“I don’t know. Something.”
“But he promised he would be here,” Arby said. “To take us on the field trip. It was all arranged. We got permission and everything.”
“So? We can still go.”
“But he should be here,” Arby insisted stubbornly. Kelly had seen this behavior before. Arby was accustomed to adults being reliable. His parents were both very reliable. Kelly wasn’t troubled by such ideas’ “Never mind, Arb,” she said. “Let’s just go see Dr. Thorne ourselves.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Arby hesitated. “Maybe I should call my mom first,”
“Why?” Kelly said. “You know she’ll tell you that you have to go home. Come on, Arb. Let’s just go.”
He hesitated, still troubled. Arby might be smart, but any change in plan always bothered him. Kelly knew from experience he would grumble and argue if she pushed for them to go alone, She had to wait, while he made up his own mind.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s go see Thorne.
Kelly grinned. “Meet you in front,” she said, “in five minutes.”
As she went down the stairs from the second floor, the singsong chant began again. “Kelly is a brainer, Kelly is a brainer….”
She held her head high. It was that stupid Allison Stone and her stupid friends. Standing at the bottom of the stairs, taunting her.
“Kelly is a brainer….”
She swept past the girls, ignoring them. Nearby, she saw Miss Enders, the hall mointor, paying no attention as usual. Even though Mr. Canosa, the assistant principal, had recently made a special homeroom announcement about teasing kids.
Behind her, the girls called: “Kelly is a brainer….She’s the queen…of the Screen…and it’s gonna turn her green……” They collapsed in laughter.
Up ahead, she saw Arby waiting by the door, a bundle of gray cables in his hand. She hurried forward.
When she got to him, he said, “Forget it.”
“They’re stupid jerkoffs.”
“Right.”
“I don’t care, anyway.
“I know. Just forget it.”
Behind them, the girls were giggling. “Kel-ly and Ar-by…going to a party…take a bath, in their math….”
They went outside into the sunlight, the sounds of the girls thankfully drowned in the noise of everyone going home. Yellow school buses were in the parking lot. Kids were streaming down the steps to their parents’ cars, which were lined up all around the block. There was a lot of activity.
Arby ducked a Frisbee that whooshed over his head, and glanced toward the street. “There he is again.”
“Well, don’t look at him,” Kelly said.
“I’m not, I’m not.”
“Remember what Dr. Levine said.” “Jeez, Kel. I remember, okay?”
Across the street was parked the plain gray Taurus sedan that they had seen, off and on, for the past two months. Behind the wheel, pretending to read a newspaper, was that same man with the scraggly growth of beard. This bearded man had been following Dr. Levine ever since he started to teach the class at Woodside. Kelly believed that man was the reason why Dr. Levine asked her and Arby to be his assistants in the first place.
Levine had told them their job would be to help him by carrying equipment, Xeroxing class assignments, collecting homework, and routine things like that. They thought it would be a big honor to work for Dr. Levine -or anyway, interesting to work for an actual professional scientist -so they had agreed to do it.
But it turned out there never was anything to be done for the class; Dr. Levine did all that himself Instead, he sent them on lots of little errands. And he had told them to be careful to avoid this bearded man ill the car. That wasn’t hard; the man never paid any attention to them, because they were kids,
Dr. Levine had explained the bearded man was following him because of something to do with his arrest, but Kelly didn’t believe that. Her own mother had been arrested twice for drunk driving, and there was never anybody following her. So Kelly didn’t know why this man was following Levine, but clearly Levine was doing some secret research and he didn’t want anybody to find out about it. She knew one thing – Dr. Levine didn’t care much about this class he was reaching. He usually gave the lecture off the top of his head. Other times he would walk in the front door of the school, hand them a taped lecture, and walk out the back. They never knew where he went, on those days.