and it
is
a sleepover, so I'm mostly sure she expected some regular party mess. But
this
? A piece of Silly String detaches from the fan and lands on my arm. This goes way beyond. And if Mrs. Guerrero mentions anything about any of it to my mom, I'm doubly dead. As in, my mom will kill me and then find a way to bring me back from the dead just so she can kill me again.

Paige tugs on my sleeve, and we tiptoe carefully through the minefield of spilled food. Operation Wake Up Anna Marie is on. We're almost to the stairs when Veronica races up behind us, huffing like she's just run a race, despite the fact that the distance between the sleeping bags and the stairs is about ten steps, fifteen at most. She grabs my sweatshirt at the elbow, bunching the fabric between her hand. “Wait!”

We pause. I'm getting used to Veronica's weird behavior now, and so I wait patiently, not even bothering to exchange secret smirking glances with Paige. Veronica puts her free hand up in a crossing guard's stop motion. “We definitely can't let her mom see us,” she says.

“Why not?” I ask. As long as the encounter isn't taking place down here, what's the harm?

“Be-caaaaaause. If Anna Marie
isn't
up there, then her mom is going to have all kinds of questions for us. And she's probably going to ask them
after
she's stormed down to this basement to make sure Anna Marie's not here. Do we
really want Mrs. Guerrero to see all this?” She releases my sweatshirt to gesture around the room. First I have to stretch Jake's sweatshirt carefully back into place, smoothing down the wrinkles Veronica's fist caused. But then my eyes fall on a pizza box I hadn't noticed before. A fly is crawling on one of the half-eaten pieces. And wait, is that a giant blob of Cool Ranch dip on the corner of the couch? Ugh.

Of
course
Anna Marie is up there. Where else would she be? But letting Mrs. Guerrero know we're awake might make her want to come downstairs to help us pack up or something. That could not, repeat
not
, happen. “She has a point,” I say.

“Veronica, I have to give you credit. You're totally right,” Paige adds.

Veronica blushes and sticks out her chest a little. “I completed the Junior Hardy Boys Detective Certification Course.”

Um, oooooookayyyyyyy.

“Well, since I don't know how to respond to that, I'm just going to move on,” Paige says, gripping the banister. “Okay, so let's be superquiet, girls. Stick together and
do not make a noise
.”

“I also take ninja lessons,” Veronica whispers when we reach the top stair.

Paige goes first, easing the basement door open and motioning with hand signals for me to follow. Then she waves on
Veronica, and soon all three of us are pressed against the hallway wall, ears straining hard for any noises that will clue us in to everyone's whereabouts. In the kitchen a television is reporting on an Upstate New York teen who forgot his keys and got stuck in his chimney while attempting to get into his house. There's the sound of silverware clanging against a plate.

I stare hard at the yellow-and-white flowered wallpaper in the hallway until all the petals blur, and I try to quiet my heartbeat. Paige swings her head in the opposite direction from the kitchen and slides along the wall toward the stairs to the upper level. She gestures for us to follow. Tiptoeing, we take the carpeted stairs one at a time, pausing every so often to listen for approaching footsteps. I barely breathe until we've squeezed through the door into Anna Marie's room.

Even before I spy the perfectly made canopy bed with its white eyelet comforter and the giant purple-and-green peace sign pillow that Anna Marie and I sewed from felt last Christmas vacation, I can tell the room is empty. It just
feels
empty. Paige, Veronica, and I exchange quick looks but barely have time to process anything before we hear someone climbing the stairs.

“Hide!” I whisper-yell. I dive onto the ground, rolling under Anna Marie's bed, and brush the pleated bed skirt aside to peek out from underneath. Paige slides smoothly into the
closet, and I watch her nudge aside a jumble of clothes and shoes before noiselessly closing the door. Veronica spins in a circle a few times before plopping heavily into the corner of the bedroom where a bunch of stuffed animals are perfectly arranged. It's a good thing Anna Marie isn't here because she might just kill Veronica for that. I feel relatively safe under Anna Marie's bed as I watch Veronica try to blend in among a zoo's worth of creatures, propping the stuffed giraffe on her arm and a parrot that was a souvenir from a trip to Key West on her shoulder. She finishes by dropping a floppy dog (who I happen to know is named Newbury and who is Anna Marie's favorite) on her head. Veronica might as well be wearing a flashing look-at-me sign, but she sits 200 percent as still as the animals, in her one-piece footed pajamas, seemingly convinced she is completely camouflaged.

I'm seriously in awe of how long the girl can go without blinking. It's, like, superhuman. I get so absorbed in trying to match her (not possible—the more I think about not blinking, the more I positively
have to
blink), I barely register that the sound of whatever tune Mrs. Guerrero had been humming as she'd climbed the steps is fading.

I let out my breath in a whoosh (and also blink a whole bunch).