Chapter 10

Chapter 10 Snooping snooping (v.) investigating or searching in a secretive way to uncover private information It had been an accident. Really and truly. The only reason Jessie had gone into Evan's room in the first place was that she'd needed a piece of paper. That's all. She wasn't looking for anything else. She wasn't snooping. She wasn't. And even though she wasn't supposed to go in Evan's room without asking, and she definitely wasn't allowed to look in his top desk drawer without permission, she was in a big hurry to count up the results of the survey. And Evan was all the way downstairs. And he'd been in such a bad mood when they'd walked in the front door

together. And she was in a big hurry. That was the thing. She didn't have time to follow all the rules. But when she grabbed a piece of paper out of Evan's desk drawer and turned to run back out the door—so fast it was as if she hadn't even broken the rule in the first place—she tripped over Evan's wastebasket, which crashed into the floor lamp, and the papers spilled all over the floor. They were like little animals escaping from their cage. The wastebasket was made of wire, just like a cage, and Jessie couldn't help imagining the papers shouting, "Free! We're free! At last, we're free!" "I'm okay! I just tripped!" she shouted so that Evan and their mother wouldn't come running upstairs to see what the noise was. She started to scoop up the crumpled-up pieces of paper, still thinking about the animals escaping from their cage, and then one of them really did look like a turtle. Look at that, she

thought. There was the shell and a leg and a head poking out. Jessie was good at noticing patterns and shapes, and this crumpled-up piece of paper definitely looked like a turtle. She picked up the piece of paper, tugged on the head, and then pushed on it to see if she could imitate the way a turtle pokes its head out of its shell and then pulls it in when it's threatened. And that's when the paper became uncrumpled and she saw a few of the words on the page. Words were meant to be read. Everyone knew that! You didn't write a word down on a piece of paper if you didn't expect someone to read it. Otherwise you would just leave that word in your head. So without really thinking and almost before she knew that she was doing it, Jessie uncrumpled the paper and spread it out in front of her. And then, when she got that feeling in her stomach—that tingle that told her she might

be doing something wrong—it was too late, because a question had popped into her mind. And once that happened, there was no stopping Jessie. She needed to know the answer to the question, just as she had needed to know the answers to all the other questions that had come up this year: Who stole the lemonade money? How did Scott Spencer buy an Xbox 20/20? Where did the New Year's Eve bell go? What was wrong with Maxwell? The questions were like math problems, and Jessie couldn't rest until the equation was solved.

Who was pony girl? What did these words mean? Jessie heard a sound from downstairs. She

wasn't sure what it was, but it reminded her that she was in Evan's room without having asked him for permission. So she scooped the balls of paper on the floor into the trash can, set the trash can upright, then ran out of Evan's room. Back in her own room with the door closed, she settled down at her desk and smoothed the wrinkled paper in front of her. A thought flickered through her mind: Am I stealing something by taking the paper? But no, that didn't make sense. The paper was trash, and you couldn't steal trash. Besides, Jessie carried the trash out of Evan's room every week. It was one of her household chores. What was the difference between carrying it out today and carrying it out on Saturday? Still, she opened her door and hung up the Locked sign, then closed her door again and slipped the paper into her top desk drawer. There was no time to think about trash or words or Evan. Right now, she had to tally up the