“Liar, liar, pants on fire!” She gave him a hard push. “You know what they call nasty old men who follow little girls around? Perverts! Just because you’re a little boy doesn’t mean it’s any different when you do it, too! You’re a sick little booger head!”
Jillian gazed at them both in wide-eyed amazement.
“I’m not a pedophile!” Tristan cried.
“Neener, neener, boo, boo, stick your head in doo-doo!” Louise gave him a hard push. “Just go away. Cootie breath! Didn’t your mother teach you not to be mean to little girls? Your mother would be ashamed of you.”
Judging by the way he flinched, Anna would have been upset. Which meant that Anna didn’t know that he was there.
“I’m trying to protect you!” Tristan snapped.
“From what?” Louise cried.
Tristan pointed toward Manhattan and their school. “If you didn’t notice, there was a bomb at school!”
“And you were going to protect us how?” she shouted. “Poop on it?”
“I would have taken care of it!” Did that mean he hadn’t been the one who warned Mr. Kessler?
“By pooping and peeing on it?” Jillian realized what Louise was doing and joined in.
“Don’t be so stupid.” Tristan sounded his forty-some years. “I know you’re smarter than that. How did you know it was Kessler?”
Louise clamped shut her mouth, not sure how to answer.
Luckily, Jillian had something prepared. “Mr. Kessler hates us because we keep blowing his curve; he used to tease us during class. When we started working on the play, we had to go through him to use the printer in the annex.”
“Through?” Tristan mimed a ramming motion. “Like a plow through a snowbank?”
“Somewhat,” Jillian admitted. “He slipped once or twice and ranted in class about how much he hated elves. Once the FBI released the news about the trigger, Mr. Kessler was the first person we thought of.”
All mostly the truth. Convincing Tristan that they were still just normal fifth-graders was probably the wisest thing to do. Louise took up the thread and started to weave out a more elaborate fabrication. “I was in the annex on the morning of the bombing. I saw him come in and trigger the bomb; I just didn’t realize it until later. After the bombing, he was really nice to us. Super nice. It made us suspicious.”
Jillian tied off the loose ends. “Then we found out he’d scrubbed the memory of the printer.”
“So you told the FBI.”
“No, that wasn’t us,” Jillian lied. “We think it was Mr. Howe. We’ve been dropping hints to all our teachers over the last week and a half, but we didn’t think any of them took us seriously.”
Louise wrapped up the story in a neat bow. “That’s what we were debating this morning: what to do since no one seemed to believe us.”
And he believed it. Tristan’s eyes widened as he calculated the vectors of their made-up activities. Homeroom. Art. Music. Library. French. Math. In the course of a week, they had over a dozen teachers. Any of them knew Mr. Kessler well enough to make the leap that Tristan had failed to make.
Of course that left the question of how Mr. Kessler had known that he had to flee.
“Are they here yet?” Jillian whispered as Louise checked her video screens.
“No.” Louise could see the two empty seats beside Nikola. Aunt Kitty hadn’t been able to change her business meeting in California when the date of the play had been moved. The babies desperately wanted to see the play, so the twins used Aunt Kitty’s ticket for Nikola. Louise had settled him into the seat next to Zahara’s little brother and explained to Zahara’s mother that their nanny-bot was going to film everything for their aunt. They’d spent dinner break stuffing Joy with tuna fish sandwiches. Last Louise checked, the baby dragon was deep asleep in Nikola’s storage chamber.
The babies seemed fine, but where were Mom and Dad?
Louise scanned the crowd filtering in through the doors at the back of the theater. Their parents were driving in to the city so that they wouldn’t have to brave the subway after the play and the celebratory dinner. Their mother hadn’t been able to get off work early but promised to be there well before the curtain went up. Anything could be holding them up, from their mother’s boss wanting “one more minute” of her time to them running into a talkative parent in the lobby.
The sense that everything was about to go horribly wrong echoed through Louise, making her focus tightly on the control board. Between the large sets needing to be lowered from the ceiling, four of the cast members on flying wires, and a sword fight, there was so much that could go wrong. The FBI still hadn’t found Mr. Kessler, but Louise wasn’t sure that he was still alive.
The clock on Louise’s console indicated that it was nearly time to cue the overture music. She scanned her sound levels, and made sure everything was reset back to base. She moved her finger to the play button and waited for the time to change.
