The Mystery of the Missing Everything

Epilogue

So the bus to Taproot Valley left that Monday morning after all, right on time and with just three empty seats.

The first empty seat was Natasha’s, Principal Van Vreeland having decreed that, since she was the one who had lost the gymnastics trophy, she would be excluded from the trip.

The second empty seat was Todd Spolin’s. “No way,” he argued vigorously. “If she stays, I stay.”

The third empty seat was the result of a special favor granted Chester Hu by Principal Van Vreeland, as a reward for bringing Mr. Piccolini-Provokovsky and his gigantic trophy to the school. Told that he could have anything he wanted, Chester had asked for a bazooka that shoots candy. When it was clarified that he could have anything he wanted, within reason, Chester had requested that his best friend, Victor, be allowed to skip out on the trip, no questions asked.

For the forty-five-minute bus ride to Taproot Valley, Tenny Boyer sat by himself way in the back, gazing absently out the window as the highway rolled by. Sliding into the seat beside him, Bethesda heard the tinny blare of something epic and punky from his earbuds; she guessed it was either Braid or Sunny Day Real Estate.

Bethesda leaned over and brazenly plucked the little white buds out of his ears.

“Hey!” Tenny protested.

“Sorry,” she said, hurriedly replacing the snatched-away earbuds with her own. “But you gotta hear this.”

Bethesda smiled with embarrassment as she hit play. She had recorded the whole thing on the computer, which she didn’t really know how to do properly. But what the song lacked in quality, it more than made up for in spirit. “Because I was wrong, so very wrong,” she sang, accompanied by energetic strumming on her dad’s old guitar. “I wrote you this terrible song!”

It was an off-key, off-kilter performance, full of purposefully awful singing and purposefully awful lyrics, like where she rhymed “I stuck my nose in” with “so forgive me, is what I’m proposin’.” After a minute or two, Tenny’s mask of annoyance dissolved and he cracked up, stabbing for the pause button. “Please!” he yelped. “Make it stop!”

“So you forgive me?”

He nodded, laughing helplessly. “Make it stop! Make it stop!”

Tenny told Bethesda the whole story that evening, during the half hour of free time the eighth graders were afforded after their daylong “ecological hike” and before that night’s recreational activity. (Which was, as it turned out, a giddy, exhilarating, and exhausting game of capture the flag, organized by Coach Vasouvian, that they’d still be talking about years later. It would emerge as one of the famous facts about the Taproot Valley trip, along with Dr. Capshaw’s nonstop reciting of Robert Frost poems during the apple-cider demonstration, and Braxton Lashey stomping around after lights-out in his bear costume.)

Tenny had not been expelled from St. Francis Xavier. He hadn’t set any fires, or driven any cars into any lakes. After just a couple weeks, right when he was getting the hang of the place, his parents had pulled him out because they were getting divorced.

“I guess it’s not, like, one of those really easy, everybody’s-all-cool-with-everybody divorces,” Tenny said. They were sitting together on two of the oversized deck chairs that lined the edge of Lake Taproot. As he talked, Tenny kept his eyes locked on the lake, where minnows dived and darted in little clusters. “So there’s a big fight about money, and I guess St. Francis costs a ton.”

“Tenny…”

“Yeah. So, anyway. I really didn’t want anyone to know. Didn’t really feel like talking about it, you know? I did call Ms. Finkleman, though, when—when it was all getting going.”

Bethesda nodded. Of course.

“The real bummer is, I was sort of digging the place, a little.” Bethesda thought about the ways Tenny was different since he came back: polite Tenny, logical Tenny… but still good ol’ Tenny, just the same.

They stood up from the deck chairs and flipped a couple flat rocks into the lake, rippling the murky surface and startling the minnows. The solution to the great mystery of Tenny’s return to Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School had at last been revealed, but Bethesda felt a lot less satisfaction than she had anticipated.

“Let’s go, people!” boomed Coach Vasouvian’s big voice, and they ran off to play.

That left just one more mystery, the one that had caused Bethesda so much trouble. Who had scrawled the letters IOM on the lower left-hand wall of the Achievement Alcove… and why?

She never would have found out if they hadn’t crossed paths with the eighth graders from Grover Cleveland, whose week at Taproot Valley was beginning just as the Mary Todd Lincoln week was ending. Everyone was milling around the parking lot outside the Welcome Center, sizing each other up as kids from different schools always do, when a Grover Cleveland girl named Sue Park ran up to Marisol.

“Oh my god! You’re one of the girls from the Save Taproot Valley video!”

She pleaded for an autograph, but Marisol pointed her over to Chester. “That’s the guy you want.”

Sue Park was a bit disappointed, even more so when Chester had autographed the piece of loose-leaf she shoved in his face.

“What does this say? Chapter? Your name is Chapter Hut?”

As the Grover Cleveland kids were rounded up and marched inside, and the Mary Todd Lincoln kids piled back on their bus, Bethesda looked from Chester to Marisol, and back to Chester. Of course! It wasn’t IOM scrawled on the back wall of the Achievement Alcove, directly below Marisol’s charcoal drawing of a fruit bowl. It was an I, and then a heart—a badly drawn, terrible-handwriting heart—and then an M. It had nothing to do with the trophy. Before it was stolen, probably before Pamela even won the thing, Chester had snuck into the Achievement Alcove and left a secret tribute to his all-time favorite artist: I heart Marisol.

During the long bus ride home, Bethesda listened as Marisol and Chester laughingly recounted the game of capture the flag; she watched Tenny sitting in the very back row, fingerpicking his acoustic guitar; she saw Reenie, with no book in her lap, chatting with Bessie about the animal they’d chased up Taproot Hill. They’d decided it was either a gila monster or the world’s last surviving dragon.

Bethesda never told Chester what she’d deduced. She never revealed the solution to Tenny, or Reenie, or anyone.

Some mysteries, she decided, are supposed to stay mysteries.