

HEMLOCK STRAVENUE

Lorraine Ray

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2018 Lorraine Ray

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. Although this is an ebook, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoy this book please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

You can download more of Lorraine's works from her author's page at

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LoRay

CHAPTER 1

"Agent Y to Agent T. Y to T! Are you there?"

Standing outside the creepy church. The name is House of Isaac. Standing beside the creepy memorial to the guy who died outside the church. Maybe that's something important. Something like James Bond? That's what I want.

Talking into my cupped hands again. I just pretend I have a microphone. Like I'm a bodyguard. Like I'm James Bond. Whispering into my hands up at my mouth for fun. One earphone in my ear and the other earphone dangling in front of me. That way I can pretend I'm chatting with this awesome dude, Agent T, at Headquarters. Talking to someone in Paris or London or some shit. He's my Headquarters contact. I gotta tell him everything that's happening to me and he keeps a record of it and sends out help if I need it. We have a cool relationship and blab all the time. We joke with each other. Joking about danger. And he sends out help, like I said. Except he's always real late. Never sends the help fast enough. Or the help he sends is kinda dumb and they get themselves offed by Kronos before they can do me any good.

"I have contact with Kronos. That is, contact with the target. Mission going forward. Please provide assistance! Are you there?"

Agent T not listening. Headquarters must be busy with other attacks. Probably Kronos is offing a bunch of agents. Of course, I'm getting closer to the missiles, so there's that. No wonder the enemy agents are closing in. I must be getting very close to the secrets.

"Agent Y calling. Urgent request for assistance. Give me a response."

"Enemy agents within twenty meters. Please advise me! What is my best action? I repeat, please provide a best response. Emergency!"

Running away from the church and across the street. Then down the alley to the back of the Dharma Flower Center. I can see the big white Buddha body. He's a giant ice man.

What is this? Gas? Gas to repel me? But I am way stronger than they thought. Ha! They will have to rethink their plans of getting rid of me. I spin around and run out of the alley toward the front of the Dharma Center.

"This might be...a gas....a gas attack! My last message. My last! No escape!"

Ack! Of course, that's what's happening to them. Killed off by gas before they reach me. That puts me in big danger. I have to solve things on my own. Come up with answers to what's happening. Decide how to get the information we need. Penetrate the defenses and ward off attacks. Sneak around and solve mysteries. Stuff like that. Important spy stuff.

Interesting stuff that's dangerous.

Saying it again into my hands. Got my back up against a dark pink brick wall that is way taller than me. But then I give up the game. I'm dead by now anyway.

My shoulder blades hurt! Probably because Grandma says I don't stand up straight all the time the way I should and my shoulders are getting weak and hunched over so I'm too droopy looking, she says. Drooping is not becoming. Becoming what?

I like to bug her.

Being tall is super hard. I know all about it. I can't explain it to Grandma, though. What girl wants to tower over everybody in Mrs. Sturbridge's class like a stork or a super creepy monster? I am taller than every girl in my class and only one single boy is even taller than me and not by much. Shit. I'm like those alien Slender Men that Esperanza believes in or something. Except I'm sorta fat, actually. Slender Men are super tall thin dudes who, you know, steal kids. Who wants to be that? What girl, I mean? Nobody wants that, that's who.

The way I look is super freaky. Grandma doesn't get stuff like that. She won't listen when I try to tell her about it either. She isn't tall. Never was tall even when she went to school a long time ago in Sells. She likes to say that tall don't run in the Warriors and you can see that is true when she and all her sisters get together for a family do at a park ramada—and we do do that a lot—and you can see they are all what you might call short-asses, pardon me for saying that, but it's something real funny that Jedidiah Williams says at school a lot and it makes my best friend Esperanza laugh every time I say it. I'm working it into conversations because I like to make Esperanza laugh.

I like to laugh. Probably everybody does. I'll give you an example of what I like to laugh at. We were at one of those family parties like I was talking about at El Rio Park once and a lady at a ramada near us ran over to the parking lot all the sudden and whacked a Cadillac with her frying pan she'd been using to heat some refried beans. One minute she was wiping the frying pan out with a big old wad of paper towels and the next minute she was swatting the side of a green Cadillac with the pan! Bam! Bam! Bam! It was like she was spanking it!

That was about the funniest thing I ever saw in my whole life so far. Quincey and I laughed so hard we were squishing our insides and Grandma, too. Somebody, not us, called the police cuz that lady might have been on something, seriously, at the time she did it. You cannot tell with people. What's on their minds or if they're on drugs or what. We didn't stick around to see her arrested or nothing. Just makes me laugh to think about it.

That's probably the funniest thing that happened to us. We still talk about it. Whenever it comes up.

So I'm beside the gate. Dharma Gate of the Heavenly Flower. Crazy name, huh? Got pricks in the cement between the pink bricks of the big wall around the Dharma Flower placey-who. I like to be here mostly when I'm outside by myself playing after school. It is not on my street but one block over and on the other side of Bonanza. My school is on Bonanza. Well, one side is.

This is a nice cool day. In February. It's spelled weird. In Tucson. It's spelled weird, too. And I'm smelling incense sticks stuck into sand in an incense burner they have near the gate in the Dharma place. They burn incense almost every day in there and I have to smell it if I play around here at the gate. Very smelly incense. Actually, it's something Vietnamese. Which is also spelled weird. Their incense smells like spice and leaves on fire in a meadow of weeds.

"Headquarters! Headquarters!" I turn myself so my eye sneaks near the gate opening. You can see into that place because the gate is just a mesh of black metal that's mostly see-through. They got these little fake mountains and rivers made out of plaster and painted pink and brown. This center is super crazy! Water is flowing around the fake mountains. There are lots of little fat guys who are smiling made into statues. Buddha guys. He's a guy. There are also beautiful women statues that are taller and white. They are like little ghost ice ladies. I don't know their names. They have put a lot of plants in pots and set them around here and there. All these golden flowers they put on the gate, too. This gate takes you into that Dharma place which is pretty near our house, just one street over and down a ways nearer the park. Quincy Douglas Park. Which my brother was named for, by the way. I was named Trinity for the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, but Quincy is named for a city park. Lol!

This Dharma place is some crazy religion with real looking golden dragons on top of the three little roofs above the gate right above my head where I am. I can see their golden claws sticking out above me. Super sharp claws. I love those golden dragons, but they're for Vietnamese People. That is part of their religion. Buddhism. In that place they do Buddhism, like the other churches in our neighborhood. If you throw a rock in our neighborhood, you hit a church. Grandma always says that. And laughs.

Yeah, Grandma says you can throw a rock and hit a church in South Park. We don't go to any of them. O'odham have their own ideas and lots of them aren't always Catholic. I am part black, on my father's side, but Grandma isn't because she's my mother's mother. But just because I'm part black doesn't mean I'm not O'odham. And O'odham have their own ideas about gods.

I just like to play around at this place because of the shiny golden dragons. To tell the honest to goodness truth. Only I'm not supposed to be here anymore on Grandma's orders because I might be bothering them too much when they are doing serious things. Don't ask me what they're doing, I don't know. But I have been told. By Grandma. Keep away. Which I'm not. This is too good of a place for spying!

I've got a finger on one earplug holding it in my ear and the other earplug is hanging down in front of me. I think this is like a secret agent. At least in the movies of James Bond, the modern ones. He always has earplugs. I'm wearing a hoodie I like a lot. The faded orange one with diamonds. Real ones. Ha! As if. Now it's time to face the music. Time to see what's coming at me from inside the Dharma place. No more fooling around.

Smush, smush. A person limps away in flip-flops. Sweeping a broom? More bubbling sounds of water gushing. A sparrow comes flitting out of an orange tree and sits on the top of the gate. Then another one follows it and they both fly away. More sparrows playing in the water. Chirping at each other nonstop.

I drop in a crouch and move my arm out slowly. Gently, I brush the side of my hand against the frame of the metal gate. Not currently electrified with a current that could electrify me. A lesson in electricity from the fourth grade science kit taught me the word currents.

Somebody shuffling around in there. Sounds of water bubbling. Spooky. It's a spooky sound to hear someone's feet slapping around on the bricks and not be able to see their body at all. It's all shady bricks and grapefruit trees and bamboo in big pots and in the ground and statues of Buddhist gods in there and the sun is in and out in spots that are moving so it's like flying ghosts. Especially with those white lady statues. I've never been inside.

That building they got inside there is called a pagoda actually. Grandma knew that and didn't have to look it up or nothing which is education for you. Someday I would like to be as educated as her, even if she is only a crossing guard right now. She knows pagoda and she knows the people are Vietnamese. She knows those things to teach me them.

I hear a voice that's far away in there talking and talking in another language and a kid's crying. I can't see no one when I put my eye around the corner. Just seeing the dark pagoda. It's like a hat with wings and it goes up a little high. If you haven't seen one. The doors are real cute. It's like nothing else in America. Colors are red, green, yellow and gold. And some black.

They got lots of plants. Two big pots beside the doors. Gold on the doors. The pots are fancy with pictures of people. The smoke of the incense is drifting my way slowly like a gray snake in the air.

I touch the lump in my pocket. I got a keyring with a teeny tear gas thingy. Got that from Grandma Warrior's stuff in her drawer. Drawer of her desk. I don't know who gave it to her. I don't think she'd buy that. She's not afraid of nothing and wouldn't need pepper spray. She never talks about wanting to spray anybody with peppers. Because she's brave. I'm afraid. I gotta be prepared on these missions. Gotta get trained in self-defense by Headquarters. Which headquarters? Headquarters XX. Super-secret stuff. I'm not sure how to use this little pepper thing.

"Agent T. I have discovered the link," I whisper. "The head of Kronos controls the organization from...the Greyhound racetrack. Their missiles are hidden here! At the Dharma Flower Center on Bonanza and 32nd. One block over from Hemlock Stravenue."

That's our street! It has a great name which is an actual poison that kills people. Grandma told me about that one day and Quincy knew too. Education. Wow, right?

Oh hell! Should have used the super-secret scrambler. Relayed that message to Agent T on an open channel. Damn, I'm super stupid! They probably want to fire me. I'm a no-good agent for keeping stuff secret.

Are the channels scanned by Kronos agents? Too late. Now I'm thinking I've made a Big Screw Up. Any other enemy agent close enough and I'll be dead meat. Blasted to nothing. And those satellites can do it. Who knows what those satellites can hear from agents. Could be a lot. A missile might be targeting me right now! Might be able to pinpoint my location just from one stupid call.

I look up in the sky. Above me, the pointy little claws on the golden dragons on the top of the gateposts. I always think of those golden dragons like real good helpers in emergencies when I'm being an agent. Those golden claws are dope. Quincy would say that. He says dope too much.

I stare up at the dragon claws and the blue, blue sky. The creepy shadows of some pigeons flap around me and into the shade of the pagoda in there.

I listen real careful and heard a broom sweeping inside the courtyard, maybe at the side of the pagoda. Pretty close.

"Agent Y here. Certain of contact with Target. Target is clean. I repeat, target is clean."

"Confirmed. I'm going in for initial survey. I will be reporting back momentarily. That is all. Wish me well. If you have any spare agents, send em over. Over and out. And all that."

Any movement has to be quick and smooth. The margin for mistakes gotta be narrow cuz I've stood there at the gate so long. Kronos agents could be sighting rifles on me.

One look at the missile complex. That's all I really need for me to be able to tell Headquarters about the weapons. About how high they stand, how fat they are, and then Agent T could use a formula to figure out where those missiles could land. Right! That's it!

Also, if I could get exact missile names and numbers and the exact size as they are in the pagoda later that would be super good. Agent T has told me that. I probably could skype with them in person in a few days. On Grandma's laptop. Encrypted message. I will be sure to have a lot of information before then to really make things get figured out in Headquarters. I have my mind on this game and am thinking of what I'm going to say into my cupped hands once I've made my inspection.

Then, getting up my courage, I jump into the gate opening. Woo!

I tuck myself into a crouch again. I'm bold, but only a fool exposes herself to fire without a defense. My fingers travel to the dagger-like letter opener tucked in the waistband of my pants. I'm glad I brought that. Smart move to bring weapons at all times with you on these missions. I draw it out quickly. Ah hah! This will frighten them! They don't know who they're dealing with. Kronos has met its match!

A leap and a twirl carries me across the open gateway to the protection of the other gatepost. Success. I am still alive. And no sound of a missile approaching from above.

"Agent has visual contact. Prepare to download data." I tap some on the gate like I'm doing a code for data going somewhere. I pretend to listen to a message.

I'm gonna scratch something in the black metal gate with the letter opener. Not my name. Honestly, that would be stupid. And I am not that stupid. Ah yes, "yield" is what I want to write. Kronos will get the message from that!

"Y," I scratch. "E," I add. "I," I dig.

This black gate is pretty hard to scratch. You can barely see what I wrote. I start to trace over the letters I've already done. I'll see if I can get them scratched a little better. Kronos needs to get the message.

"What are you doing?" says a loud voice right behind me.

It's a voice I know well, but still I jump at the sound so close to me. The creep!

"Oh shit! God! Will you go away? Quincy!" Quincy sneaks up on me and yells in my ear. I forgot he sometimes takes this street on his way home from high school. He can walk so quietly, even though he's a total fatso, and sneak up on me without me even seeing him or hearing a thing. It's so irritating. He gets left by the city bus on Campbell at the Quincy Douglas Park and always cuts straight across the paths and the grass unless it's muddy from rain. Sometimes he walks on Hemlock Stravenue and sometimes on 32nd.

I am poking the letter opener up the sleeve of my hoodie as fast as possible so he doesn't see it.

"Did you scratch that?" he demands, bending down and leaning in for a look. He has all this disgusting long oily black hair that shines in the sun. The tops of his eyebrows are like black fuzzy caterpillars. They're as oily as his hair. And with dandruff. Not a pretty picture, right?

"Get away!" I say. The minute I say that, I hear the sweeping stop inside the Dharma Flower Center. The last thing I want is someone to come out of there, too. I don't want an adult getting mad at me.

"Let me see!" He shoves me away from the scratched metal gate.

"I'm not doing anything. I'm playing here, that's all," I say.

"You are scratching something!"

"No, I'm not!"

"Grandma's gonna kill you. You're using her letter opener and scratching letters on the Dharma gate." Quincy thrusts his face up closer to the gate. "What does YEI spell? Are you trying to write O'odham?"

"No! Don't tell!"

"Oh, I certainly am going to. As soon as Grandma's home."

"Don't! You bitch boy!" I scream at my brother.

"Tsk, tsk. That's not nice." Quincy is shaking a finger at me and flapping away toward home. He looks like a huge black crow, cackling and bobbing.

Grandma is at El Rancho Market right now, but still he will tell her when she gets home, if I don't stop him. He's that way. A real jerk. You gotta give him stuff to make him not tell on you. If you don't give him anything, he tells right away. He won't even give you a chance. I can't ever spend all my money. I know I'm gonna get in trouble because of him, and I have to keep money to stop him tattling all the time!

"Quincy! Quincy!"

But Quincy can move his fat self when he wants to. The back of his black hoodie says Miracle Gym.

Yeah, it's gonna be a miracle if he ever goes to a gym. He won't even go near the actual boxing gyms because he's such an actual chicken shit.

Then I look again and he's left 32nd Street already! No Quincy, nowhere.

Shit! I am going to be in so much trouble pretty soon if I don't do something. I use my spit to try and cover the scratch. Grandma's gonna ground me for sure if I don't bribe Quincy with money to forget this. I need to bribe him pronto, and that means fast. He's trying to save up for Assassin's Creed which is a video game on PS3 and money is about the only thing that'll shut his trap about what he saw me doing. Shit! Shit! Shit! I can't even remember how much I have in my drawer. Grandma doesn't owe me nothing. And I don't have much saved. I hope it's gonna be enough to stop him!

Why did I do that? I shouldn't have scratched that gate. The letters still show a little if you get up close and you know where to look. I should have realized Quincy might come by. He thinks sneaking up on me is "dope".

So then, when I'm so mad at myself for doing something dumb and getting caught by Quincy, this piece of junk car, which is all covered in rust on one door and has patched spots where it had been hit and stuff, rolls by me real slow and what happens happens before I can stop it.

"Heya, pretty young thing! You got a big fucking butt! I want to fuck your butt!"

Some dude yells that! Which is super scary! At me! From a car that is stopped right beside me!

But it's worse! The man yelling that sort of rears up off the seat all the sudden and it looks like he is playing with his penis thing! He's showing it in the car! His pink dick. Sticking straight up. He's got his back all bucked up and his butt off the seat so he can show me his junk, his ghoulies. Shit! Shit!

I want to puke right here. Just puke all over. And he is the ugliest pale whitish dude you could ever imagine with like the ugliest, horribliest toad eyes and a creepy mouth that is loose and baggy. His skin is like an infection of ugly and mean scabs. This might be a meth guy or worse. It's horrible and my heart is beating so hard because I realize I'm standing alone out here where there is usually a bunch of neighbors and kids and stuff, but today it's nobody nowhere on the whole of 32nd Street. There is nobody around and the car is stopped pretty close to me.

I'm thinking next he's going to get out of the car. Get out... and get me!

CHAPTER 2

Only he doesn't. Because someone from the Dharma place screams: "Get hell away!"

A second later the same voice adds: "Get out! I call police! Get hell out!"

It's a Vietnamese lady's voice and I think it's me she's yelling at so loud. Grandma warned me not to stay around their gate and I should have listened to her. First the scratching of their gate and now this! I'm really messing up. Then I realize the voice is not yelling at me but it's screaming at the car with the Dirty Dude and he realizes he's been seen by someone other than me, a dumb kid, and he sits down real damn fast which hides his ugly pee-pee and the car takes off. Heading for Bonanza. Like, zoom! Tires squealing around the corner as it takes a left onto Bonanza. I don't have time to see no license plate, not that I'm gonna call the police, but still. I can see the trunk is painted gray, not green like the rest of the car. And like I said, the door is rusty.

An old truck comes right behind it on Bonanza going south and the driver lays on his horn. I recognize that truck from over on 30th or something. Beeep! Beeeep! Beeeep! That Dirty Dude almost causes a wreck by pulling out in front of the truck like that. What a jackass! He's lucky he didn't wreck right there. I can hear the car speeding off. The truck is stopped and then goes on its way with the driver slowly shaking his head. Like he's thinking, "What a jerk!" And he's right.

"Who you be?" says a voice when some keys rattle beside me in the lock of the gate. I am so busy looking at the dirty dude squealing away that I forget about the Dharma Gate. I can see a thin hand putting one key from a key ring in the lock. The hand turns the key and the gate swings open.

I almost jump out of my skin. Everybody's sneaking up on me today!

The gate swings wide right beside me and a Vietnamese lady steps out holding a pink broom in her hand. She twirls the broom and stops it across her body while she takes this martial arts position that is pure dope, as Quincy would say. She twirls the broom the other direction and stops again and stomps her foot. She's searching the street. She's looking at me very angry like. Frowning a serious lady frown. Her mouth is like a frog mouth and her hair is oily. She has beautiful eyes and super skinny arms. She's way shorter than me. Her clothes have little dark flowers turning all over them and the top is like velvet. She wears a coat that is dark brown fake fur at the neck. It's not very new and she has gardening gloves in the pocket. And teeny yellow plastic sandals with bare toes showing. She must have skinny legs because her pants are flapping around loose. They are loose pants all the way down her leg.

"Oh, I'm sorry," I say, backing off. "So sorry."

"You not be sorry! He be sorry! That guy he be so sorry! That guy! I beat him good! I beat him up and then I want the police come! Take him away." She shoots the broom in the air like it is a spear and does another incredible spin, this time both ways quickly. Her face isn't happy when she says that so I take off toward home, almost running. Sort of skipping away from her. What is she planning to do to me with that angry face of hers?

I turn back and she is still there, watching me.

Then she smiles and waves goodbye to me. She looks very shy.

I wave back, but small and shaky. We just standing there across from each other waving at each other like two crazy people.

I decide to run all the way back to Hemlock Stravenue.

Goddamn! That lady from the Dharma Center is walking to the corner of Bonanza with the crazy pink broom in her hand and watching me where I am going and I know I better not go there to the gate for a while cuz if she tells Grandma I am so screwed, and there's gonna be no way to bribe her!

I hurry back to our street and when I'm about to go off Bonanza I can see that the Vietnamese lady is gone and I am happy, except I'm worried about the car with that creepy guy and it went in this direction, so my problems aren't over really and I have to stop Quincy from telling Grandma what I was doing when I was scratching the gate. Which is another problem.

I am so stupid! I don't even know why I scratched that stupid gate. That was a dumb ass thing for me to have did.

I look for Grandma's golden van the minute I turn our corner. But it's not there. Thank goodness for that. Our little house is just quiet. Grandma is probably still at El Rancho Market, I guess, or doing something else like the bank. Thank you, Grandma. No cars in front of our house which means none of my aunties are over visiting either, which would also be a disaster because Quincy will tell them anything he'd tell Grandma and I'd be in even more trouble!

And the pit bulls at the Quihas house even bark at me to make me super nervous. I hate those dogs and their yard is such a scary mess of dog poop. Even on the toy slides! They never clean nothing. Ever. And the guy is home all the time.

I race up the short dirt drive to the small concrete porch and to our door. I open the screen and find out that Quincy left the front door unlocked. Like always. Mr. Irresponsible. When I open the warped door I see the blue rubber mat inside that says Shuhthagi, which means water in O'odham, and I notice the house smells like beans and bacon. I didn't notice that when I came home from school. Probably too excited about it being Friday. Grandma musta cooked something in the daytime after crossing kids in the morning and before the Friday afternoon crossing. I lock the door behind me like I always do.

My sneakers make no noise on the linoleum. Stepping around the door, the hall is so small that I am brushing against all the coats we have hung near the door for the last cold days still coming. Mine is too big for me because it's a hand-me-down from my cousin Yselia and it's white. Quincy's is black because that's the only color he wears now, even in the summer when it's 110 degrees! His has the logo of another boxing gym on his coat because now that's all he wears too. Boxing gear. We go all over the place looking for boxing gym stuff for Quincy. He doesn't even box anywhere and I think that's pretty dumb. I said "Why don't you take boxing?" And he said "Why don't you shut your trap is why."

Grandma's coat is blue, but she doesn't wear it a lot. She says she likes sweaters better except for January when the coat is pretty good bet to be on her every day. After January she leaves it hanging up until April, then sticks it in the closet for the next year.

"Quincy?" I tap on his door. He put stickers on the door of stupid emojis and stuff. He has shit emojis stuck in a circle around the door knob. For a while he actually believed that would keep me from opening his door. He must think I'm still a dumb kid. Which I'm not.

I push his door open. He's sitting on the bottom of his bunkbed looking at his phone. He wants that bunkbed out of there, but Granny doesn't have another bed for him, so it has to stay for now. He hangs clothes off the top bunk on hangers because his closet is super small. Not big enough for all the black T-shirts and black jeans and black hoodies and blackness. All the black gear from boxing gyms. Where he's never been to go boxing.

"What?" he says in a bad mood. Somebody probably posted something about the girl he loves. He doesn't think I know about her, but I do.

"Quincy, listen."

"What?"

"I can give you some money but just don't tell Grandma about what I was doing. I don't know why I was doing that. I know it was wrong. Please, Quincy." I put my hands together in like a praying look just to get to him, but he doesn't even look up from his phone, so I drop my hands.

"Get it. Go get the money and I'll think about it. Maybe."

"Okay." I feel so scared. I hurry out of his room without even protesting and I pull open my desk and find about two dollars and then some change that makes a couple dollars more altogether.

I rush back to his room. He's taking his shoes off and the room stinks of his foot odor. I'm not going to say anything rude about how much he stinks because I need his help, but it actually stops me for a second. "Please, Quincy. Is this enough? I don't have any more and Grandma doesn't owe me anything right now. I don't think I'm going to get any money for a while."

"Okay. Throw what you got on the bed. Doesn't matter to me. I don't care what stupid shit you do to that place. If they see you though, they might call the police, so don't do that in daylight, dummy."

"You won't tell?"

"I won't tell Granny. For now. Now get outta here. I've got stuff to think about."

"Thanks, Quincy. Please don't ever tell."

"Sure kid."

I go to my room and worry about the guy in the car. Another worry. Oh boy. I hope he doesn't live in the neighborhood around here, but I'm sure I've never seen him or that green car with the gray trunk. I like to play outside and I see everybody. If he does live here, he might see me again though. I try to remember exactly what the car looks like but I only remember the light green and the gray trunk and the rusty door. I try harder to remember if I've ever seen him in the neighborhood, even visiting. Most of the people here are black or Mexican/O'odham or Yaqui, so white guys are sort of unusual. I think he's so young that he could not own his own house so he probably doesn't live around here at all or maybe he's visiting a grandma or someone. Maybe he was passing through to get to Park Avenue though. There might be some bad places he's visiting nearby or he was at Quincy Douglas in the night doing bad crap which is what happens over there in the park.

Grandma comes home. I hear the van engine roaring. It's always pretty loud when she drives in to park in front of our house.

"Help unload the groceries," Grandma yells when the door opens. "Where's Quincy at?"

"He heard the van," I say. "He isn't in the shower."

"Don't be belligerent," Grandma says, but in a sort of laughing way that lets me know I'm not in trouble.

"What? I don't even know be—whatever that is what you just said!"

"Means sassy. Quincy, Quincy!" she's calling in the hall. "Come help with the groceries! I got a lot of stuff and I need your help. Right now!"

Going outside again after seeing that Dirty Dude in the car is actually tough to do. I look around in all directions and walk real close to the side of the house, the hedge, and then the van. I stay on the porch instead of walking across the front yard. When a car comes down the street, I'm real afraid and my heart beats fast, but it isn't the Dirty Dude. It's just an old guy in a big white dented car. He waves at me cuz he's Esperanza's uncle which I saw at her family Christmas party that was real fun. Shit! Am I gonna feel this way forever? It makes me mad that the dude has made me afraid of cars and outside. Outside is the best place to play for me. Outside has the mountains and the sky and I don't want this guy to take those from me.

I should have cursed at the Dirty Dude like that Vietnamese lady did. She was super brave. She was like a James Bond character for sure. Whipping the broom around real cool like. It was dope how she knew how to whip that broom back and forth and around like a dangerous woman secret agent. Exactly what I want to be. How is it she knew how to be a James Bond character and I don't but I watched all the movies where the women fight back and are super tough? When I was in trouble, I didn't do anything but stare with my mouth open! What a jerk I am!

That was really nice of her to stand up for me and scare that creepy guy away. I forgot to say thank you to her, which was another real stupid thing actually. And she was moving that broom around like it was a weapon to defend me! What a great lady!

Maybe I should go back to say something? But she probably isn't outside any more. She's probably taking care of that crying baby I heard. Maybe another day if I see her I might thank her. She will remember me because I'm so tall and fat and my front teeth are far apart.

I'm gonna ask her about that stuff she does with brooms. I'm gonna try to do that stuff soon.

Grandma heats us a dinner while I watched some dumb TV show and think about things that happened to me today. I was not really very good at being a secret agent. Today was terrible and everything went wrong that could have possibly gone wrong. I feel like a total failure. And I lost all my savings!

Grandma doesn't talk much during dinner and neither does Quincy. He eats the bacon and beans real fast.

All Grandma says is "We're going to the Rez to see Francis tomorrow."

"Why?" asks Quincy.

"Carlos has his fifth birthday."

"Not him! Last time he hit me with that whiffle bat." I say that. "When he hit me I felt like saying, 'Why doesn't someone take care of that kid?'"

"That..., let me tell you, that was pure dope," says Quincy, taking more bacon.

"No, wasn't that the little brother?" Grandma asks.

"No, it was Carlos," says Quincy.

"Anyways, he wants pirate stuff," Grandma tells us.

"Yo ho ho," says Quincy in a dull voice. "Bring me the treasure or you walk the plank. Bitches."

"I don't like that bitches," Grandma says, giving Quincy the eye.

"This is my ship," says Quincy in a fake hoity-toity voice.

Grandma laughs.

"How about one of those patches? An eye patch," I say.

"Maybe. That doesn't cost much," Grandma agrees.

"Where is there pirate stuff?" I ask.

"Dollar Store, maybe. We could probably find that and get it wrapped up before ten thirty."

"Are we going to the party?" Quincy asks. "I want to stay in the car if we are."

"No, we aren't. It's gonna be only for his friends from the school."

"Good, because he doesn't have any," I say that quietly. Grandma gets mad sometimes if I criticize the family even if they hit me over the head with a whiffle bat.

"They aren't going to have another family party because Carlos' father isn't feeling well. He's sick from working at a tranny repair shop. He threw his back out even though he was wearing the right harness and everything. He's just on the couch now."

"Are you sure they want us coming at all?" I try to sound considerate, like I don't want to be a bother or something.

"She knows we're coming. She asked us. Mom's gonna be there."

"Oh, I like Great Granny Warrior," says Quincy. He leaves to have a shower. He has one every day but he still stinks.

Loading the dishwasher by myself. As usual. Quincy doesn't do crap around here and Grandma doesn't say a thing about it. I ask if I can watch another James Bond movie on Grandma's laptop and she says she is okay with it as long as it's not the same one we watched last night. She doesn't like repeating ones, but I do.

I know how to set everything up and stuff and I'm getting the movie I want. I pop open the case and snap the disc out. I've got the drive open and the movie in.

Grandma wants to relax and put her feet up and also play Candy Crush which is her favorite game on her phone. James Bond is okay with her because it's exciting even if we've seen the movie a lot of times before. The one I pick is the one with the bad guy in South America and it's modern. There is ecological stuff in that one. I watch the whole thing. James Bond is looking so handsome in that movie. Wow, I really like the way he looks and talks.

"I like the way James Bond gets things done. It's real good. He always wins at stuff," I say when the credits roll on the little laptop screen.

"Hmm." Sometimes that's the best Grandma can manage.

"That's the best thing. In these movies."

"Yeah. He does win. They gotta have it that way," Grandma says.

"Maybe I could be like him. A little bit."

"Like who?" Grandma Warrior speaks to me without turning her head toward me. She does that a lot nowadays.

"Like James Bond! What I said."

"Oh him? From the movies?"

"Yesss, Grandma," I hiss. "I mean like a girl James Bond. Aren't you even listening to me?" I slump over the arm of the couch. An always angry feeling follows me since my eleventh birthday. I invited nine girls, but only two had bothered themselves to show. Since then I have given up on girls and completely devoted myself to the idea of being a girl James Bond.

"What do you mean? Like a Bond girl? That's what they call the sexy girls in the movies, huh?" Grandma grins. She uses her sock foot to gently nudge me. In the butt.

I swat Grandma's foot. "No, Grandma. Stop being that way! I mean like me being a James Bond myself!"

"Being a James Bond yourself..." Grandma says this in exactly the way most likely to make me mad at her, kinda like something a crazy person said, and Grandma grins again, maybe at me, but also at her new phone where she likes playing Candy Crush all the time, even during the James Bond movie we're done watching together. On a Friday night in February. Reflection on the phone's screen. Grandma Warrior's face. And it has loose white hair and crooked teeth. She could be a new super evil villain planning a horrible crime.

That phone is my grandma's favorite thing most of the time when it's the weekend because she isn't the crossing guard at Rollins K-8 School and she can put her feet up on the coffee table we made out of plastic milk crates we found in a Walgreen's parking lot and a perfectly good piece of wood we found at the side of the road near Three Points. (It musta fallen off a truck that carried scaffolding, Grandma claimed.) Grandma's face is wide and like a walnut, brown and wrinkled deeply, especially at the sides of her mouth. Besides playing Candy Crush, Grandma likes to listen to Quincy playing his PS3 in his bedroom, though she doesn't dare go in or he'll be really mad at her and shout for her to stop bothering him, and she says she likes to watch me as I grow up. Right before her eyes. Growing up into a beautiful young lady.

"Hmm. I'm gonna think about that being James Bond yourself stuff. Hmm."

"Why don't you. You should." I like saying things like that in a pouty way, maybe you could say even a little bratty sounding, so my words sound angry and frustrated at Grandma. She needs to get the message. That's a way to get her to pay attention and take things I say serious. No one takes things I say serious and I need that to start happening. Soon. How am I going to learn anything if people keep laughing at the things I say and not helping me at all? I want help, not laughing. Laughing isn't helping.

"Are you thinking?" I demand.

"Yes. Didn't I say I was?"

"Sometimes, Grandma, sometimes you lie." I give her a good, long squint to let her know I have caught her doing that recently.

"Well, not this time. How long has it been?"

"What?"

"How long has it been?"

"Okay, I give up. How long what? What are you saying? Spit it out, Grandma."

"How long have you been crushing on James Bond?" She looks at me and grins the biggest grin. The Grandma-said-something-funny grin. She looks so happy about saying that disgusting thing to me. So very proud of hurting me!

"Crush!" I jump up to my feet with a pillow in my hand. I hit Grandma with every one of the couch pillows even though I'm falling over doing it so fast. The pillows are flying from my fists and I am yelling for her not to say that word crush to me ever again because I hate it.

"Quit pelting me," Grandma says, in a baby's whiney voice. That makes me even madder at her. She thinks acting like a weak little baby is gonna make me stop pelting her with pillows, but it won't work. It isn't gonna make me laugh either, if that's what she thinks. Who knows what she thinks. Grandma's are super difficult to understand. She's trying to make me laugh! At myself! I got plenty of people doing that already.

The pillows bounce off her and land here and there on the tiles. The brown shit emoji one. The green dog one. The big fuzzy purple one that used to look like a grape but looks like a fizzy blob of soda now. Grandma barely moves after all that throwing I did. She is smiling that creepy smile of hers. Still smiling it.

"Wipe off your creepy smile!" I yell.

I run around gathering the pillows up and start throwing them again. Sheesh, she makes me so mad sometimes.

"Quit it," she says finally in her normal voice.

"You quit it! Don't say those words! I warned you! Don't ever say those words! Oh, really, crush? You're really gonna say that to me? I told you not to ever say crush to me again. I don't like that what you are saying." Recently, because I like watching those movies with James Bond, the secret agent from the country of England, which is a long way from my tiny brick ranch-style home in Arizona in the neighborhood near Rollins K-8, Grandma thinks I'm crushing on him. I know that Grandma knows I probably like (and even love if I admit it) that handsome guy, Mr. Bond. I don't want to talk about it at all. I want her to stop saying that word crush to me.

"That's all right by me; I don't care. It's all right to like handsome guys even if you're never going to get one of them."

"Why? Because I'm dumpy?" I say this at her to see if she will tell me I'm beautiful. I really want to hear that.

"Dumpy means short. You're already taller than me, so that's not dumpy. You're not gonna get James Bond because you're a little kid living in Arizona who wouldn't get a chance with a handsome spy from England. And he's made up."

In that case, the case where you lost out on love with James Bond, you could be the spy yourself, I thought, which is another reason why I said what I did to Grandma about maybe being like a spy.

I snatch up another one of the pillows of the couch and I guide it slowly toward the back of Grandma's head like the hovercraft I've seen in one of the Bond movies; I can't remember which one. Slouching over the couch back, I could reach all of Grandma's head. She puts her hand behind her head to block the pillow in case I really try to hit her, but she goes on looking at her phone the whole time.

"Yselia broke up with her boyfriend," she says. "She's all broken up about it."

"Good for her." I sit back on my heels. "You didn't like him anyways. Are you gonna pretend you did?"

"No. You're right. I didn't like him. But she did."

I crawl over to the edge of the couch and put the pillow back where it belongs.

If I lean over the couch like that, it pushes my stomach in and makes me think I'm skinny, which I'm not. I can't remember ever being skinny. Not even in my first day at school was I the thinnest or shortest girl in my class. I stuck out. I am big; there is no other way to put it. "Are you even thinking at all?"

"Yes, I am."

"And don't think about Bond girls! Or crushes! Never, ever, again Grandma. And promise that." I point at Grandma's face.

"I'm not thinking of that. I never will again. Pinkie promise." For a sec, we link pinkies.

"You always break those," I say.

"I don't!"

"Grandma, you look funny grinning into the phone and not at me. Why do you do that so much?"

"The phone has funny stuff on it tonight. Cats."

"Grandma, why do you make fun of me about sexy girls all the time? It's teasing and that's bullying. I don't like it. I wish you would give up on thinking it's making me feel something good."

"Teasing is okay. Who's saying it isn't? We tease in our family. It's something O'odham, I think."

"At school they're saying it's not good. And besides I don't know what you're teasing about exactly. Well...maybe I do."

"Mwah ha ha."

"It's about sexy stuff! And that isn't so nice of you." I point at her and squint.

"Mwah ha ha."

I don't want to say it makes me feel real bad because Grandma would only tease me more and possibly cackle and that cackle was about the worst thing I have to listen to. I've already tried and found out.

Grandma must be going through a stage. Grandmas have stages, not just eleven-year-olds. Or it's Alzheimer's, which I always say.

"I wanna be him. James Bond."

"I think it's a tall order."

"What's that even mean?"

"It's hard. That's what I mean. What he does is very hard. He has a lot to do. Fighting all those bad guys."

"I can do a lot."

"Hmm."

"You don't think so?"

Grandma doesn't reply.

"You don't believe me?"

I listen to that and turn my head up and see under the curtain a slice of the dark mountain near where we live and the sun going down behind it.

"How did that mountain get the big A on it?"

"They made it of old black rocks."

"Who?"

"Oh, a bunch of the white kids from the university. They come every fall and repaint it. Those rocks are covered in goopy paint."

In the dim twilight I can just make out the big letter.

"Is it hollow?"

"What? The mountain?"

"Yeah. Is the mountain hollow?"

"No! What a crazy thing. Who said it was?"

"Maybe it is. Maybe you don't know everything, Grandma. Maybe it has a secret army of an evil genius. Like Le Chiffre. Or Mr. Big. Or remember that Sir Hugo Draw or Jack Spang?"

"You know the names. You are the expert on James Bond."

"I'm gonna know them all. All the villains in those James Bond movies. Do we have most of them now?"

"I think so. Check the list Quincy had. In my desk. The middle drawer."

I get up and open the middle drawer of her desk. I'm rooting around and looking for the list Quincy printed when he liked James Bond.

"We should keep buying DVDs of them at yard sales. We got some of them for a couple dollars, and some of them we've seen a buncha times. I want to own them all."

"We could try. Quincy made a good start for you."

"Why do you say James Bond has a lot to do? Don't adults always have a lot to do?"

"I believe so."

"Maybe an evil genius really is living in the mountain."

"Mwah ha ha."

"I figure that with all the dark rocks on A Mountain, people in town wouldn't even see the opening to the secret cave. If there is one. Somewhere. And the mountain might be an old volcano, which means it could be hollow. That kind of hollow volcano is in lots of James Bond movies. Right?"

"Right." Grandma nodded. "The bad guy is in a secret volcano a lot of times. That's where he hides out with his missiles."

"I mighta seen that in a book about A Mountain."

"That a bad guy was in it!"

"No, Grandma! That it was a volcano! Probably the opening to the bad guy's secret hideout is in one of those dangerous mine shafts you warn about all the time."

"Yeah."

"You're always telling about kids hiking around the mountain and falling into those deep mine shafts, never to be seen again." Grandma says there are mine shafts all over the mountains, but when I got scared once about walking around the neighborhood, she told me the mine shafts were not in the city.

From this, I figure mine shafts are things to scare kids with. They ought to think of better things that are real to warn kids about. They don't tell kids about guys in cars showing you their pee-pees. That they don't tell you about in time.

"Maybe an evil genius is living on A Mountain."

"Mwah ha ha."

"Maybe."

"Where's he getting his groceries at?" Grandma demands. "Tell me that."

"He sends out guys at night with little cars, golf carts, huh, and they buy at the 24 hour stores, that's all."

"That's gotta be hard. That evil genius would be paying a lot for his food. And he feeds a whole lotta people in his headquarters. Hundreds."

"Bad guys do a lot of hard things. Their lives are always hard. They pay a lot for food, but they don't care about that. When they make money, it's billions anyway."

"Somebody needs to mind his money for him. Maybe you could marry him? The bad guy."

"Shush up. You promised to stop that! That's what your promises are worth! Back to teasing again, huh?"

"Mwah ha ha. Where's the doors for the evil guy? How's he get in?"

"If an evil genius lived there actually, Grandma, a sliding door might be hidden behind a rock, if the hideout followed the James Bond stories. If I went there, I would have to hang around, hiding somewhere, and watch how to get in. They use a secret button or a lever which some bad guys would pull coming in. I would see the button or the lever and figure out how to use it by watching someone come in. Then I'd wait until they were gone and trigger it myself! I'd get in!"

"Sure, that's the way he always does it," says Grandma chuckling. "You got it all figured out, don't you? You pay good attention to that stuff."

"But then, Grandma, then the real dangerous part of the adventure would begin. Mr. Bond's arrival at the headquarters of the evil genius is always the most dangerous part of the James Bond movies. That is when we get real scared about whether he will make it out alive. Well, he always gets out, but sometimes he gets caught! Captured in real scary ways. Someone sneaks up on him and hits him—bam!—on the head before he can jump out of the way. Then he wakes up and a laser is about to slice him in two."

"Yeah, lasers slicing him happens a lot," Grandma says. "Sometimes he has to do terrible things to knock out the bad guy helpers."

"Yeah. That means battles, throwing things, running fast, driving electric vehicles and stopping bombs. I should start some kind of training because I'm in bad shape for fighting bad guys and terrorists and all their helpers. I should start with sit-ups or jumping jacks."

"Good idea."

"I would like to help my neighborhood and be the one to protect the people around me if I get in shape. Esperanza wants to be a policewoman."

"Does she?"

"Yeah. Actually a lot of girls want that now. I really don't want the police thing myself. But the police is a job. The people in my neighborhood they need protection because life in my neighborhood is awfully tough with people barely getting by and poverty everywhere you look. Right?"

"That's right. You listen good. Did I say that?"

"I want to make sure all the people get what they need and aren't threatened by someone trying to do something bad nearby. A bad guy could easily hide out in our neighborhood because everybody is busy with their own problems like working and school and doesn't pay any attention to what goes on in the houses or on the street near them."

"True. We should pay more attention to one another."

"So A Mountain could be where the bad guy has his secret cave and where he keeps the weapon that he's going to use on the world unless we pay him. Trillions. Or it could be in one of those secret buildings at the back of San Augustine that you're always talking about or at the top of the Greyhound Park." I look at Grandma hopefully for confirmation of this great idea I'd had during the Bond movie. For San Augustine I'm thinking the bell tower could be a missile site, too. The Greyhound Park looks like the headquarters of a bad guy where a lot of computers would be stored. I have an aunt who liked the Greyhound Park and she took us once, but Grandma didn't like it, so we never went again. I wonder if I can get there on my own. Now they say the Greyhound Park was going to be closed, so a bad guy could really move into the empty building. That makes it super dangerous.

"Mwah ha ha," Grandma chuckles. "Okay, if you like silly stuff." Grandma puts her foot up on the couch and pulls her sock down to scratch her ankle. "I can't keep the heat in my bones."

"You always say that!" I complain. "You always say that same thing!"

"Because it's true."

Grandma wears knee-highs because she can't keep enough of the heat in the house for her old bones, so she says every winter night.

"Oh, those ones are your striped red and white ones. Did you know Quincy says those are like the books of his he gave me called Where's Waldo where it is Waldo's shirt and hat that are striped? Or Pipi Longstalking's stockings."

"That kid is good at seeing details. I gotta think what he's gonna be good at. He's got talent."

"No, he doesn't have any talent. Don't waste your time. Yeah, but about the socks. You never wear them to school to be a crossing guard, but only in the house on the weekends."

"Wearing socks like these to school would attract the attention of a bad wind and the principal might not think it was proper," Grandma explains.

"You've got some crazy ideas about the wind and crazy socks?" I ask.

"They attract bad wind."

"You're wearing them in our home!"

"That will never hurt us. These painted bricks and glass of the house have the power to stop bad stuff from happening to people once they are inside. I was told that years ago."

"By who?"

"My grandma."

"Great granny Beaton's mother?"

"No, the other. The long dead one. But if you went outside it was a different story."

Grandma works outside as a crossing guard and she has to be on her guard, which is pretty funny when you think of a guard being on her guard against a bad wind.

"Well then, what would be real? For James Bond," I ask. I still lean over the couch arm, but now I'm swimming my arms in the air and the pillow is tucked at my side so the couch doesn't bite into my ribs.

"What would James Bond do here, huh? What would be his job, you mean?" says Grandma, looking over at me and grinning again. I'm always collapsing over the couch like that and swimming my arms in the air.

"Yeah. You think of something." I like demanding Grandma think of things for me because Grandma used to think of fun stuff to do and places to go in her golden Chevy van. Now Grandma isn't taking us anywhere except to exercise and to school and to the hospital for our diabetes check-ups. I want something to happen that will be more interesting. I feel like pressuring Grandma into thinking of something. Why has she stopped being any fun?

"He could hunt deer. He's a good shot. Remember that, in that one I don't know which one of the movies. Anyway, we saw it a few weeks ago where he shot at that train from far away? He was on a hill. Remember? So we know he could shoot real good," Grandma says this, cackling, and goes back to Candy Crush and checking Facebook about her family. She has so many grandnieces and grandnephews and they are always up to something that she can see about.

"Grandma—" I whine.

"Men do that. Hunting." Grandma shrugs impishly. "I'm just thinking like you told me to."

"Grandma, don't be ridiculous! James Bond doesn't shoot deer in Arizona. Like he's one of my dumb uncles."

"Okay, javelinas."

"Delicious!" says Candy Crush. The game Grandma likes sometimes says that out loud.

I have seen a dead javelina, huge, gray and grizzly. Last October strapped to the top of a weird little car called a Gremlin, which is a horrible creature in fairy tale books, too. The Gremlin was red and the guys inside were Mexican and they were laughing.

"He can't do that!" I slap at the place where Grandma's arm had been, but she pulls her arm away, and the phone up in the air before my hand gets there. "He's too busy with the bad guys to be shooting animals. I never saw him shooting animals in the movies. He only skis. That's what he does in the woods. Skiing!"

"Don't slap at me or you'll give me a bruise," Grandma warns. I don't like the way Grandma gets bruises on her arms every time the wind blows. She always buys a pineapple and eats it to get the bruises to go away. "Okay, he could be skiing on Frog Mountain up at the ski lift. If there's still any snow up there now. There isn't much. He'd probably go someplace better."

I feel sick. "Skiing isn't a job, though."

"I didn't think of that, you did," Grandma points out. "I think you could cook for him and stuff after he went hunting. If you lived together. And loved each other... as husband and a very...very... loving wife." She leans toward me to tease me again. She is teasing me about the crush crap after I just threw all those pillows at her to make her shush! And after her pinkie promise! She is such a liar. She will not give up now that she knows it bugs me.

"Stop kidding me!" I say. "Don't you remember your promise?"

"Oh yeah. I forgot."

Quincy comes out of his room, which we call the Holy Room because he punched holes in the walls and closet doors and stuff when he got pissed about shit. When he comes out, the door always makes a sort of ripping sound as it goes scratching across the carpet. The bottom of his door usually has snags of carpet yarn hanging off of it and stretching. Most of the house is tile but Quincy likes the piece of black rug remnant he bought at Carpet Giant and Grandma brought it home in the van when I rode along. Quincy is getting very large for fifteen so when he comes out of his room his head almost brushes the top of his doorway and he goes for the refrigerator, as usual. He doesn't turn on the kitchen light cuz he doesn't want Grandma seeing him going into the kitchen. He thinks she is only watching Candy Crush, but she has pretty good ears, too, and doesn't miss any refrigerator raids by my fat ass brother.

"Don't take anything," warns Grandma. Quincy is doing another diabetes diet with the hospital and we are all trying to take it serious for a change and follow every rule every day. Grandma is being strict about any snacking unless it follows the diet.

"I need something," says Quincy moaning and rubbing his stomach. He comes over to the counter that we never use for anything but a place to put the mail and Grandma's van keys and our house keys in a ceramic duck that has "You quack me up" on it. At the counter he can look at Grandma and get her attention away from Candy Crush.

"Okay, take a hardboiled egg and maybe a couple frozen grapes and a few crackers like you're taught. Don't cheat. I just went up a level." Candy Crush is singing softly its usual theme like bad whistling and a spooky toy piano.

"Ohhh, I hate these." Quincy glares into the open refrigerator at the bowl of hardboiled brown eggs. He goes back to his room with one hardboiled egg. He taps it on the wall and I hear the shell snap.

"Clean up the eggshells," says Grandma without stopping Candy Crush.

"I thought you would tell me something. Isn't there something for a spy to do?" I say, trying to get back to my demand on Grandma so she won't forget she was going to help think of what a girl James Bond could do. I bring myself upright and stretch my arms out and then up as far as they can go to see if I can touch the calendar of kid's art from the community food bank on the wall above me without pulling myself off the couch cushion. Not yet. I was way over the chart at the doctor's office for height and weight, but there are things I still can't do. Maybe if I do a lot of exercises I will be tall and thin like my dad.

"No. I can't think of anything," says Grandma. Her grin is even bigger and I can see the dark stain of all her filled teeth at the front of her mouth. "We don't have too many of those evil nuts living inside A Mountain, that I heard of anyway. We're probably getting along okay without a big international spy."

"How about protecting your people? Protecting the O'odham. Or protecting the O'odham stuff from bad guys."

"He won't care about O'odham people."

"Sure he would, Grandma."

"He's got nothing important to do here so I guess he stays in England all the time doing important stuff." Grandma has Candy Crush on pause and she's stretching her legs a different way. She takes a drink of tea from a whale mug with the handle made of the tail. A tangy smell of terrible tea that is supposed to be made of good weeds or something from the mountains reaches me on my side of the couch. It is another diabetes thing Grandma is trying. She even tried to make me drink it once, but I said no.

"Take that tea away from me. It stinks. It's like Raid and cabbage."

"Oh, sorry, Miss Sensitive."

"Think of something!"

"I think of nothing."

"Nothing? Come on, Grandma, think of something for me." I like pleading with Grandma.

"I can't think of anything."

"Even pretend?"

"Aren't you too old for that? You said you were last week."

"Too old for dolls! Dolls are not my thing any more. I still like pretend. A different kind of pretend than dolls. Real world pretend."

"Okay. Real world pretend, huh? No, there isn't anything for a spy to do that's real world pretend, still. I can't think of a pretend job. I can think of real jobs like do the dishes spying and why don't you run the laundry investigation."

"I'm not touching Quincy's underwear, ever. You get that straight, Grandma. Come on! What about a good mystery? Don't you know any? At all?"

"What about one? I don't know any. What about you doing the thinking. You're young. You think."

"There must be a spy mystery you know about, Grandma."

"No. I don't know any spy stuff. Stop bugging me. Why don't you do your kit I bought you?"

"What kit?"

"See, you don't even remember the kit! You think I have Alzheimer's? Why do I remember this? That's why I don't buy you any kits anymore when you beg me at Walmart. I'm talking about the one with flowers that makes a pillow. For your bed."

"Oh yeah." I put a finger to my nose just to be silly in front of Grandma (because that's what Grandma Warrior does whenever she forgets something), tap my skull, and get up. I go to the closet in the corner of the living room. That is where Grandma keeps her clothes, because she sleeps on the couch and doesn't have a bedroom so Quincy and me can have ours. I look for this kit Grandma is talking about on a shelf of games and art supplies we keep out in the living room closet in case anyone gets bored, and I notice in the big plastic bag I never finished where you could make a pillow. Only it hadn't worked out so good since I did not follow the directions carefully and the bee was nothing but a giant blob. So said Quincy. I put that kit away when Quincy insulted it. I would like to have a flowery pillow on my bed. The blob bee is not so great though. Quincy was right. I hate it when he's right.

I sling out the bag. I make a disappointed face and flop back on the couch beside Grandma. There is nothing to do when it is 9:04 on a Friday and you live with your dull Grandma and a brother who likes his PS3 better than anything in the real world.

"You're gonna like that pillow. I just went up a level," says Grandma.

Before I can say congratulations or something, the phone says "All Aboard!"

"I suppose so," I say in my tired voice, talking about liking the pillow.

"It's too late tonight. Start it tomorrow night. You gotta go to bed."

"Yeah. I'm really tired."

I worry some about the dirty guy in the car when I get into my bed. Stupid shithead. He's wrecking my love for James Bond! I'm glad I didn't tell Quincy about the dirty creep. He would have laughed at me. I'm glad I didn't tell Grandma cuz she would have restricted me.

Later at night, I wake up hearing Grandma saying goodnight to Quincy. I am awake enough to think of James Bond. I am marrying him and kissing his face and his lips. He is very strong when you kiss him actually. Kissing his beard might be like kissing that scratchy pillow so it might be a good pillow after all. Which makes me laugh.

CHAPTER 3

"Why are we stopping?" Quincy asks.

We are in Grandma's golden Chevy van on Saturday morning and we've already passed the Tohono O'odham Rez sign and we're slowing down at the entrance to the Indian Health Center in Sells. We've already come through half of Sells (it's teeny!) and passed Basha's grocery and the post office. Grandma, Quincy and me are on our way to one of my aunt Francis' houses south of Sells, supposedly. We got a pirate sticker book, a set of play pirate figures and a book where you can read about race cars. That's enough, says Grandma, when she finished wrapping them for Carlos. Don't want to spoil him.

"I want to talk to Ladora," Grandma says in answer to Quincy's question. "I haven't heard from my sister Gloria's friend for a long time. She hasn't either and we're worried. Ladora is gonna know what happened to him. He was her client. It's not gonna take long to ask. You don't have to come in."

"Not again," Quincy groans. "You always say it's not gonna take long, but then it takes long. Is that guy in trouble again? I remember him. He's always taking drugs and Ladora has to treat him and shit. Is he in trouble?"

"No, not that I know of," Grandma claims. "I want to be sure though. She's gonna know cuz he was in treatment. I think he was in treatment at Christmas, they say. Gloria lost track of him and she wonders what happened. She always liked him a lot. I told her I'd ask Ladora when we are out here. We don't know her number. I gotta get that too."

Quincy rolls his eyes at me. "Gloria likes him so much she lost track of him!"

Quincy and me know the crazy excuses Grandma makes for seeing someone, and we also know how long this is really gonna take. Once Grandma starts talking it could be an hour. That's the one thing Quincy and me actually agree about: Grandma knows how to talk and talk and it's truly torture to listen to her blabbing at her sisters' houses. Quincy and me are usually left with this stupid (Quincy says shit-ass) look on our faces as we listen to Grandma going on and on with her family. She doesn't even include us in the talk much. Every once and a while she seems to come to her senses and realize we actually exist.

It surprises me that Quincy and me have anything to agree on. I just don't see the world the way he does. Not at all. But on this—yes.

"We're trying to get the presents to Carlos early," says Quincy. "Remember?" I can see his pissed off face in the side view mirror.

"We'll get there early," says Grandma snappily. "You kids stop worrying so much. You're like old people the way you're worrying."

The Indian Health Center has new security that we have to pass through before we can park. Like lots of people wanna break into the hospital or something. And steal sick O'odham. Everybody is just dying to have their own sick O'odham.

"It's cuz of the drugs. They got stuff that makes heroin addicts think they're getting a fix. Methadone. They want to steal it. It's stupid because you can get it for free anyway. Well, they got the stuff for operations and after, too. Pain killers." Grandma is trying to find a parking place near where she's going.

"Sheesh. Did anyone really steal stuff from here?" I ask.

"No. I don't think so. They're being stupid."

She parks the car in front of a tree and pulls it in so far the tires sit up against a big log with splinters. There are several cars around us of the visitors of the hospital. This dumb visit will mean sitting in the Sells Drug Treatment Outreach lobby for a long time while Grandma talks to Ladora about our aunt's friend or staying in the van which is actually nicer.

Grandma leaves us in the van. She looks for Ladora in the Sells Drug place on her own and we stay behind because we don't have much to contribute to the problem. And we both have phones to look at.

Quincy and me are sitting there for what seems like forever. Nothing happens in Sells, which is like the emptiest place that doesn't really exist, actually. I look at some trees. No cars go by. No people go by. The hospital is at least something to look at. It's low and whitish. There is a little hill behind it with cactuses and creosote bushes spaced all over it.

I roll down the window. The sky above is cloudy and gray. But it won't rain.

Not even a town here.

Nothing is happening. That's what happens there every darn Saturday. You can sit and watch and watch and absolutely nothing is what happens.

I don't know why we're stopping when the whole reason we went early was to give these darn pirate gifts to Carlos before his party. He probably won't like pirates any more in three days or something. Kids are like that all the time.

I watch a bird hopping around in a tree. People sitting in a car arguing. The door of the hospital opens and no one comes out.

"When is Grandma coming?" I moan.

"In her own sweet time. Like never," says Quincy in frustration without looking up. "Don't get your hopes up for about an hour." He is playing a game on his phone. Or looking at his girlfriend's Facebook. I can't tell what he's doing. He always fakes stuff.

"Why did we go early? So we could come here?"

"Yeah, good guess, my sista."

"The Rez is so bad. I don't care if it's my tribe or not. I can be honest."

"Yeah," says Quincy about four minutes later. "So bad. You know, I'm really getting good at this game. It's dope."

"What you playing?"

"Bomb disposal. It's pretty easy. Even you could do it."

"Oh thanks. That's real nice of you to say."

"Have you tried it?"

"No. I'm not going to."

"Because you might not be good. Right?"

"Have it your way. Sure. You're just the greatest at everything in the whole world and I'm the worst at everything."

The door to the center opens.

"Oh, finally," I say, flopping my arms in desperation.

"Really," Quincy agrees. "Grandma likes to talk, talk, talk." He made his hand do a yakking mouth.

Grandma gets in. Ladora Sommer comes to the window. "You kids being good?" Ladora's black face is shining at us. She is very short and has the arms of a man. Her skin is shiny black. She wears T-shirts and a lanyard thing hangs on her neck. The people in the drug treatment place like her a lot and they once brought her two saguaros for a house she bought in Tucson. They broght them to her house and planted them for her. She drives out to Sells from her Tucson house and stays for the time she is on a shift. She stays all night working with O'odham people if someone is in a crisis or something and once she drove into Mexico looking for someone who might have overdosed. Those saguaros made her real happy in front of her house. She said a Gila Woodpecker already made a home in one of them last year. I know how she is and that she's good, but still I don't like the way she asks about us so much. Like we're lame or special needs or something.

"You're being good for your grandma?" Ladora asks.

"No," Quincy and me say loudly together. "We're being very bad actually!" I add.

"Okay. I get you." Ladora hugs her upper arms and then puts her hands in the back pocket of her jeans.

"What's new?" she asks.

"No much," says Quincy. "So... what happened to Gloria's friend?"

"Well, it's not good. I'll let your grandma tell you."

"It's not good," says Grandma lumbering around Ladora to get in. "He died."

"That's about as not good as you can get," says Quincy sarcastically.

"Yeah," Grandma agrees. "I'm gonna look up his obit. He was off and on sick. My sister couldn't take all the sickness. She made him get out. Ladora told me what the date was when he died and his real name. We always called him Welkup, but his name was Laurence Welkup White. I never knew it. Gloria didn't know either. I guess."

"Bye!" says Ladora, helping Grandma close the van door. "Look after yourselves."

"Sure," says Quincy.

"What's an obit?" I ask when Grandma starts the van.

Grandma puts the van in reverse. The mountain goes away from us. We drive away from the hospital slowly. A red truck pulls into the spot beside where we left. "It's what they write about you when you're dead. Your family usually sends in stuff about your life and they publish it. Used to be in the papers, now it's online mostly. You can read the obit and find out stuff sometimes. Like who the family is and what the deceased person did for a living. Who their kids are. Stuff like that."

"Oh."

We drive out of the Indian Health Center and head to my aunt's house. It's a little brick house with brown trim and a chain link fence far from the house. Everything around it is desert. There are yard toys in the dirt area in front and a tree with a swing near the door. This relative of ours likes petunias and there are some in a barrel of them beside the front door. It looks funny to see pink and purple pedals in the dusty desert.

The house is on a short dirt street with a vacant lot across from it and a trailer home also behind chain link at the end of the street. Sells and the Rez is super cloudy today, but not really rain clouds. There are no people walking around because it is Saturday and they are at the stores. We see a coyote in the vacant lot.

When we get to the house, a lot of trucks are parked around at different angles so we have to leave the van sideways pretty far from the front door.

"I hope my sister keeps a good eye on Carlos," says Grandma when Quincy points out a coyote and she spots it.

Quincy is on his best behavior for some reason, probably because he's going to beg for Assassin's Creed again, and he actually picks up Carlos' presents without Grandma telling him to and he carries them with him to the door. All like, "I'm the best boy." Disgusting.

This house is where my auntie lives and it's where Carlos is staying. He belongs to someone else but it's a long story how my auntie got him but he is our real cousin and everything. Our family just keeps having these problems where the kids have to go live with people who are not their own parents. Like Quincy and me. We go up to the door and it swings in and lots of people are saying hello to everyone. I didn't even see who opened the door, but it was some cousin who ran away. There in the front room is everybody getting the party ready. People are bustling around. Quincy puts the presents we brought in a big pile. That kid is getting too much shit. I guess everybody feels bad about him being removed from his parents like that. My Grandma's mother is there in a wheelchair. We give her a kiss on the cheek. Even Quincy. There isn't much of her left. She's like a paper bag that doesn't talk. Quincy used to like to talk to her.

"This house looks real pretty. Are you happy with it, Carlos?" asks Grandma.

Carlos nods. His T-shirt is Five Nights at Freddy's.

"Are you ready for your party? Got some games planned?" I ask.

Carlos nods. No details about the games.

"Say thanks for the presents," his aunt reminds him as she comes in with dips and chips. I want to take some, but we said we wouldn't stay.

He only waves at us.

"Aren't you gonna talk at all?" my auntie Francis asks. She has her hands on her hips. She pushes her glasses up while waiting for an answer.

Carlos stands looking at her. He puts his hands on his black hair and smiles. He smashes his hair down on his forehead. Completely across his forehead. He sorta looks like Frankenstein.

"Nice hairstyle," says Quincy. He's being his annoying comic self, as usual.

"This is the girl you hit. With a plastic bat," says another auntie. "Last year."

"Yeah. That's what we remembered," says Grandma chuckling.

"Well, you didn't remember that, Granny," says Quincy.

"Sure. He hit you. What do you think of Trinity and Quincy now? Aren't they big? What do you think that they came to visit you and give you gifts?" Francis prods.

Carlos looks all the way up and down at Quincy. He turns away and buries his face in the couch pillow.

Everybody in the little room laughs real hard. Some people who came in to wave at us get up to start doing more work.

"Do you want to show them how you can ride your new bike?" asks Francis.

Carlos nods.

"Okay, show them that."

"He's a good boy," she says, pulling her shirt down. She's the type that likes men shirts that are plaid. I got two aunties that like those. Like I'm a lumberjack dude auntie.

Quincy and I go outside to watch Carlos fall off the bike three or four times. He can't ride it at all it turns out. We say some goofy things to him to make him feel better. But we're laughing at him really.

"Good job," says Quincy when he falls over again. "You're getting it."

I am snickering at Quincy being such a comic. "Oh, my gosh!"

"Oh, my gosh," says Quincy in a girly voice. "Oh, my gosh." He dances around with his hands under his chin.

"You're funny," says Carlos.

"Will you shut up?" I say.

"Will you please shut your trap?" says Quincy in the same high-pitched squeak.

We go back inside and the grownups are talking. We eat a little lunch and I get to take some chips and dip. Quincy takes too much and Grandma warns him it's for the party people later. He can take celery. As much as he wants of the celery.

"She's having a good day." I hear my auntie saying. I guess she's talking about my great-grandma.

"Oh really?" says Quincy being a real smart-aleck. "I think she used to talk to me, though."

I know he's upset that she doesn't even talk anymore but he wants to act like it's something to laugh about. I can see he is only pretending to think it's funny. He used to talk to her about things she knew about traditions in our family and he really listened. I hope he remembers some of it because I never really listened. Because I was little.

"Do you want to stay?" asks Francis. "The party starts soon."

Quincy's eyes roll around to me.

"No," says Grandma. "We're not going to. We're going back to Tucson."

Outside, heading for Grandma's van, Quincy lets his breath out loudly. "I thought you were going to have us go to that birthday party."

"I said I wouldn't."

"We don't trust you, Grandma," I explain. "When you get with your sisters and your nieces you go kinda crazy. Remember that time we stayed so late we had to sleep at your sister Velma's house? That was weird."

"Oh yeah. We got to talking. I agree that was kinda bad. I went crazy."

Quincy makes an eye roll. "Yes, you did."

After a long ride, we are finally near Hemlock Stravenue. We turn on 30th instead because Grandma can get the van in better if we come in from the east so she doesn't hit the hedge and wreck the van all up like she did one time. Then I see something I forgot about that's really important. It's something I can maybe spy about! What good luck I have sometimes when I'm not even expecting it!

It's the flower memorial and the white wooden cross tied to the chain link fence around the weird House of Isaac church. That's the creepy place that has church services but ONLY at night. I have never seen the people who go to that place. It's like a ghost church. And it's gray. I know that memorial says something about a guy who was found dead on Bonanza last year. Esperanza and I went down there and read it once after it showed up. I can't remember exactly when it showed up. I vow I'm gonna go there right away and write down what that cross says. It might be a mystery I can solve!

Quincy gets out of the van really fast and goes straight to the front door. He stands waiting for Grandma to come with the keys. He looks super fed-up.

"You look like some kinda kook standing there," says Grandma, laughing. She shuts her door and starts up to the porch. She walks pretty slow and stops to open our mailbox on the street.

"I'm the kinda kook who needs to use the toilet," says Quincy, crossing his legs. He sort of snorts and blows air up to his bangs so they flip around.

"Ha ha," I say. "Somebody shoulda peed."

"Okay, so that's the problem," Grandma says. "You always have a problem." She comes to the door rattling her keys and unlocks it. Quincy pushes past her to get inside.

"Sorry," he says.

"Hey, you stepped on water," I say, laughing at him stepping on the doormat. "Maybe you'll piss yourself."

I go inside after Quincy and Grandma.

"Can I play outside?" I ask.

"Sure, go ahead." Grandma flops on the couch with her mail.

I get out my notebook and my little pen from my desk. I slide them in my back pocket and walk down there to the House of Isaac.

Walking on Bonanza away from home. Toward the little bouquet of plastic flower which has been there for a long time. I know I should go down there and look at it. If I really want to be James Bond, that is.

I wonder what those flowers mean. I should pay attention to them, they're important. There's a little wooden cross with it and I think the cross has printing on it. Sure, Esperanza and I noticed the wooden cross had writing.

There is only dirt around the building which is plain, just like a gray and white barn. It has a wheelchair ramp, new, poured outta concrete. The doors are painted gray and there are three small shrubs outside the double doors that are the entrance and a small porchy thing above. A white sign with black lettering rises out of black rocks and an edge of concrete. The sign declares that I am looking at the Supreme Council of the House of Isac of the United States of America, Incorporated in Washington D.C. The times of services is eight every weeknight. There is another newer black glass sign with white lettering telling the name of the minister and the times of services. I open my notebook and copy all of that on a page. I write in my notebook using the metal ball at the corner of the chain link for a support.

The front of the lot is as empty as the back and the whole thing is surrounded by a chain link fence, a little higher than my waist.

Then I see it, the other thing which I wanted to copy. What I see is something I see nearly every day when we drive to school or anywhere from the house, but don't take notice of anymore. It is two bundles of plastic flowers and a white cross that someone stuck in the chain link fence. It is a little shrine, Grandma called it, for the guy that they found dead last year. He was dead in the street here. They couldn't tell where he came from, if he was walking in our neighborhood, because of the little amount of blood on the street. I heard that he wasn't killed there; maybe that was true. My neighborhood is sort of an easy dumping place for mattresses and garbage and dead bodies. That's why people put chain link around empty lots so no one can dump a body on the lot in the middle of the night.

That whole dead guy story is a lot like James Bond! Why hadn't I remembered that before now? There was something important on my own street that I had forgotten. It seems I saw that and never really saw it at all.

Wasn't there a scene in one James Bond movie Grandma and me watched when someone was thrown out of a black car and shot with a BANG? It happened right at the start of the movie and the movie was in a hot place like this, but more grassy. One of the islands or something. There is no grass in my neighborhood except some straggly Bermuda in a couple yards, Bermuda coming out of the chain link fences and growing in the summer with the rains and freezing again each winter, but the school has lots of Bermuda and they have to have the school district bring big mowers in August before school starts and every three weeks for the fall. Some kids have bad allergies to the blooms, but I'm not one of them.

Anyway, this shrine is super important.

I hear a car passing and it's one of the African girls I know, so I wave at them.

"Hi, Trinity," she screams out the car window.

It makes me scared to see a car after what happened to me at the Dharma Flower place yesterday with that Dirty Dude yelling at me. Maybe I'll never see that guy again. I sure hope so. He made me afraid and that makes me so mad I want to punch him and kick him.

I stand near the shrine thinking about it for a minute, and then I bend down to get a better look at what it is made of.

Flowers. A cross. It don't say who put the cross up. I will copy it in my notebook, copy what the cross has written on it.

I glance around to see if anyone is watching me look at the shrine. A curtain moves which really scares me. Oh, it is only a little Chihuahua looking at me. It barks.

I look at the white cross again. The painted writing on the cross is that of a lady and it is done in black with a skinny brush like you use for modeling. The name is Juan Verdugo Jimenez. I write it in my notebook quickly. Someone who is his relative did the cross and flowers. Not the daughter because the man is only 24 years old if you do subtraction from what is written on the white cross, which I do while I crouch with the notebook on the sidewalk beside the chain link fence. I write down what is on the cross and do the subtraction in my notebook. That is how you can figure out how old he was. It will be one of the women he knew or a relative who planned this cross and put it there wired to the chain link fence of the church.

A little low black truck goes by. It kinda slows down when it's near me, but goes away fast when I look up from my notebook. That kinda gives me the creeps, so I watch it go away. The windows are all black though.

Why did that truck slow down like that?

That was weird.

In a little while, I'm back thinking about the shrine. This could be a crime on our very own streets! That is very much like James Bond, isn't it? Then I should write memorial made by women that loved him. I write the man's name and his birth date in my notebook and write 'Is a crime?' at the top of the page.

Once I'm back home and inside, I put the notebook away and start feeling sad about things, though. The mood just comes over me all at once. The mood of sadness. I sometimes get that way since we came to live with Grandma. Maybe it's seeing my mom's family like that out at Sells. Maybe it's some of them saying how proud our mother would be of us two. Yeah, she would be proud, if she was alive still. But I don't want to think about it. And our dad is in prison for killing her. It was jealously. But I don't want to think about that.

"This Saturday night is going to be ruined like the pillow kit," I say later when I sit at the couch with my kit.

"What!" Grandma says. "Well, that's the last kit I buy at Walmart."

"Oh, I'll work hard on it and then ruin it," I explain.

"Talk about being down on yourself! What's causing this?"

"At least the big needle still has its yellow thread in it, because I cannot thread needles on my own and if it were off I would just give up. That is another way in which I'm unhappy with myself."

"There seem to be a lot of unhappy things you're thinking. I can't keep up."

"It's just life I guess," I say.

"I want to find that obit of our friend."

"He's your friend. I don't even know him."

She ignores me being sassy and sits down and opens the laptop on the coffee table. She searches for his name and finds the site with obits. I can see it's called Remembrances and it has candles in the corner. She looks up his name and finds his obit there. For a while she reads it and then she turns on the printer on the corner of her desk and goes back to the laptop to send a copy to the printer. It only takes a second and the printing is done. She sits down with the paper. To read.

"Are you done?" I ask, putting the kit down on the table.

"Yeah, sure. Put on a movie. This is real good. It has a lot of information that makes me feel better about what happened. We couldn't have done nothing. He died real fast one night at the hospital in Nogales."

Once the movie's starting I go back to work on my kit.

"How can I be so big and not be able to get big wool thread on a giant needle without Grandma-help! It's so lame of me. I'm tired of being a baby. How can a giant like me be so lame and babyish? It isn't even logical. It isn't even right."

"Oh, poor baby. Can you be happy ever?"

"What is there to be happy about? Oh yeah, I have seen a James Bond movie again and that is my favorite thing to do now." I will get this flower pedal going and think about being James Bond for real. I could do some real thinking. Thinking in my room at night wasn't so good because I was a little afraid of the dark, to be honest. I always thought someone was outside the window. Once Grandma turned on the outside light and went out to make sure there wasn't anyone there because I was so sure there was. She walked all around and I got to watch her out of my window.

Having that Dirty Dude do that yelling at me didn't help with the worrying. Now it's even harder to sleep. I keep seeing his creepy face. Am I ever gonna forget it?

I will have to use James Bond thoughts to help me. Being James Bond might mean you would figure things out and use your own brain which I like doing. But he didn't just do mysteries in his movies. He also protected people with his strength and he had adventures that involved travel.

I could protect people, possibly. The travel part wouldn't work because we have no money and never go nowhere except for Sells on the Rez. Sells is terrible. Tucson is actually better. But not much better sometimes.

"Why do we even visit with that lady named Ladora?" I ask Grandma.

"She's helping drug addicts out on the Rez. She's doing good work."

"She talks funny."

"Not really. She's just from Georgia and I like her a lot because she's friends with people I know. She'll tell me all the stuff that happens out there and how she had to deal with all the crap of the addicts. It's rough out there. I know stuff to tell her."

"Maybe I could help kids in the neighborhood because I'm the largest kid on my block and for a bunch of other blocks. The kids in my neighborhood are actually like shrimps."

"It's their eating that's bad. They only eat snacks."

"The school made Weekend Warriors for all the kids that don't have food and they send them home with crackers and crap in a bag that they put in their backpack."

"Right."

"I would like to protect the African refugees because they have it the hardest," I say.

"Okay."

"And Nathan, because nobody washes his clothes and he smells like cigarettes."

"Who is this?"

"Nathan. Daniels. He's white."

"We should see if we could do his laundry."

"Somebody from the school might buy his parents a washer. They got the hook-up and everything."

"Well, if they don't, let me know."

"Okay. And I like those little kids, especially Neema and Alice."

"Oh, those girls from Burundi?"

"I guess. Bastami or Bur-cootie or something. I don't know the name of where they come from. They're all so skinny. Their arms are like twigs mostly. Their mothers wear real African-type dresses and tie their babies to them with pieces of material."

"Don't say Bur-cootie. That's not funny," Grandma warns.

I have an African-American father, but not my mother or Grandma Warrior, and that makes Neema and Alice be friendly to me sometimes. I wish there was a refugee my age at this school. I asked them once if they knew of any my age and they said they would think about it. They never said nothing again to me so I guess the answer is no.

Doing mysteries will be a lot harder because of the thinking I need to do rather than just protecting people. I don't know if I could think up answers the way I should to what happened to Juan Verduga Jimenez, for example. Maybe the way to do it is to put it down on paper. Grandma says she puts her problems down on paper and stares at them for a long time and the answer comes to her.

Grandma says she doesn't know any mysteries, so maybe there aren't any in our neighborhood. Or Grandma has forgotten them, which is kinda likely because she forgets some things like where she put Quincy and my birth certificates. That's important. Or the day of my aunt's wedding in 1994 in Nogales. This does not seem like anything to care about. To me.

One thing I can think of to investigate is to study the sides of A Mountain for any sign of the entrance. If I get those binoculars of Grandma's from the closet (I just saw them and realize that is a thing from James Bond) I can sit in the backyard on the picnic table and look over all of A Mountain for a sign of the secret entrance like a real spy. Actually James Bond did that in one of the movies. Even if I don't see anything, it will be like training to use the binoculars. It would be best to look in the morning at the eastern side and the south, and maybe check also at night if any light came gleaming out of a certain spot or something mysterious like that. Maybe I could see a car come out of a secret cave. The inside headquarters of the James Bond bad guy are always bright in the movies.

Maybe the secret entrance will be on the west, though. That would be smarter of the bad guy because the city is on the east. If you want to stay hidden, the west is the better side or even the north. I might get Grandma to take me out to the mountain for a picnic. I could use the binoculars then on the west and the north. I will start this idea of looking at the mountain tomorrow. It doesn't seem too complicated.

I can hear some shouting noises outside. Grandma hears it too.

"Is your light on? In your room," Grandma asks, looking away from Candy Crush for a moment toward the hall. You can see a little light that isn't Quincy's bedroom coming toward us. That's the light in my bedroom. Shining.

"Yes," I say after considering it. I had been in there earlier looking for my sweater and I flipped the light on cuz my room is the dark one because it has a pine tree outside it. I'm wearing that striped sweater that zips up the front. It is almost too small, but it is a favorite and I don't want to give it to my little cousins, no matter how many times Grandma suggests it.

"Then go close your curtain."

"Why?"

"Do as I say."

"I'm not even in there."

"Do as I say."

I put the movie on pause, drop the scratchy material on the plastic bag and get up. I go to my bedroom which is down the hall and across from Quincy's and reach around the curtain for the pull. I look out the window as the curtain closes and I see the neighbor behind Grandma's house walking around in her yard with a tall can of beer in her hand. She has a red flannel shirt wrapped around her waist and it is flopping in the wind as she walks around. She is sort of stumbling in the yard because some weeds are tripping her. She is wiping her nose like she has a bad cold. She is always really proud of the tomato plants of hers and she knows to plant in late February and where to get horse manure for the soil. Her garden grows good. She has tomatoes, lettuce and carrots. That I can see from my window. Maybe she has more. Her husband stands at the back door yelling at her to come inside before she falls on those weeds in the dark and breaks her butt. Breaking your butt wouldn't be easy. What part of the butt would break? It already has a crack, I think, but I can't smile thinking of what that dirty guy said to me yesterday. What if he's looking for where I live?

"Who's yelling out there?" asks Grandma when I return. "I hear some scary yelling."

"The lady with the good garden is getting yelled at. I think she's crying or something."

"Oh sheesh. Yeah. He's always yelling at her now. He could make himself useful and pull some weeds and stop all the yelling and yakking at her nonstop. The weeds are getting bad. She isn't good looking, but she can garden good. Why doesn't James Bond figure them out?"

"Okay. I'll try. James Bond will, I mean."

"I'm kidding. Don't talk to him, he's not a good person. I just lost Candy Crush."

"Is this flower even pretty?" I ask. I turn the pillow toward Grandma.

"It's very nice. You're going to like it," Grandma predicts.

"I think it's too scratchy," I hold the material toward Grandma's cheek.

"Let me feel. Yeah, but it's only for decoration. You wouldn't put your face on it. You have a pillow with a pillowcase for that. That's burlap. It's supposed to be like that."

"I don't even want to hug it because it's so scratchy."

"Too bad. You picked it."

"Oh, I ruined this petal!"

"Let me see. Oh darn! What did you do? I can take the yarn out for you. That's gonna be easy to fix up with a snip. What? What did you do here, too? How did you get it so tangled up in a few minutes?" Grandma is laughing in a confused way. She's looking at the balls of tangled yarn hanging off the back of the cloth.

"I don't know." I flop back against the couch.

"Wow."

"I can't do it right! Can't you fix it?"

"Okay. I'll take this out." Grandma gets the scissors that came with the kit and are made of pink plastic. "These scissors are so cute." Grandma snips the air with them.

"They don't even work," I say.

"Quit being so sassy."

"I'm not being sassy, it's just true. Why is the true stuff sassy?"

Grandma slips the edge of one scissor blade under the yarn and tries to snip. She closes the scissors again and again, but the yarn comes out whole every time. "Yeah, you're right. All these things do is bend the yarn. Stupid things. I need my big pair." Grandma gets up and goes to the kitchen.

"See," I say. "And I'm not being sassy."

"Okay. I'm sorry."

I have a sudden idea of something from James Bond. It is about casinos. I go to the stack of DVDs that Grandma and me keep piled up on the little desk near the door. It will only take me a second to look through the stack for the DVD case for "Casino Royale," which would tell me how to spell casino. The right DVD pops up right away. I write down the word on a post-it note while Grandma is getting the big pair of scissors out of the kitchen drawer. That drawer is really hard to find stuff in and she has to root around for a long time. I stick the piece of paper with the word in my pocket and put the DVD back in the stack in the same spot. I dive back onto the couch where I was.

If Grandma won't take me, I might go on my own to a casino. That wouldn't be very safe, though.

I go to bed after Grandma fixes the pillow part I messed up by clipping the back and taking the yarn out of that ruined flower petal. Then Grandma tells me to put the kit away in the closet and work more on it another night because I am screwing up too much and the whole pillow is going to be ruined if I keep messing up like that.

Grandma says she isn't staying up late, but when she looks at the guide on TV she says she might watch one of the late night talk shows. I like that because if I leave my door a little open the sound of laughing puts me to sleep in a happy mood and I have good dreams all night.

Sometimes how I get ready for bed also is I get out a secret picture of James Bond. Yeah, Grandma was right; I have been crushing on his face. The print is getting a little wored out from that piece of paper with the James Bond actor on it. I pull his picture out of a place in a book where I keep it and tuck it under my pillow. I always put it back before I get sleepy so Grandma won't ever find it if she messes around in my room which she doesn't because I keep it clean myself.

Walking around my room, I think about the great James Bond plans I have. What I will need to do is consider things carefully before I do them, because that is something I can tell he does, usually in his apartment as he walks around by himself and focuses on the dangerous situation he faces. I wish I hadn't thought about that because it worries me usually that James Bond will get attacked in his apartment walking around and that makes me think about how much I love James Bond and want to kiss him on the mouth. I fall back on my bed and kiss my pillow with his face propped beside me, but I get up right away. A crush is a stupid thing! I will be James Bond, not crush on him! I will do his kind of planning in my room.

I drop down and kiss the pillow again. Oh, I do love James Bond. I do. I do.

One way to prepare to be like James Bond will be to take that post-it note paper with the word casino copied from my pants pocket and hide it in my desk drawer. I round the bed and reach into the pants which are draped over a chair. The slip of paper is still there and I hide it in the desk. I don't want Grandma asking about the casino until I have a way to get Grandma to help me. I also get out a notebook with an igloo on the front which only had the list of my birthday party invitations (and I tore that out because my party had already been and most of the girls had been too mean to come) and the pen that is small enough to slide into the wire at the side of the notebook. I leave this on the desk so I will remember it in the morning before I sit on the picnic bench. Next morning which is a Sunday I will do some spying on A Mountain. I will use the binoculars. That is a thing to try to do. Also, I will write down more stuff about that memorial at the House of Isaac! I'm glad I remembered it! That's a real mystery.

I am thinking my James Bond love story. He comes to Southern Arizona. I am going to marry him after we do a case together which is super risky but we fall in love. He wants to meet my family and so I drive him out of the Rez. He meets everyone including Carlos who is riding his bike. Seeing Carlos makes him want to have children. With me, of course. I say I want them too. We kiss. It isn't awkward that he is a white guy with blue eyes on the Rez because he is super cool and nice, just like in the movies. He doesn't make a scene when everything is shoddy. He likes the little house of my aunt. He likes Quincy. No! That's taking it too far! He doesn't like Quincy. He likes Grandma. No! She says embarrassing stuff while he's there. This dream is getting ruined. I gotta stop this. It's better to sleep than think this dumb stuff with James Bond. It gets me upset when he actually meets actual people. From here.

There is a lot to consider and a lot to plan and it keeps me so busy thinking that I fall asleep, but tuck away James Bond's face first in the dictionary in the closet and I hear Grandma come to say goodnight to Quincy which she does every night. It is sort of a ritual with them that she walks back there and says goodnight.

And every night he asks her, "Please let me buy A.C."

Those letters stand for Assassin's Creed only Quincy always says A.C. and not the whole words. It's his current obsession to want A.C. nonstop.

"No," says Grandma. "I don't want that in my house."

"I only want permission to spend my own money that I've saved," he says.

Some of that is my money now! Darn!

"I don't like that word assassin and any game that uses that word in the title will not be good."

"It is. It is good."

"I know that's a violent game and it won't make you happy."

"It will."

I wonder how long that argument is going to go on and how it will finally end. Quincy isn't the type to give up. Neither is Grandma.

CHAPTER 4

In the morning on Sunday, sometimes, I wake up early and take another look at James Bond if Grandma is not making any noise. I don't want her sneaking up on me and finding me crushing on James Bond because she'll say "Ah ha! I knew it! You do love him!" Sometimes when I'm watching the movie now I see her sneaking peeks at me that look like she thinks I love James Bond. I have to ask for other movies so she doesn't get too suspicious about me. I would rather watch Bond movies, but I have to pretend I don't. That is a frustrating thing. And she still thinks I love him so all my work to get her off the trail did nothing. Darn Grandma!

I look for the binoculars on the back of a shelf in the living room closet behind a puzzle of the white place in India. Still there. I decide the best thing will be to tell the truth to Grandma and say I am looking for the entrance of the bad guy's headquarters by using those binoculars to search the side of A Mountain. I don't want Grandma thinking I'm spying in people's houses, which I won't be actually, (though it might be an idea later if I have a reason to think that someone is a bad guy) and I don't want Grandma thinking I'm doing bird watching or she'll buy me a book on the birds of Southern Arizona, which I wouldn't want at all. Sometimes being honest is the best thing if being dishonest means getting a birdwatching book.

"Thank you so much for making this wonderful oatmeal," I say.

Grandma cackles away in the corner of the kitchen because I say it in a way that makes it clear I am so tired of oatmeal that I want to burst and toss the oatmeal in the garbage and then when Grandma is laughing I say "I want to use your binoculars. Okay?"

"I'm running the laundry. Carlos liked the pirate stuff." Grandma's looking at a message on her phone. Maybe she wasn't laughing about the oatmeal dig.

"Good."

"He got upset and threw up though. On his new bedspread. It was pirates, too."

"What? Why? I bet he doesn't like pirates now. You wait and see."

"He gets upset easy."

"I never noticed him getting upset."

"It was all the kids running around in his room. Touching his stuff."

"He's weird."

"Oh. The washer has just about quit."

This means Grandma is going to have to unload the wet clothes, and Grandma hangs around the washer sweeping the floor in front of it and the narrow spaces on either side of it because she is waiting for the end of the cycle so she can unload the wet clothes into a big white plastic laundry basket. Grandma lifts the broom and starts knocking down a few spider webs clinging to the corners of the ceiling.

"You have to get out of my house." She is talking to the spiders in a kindly way, but telling them they have to go out of her house, one way or the other. Grandma stops to try to crank open the little window above the washer. The crank won't move and so Grandma pushes back the lacey drapes in the window to get a better try at it.

"This old stubborn crank is rusty and don't want to turn. Quincy can do this better. Or maybe oil." She looks around for an oil can.

"I can do it," I say.

"No, you can't. If I can't do it, you can't either. I'll get Quincy."

That makes me mad when she cuts off me trying to help her. Quincy doesn't even want to help. You'd think she'd be happy I wanted to try. Instead she just wants Quincy to do everything because he's so wonderful. It's sickening.

I can hear water pumping out of the washing machine and the hose is shaking the way it does when the water leaves quickly at the very end of a washing. Then the next step will be the washer will have to spin and spin and spin to suck out more water from the clothes. This takes a while so I will have time to use the binoculars on the mountain before Grandma pulls the clothes out of the washer tub and comes outside with the load to hang it up. I just hope Grandma doesn't ask me to help hang up the clothes. She usually doesn't because she is picky about how the clothes are spread and she just ends up rehanging everything I do!

"So—can I use the binoculars?"

"What for?"

"I want to look at the mountains. For the secret hideout of the bad guys."

"Mwah ha ha. Sure, go ahead and use them. You know where they are?"

"Yeah. I know."

I scoot around the living room coffee table quickly to the corner closet. I reach up to the shelf and take the binoculars outside in their case. The best place to sit will be on the picnic table top because I'll be higher.

Our yard is mostly empty, except for a small Chinaberry tree in one corner, a pine outside my window, a clothes line and an old barbeque built of bricks. A low wall of bricks painted yellow disappears into the soil on the east. Someone had built a chain link fence on the other side of that short wall and all the way round the backyard. A small fringe of Bermuda grass circles our house. Gets bigger in the late summer with the monsoon rains and freezes yellow in the winter. It is lightly green now because it's early spring. The Chinaberry tree has a thick trunk with holes where lizards hide in the summer and its leaves have already come out in February with a purple and white bloom that is mostly falling on the dirt now. Because the yards are chain link, I can see some other yards until one that has a burnt adobe wall with little stacks of bricks every four or five feet. The other neighbors have dogs but they aren't out this morning. Some of the dogs sleep in the weeds for fun. One house has a lot of grass and a little sculpture of a fairy and a birdbath with plastic flowers around it. Most of the yards have chairs facing in different directions. Some of the chairs are old iron ones and some are molded plastic or strap ones. The guy next door to the east has a cat named Lady.

It rained in the night so the table is wet. I have to use a pillow from a chair that's dry to sit on the picnic table. I don't like sitting there on the picnic table because there are messy spider webs under the table and the benches. I'm worried those might be black widow spiders which can kill you. It is an act of bravery to sit there. With the black widows. And that bravery of me might be like James Bond facing dangerous people and animals, which he does a lot in the movies.

I concentrate real hard and try to imagine I'm sitting on the edge of a lonely cliff somewhere near a train track. I will have to watch my back also so no other enemy agents will sneak up on me and attack. Also, I'm not too worried because I remember a fact which is the black widow spider isn't happy in the winter and might even be dead.

I unzip the binocular case and pull some round covers off the part where you put your eye at the front. I loop the strap over my neck. My feet are on the bench in my new red sneakers and I set them apart enough so I can place my elbows on my knees and lean on them in a steady way. That keeps my arms still. I bring the binoculars up to my eyes.

Focusing the binoculars is hard. At first I can't see anything but sky, because I'm not aiming at A Mountain, even though I think I am. Finally, I get the mountain in my sights and not that much of it shows from our backyard, but I begin at the top of what looks like a dark cone and work my way down, scanning left to right and then right to left, but sometimes I run right off it and have to find the mountain all over again. All I see are brown and black rocks, those creosote bushes, the same as on the side of our house beside the straight concrete drive, and saguaro cactuses that look like pickles with your bare eye and then like little cactuses in the binoculars. I decide to write down that I did not see anything like an opening on the east and south. I use the little notebook because Grandma isn't there yet. I hid that in my pocket when I got up before I ate my oatmeal. Sneaky stuff feels like James Bond.

The back door swings open. Grandma struggles out onto the steps with the laundry basket full of wet clothes. From the picnic bench, I can already see some of Quincy's underwear dangerously near mine. And his shitty jock strap, too! Oh I hate the sight of that strappy thing. He showed it to me once and said, "This part was in my crack." Sheesh! That just makes me sick all over! That just makes me mad! I don't want our underwear ever in the same load! Haven't I told Grandma that a hundred times? I look away so I won't get too sick seeing what is happening to my poor, poor underwear.

Grandma. Slowly limping out to the clothesline which is on the other side of the backyard from where the picnic table is. When she reaches the first iron pole of the line, she drops the basket and reaches down in it for two clothes pins and something to hang up. She comes up with a black T-shirt. Quincy's. She pegs a corner of the hem to the line and stretches it out. The morning sun is in her eyes and makes her white hair gleam like a puffy cloud. She is smiling into the sun, not really looking at what she is doing, but feeling her way along the T-shirt to the other side of it. Before she hangs something, she gives it a shake which makes a sound like a whip cracking. A little plane crosses the sky toward the airport. "See any bad guys," she asks.

"No." I don't take the binoculars off my eyes and that way I can't see Grandma Warrior grinning the way she probably is. I already know Grandma is grinning. She keeps a grin on her face whenever I'm doing anything. That old lady must have come with a grin on her face at birth!

"Mwah ha ha," laughs Grandma. Next, she picks out one of her T-shirts. It's the green one with a dragon on it. Grandma really likes that dragon shirt because one of her older sisters gave it to her from visiting Harry Potter World in Orlando.

A raven goes by and says, "Krak, krak." Ravens are important to Grandma and she watches its flight carefully. Ravens are some kind of omen. I don't remember if it is a good or bad omen. Just an omen, probably. Grandma notices the ravens are living all the time at the university and she is sure that means something. The university is going to give us something that the ravens know about. That was what she said after she thought about it for a while.

"They might be there, huh? You never can tell. It would be good spot for bad guys. All those mountains would. That's where the O'odham went to watch for the Apaches when they were coming to take the crops and some of the peaceful Apaches went too. They watched with us. The bad guys nowadays could watch for the police or James Bond when he comes in one of those flying machines of his. Mwah hah." Grandma laughs and gasps a little. Her asthma acts up sometimes in the morning. She says sunshine can give her asthma, but I do not see how that would work. "I gotta get my inhaler pretty soon."

"Oh yeah." I wish Grandma Warrior would go back inside. Not that I would wish an asthma attack on her. I just want to do the searching on my own without people watching me and making comments. I'm trying to be careful, but it isn't easy with people breathing down my neck and watching everything I do. All I want is a little privacy for my spying job. James Bond doesn't have Miss Moneypenny breathing down his back, or at least I never saw anything about that in the movies.

My wish about Grandma going inside comes true! The laundry is hung up, Grandma slings the empty plastic laundry basket at her side, and goes in slowly.

"You could see the dust rising from their feet when they were running." Grandma adds this as an explanation for how the watchers saw raiders coming when they were on that mountain. "Enjoy your spying."

My wish doesn't exactly come completely true, because once Grandma goes inside to the washing machine, Quincy lumbers out eating his big bowl of oatmeal. He squints at me where I sit on the picnic bench. He watches me watching A Mountain. "Who's up there?" Quincy asks finally.

"There's a man and a woman in a car," I say.

"I know what they're doing," says Quincy right away to be funny.

"What?"

"Mwah hah," laughs Grandma from inside where she is beside the washing machine.

Quincy laughs too. He wanders back inside. He's helping crank that window open. I hear Grandma and Quincy laughing together. At me. A mountain is where lovers go sometime. I forgot that. That is the price I pay for telling the truth. I get made fun of by people. People without sense.

Next thing Quincy is begging Grandma for permission to buy Assassin's Creed again.

"Listen, Grandma, there's a sale on A.C. this weekend at Walmart."

"I don't care if it's on sale. Why should I care?" Grandma says impishly. "I know some people care, but not me."

"Sheesh. A.C. is dope. I want to spend my own money on it. Not your money."

"I understand."

"Then why are you making this a big deal? Just take me to Walmart and I'll buy it. You don't have to spend your money. Just drive me."

"It's my house. Don't I get to decide what is in here?"

"Not in my room."

I start getting cold on my butt from sitting out there on the picnic bench and I'm really tired of this old argument between the two of them. I haven't seen anything on A Mountain but one car with two people in it that didn't even move. This spying game was a little dull. I wanted to do investigation around the neighborhood which would probably be better.

"I want to see if Esperanza can play," I say to Grandma when I put the binoculars away. She is starting some enchilada sauce for Sunday dinner. We're not having company. For a change.

"Okay," Grandma says. I have to do lots here." She's dropping the dried red chili into boiling water.

It looks like Quincy has given up on begging for now. He'll probably be at it soon again. A good reason to get out of here!

I am lying. I'm not going to see if Esperanza can play. I want to do more walking around the neighborhood pretending James Bond things.

I have the notebook in my back pocket and the small pen that writes good. I'm going to look for neighborhood secrets on my own. Just me doing the thinking inside my head. That's the way to do it. When you're a spy.

I close the front door. The notebook with the pencil is in my back pocket. One earphone is in my ear and the other one is dangling in front of me. So I can pretend to talk to Headquarters.

So there is the mountain to investigate. And Cat Mountain could still have the secret headquarters of the evil guy even though I didn't see it, but I don't think Grandma will take me there and I know I can't get there by walking myself. It would take forever. And I would be grounded forever if I did that.

I know some houses that need to be spied on. For example, there is a place across from the school that burned up, but it got boards put on the windows and probably no one lives there. Sometimes I wonder if someone does care for it. Whenever the grass gets cut. That really happens, too. I try to imagine what it looked like before it burned up, but I can't remember it. Did someone burn that house up for a reason? I stop at the corner of Bonanza where I can see the house and sit on a brick wall. I write about that burned up house on a page of its own. I need to investigate that mystery one day. Someday.

And there's another house. The one where a weirdo guy puts stuffed animals outside all over the place. I get up and start walking towards it. The guy who lives there has stuffed snakes hanging in his eucalyptus tree and a panda stuck in the chicken wire fence. He tells everyone the snake isn't a python, it's an anaconda. An anaconda is definitely like something from James Bond. An evil genius guy would have one of those anaconda snakes in a pit and lower James Bond in by his heels. Poor James! That might have happened with some big lizards and I've seen it in the movies. That stuffed snake is awful faded but it scares all the kids on Halloween. We walk down there to see it in the night. It's sort of something every little kid should hafta see. Even though we're in a desert with lots of real snakes, it still scares the kids. The guy who owns the house used to stand outside and holler "don't be afraid of my snake." But no one came up to his house for candy. Ever. That house is two blocks away from mine, but one of my uncles lives pretty close to here so I better not be seen hanging around for long. The guy with the stuffed animals isn't a bad guy. He is desperate for kids to visit the house at Halloween and that would be the opposite of what a bad guy would want. That's pretty easy to figure out all on my own. It would be fun to look at the anaconda again and imagine James Bond things, but there isn't much of an adventure.

When I reach his house, I stare at his big white Teddy Bear. And he has a lot of tables and chairs set out like he's having a party with the Teddy Bear watching from the side. Maybe he brings that bear down to one of the plastic lawn chairs at the table. What kind of a weirdo adult plays with stuffed bears? He probably thinks he's keeping all the kids entertained, but every kid in the neighborhood thinks it's weird. I write down everything I can see and everything I know about that house. I write on the trunk of a car parked across the street from the weirdo house.

When I'm done, I turn around and walk toward the Dharma Flower Center. Past Hemlock Stravenue, my street. My street is named for poison and that is super weird but makes me feel I'm doing the right thing being a spy/detective. I was probably meant to do that since I landed on Hemlock Stravenue when I was really little. A Stravenue is a Street and an Avenue put together. They did that here to be weird.

I put the notebook away when I'm at 32nd and walk down to the Buddhist temple. When I get there I find a tree stump near the sidewalk to sit on. I write the name of the temple which is Chua Phap Hoa and also called the Dharma Flower Center. There are gates with golden letters rising up to the red tile roofs, little roofs on the gate. Big red pillars of the gate and a black metal security gate with golden flowers spaced on the metal mesh. That's where I started scratching the word yield Friday. A big tree is in the front yard. The lettering is strange on that place. That is a strange church to be in our neighborhood. I never know who goes there, because I've never see many people in that place. I write about it in my notebook. I write about the dragons and the arch of the gate. This could be the place where the evil guy lives and has a missile to threaten us. A tall one would poke over the wall. The temple is in the middle of the block with houses on both sides, and then this Buddhist temple pops up.

"Dharma Flower Center, my eye," I say quietly. "Someday, someday I will come with the forces of good and we will work to disable your missiles which you are hiding under your roof and then you will no longer threaten the ancient artifact sites of our people. When that day comes, I will be ready for you."

I get up quickly and I'm about to walk away when I decide to look again through the black metal gate at the Buddhist shrines with all that bubbling water.

I peek in. The sparrows are still splashing around in the running water. The Buddha statues are sitting like big frogs. And the beautiful white ladies stand like ghosts. Then I see movement. Further back in the dappled sunlight of the Dharma Flower Center, an old Vietnamese man in baggy overalls stops sweeping a pile of mesquite leaves and stares back at me.

"Passing Kronos Headquarters," I whisper into my hand. I push the ear bud into my right ear.

"The missiles have not been moved. Repeat missiles are still there. Can you give me an idea of what you need to know?" I pause.

"Are you listening Headquarters?"

"General size is easy..."

I cross the street and stand near a car.

Then I see the lady who protected me coming out of the gate. I'm across the street but still pretty near and she looks up and sees me.

She waves again. The toddler with her waves at me too!

"Hi," I say loud.

"Hello," she calls.

At least I have a friend in the neighborhood now.

I know I can't play outside the gate with her there though, so I walk past her to the end of the street, pretend to look at something and then come back. I wave good bye to the two of them when I head back to Bonanza. The little girl is stretching up to hold the lady's hand. She can hardly walk. Actually, she walks like a wind-up baby gorilla.

I decide to go back to the shrine with pink and blue flowers at the House of Isaac.

Why pink and blue flowers? That's strange. What do those colors mean? Why put both? Did they like both colors or just have the two and decide to use both of them? It might mean something to James Bond. I'm sorry I'm not really him because he would do a better job understanding it. But there is a good thing, which is I live near it and can take my time to think about what it means. I might come down here again another time.

I'm thinking about that for a second when I see something coming and terror hits me.

I see a green car. A green car coming and it's like the one with the Dirty Dude in it. The guy who yelled at me about my butt.

The car is coming straight for me. There's nowhere to hide! I shut my notebook fast and jam it in my pocket with the pen. I go along the sidewalk as fast as I can with my head down. If I keep my head down he might not notice me.

This is shit. Total shit!

Damn, why did I even come out on the streets! That was so stupid. Nobody knows where I am, too, which was even dumber. Esperanza's house is the other direction.

I could start running. I don't really run very fast, though. Maybe I should. Maybe I should start now. I don't know if that will make the bad guy notice me, which I don't want. I want him to drive by and not see me at all. What bad luck that I'm here!

I don't think he sees me at all. At least, I hope not. Then I glance up to where the driver sits behind the wheel.

This green car has an old lady driving it. Her hair is the color of orange bricks and she has a big sweater on with embroidered flowers and bugs. She is picking her teeth while she drives. She gives me a happy little wave.

CHAPTER 5

"Grandma, why do you always wear acid wash jeans and those white sneakers?"

"You don't like my clothes?"

"They're always the same!"

"I'm like the ravens. They don't change their feathers, do they?"

"I'd like to see a raven wearing a denim shirt and sunglasses. For a change."

"Yeah, that would be funny."

"You and Quincy always wear the same stuff."

"Yeah. He's like the ravens. Black. Every day, black."

I laugh. "And he asks me 'How do I look?' I say, 'It's all black! What do you mean how does it look? It looks like black, that's all.'"

Grandma laughs.

"You got about ten minutes," Grandma says.

She's talking about how much time until the school cafeteria opens for breakfast. When Grandma and me arrive at school we always pull up parallel and park in the dirt at the side of a house where a metal carport is on Bonanza. Across from the school. The lady who owns the house is called Mrs. Hubert, but she says call me Maria when we see her. Grandma says Maria works at some dollar store and one time she gave me a bunch of dresses which I don't remember at all. Grandma says I outgrew those right away and she gave them to one of my little cousins in Sells or something. I always outgrow the nice shit.

"You know those trees of Mrs. Hubert's are a pattern," I tell Grandma.

"What do you mean?"

"Grandma, didn't you ever notice? These four ones growing at the side are planted in a pattern: a mesquite, a palo verde, a mesquite, a palo verde."

"Oh yeah! So they are. Very good observation."

There is a sidewalk on this side of the street and a powdery rectangle of dust. Grandma shuts off the van on top of the dust.

After she cuts the engine, she takes off her seat belt and puts on a bright green vest with shiny yellow stripes of tape on it that Grandma says reflects light at the drivers and helps her show up better. She keeps that in the van behind her seat. She checks her cellphone for the time and slides it across the van console so I can play a little before school. Sometimes I really want to, but today not so much. I am thinking about James Bond too much. That's my confession of love!

"Nobody can see what I wear cause of this vest, you know. It's gonna warm up today. They say on the weather."

"My hoodie is good enough today, huh?"

"Yeah."

I watch Grandma close the van door and walk slowly across Bonanza to put up the Stop When Children in Crosswalk sign outside the school on the edge of the crosswalk. She usually does that first, right after we park the van across from the front of the school. Then she pulls the other school crossing sign off the sidewalk where it was left overnight and she rolls it to the side of Bonanza there on the other side of the intersection. Next she moves out the two No Passing, 15 MPH, Fines Double, School in Session signs. To the middle of Bonanza on either side of the crossing zone.

It's not dangerous to walk out into the street because there's no traffic this early, but those signs are heavy and she has to walk them and roll them into place in the street. I always ask to help, but she says she can't have children do it or she'll get in trouble with the district. It's also cold today and there's wind.

She doesn't go to stand at the corner unless there are already kids coming, which sometimes there are. She comes back to the van usually and sits with me. On cold mornings I stay there until after eight so that the cafeteria will already be serving, but Grandma is usually out before then. If it is warm I go out early and look for my friend Esperanza.

Then Grandma comes back and opens her door.

"You better zip up. It's colder out than I really thought. The wind is bad."

"I'm going now." I get my backpack and lay her phone on the van console. I never even looked at it much.

Grandma grabs her cell phone off the console and slips it in her back pocket. Her hand goes behind her seat to get the red stop sign. She walks with the red metal stop sign in her hand which means she'll cross me and also she probably saw someone coming up who'll need crossing pretty soon.

The two of us could walk to school easily, but having the van there gives us a place to stay out of the wind and rain and sun until Grandma sees a kid coming in the morning or finishes her crossing guard duties after school. Grandma also stays in the van early on cold and rainy days until someone wants to cross the crosswalk. She keeps watching for kids coming. Our windows are tinted so we can laugh or whatever inside the van and no one knows what we're doing in there; it is like a secret girls' club. Grandma thinks it's funny that she can sit in there behind tinted windows and no one really knows what we are doing. I agree it's pretty funny.

"Have a nice day," she says.

"You too. What are we having for dinner?"

"Maybe chili. I don't know."

"Oh good. I like chili."

I can't go into the school through the front door beside the principal's office which is the fast way to the cafeteria. I have to walk all the way down the sidewalk to the gate at the side of the school and enter the schoolyard where the buses stop. Then I walk down the patio back to the front of the school. They make us go all the way around so we don't disturb the front office of our own school. Sheesh. Nobody can go through the front hall unless they're entering school for the first time or their mother wants to talk to the teacher or the nurse with the kid along. Sometimes they bring in the kid's meds and they have to talk to the nurse. Sometimes the kid is in trouble and has to talk to the principal before the parent goes to work.

"Good morning, Trinity," says Josie. She's a volunteer who does the garden at school.

"Good morning," I say back. I can't think of anything to say to her. I used to help her a lot, but now I want to play on the playground. Besides, she sort of gives me the creeps with her bad asthma all the time. Her eyes are watery, too. Like crying all the time.

Josie is always doing the garden work at the school. Most days she waves at Grandma and me when we pull up because she is usually already there. Josie wears a floppy shirt and acid wash jeans, like Grandma. She stares with big eyes at stuff and it looks like she's seeing death and it's scaring her a lot. Her face has loads of deep wrinkles and tons of little cracks like old mud. Her hands are spotted like spooky leopards or something. She has trowels in her hands all the time like her hand has been replaced with a metal scoop. Her favorite place to work is right at the entrance of the school or way up near the art room. She is bent and can't straighten up good.

Asthma puts her in the hospital a bunch. She doesn't take the asthma medicine her doctor gives her, says Grandma. Grandma thinks she ought to take the medicine, but Josie just throws it out. She brings her Jade Trees she grew herself and any Poinsettias she gets after Christmas to school and leaves them on top of the trophy cases in the windows that face the eastern patio. It cheers up the school to have plants, she says. Another thing she does is she stakes a fuzzy fake dragonfly on a wire at the front of the school where she grows Calla Lily bulbs real tall. I always look at the dragonfly in the morning when I go by. Every year it's more worn out. She needs a new one.

I wave at Mr. Velasquez. He's busy talking to a mother. He stands at the open gate to make sure the kids stay in.

"Mr. Velasquez, you didn't do the pony tail!"

"I'm gonna do the pony tail. Just wait for it," he says. "Patience."

"When?! When are you ever gonna do it?"

"Oh, I don't know, but I'm gonna do it."

We all want him to put his hair in a ponytail at the top of his head. He would look good with his hair that way and he always says he's gonna do it, but he never does. I've given up on him.

I walk by the multi-purpose room and the first hall which takes me by the compost spot. Then I have to walk to the courtyard and enter the cafeteria that way. To get to breakfast I have to go down the patio gate and stand in line. I always go for the free breakfast every school day and in the summer I go there too on weekdays because lunch is free. I usually have tutoring in the summer which is awful.

The cafeteria isn't open yet and the kids are still lined up in front of the school door.

"Hey, fatso!" says Nene Grant.

I try to stay away from that little kid Nene. She is one who always picks fights with other girls and she tries to make me mad every time she sees me at school. Nene comes when the first bus arrives and usually that is the earliest one, unfortunately, but sometimes that bus can be very late, which was good because most of the kids on the bus were hard to get along with, as Grandma would say.

"You're so fat in the tummy," says Nene, laughing. She laughs evil like and falls over laughing at me. She likes to follow me around and say mean stuff to me in front of other people. Luckily, today there's nobody much around except some first graders in the line and they don't matter. They don't even know who I am or anything about Nene.

I don't know why she likes to do that teasing. It isn't like I ever even talked to her about anything. But once she latches on to me it's like she's a dog holding on with its teeth sunk into you real far. Or a Gila Monster might be better thing to call her. She's super mean to people. She just won't let go of someone she wants to torture like me. I'm not the only person she does this to, but today she's latched on to me. I wish she hadn't seen me, but it's too late.

"You're a lard belly."

"Shut up!"

"I heard what you said," says the monitor.

To me.

I forgot her name because she's new. She has a tattoo on her shoulder that is like a wheel with red spokes or maybe it's supposed to be a flower. "I'm gonna give you a detention if I hear that again. Do you understand?" She hold a little pen above a notepad like she's threatening me. I just look away. No point in saying that Nene is talking about how fat I am because the monitor won't do anything to Nene.

Then the monitor tells us to go to the lunchroom and eat our breakfasts. That makes me happy. Nene disappears, giggling; she never eats breakfast or lunch. And that is one of the best sights in the world when she leaves. She is full of hate. Once she attacked a girl who has hair extensions which are braids. Those are ugly when they're off heads and one of them fell on the floor in class and people screamed, but it isn't nice to say they are ugly.

I really hate Nene. She also told a girl who had cancer and was bald that she was ugly with a kerchief on her head. Stuff like that. She always says that stuff to me about being fat and crap. She also calls me slow because she gets better grades in school. But her grades aren't much better than mine.

Little groups of kids start walking toward the school for the free breakfast that starts at seven forty five. Oh boy. I'm hungry. I always have the free breakfast and like it usually, except when they serve the breakfast burrito, because the eggs aren't right at all and it has bad spices in it like someone has left old twigs and grass in the eggs. Grandma didn't believe me, but one time she tried it and agreed with me that it was the worst breakfast burrito she'd ever tried. I never eat that or the yogurt parfait which is horrible, too.

"Your name?"

"Gardner, Trinity."

"Thank you, Trinity."

Ms. Patricia, our cafeteria manager, has our pictures on the computer now, but you still have to tell her your name. Last then first. Then I sit with the kids and try not to get Ms. Maria mad at me again. Ms. Maria is the lunchroom monitor and she has her foot in a gigantic cast with a blue plastic part going up her leg and she can't move fast but she likes to write kids up and give them detentions in the lunchroom where they have to clean tables instead of playing outside. Her mouth only opens toward her bottom teeth and her hair has henna on it, which is what made it reddish/orange and brown and maybe what makes it frazzled. She has eyeliner smudged on her lower eyelashes. She looks hungry for the flesh of babies some kids say.

Ms. Maria is a terror. She tells everybody to stop talking so much or they will keep the lunch ladies from hearing what the kids want and Ms. Maria will have to give a detention for that.

While I'm waiting for Esperanza to show up for breakfast. I'm thinking of my James Bond idea. The movies of James Bond usually have a casino in it. I have noticed that and I have looked up how to spell casino from the DVD case Friday night and suddenly I know there is something to think about because there are casinos in town somewhere south of where we lived with Grandma. That is why I wrote that word down on paper and it matched with stuff from James Bond. It might be a clue to something because it isn't too far from my house. I remember Grandma saying that once. I want to look up where the casinos are and find out about them. Grandma has been to the bingo tent there, but I can't remember much about it except that it was called Desert Diamond or del Sol. Grandma sometimes plays bingo in the big tent that is there, but she hasn't in a really long time. The name of the street where casinos are is not so easy to remember, but it might be on the bus line and I can probably use the computer soon to see where those casinos are. If I get to use the computer on my own, I could look for that on my own or I can come out and ask Grandma.

So that is similar to a James Bond movie that I have a casino near me. Maybe I can take a bus down there and see if stuff is happening at that casino. That probably won't be safe for a ten-year-old, actually. And they wouldn't let me inside. There might not be much excitement like that story with the bad guy either. When I had been there I hadn't seen any really, really bad looking guys, only drunks and people arguing loud.

I wonder if I should tell Esperanza about some of the things with my James Bond plan. It might be a good idea to let her in on the mysteries and see what she thinks about them. Another brain is better than one brain alone. Esperanza might have some real good ideas about what the solutions would be to the problems in the neighborhood. Esperanza does live close and she might be a good person to figure out the meaning of things I don't understand, to find clues where I miss them and to point out dangers. I might even invite her to go along on an investigation. Esperanza is always willing to do things on the playground and she has played at my home once.

"Nene was mean to me before you came," I say to Esperanza the first thing I see her.

"Oh she is such a dweeb," Esperanza says laughing.

Esperanza always makes fun of stuff. Sometimes I like that, but not today.

"She's worse than a dweeb. She's rude."

"Stop the talking," Ms. Maria orders. "Are you talking?" she asks to me.

I shake my head. It's dumb to even speak to her if she asks if you're talking because if you answer she says you just talked.

"I think you were talking."

"No, I wasn't," I say.

I shouldn't have talked.

"I'm gonna give you a detention for talking. For today. You serve it today."

"What? I wasn't!"

Oh boy. I watch her writing my name on her pad of detentions for lunch. She really likes to give me detentions. All the time she's after me with threats of detention. Well, I was talking to Esperanza about Nene. My luck is not very good. Now Esperanza will be outside at lunch without me. Other girls want Esperanza as a friend and it's really hard to keep her from playing with them when they try to coax her away from me all the time. Every single day they're trying to get her away from me. They say she can be the queen if they're playing queens. Or they say she can be the beautiful horse. They never want me to come along with them. They never ask me to join them playing queen.

I trudge off to class. Esperanza isn't in my class. Work is just dumb today. At least Ms. Sturbridge doesn't get mad at me and she says I did a good job on my graphics organizer but I needed to do the Title better.

But at lunch I have to sit at the detention table to eat and I don't get to go out. I have to wipe dirty tables with a rag. I don't know if Esperanza is sad or what. I hope she is. I never even get to see her at all.

If Nene gets mean to me, Ms. Maria is good about giving her detentions. It won't stop Nene from being mean forever but it usually works for a few days and I have a better time on the playground once Ms. Maria has given Nene a detention. I don't like it when I see Nene talking to the kids in my class because sometimes she tells them stuff about me. I think she hates me because I'm Native American and black. Nene is just black. She doesn't like me for some reason, but I'm not sure what. Ms. Andrea at lunch time is also quick to give people detentions. She is huge and black and she doesn't like any nonsense from kids. She doesn't favor her nieces or nephews who are always in trouble and getting detentions from her. All her nieces and nephews go to our school. I don't even know how many she has. Her sister is the nurse, also. All those kids want to go to the nurse to see their auntie.

After school I decide to try to spy! I want to get some James Bond type info.

When I cross on the other side of the crosswalk Grandma gives me her phone and I go to the van with my backpack. Usually I play games on Grandma's phone until everyone crosses and Grandma walks the heavy metal signs off the street and tucks them away at the sides of peoples' homes. But today I get interested in the cars and vans of people picking up kids. They are parked in every direction on the side of the road and in a dirt lot across from the school. Cars are parked everywhere except where the buses pull up, but the buses usually come after three when most of the cars are gone. Once most of the kids are picked up, some teachers will take the leftover kids into the school. Some of them have to call home to remind people that they are waiting to be picked up. Also, strangers come to pick up kids who are being cared for in foster care. Later, other white vans will come for kids in daycare and the kids will be waiting in the hall outside the school office.

I see a real long brand new white van. "That's a spy thing," I say to myself when I see the brand new van. With El Camino Baptist School on it. I get out my spying notebook from my backpack and copy all the words. Also there is USDOT. What does that even mean? And a big long string of numbers. The windows are completely black and I can't even see who is inside that thing. I write down "windows black." That creepy van could be a James Bond thing for sure. It looks spooky and mysterious. Maybe kids are being taken away by the government to go somewhere bad. I will have to look into it. I write down everything I see about the van. This could be something bad the government's doing. They could be rounding kids up like animals.

A lot of cars are pulling out with kids already in, kindergarteners mostly who come out earlier than me. Grandpas in trucks are coming up slowly looking for their grandkids. They aren't that good at recognizing their own grandkids sometimes! Some have big straw cowboy hats and tight cowboy shirts. Those guys wear boots, too. I see some of the grandpas I know who have older grandchildren in my class. Some families walk to pick up their kids. There are mothers with their mothers and other kids in their arms and holding hands. I like seeing the groups coming together. The parents of different kids joke with each other.

The sky is clear today and there is a light breeze.

I press the button to roll down the window beside me. Grandma has to keep the signs up until three-thirty. There is another guard who is younger and has strawberry-blonde hair who crosses kids and parents who live on the other side of Park.

"I'm gonna see if the African girls can play," I say to Grandma the minute we get home.

"Okay," she says.

I go down to the Dharma Gate to play.

As I'm looking across the street, about to cross, I realize an old lady is peering at me through the gate! Not the lady who I saw before, but someone else. Someone older. But she disappears.

The gate stays closed and I decide I can play around there. No one comes out or sweeps or anything.

I imagine the missile complex and describe it.

"Am observed. Enemy agent has spotted me. Please advise. Go forward with mission? Roger. Will continue with sight observation and transmissions. Size and type of objects are as follows: XN-89, 34 megatons, in silo depth of 167 meters, secondary missile, XN-88, 34 megatons, in silo depth 154 meters. Please copy. Do you have those? Repeat, do you have?" I learned meters in school. It's like Europe stuff. Megatons I looked up once for a missile.

I act like I'm listening into my earpiece. I type on the wall onto a pretend transmission pad or something. Suddenly, I glance into the clouds.

I pretend the small plane flying overhead has a team of Kronos agents in it.

"Being scouted overhead. Repeat, air attack underway. Will contact when attack over. I see parachutes. Enemy agents shooting as they come down. Will return fire if possible. Wind may be blowing them off target. Under attack! Will make my way to a safe house. Where is the safe house?"

I have a really great time for another hour playing James Bond even though I don't do any mystery investigation. Well, I have a really great time as long as I don't think about Esperanza playing at lunch. Without me.

Right before I'm gonna go home, I walk down toward the House of Isaac and the memorial. I kinda forgot about that! Behind the low chain link fence is the bare dirt lot.

And something really, really horrible and strange!

The flowers that were pink and blue, those plastic flowers in the bouquet, are just sitting on the dirt against the outside wall of the House of Isaac!

Did the wind blow them there? They are pretty far from the fence. To me it looks like they were thrown there! The wind wouldn't have blown them like that.

Wait! And it looks like the cross is missing too! It's not there!

I walk to the edge of the fence. Yep. The cross is gone too! Someone tored apart the memorial to Juan Verdugo Jimenez!

I go down fast to the end of the hedge and look around. It takes a minute or two, but then I spot the cross. It has been snapped in two! Oh, my goodness! Who would have done that? It's so weird. Whoever snapped it, finished up by throwing it into the hedge behind the chain link fence. Who would have broke that cross? Who would throw the flowers like that? The person who did that must have been angry.

The cross is wood but snapping it wouldn't be easy. The wood isn't thin. I wish I could put it back together, but I know I probably couldn't do it. And I don't want to climb the fence to get inside the yard of the House of Isaac. The gate has a padlock on it.

Whoever did that hated the memorial. But who would hate it?

I could see a kid throwing the flowers, but not wrecking the cross.

Or would a kid or a group of teens do that to be funny? I don't think they'd do that just to be mean. It seems like a waste of time. The cross was wired onto the fence. I saw the wire and it was twisted a lot and then twisted more onto the fence. Someone undid the wire first. That took a lot of time. A kid or a vandal wouldn't take all that time to pull the wire off. They wouldn't have enough patience to stand there bending over and undo all that. It was twisted wire done real carefully. There were three wires that would have to be undone. Who would waste their time undoing all those twists?

Some kids were Goth in our neighborhood and got together to burn candles and crap and pretended they hated religions, but even they wouldn't waste that much time undoing the cross. It just didn't make sense. I don't even think they live around here anymore. They left a long time ago when that went out of style. Goth stuff, I mean.

This place looks so spooky and suspicious. I write that in my notebook at the bottom of the page where I copied the stuff of the House of Isaac. The whole place is creepy. No sign of anyone, not a caretaker or anything and I'd never seen a worshipper. Where did they keep themselves?

What a shock that was when I got to the corner and I saw the white cross was completely gone!

Definitely like something in a James Bond movie. A creepy church that I've never seen used, a memorial out in front and now the memorial is gone! I'm kinda waiting for a car to come squealing around the corner and a gun to go Bam! Bam! And then a body would roll out the back door of the car right in front of me. That doesn't happen though. And I feel creepy remembering about the dude in the car the last time I was alone. If I did some exercising maybe I would feel a little stronger.

CHAPTER 6

On Tuesday morning at school I start thinking it's better if I don't get anyone else involved in what I'm doing about the memorial with the cross. I think I've already let Grandma Warrior and Quincy know too much. Look at how they made fun of me for using the binoculars on A Mountain!

If they know anything about the memorial, about it being ripped apart even, they might make fun of me again even more for being upset! I just don't want to hear them mock me and make me feel bad about myself. Besides, that Juan guy who was found dead in our neighborhood could have died naturally. He's kinda young for that, though. Unless drugs.

I don't think Esperanza would make fun of me about the Juan mystery, but she might now that I didn't play with her for a lunch. She's like that. If I even get sick, when I come back she always has a new friend. Or she might tell her parents what I'm doing and that might mean they would talk to Grandma, and Grandma would put a stop to my fun. I will have to figure out what the chance is of that happening. Maybe Esperanza can be trusted with the secret mysteries I'm planning to solve, but maybe she is a blabber-mouth at home.

It's hard to tell about things like that with kids. Esperanza seems to keep secrets, but she has an older sister and I think if she has an older sister she might tell her things she's doing just to make the sister think better of her. They are really close and Esperanza shares stuff with her. If I mention doing mysteries to Esperanza, I bet she will tell her sister what we're doing and the sister will tell the parents and they'll put a stop to it and say it's dangerous. I can see how that works. I don't try to impress Quincy because there's nothing I can do that will interest him. Having a sister would be different. Especially an older sister.

Esperanza comes into the cafeteria for breakfast and I decide to think longer about whether or not to tell her anything about James Bond or the memorial. There's no hurry. If you make a mistake and tell the wrong person they would kid you about it all the time.

We eat breakfast together and go to the playground before the bell rings. She starts talking about the Slender Man and how he kidnaps kids. That is a really creepy thing that Esperanza believes in. I don't know why she thinks this weirdo wants to kidnap her so badly. She is kinda cute, but she wears glasses and her hair is curly. What's the point with him? That's what I wanna say to her. I mean that guy could kidnap a lot more interesting people than a bunch of kids in Arizona. We don't even know anything. Not actually. Why not kidnap a scientist or something? Why not an inventor? But I play along. We just pretend that some of the clouds look like the Slender Man's UFO. She figures it is long and thin. There are lots of long and thin clouds today. She has all sorts of ideas about the Slender Man.

I'm almost thinking I'm gonna tell her about James Bond, but I change my mind. I don't know why, but the Slender Man is way more popular with girls on our playground than James Bond will ever be. You can't mention something unpopular or people come down on you like a ton of something. Bam! You are the bad one right then. You are the one doing unpopular stuff and saying goofy things that they don't approve of. It's like there's only some games you can play, and anything else is off-limits. Even with Esperanza.

"Who are you?" this weird little girl says to me. She comes up to us and links Esperanza's arm in hers. She is moving Esperanza away from me. She's pulling her away to another part of the playground where she can probably talk about me!

I'm freaking out. Who is this horrible girl? She wants to talk to Esperanza and it really makes me mad that she is already acting like she and Esperanza are besties. I bet she met Esperanza yesterday at lunch when I had detention from Ms. Maria! How do I know? This has happened before! That's how! If I get detention, Esperanza gets a new friend. If I get sick, she gets a new friend. It's out of sight, out of mind.

How could they be best friends after one lunch? That is dumb. I knew that detention would cost me. And now Esperanza has a new friend. That's what I get for being the one to always get in trouble.

"I'm Trinity," I say with an angry voice.

"Why don't you sit somewhere else?" she says in a very rude way. She is sitting with Esperanza on a bench and trying to knock me off. Rude is what she is. She thinks if she's rude enough I'll get defeated and leave my best friend for her. But I don't give up that easy. No one being rude is going to stop me from having a friend.

"Esperanza and me are friends. Who are you?" I say right back.

"I'm Oseana. Esperanza and I are friends now. We don't want you listening in on our secrets. Go somewhere else." Oseana almost spits this at me. She turns her back to me quickly and looks at Esperanza. She starts to say something to her.

"Oh, Trinity is my oldest friend since first grade, Oseana," says Esperanza. "We can all be friends together. Right?"

Finally she stands up for our friendship! But that last part is no good. I know right away that Oseana is not the type to want me as a friend. She only wants attractive people. Not that she's so good-looking. She has freaky huge eyes like a Monster High doll or one of those old Furby things that Grandma has on her desk.

"Well, I don't know why you're friends with someone who's so big. I don't have any fat friends," says Oseana with a mean look at me. She emphasizes big and fat, because she and Esperanza are the same size. Small.

"That's not nice," says Esperanza. But she is laughing because Oseana called me fat. She starts giggling slowly and then laughs a lot louder. I said I liked Esperanza's laugh, but maybe I don't! Not when she laughs at me with a stranger.

Oseana and Esperanza laugh together for what seems forever. They are giggling and giggling. The outside monitor looks over at the bench. I'll probably get another detention because they're laughing at me. Oseana has already turned my best friend against me and made her laugh at what I look like. I don't see how she worked so fast. It has only been a day that they've been friends. Maybe it won't last long either? Maybe I shouldn't give up so easily.

It makes me so sad. My insides are flat and sore. I feel like my breakfast is flipping around inside me. That detention cost me a friendship. I look over at Esperanza and Oseana. She is the type to dump friends. That's for sure.

I have known Esperanza since kindergarten but we haven't slept over. We talked about that a couple of times last summer and spring and over Christmas vacation. Maybe we'll do that during Spring Break, which is coming up. But now that she is best friends with Oseana that might not happen. Even though I know her parents and they know my Grandma.

Esperanza is too nice to this goofy girl. Oseana has really big eyes and is saying all kinds of fun stuff to Esperanza and I hear her whispering (loud) that she is promising to bring her in a neat hair bow thing tomorrow that her big sister knows is popular in middle school. I can tell Esperanza is happier with Oseana than with me. I don't even know what is popular in middle school. I don't even have an older sister. If I ask Quincy what's popular he says "just SEX kid." That's what you get with a brother. Smart aleck remarks all the time. He doesn't give me any help or encouragement the way a big sister would.

They are both small, Esperanza and Oseana, so Oseana thinks I will be pushed out because I'm big. She is buying a friendship with the hair bow promises. "I'm gonna bring you something." Yuck. Why doesn't Esperanza see that? It's so obvious.

Then a good thing happens. Oseana sees another girl that she was waiting for. Waiting for her to come out from breakfast. She was using Esperanza so she wouldn't be alone while she waited! When the other girl shows up, she jumps up and runs away from Esperanza! Esperanza isn't paying attention. That girl is better looking than Esperanza and Oseana just wants to be friends with the most popular, most beautiful girls so that she can be popular too. Esperanza isn't the most popular in the fourth grade at all. Oseana sneaks away because she is a sneak.

That means we are free of her. Thank goodness for that. She'll be back though. I can predict she'll be back because her type always is and now I know Esperanza isn't very loyal to me. Maybe that's a good thing to know before I get too far out on a limb some time and need her help. Maybe it's good to know what she really thinks of me.

Things are sort of awkward between us after Oseana shoots off after her new bestie. I drift back to Esperanza kinda slow like. I don't know if Esperanza will be best friends with Oseana or not. Time will tell is what Grandma always says to me. And it's irritating!

Telling Esperanza about James Bond seems like a bad idea now. I don't talk to her about anything important and I just listen to her tell me something about a cousin who is really annoying and has to stay at their house after school and she has to play with this annoying cousin. Maybe she's telling me this because she thinks I'm like the annoying cousin?

I feel pretty sad to think of my friendship after Mrs. Sturbridge brings us in the room and silent reading starts. Esperanza isn't in my class. I think Oseana is in a lower grade so she will not have Esperanza to herself in the classroom, but lunch might be different. I don't want to take a chance that Oseana will find out that I am playing James Bond and make fun of me for it. Esperanza won't make fun of me, but she might not be so friendly. I had wanted to play it with another girl, but it isn't going to happen for me.

At lunch Esperanza doesn't come out because she's having a reading testing in the library. I try to remember the way Esperanza and me used to have fun looking at the flat balls stuck on the roof of the ramada. I'm by myself though, but it might be fun. The monitors say no one will get those down ever because they are too stuck and they have tried rakes that Josie the volunteer gardener gave them. Esperanza and me once walked back from the ramada and we could see those balls of different colors and sizes sitting on the green roof. All of them were flattened and they look like they had sunk into the roof. The janitor won't go up because he doesn't have the strength anymore and we lost the P.E. teacher we used to have. He always got those balls down himself for us. So I go to look at the balls today.

They're still there. Oh, there's a new yellow ball.

At the end of the day, I have to wait in a line for Mrs. Sturbridge to decide we are quiet enough for her to lead us out. Esperanza's class goes ahead out the hall doors. That means she and Oseana can talk. Our class has to show good hallway behavior and proper line formation before we go. Our hands have to be to ourselves, we have to be behind the person in front of us, and we have to be making the peace sign with one hand and have our index finger on our lips with the other hand. No touching the posters about Earth Day. We can walk in the halls directly from fourth grade because the principal gives our class permission to walk by the cafeteria. Then we go down a little hallway which is behind the theater's back door (that is a secret door to a secret way we go to the stage when we have a performance). The door to the school stays open because a couple big rocks hold it and if your class comes out first the teacher usually kicks the rocks to the door and jams them up against it. Today the kindergartens are already out. Every time a new class comes out, the people waiting look worried that their kid hasn't shown up yet. I look for Esperanza but no luck. She's somewhere at parent pick-up, but I don't know where, and then I go over to the crosswalk where Grandma stands.

"How was your day?" Grandma asks me as I cross Bonanza. The wind is blowing harder than in the morning. The sun isn't doing much to warm me up with this wind.

"All right. I got a 78 on math."

And I lost my best friend! I'm not going to tell Grandma. I'm going to think about my James Bond mystery and forget about Oseana and Esperanza. It's just a sad topic for me. It's gonna make me wanna cry and I don't like to cry in front of Grandma, if I can help it.

"Okay."

I know I will have to show Grandma the math paper and fix all my mistakes, but I usually do that on Saturday, not on a week night. I keep a pile of the week's papers and Grandma goes over them.

Grandma crosses me and smiles and waves at a passing car and then leads me with the sign in her hand. She hands me the van keys and her cell phone.

I open the van and hop in. It's warmer in here. I have the phone, but I don't want to play a game.

I watch the father of Ezekiel and his little brother come out of the school. They probably have been in trouble again. Ezekiel is a year older than me but he flunked first grade so he's in my class. He always has a look on his face as though he's done something awful. Ezekiel's father is more interesting to look at than Ezekiel, though. I can look at Ezekiel any day in my class.

Ezekiel's father is a short man; I'm almost as tall as him. He is heavy on all his parts: arms, legs and trunk and the color of his skin is chocolatey brown, almost as dark as me. He wears shorts and hiking boots with tube socks. The tube socks have two red stripes at the top. Very weird.

The really strange thing about him is he has only one eye like a scary pirate in books. The other eye is only a socket! And he doesn't ever cover that missing eye with a patch! There are also scars on his skin near the eye. Everybody at school thinks he's a pirate and that makes Ezekiel popular with boys, but not with girls, who don't want to see Ezekiel's father because of the empty socket they have to look at. Ezekiel acts like he likes the fact that his father scares girls, but I'm not so sure. Sometimes Ezekiel seems embarrassed about his dad, like one time when he brought in Ezekiel's birthday cupcakes. The dad has tattoos on his arms below the sleeves of his T-shirt, but I've never seen what they are. His hair is brown, long, and standing wildly in the wind and without the wind. He looks like a bad guy in lots of ways. I wonder if he really is. Everybody at the school is terrified of him when they first see him. Some of the boys who play at his house say he is pretty nice and all he does is help them out with playing and offer to take them places.

Ezekiel says his dad works at the casino, one of them anyways, but I don't know which. And what he does there I don't know. Nobody at the casino would want to look at him because of the empty eye socket, so I figure he vacuums floors or cleans the toilets or something.

I wonder which casino it is. He is always the one to pick up Ezekiel and his little brother. He is probably working early in the morning and getting off work to pick up his kids.

Thinking about Ezekiel's dad working at the casino made me think of my James Bond mission again. Maybe Ezekiel's dad is one of the minions of the bad guy. He certainly looks like the kind of guy a bad guy would like to use. He looks very scary and tough to everyone he meets. I only spoke to him once when I told him I wanted a cupcake with white frosting.

When we get home, I feel brave and tell Grandma I will walk to the African girls' house to see if they want to play. I never call first because it is easier to walk and Grandma is okay with me doing it that way, with me staying if they are able to play and coming home if they aren't. I can use that fact because if I walk around the neighbor and do James Bond on the way there and on the way back no one will know. I can even go out of the way and look at the shrine once more. I want to do that because I feel so bad about it being tored up.

The house with two pit bulls may be a location where the bad guy lives, but it is right across from my school. Maybe Grandma knows something about who owns those dogs. I write about the house with pit bulls in my notebook. The house has a hand lettered sign propped up in the dirt that says No Trespassing. The sign folds like a book. The yard has some of those stick plants—ocotillos—and some barrel cactuses. On the long side on Bonanza it has those tall cactuses you can eat that are nopals. Somebody told Grandma those are good for diabetes and she's threatening to make us eat them. But we'd buy them in a jar. There is a shed made of wood at the back of part of the house. Someone has leaned pieces of wood against the wall along Bonanza. There is another No Trespassing sign at the back of the fence on Bonanza. There are bad pit bulls in the yard sometimes, but not today. I don't know where they're hiding or what. I hate it when they chase me and I can smell their poo sometimes. One time Esperanza asked me if I had dogs and if I picked up their poo. She said she went to someone's house who didn't pick up dog poo. That must have been horrible.

I see they have locked the school parking lot with a rolling wire fence. You have to cross a street to get to the school from the parking lot.

The burned house, which I have a page about already, is another James Bond kind of thing. It is on the far side of the school parking lot. Someone has planted a scraggly palm tree at the side of the house. The house is colored pink. It used to have a mail box, but now there is only a pink pipe sticking out of the dirt with nothing on top of it. The windows are boards with black ash around the edges.

This gets me again to the guy with the stuffed animals outside his house. He spends all his day outside, but I don't want to talk to him because one of my uncles knows him. My uncle's house is behind the school on the same street as the stuffed animal house. I stand off a ways looking at the faded python draped along the chain link fence. The yard is full of many other things jumbled around here and there. They have a green truck and a camper/RV thing. They use tarps to drape over parts of the backyard and make it shady in the summer.

Then there is the spot where Grandma leaves her van. That is where Grandma and me sit if it is too hot or too cold until the first child shows up, then I go into the school and eat breakfast. Quincy we leave on the corner every day to wait for the bus to high school.

But there is nothing here. There is no mystery about our parking spot. I think I better go home. When I go home and let myself in, I'm safe. I tell Grandma the refugees aren't home. I have time to hide my notebook in the desk after rereading it.

How much time would James Bond spend thinking about problems like this? Sometimes he was too busy fighting guys, but other times he seemed to be thinking about the solution to mysterious things in his adventures. I sit on the couch and think about the one dead body found at the end of my street. Not everybody who wants to be James Bond has such an easy case right on their doorstep. And the memorial got tored up. That makes it more suspicious. Maybe there would be a clue to the story on the internet?

I have to find out. I go to the kitchen fast and ask to go on the computer right away. Grandma is busy and says it's fine. I get my notebook again from my room, open to the page with Juan's full name, and on press of the button and the computer goes on. I can use it now for a real mystery in real life! There is something I can really look up. The name of the guy on the memorial is something that really happened down here. If I can find an article in the newspaper, I might be able to learn if he was murdered. I need to be super careful typing and not make any mistakes with the spelling or I won't find anything. I hope I copied it carefully. I'm pretty sure I did. Juan Verdugo Jimenez.

So bingo! I type it in and things come up. First, I see two articles in the newspaper online. I click on one super fast.

It is a very short amount of writing to read, but it looks like it has some pretty good information. It says the man with the name Juan was found in the intersection of Bonanza Street and 31st at 4 a.m. by a resident who was going to work at the school district central kitchen. They thought the body was someone who had been hit by a car. That was it, the whole article. Possible hit-and-run they wrote. I copy everything into my notebook.

I click on the next article. This one is dated a week later. There was a follow up investigation which said that they determined the injuries were caused by being stabbed in the back with a sharp object! Murder! Juan was murdered!

It has the dates of his death which I already have and that is the same as I wrote off the sign. I double check that. This is definitely the guy who had the cross made for him. Definitely Juan. The body was identified. He had his ID with him. I copy the info from that article.

I feel afraid. Maybe I shouldn't have started on this mystery of the memorial!

I leave the computer on. I take my notebook to my room and hide it because Grandma is coming.

"Are you on the computer?" she asks.

"I'm trying to decide on a movie," I say, lying as I come out of my room. I feel so shaky.

The pile of James Bond DVDs from a bin at Dollar Store are on her desk so I go over there and root through them. Now I own ten of them. None of the other ones every show up in the bin, but I think there are others and I gotta look it up on the computer some time.

Grandma and me are eating dinner together without Quincy because he has homework (probably looking at his girlfriend's Facebook page) and Grandma asks me to tell her what I did at school. That is a terrible thing to discuss. I don't want to talk about my problems with Esperanza.

All of the sudden, I decide to ask about casinos in case that is a good place to find a mystery. I won't tell her about the shrine, which I'm already working on, which I now know is a murder. I just decide to ask her for a new mystery and try to see what Grandma suggests.

This is the way I am getting better at investigating things. Don't come right out with things. Sneak around the real issue. By asking Grandma I seem to be open, but I'm not telling her what I've already done. She only thinks I'm interested in doing a spy thing in the future. She doesn't know I've already started one. She's going to help me without knowing she's doing it.

"Are you going to the casino ever again?" I ask Grandma. I will have to act casual and not draw attention to what I want. I feel a little guilty discovering ways to get people to help me, but maybe that is part of growing up. It doesn't hurt to think of what will please someone, even if you will get better treatment that way. You still please someone. I think that is important anyways.

"What? You mean when I played bingo?" Grandma says. Grandma is enjoying some chicken she has baked with spices on it. Grandma also put salsa on her chicken, but she doesn't bake it that way for my sake, because I don't ever use salsa on chicken.

"Maybe. I like bingo. But the hot chocolate they sell out there isn't good for me. I can smell it out there in the winter when I play bingo and it drives me crazy." Grandma wipes her mouth with a paper napkin. She keeps it in her left hand, balled up, while she eats. She puts it down every time she uses her knife.

"I like it. Hot chocolate is the best stuff. I liked it when you let us have that for breakfast."

"Maybe James Bond would like hot chocolate and you could cook it for him when you marry him and live together." Grandma is acting all satisfied and humorous. Grabbing her sweater and wrapping it around herself. That's what she does when she thinks she's just said something so funny. She is grinning too, of course.

"Will you please stop being so annoying."

"Aren't you two marrying? I thought you might be marrying soon, that's all."

"Shut up! You did a pinkie promise!"

"Oh yeah. I did."

"Alzheimer's!"

"Psh."

"So you never won bingo?"

"No. Never. My sister did. Once a long time ago. I think you were six or something."

"What happened? How much did she win?"

"A couple of hundred, I think. She screamed a whole bunch and embarrassed herself good."

"Screamed?"

"Yeah. She had a new boyfriend with her and he never went with her again after that. He never went with her to bingo or nothing after that. Goodbye boyfriend."

"Oh, my goodness."

"Yeah, she was really sad when she never saw that dude again after all that screaming she did. It probably wasn't worth it for the little bit of money she got and she lost her boyfriend." Grandma is laughing now and shaking her head. She stops eating to pull her sweater up on her shoulders and laugh more.

I laugh too. "Which one did that?"

"Bernice. The silly one who's younger."

Actually, most of them are younger sisters.

Thinking about the casino brings out something I have wanted to ask about for a long time. I worry about asking about it, but I finally decide it is a good time to get an answer from Grandma.

"Did I get left in a car at the casino?" I ask. "Didn't you say that?"

Grandma moves some beans around on her plate. She is taking her sweet time answering me. "Well, yes. Yes, you did. It was a big mistake. Your Auntie Gertrude did that, not your mother. Your auntie said it was about a man that made her do that. There was a man doing wrong to her so she chased him into the casino and you were just in the way at the time. But she could have told someone she couldn't take good care of you because her mind was on a man. I would have understood."

"It was because of a man?"

"Sure. A man your auntie couldn't get to stop running around. Your mother was always good with you. She never left you in a car like that. We never let your auntie take care of you again after that big mistake. She was sorry, but sorry don't cut it. I said that to her. Your mom had to deal with a lot of shit after that. She had to go to some meetings about you and stuff. We had some visits of Child Protective. But it wasn't anything to do with your mother's fault. I got yelled at too. I shouldn't have let Gertrude take care of you. She was no good with kids ever. I knew that cuz she did not take of her little brother well at all and that's probably what made him so wild. I made a mistake trusting her a bunch of times. She was no good with kids to tell the truth. Some people aren't."

"Am I?"

"Time will tell. James Bond would have good kids, though. That's good blood he's got! Mwah ha ha!"

"Oh, will you please shut up about me marrying James Bond?"

"Mwah ha ha." Grandma's laughing so hard her shoulders are shaking.

CHAPTER 7

At school the next day it's early release Wednesday and I should be happy but on my way to breakfast without Esperanza a girl named Ytzlani who isn't even in my class or anything says, "No one went to your dumb birthday party because you're dumb."

Will I ever get left alone?

"How do you know you're not dumb? Everybody says that to me." I say that back right away, because I've been practicing trying to defend myself with a quick insult, but I feel so crushed and sad.

I don't know why they want to pick on me so much. The girls used to let me protect them, but not anymore. Now all they want is to pick fights with me and criticize me all the time. Non-stop nasty stuff about me. It drives me nuts. Maybe she's a friend of Oseana's. That could be it. She might be trying to make me feel real bad about myself so she can get Esperanza off on her own. That would make sense for this person to come at me like that.

And then I begin to wonder if the girl who attacked me isn't Oseana's cousin. I know that girl has lots of cousins in the school because she blabbed about it during lunch. I definitely heard that blabbing.

I want to talk to Grandma about it at lunch, but she always is home then. Maybe I'll tell her after school. I'm never going to try to have a party again because these girls are too nasty. Probably I'll just take Esperanza to dinner for pizza, Grandma said to do that next year after hardly anyone came to my party, and that's a good idea.

Oh, but with this new friend Oseana who knows if Esperanza will even come to a pizza parlor with me. My next birthday is a long time away since I just had my birthday. Maybe I can just have cousins or something. That's a good reason to forget about it. I could have Carlos and get hit on the head with a whiffle bat.

Grandma is always teasing me too. About marrying James Bond. There's only so much teasing a person can stand and then they want to hit back. But how would I hit back? What good would teasing Grandma do? She'd just laugh at me.

I'm thinking about that in the day. Then I decide to do some spying work after school.

At the end of the day I have an idea that I remember because I see Ezekiel's dad again picking Ezekiel up at school. Ezekiel has to stand with a monitor or sometimes he slips away and tries to walk home on his own. Well, I remember I was going to find out if he really works at the casino. I decide to ask a girl named Vanessa who knows Ezekiel's family real well. She always says she lives almost next door to Ezekiel.

"Hey, Vanessa," I say, because I see her standing outside the school. Nobody came for her because they forgot about early release Wednesday again. I could go to the van but it's not cold and I don't feel like it.

"Do you live near Ezekiel?" I ask.

"Yeah," she says. She looks sort of suspicious. I am thinking I should say some good cover story, but I don't want to waste my time making up a stupid lie right now.

"Well, is it true...does his dad really work at a casino?"

"Yeah. He works at one."

"Which one?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's Desert Diamond. His dad has a Desert Diamond hat. Why?"

"Oh, I want to get tickets. To a show down there. Maybe he could help me. That's all."

"Ah, I don't think so. He's a janitor. Janitors can't get tickets or anything y'know."

"Oh, you never know. I could try. We could try. It's for Quincy."

"Who's he?" she gives me a horrified face.

"My big brother!" I know I sound nervous when I say that. Gee, why did I even ask that? It's not as though I'm gonna be brave enough to go down there in the night when the bad guys would be there. Questioning her was a big waste of time. Now that I've started this I have to finish.

"They don't have bands that any teenagers would like at the casinos! There's just old people stuff down there. Real stupid stuff. No teenager would like it," says Vanessa.

"Really, I better tell Quincy that. He is an idiot, you know? I don't know what he's thinking by asking me about tickets. He's an idiot. He doesn't even know what he's talking about. Brothers, they are so stupid." I make my eyes look shocked. Maybe I'm not doing a very good job of it because she looks suspicious again. She's looking me up and down as though there's something horribly wrong with me.

"Well, gotta go!"

"Yeah," she says slowly.

I wonder what's in her mind, but I'll just have to forget about it for now. Another screw up. By me!

"I'm going to the grocery," Grandma says when we're heading to the house.

"I don't want to go to El Rancho anymore," I tell her.

"I don't care if you go with me or not."

"Okay, then. I want to stay home." Is what I actually say. Nothing about Esperanza leaving me.

"Without you I will pick better food," Grandma says, "so the three of us won't get worse diabetes and get yelled at when we check in at the hospital. It's this week."

We go to City Diabetes Check on every other Saturday afternoon. When they check in, Quincy and Grandma show their blood sugar readings in a little book to a nurse who talks to them individually. Grandma shows her insulin records and other stuff too. I don't have an insulin record, but Quincy does. He doesn't keep it very well and he complains about doing it. He has to punch his fingers and they're sore so a month ago he went to his toes but they're hard to reach. Right now he's getting good readings so maybe he's going to be okay. I want Grandma to actually take him to a boxing gym so he can do the workout, but so far she is not wanting to take him. She says he needs to get off his ass hisself. I guess she's right.

"He might get off of blood sugar reading real soon because he hasn't had to have an injection in a long time. And you haven't had one either, Grandma, for a long time," I say. I'm buttering her up.

"True. But you're always begging for the wrong foods when we're walking around loading things in the grocery cart."

"I really want frozen Otter Pops," I say.

"They're nothing but pure sugar, coloring and water."

"You used to get them for me, but no more. I liked them."

"There no good for you. You might like them, but they're no good."

"I kept one of the empty boxes of those and it has some fairy dolls in it and a toadstool that goes with them. They're still in my closet. Every time I see that box it's like sad time. I should throw that box away, I think."

"Why don't you get those out ever? Those fairy dolls you had were so cute."

"Oh, I really don't even want to play with my dolls again. I might give them away. Some of them."

"Ohhhh. Okay, let me know." Grandma acts sad.

"What?"

"I like your dolls."

"You can play with them! Just go in and play with them any time, Grandma. I won't mind."

"Okay," Grandma smiles at me. "Thank you for the permission. I appreciate it."

"You are goofy, Grandma. You gotta stop that. Soon."

I'm glad I told Grandma that so she doesn't buy me any more of those dolls.

I know I won't get those Otter Pops from the store, so I ask for graham crackers with cinnamon because those taste okay if you dip them in cold milk, but you have to be fast pulling them out or they'll break off in the milk like a floppy diving board. They don't have to be the name brand crackers because the store brand is about as good.

And Grandma leaves.

Grandma doesn't know I did all that begging in the grocery last time on purpose. I realize she doesn't always see through me anymore, at least I don't think she does. I never used to want to be alone in the house and she used to always know what I was up to, but I know I can fool her. Like asking for stuff. She should know I am not that into the stuff at the grocery and I am just pretending to want a bunch of that shit. The purpose is pretty sneaky, you see. I want to be left at home alone with Quincy and I know if I beg a lot I'll irritate Grandma and she wouldn't mind leaving me at home. That way I'll be free to do the investigation of my own neighborhood in a James Bond way because Quincy does not care what I do and never even goes to see where I am when he gets out of the shower. Or at least I'm pretty sure he won't. Once Grandma goes I have everything to myself.

Quincy is still showering when Grandma leaves. I can tell by standing near the bathroom door and listening very carefully. If he is showering he'll be talking, because Quincy talks to himself all the time under water. He thinks we don't know that, but we can hear. Once Grandma and I even stood outside the door to listen for a while. That was bad, Grandma said. We were eavesdropping on his conversation with himself, but we didn't hear anything interesting. I feel so happy not to have to deal with him cuz he's in the shower and to be alone for a change as I take the house key from the duck and I bend over to whisper "you quack me up, too" and then I make sure to lock Quincy in at the front door (which has carved squirrels on it by the way) since he is not out of the bathroom.

There are birds in the neighbor's bushes, but this time of year they aren't getting drunk on those berries because those only come in the fall around November for Thanksgiving and we put them on the table in a little jar. For color. Those berries are bright orange and if you squish them with your fingers the juice will color you orange. Not me, because my skin is dark, but the girl named Donita who has whitish skin and came over to play. We did that together and it made her white fingertips all orange. The seed is in two halves. Like a brain, Donita said. She was very weird and I didn't let her come over after that, even though she asked a bunch.

Grandma being gone and Quincy in the shower will give me more than a half an hour to scout around the neighborhood and see if there are more things like the James Bond movie around in the streets near me. And think about that murder of Juan at the memorial.

First, I walk down to one of my favorite things in the neighborhood, which isn't actually a mystery or anything. It's just something I like a lot. What it is is the house that has little white metal horses on the fence and the horses are running. These horses are so cute and in between them are wheels. I touch the wheels and they are like off old western wagons, Grandma says. I like them a lot. I remember again that I want to bring a piece of paper down here and make a rubbing of the horses so I can keep them to look at. Grandma said that would work. I'm thinking how Grandma thought of a lot of good solutions when I wanted to do things. I will have to remember to do that rubbing and if it works I have to remember to thank her.

I look across the street at the church. It is the Grace Temple Missionary Baptist Church. Built with red brick. Two glass doors with black frames and white crosses on the glass. Two doves show in only outline. They swoop across the crosses with branches in their beaks. Those are decals on the two doors. Three steps to the doors. A pointy white steeple on top of the red brick church. Big words that say No Parking and white stripes in front of the steps. And at the side is painted "Reserved for Pastor" on the patched asphalt.

That is a creepy looking place because the room behind the glass door is always dark. It looks like there is never any light. Even when services are about to start the room looks dark. I wonder if it so dark inside that they can't see the pastor!

I look across Park Avenue and see another weirdo church. It is a white brick building with a sign that says Worship in purple on a security screen door. Beside the door there is a simple black cross. No other words or pictures on the whole building. That's like the saddest church in the whole world. Who would ever go to that sad place?

A bright yellow building of My Little Angels Daycare stands out when I glance over there. I am glad I never went to any place like that. I never did have to do day care. Grandma stayed with us after school and we got to be in our own home. Before Grandma we didn't go to daycare either.

What is there that's really, really like James Bond down here? I know this isn't England, but can't something be like James Bond? Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I only have to look closer and I'll see it. That's what I have to think about. It's pretty hard to think of. This might be harder than fractions and stuff in school.

Well, the only thing is that Juan dude getting murdered.

But also you could say the African kids, the refugee kids, are like James Bond characters who need help. There are usually one of those people who are being threatened in the movies and he protects them. Sometimes in James Bond movies it is only some people who he protects and other times it is the whole world. Right at the start of being James Bond it would be easier to protect some people and not the whole entire world!

A lot of those refugees are moving to Minnesota for some reason. They probably don't like the heat in Arizona. They are also talking about farms. I don't know what way I could protect them. At school I could make sure they aren't bullied, but I already do that anyways.

Then I glance down the street in the direction of my house, down the sidewalk, and see nothing. It just scares me that Grandma might come back though. Or what if Quincy came out looking for me for some reason.

What reason would that be? I can't think of a reason he ever comes looking for me. Even if he went to the kitchen he wouldn't notice I wasn't in my room because he never looks in there.

I walk back past my house, feeling a little guilty about leaving Quincy in there washing hisself all by hisself and me being outside walking around on our street which nobody knows about. I did lock the door which is more than he would do for me if he was out here and I was in there. I also feel a little scared that the Dirty Dude might be driving around again. And see me.

It feels so still this afternoon. Is everyone inside, like Quincy? Will Grandma come along right away because she forgot her wallet or something? Thinking that makes me afraid of what I'm doing. But I'm brave and have to get over feeling afraid or I'm never going to solve a mystery like I want to. How can I be afraid and help African immigrants? That is stupid.

I decide to walk home, but then I see the lady at the Dharma center and I cross over to talk to her.

"I'm Trinity," I say waving as I walk up to her.

"Oh...hi Trinity. I'm Pha Mui," she says, shaking my hand. "Do you want to see inside our Center?"

I am very shocked, but happy. "Can I? For a minute."

"Let's go around. Around like visiting. See it," she says. She wants me to come in.

"Only for a minute. Grandma will be back soon."

"Okay."

"Your mother say okay?"

"I have a grandmother. She'll probably say okay."

"Okay."

We both laugh at all the okays.

"This is our Buddha. He is very important. This is the lady. She is important too. This is like the river where she is. Like a spirit."

"It's nice in here."

"Yeah, nice. Very nice here."

"Ah huh."

"Sometime you come in the temple. I want to show you. I live in the back. You can see that too. When your grandma says so. You ask her."

"Okay, I'd like that too." I don't want to tell her that I pretend her temple pagoda has missiles in it!

"Come look at this." She is showing me the way they made a little river turn. I like the way it looks in there. I like all the birds flapping around visiting the fake streams.

"Bye!" I say after a few more awkward minutes.

"Bye for now!" she replies.

I feel great about making the decision to walk over there. She is really nice. I might get a chance to see more sometime. This was a great idea. I go right back home. What would it be like to play in your front yard with a temple wall beside you? The house to the east has a cow mailbox and a Yaqui dancer with gourds on the metal gate. Grandma would like that gate.

Grandma. Thinking of her makes me realize I'd better get back. I feel real scared that Grandma might have returned. I might have lost track of time while I was looking for clues and investigating the neighborhood.

And I don't want to see that green car again!

I walk back quickly with my whole body feeling pins and needles. I hope the neighbors don't wonder why I'm walking so quickly. They might talk to Grandma later, because a lot of the neighbors know Grandma pretty good. I hope I don't look scared in my face. When I go by a window I try to see if I have a scared look on my face. When I let myself in with my key, I notice right away that there is a sound of the sink water running. I walk back to the hall and find that Quincy is still in the bathroom (I know! He's in so long!) and there's no sign of Grandma coming in. That gives me a chance to put away my notebook and think about the memorial being tored up.

First, I put the house key in the ceramic duck on the counter. If Quincy says anything about coming out and not finding me, I decide I will say I was outside on the sidewalk playing with a neighbor and I had walked to the corner. That might get me in trouble, but not big trouble like walking blocks away from my house without permission. Hopefully, Quincy stayed in the bathroom and never came out, which is what he does lots of times. He never looks around to see who is home or not home. He also never tells anyone the shower is going to be used so other people can use the bathroom first!

So what about the memorial? It really gives me the creeps to think about it, especially now that I know Juan was murdered. And maybe someone is mad about the memorial existing. Why are they mad? Who is the person that did that? What makes them so mad about the man being dead there? Is it the person who stabbed him that's mad enough to tear up the memorial? That makes sense.

I wonder if it could be the church people. Yeah, it could be them, maybe. But wait! That doesn't make sense. They would not tear a cross apart ever. And to throw a cross away? What church person would do that? A religious person wouldn't break and throw a cross! I don't believe it could be any of them. It has to be someone else. Someone from the neighborhood, because how did they know the memorial was even there?

They live nearby maybe? They know the neighborhood and know that cross is there? A person wouldn't see it unless they had a reason. The street isn't a major street and it doesn't really go anywhere. They also needed to have time to rip it apart. Plenty of people would have seen them there if they did it in the daylight. They must have done it in the night.

I think I saw it yesterday. So they did it last night.

I hear the van come in. Grandma's golden van drives into the driveway and I go out to help her with taking the groceries inside and putting them away on the shelves and in the refrigerator. She didn't get a lot I wanted. But there is some good stuff like cinnamon graham crackers and chocolate pudding, but not a lot of that and it's the less sugar type. Quincy comes out of the shower and starts inspecting the groceries and making comments on what Grandma bought and opening packages of things he wants to eat right away. Grandma gets so mad at him that she doesn't ask me anything about being home alone and what I did and Quincy doesn't say anything if he noticed I was gone. I bet he didn't notice. He doesn't care where I am. It's all great. No one knew I had been going around the neighborhood looking for clues. That was super fun also. But finding the memorial tored up was not really fun. It was scary and made me worried. I don't want to get into something frightening. I'm not sure I'm brave enough for that.

Time to stop thinking about the memorial being ripped apart. I need to ask Grandma about visiting the Dharma Center temple.

Grandma walks in with groceries. "There's not any more," she says.

"Listen, Grandma. There's a lady at the Dharma Center."

"The what?"

"The Dharma Center place...down the street!"

"Oh yeah."

"She's gonna show me the temple. I forgot to ask you yesterday." I am such a liar.

"What's that?"

"Show me the temple and her house. She lives at the back of the temple. I said okay but I would ask you."

"Okay, and?"

"I want to see it. She's gonna show me. If you say okay."

"Okay. You go whenever you want. Maybe Quincy should go too."

"Go where?" asks Quincy, coming out into the front room.

"To the Dharma Center to see the temple."

"Any hot chicks in there?" Quincy asks.

"No, there aren't," I say proudly.

"Well, I ain't going then," Quincy responses. He takes some popcorn in a bowl and walks back to his room, but then he turns back around.

"That sale on A.C. is about to end!" he says to Grandma.

Oh god, not that again. Will he never give up on bugging Grandma about that?

"That's too bad. See they had to put that assassin on sale cuz it's so awful. Nobody's letting their kids buy it."

"No, Granny, they're coming out with a new one soon."

"That's what they say."

While they fuss at each other, I sit at my desk in my room and go over some of the things I have seen. The shrine is the most important thing I have found in our neighborhood and someone tored it apart to pieces! I think that is the big mystery of the neighborhood and nothing else is as interesting as that. I should put my investigating skills to work on that mystery and who was Juan Verdugo Jimenez and what happened to him. That's the way to start. I have to find out about him. I have to use the computer again to do it. I have to think about what more I want to learn.

First thing is does he have an obit like Grandma found for that friend of my aunt's and what does Juan's obit say?

CHAPTER 8

At school I have PE with Coach Steve—every Thursday—which is fun because he makes a lot of goofy jokes. Sometimes he makes them at me because I'm bigger than almost everyone in the class. The way he teases doesn't make me too mad, though.

Today he lets us play capture the flag and be silly. Then we are going to play on the slide, but it has water on it from rain over night. Someone throws wood chips on the water but it really doesn't help so we just play Zombie, Zombie Come Alive.

At lunch someone jumps in a puddle and they get a detention right away. I'm surprised it isn't me that gets detention. Detention for watching a person jump into a puddle. That's what would usually happen to me. I've been staying out of trouble pretty well by keeping my head down during lunch. Ms. Maria is ignoring me. She found some worse kids than me, I guess.

After school I'm in a strange mood. I decide to ask Grandma about neighborhood mysteries again. I don't know why, something came over me and made me do it. "You must know one mystery about the neighborhood!" I demand. "Come on."

"No. I don't know any mysteries." Grandma gets back off the couch and is stirring a pot of stew. She has a big wooden spoon in her hand and she looks like a cave woman grandma or something. She is staring out the window blankly. "I gotta think of a present for your cousin by Saturday."

"Not another birthday!"

"Sure. Birthdays never stop in this family."

"What about you telling me . . . once you said there was someone who was wounded in the knee." I suddenly remember this as I am talking. Something from a few months earlier that Grandma tossed off about a person that she wondered about. Someone and the word wounded and the word knee. She said that a long time ago and I didn't forget it.

I notice Quincy has come in to raid the refrigerator and he is listening, but I still want to ask, so I don't stop myself.

"What? A person who was wounded in the knee? I never said such nonsense! What do you mean, a knee replacement?" Grandma is confused, but grinning again. "There's a lot of knee replacements in this neighborhood."

"Grandma! I don't know! You told me! Don't be laughing at me about what you said. You said there was a wounded guy! And he was wanted by the F.B.I. and he was hiding around here. You said you never knew who he was. But you wanted to know him. I remember you told me! Don't act like you don't know."

"I don't know anything..." The grin goes off her face. She has a flat face when it isn't grinning. She can look serious when her mouth isn't grinning all the time. "Ah! Okay. That's a real mystery in a way. I don't know who he is. I guess you're right about that. I did tell you I want to meet him. He wasn't exactly from Wounded Knee. That was a big famous protest in North Dakota when I was younger. The guy here helped with a protest at Alcatraz about the time of Wounded Knee. He was O'odham. He is sort of famous for what he did when he occupied an office on the Rez, also. Our reservation. Nobody knows where he went. He seized the headquarters of the Rez office. He was a real hero to our tribe. He's hiding out here in our neighborhood they say. I don't know if he was one of the protesters at Alcatraz and he got away or if he was a supporter in a way. He's a hero in our neighborhood, though. I'd like to meet him. I really would. Is that a mystery, do you think?"

"Yeah," said Quincy. He had perked up hearing it. He's leaning against the kitchen counter. I never hear Quincy get interested in anything. "It's a good mystery. Who is it? See that could be good for you, Trinity. James Bond isn't always mysteries. Sometimes it's just protection. Of people. I could figure out who he is and I could protect him."

"I could protect him!" I say. "I didn't invite you in!"

"I invited myself."

"This is my thing!" I say fiercely.

"You two stop fighting over it," says Grandma. "This might be dangerous anyway. And you two probably wouldn't figure anything out." Grandma shoots ideas down quickly. She opens a can of mushrooms and the water drips on the counter. "I guess we could try together or something. We could think about it together."

"Yeah, I could try, couldn't I?" I say.

"It's a guy?" asks Quincy, ignoring me.

"Yeah. I guess." Grandma stirred the stew again with the funny big wooden spoon.

I really don't want Quincy and Grandma in on this but in a way it makes me feel good that the three of us would do it together. That is why I don't complain too much when they horn in on my investigation. We haven't done a secret thing together in years since that time we had a surprise party for one of Grandma's sisters. This is probably going to be way better than that.

Maybe Quincy will be good about this for a change. Besides, if I don't tell him anything, he's not going to do anything on his own. I know that. He won't even bother hisself for things about hisself. Why would he bother with this mystery? It would mean him having to actually move out of his room maybe and walk around. Or get off of his games. And he almost never, ever does that!

On second thought, he does like things about the tribe, though. I know that. He will be interested if it's stuff about the tribe and a thing from the past about the tribe and someone being brave. He's really gonna like that.

Another part of me thinks: "Oh no, Quincy heard what I was saying with Grandma! I don't want to hear what he is going to say about it. Too many people know what I am doing. Now they'll all start to interfere. I don't want to have them in on my secret game, knowing what I'm doing, asking me questions, prying into my thoughts."

And when I'm going to bed I think about Juan. He was stabbed. It is definitely a murder. That guy was murdered. I thought he might have died of something natural or been hit by a car or something, but looking at my notes from the article again it said he was definitely stabbed. At first they thought he was hit by a car, but then the coroner's office said it was a stab wound that killed him!

Friday morning and I wake up and go to school again with Grandma. When I get on the playground, the cafeteria isn't open yet and I'm sitting with a girl on a wall and she knows about casinos.

I'd been right about the casino being south of Grandma's house and it is on Valencia too. She knows stuff. I can get the bus that stops in front of the park. That isn't very far to walk. I probably aren't brave enough to go there without Grandma or Quincy anyway. The problem is with bravery. I don't have much of that.

I'm walking on the playground. I head for where I hope Esperanza is, but I stop for a drink and get cut off by that Nene girl. I knew when I was asking that other girl about Ezekiel casino stuff that it was a mistake! I see Nene's snide mouth looking at me and I have a weird, scared feeling right away. She wants to get me into trouble.

"You must love Ezekiel. Everyone is saying that." Nene says this to me before I can see if Esperanza got to school. I am unlucky because I wanted a drink at the drinking fountain.

"What!?"

"You love Ezekiel." Nene is smiling at me in a cruel way with her arms crossed at her chest and her one hip sticking out. Some other girls can hear what she is saying.

We haven't been brought into breakfast yet. It's bad luck. If we were in the lunchroom, they wouldn't be able to do all this talking.

"Everyone is saying that," Nene adds.

"I don't!" My heart is beating so hard. How can they get things so wrong? All I was doing was playing and they think I was serious.

"Why did you ask what his father does? People don't know why you asked that. You would only ask that if you loved him." She points a finger at me in a horrible way that I hate.

"What! That's stupid." But how was I going to explain that I asked about Ezekiel's dad because I was playing imaginary games about casinos and I thought he worked in one of the casinos? What excuse could I offer? My brain is rushing ahead to think of something reasonable to explain why I was interested in Ezekiel.

"I thought his dad worked in the casino and I wanted to get my big cousin a job! That's all. I thought Ezekiel's father worked at the casino. Maybe he could help my cousin."

"Oh, that is a made-up story. That is such a lie!"

More people seem to be hearing Nene. She really talks loud all the time. Those people are giggling and smiling about me looking so shocked.

"It isn't. Everybody knows I have older cousins. Ask people. They know them."

"You love him."

"I don't!"

"You love him!"

Damn this spy work. It was not working out the way it was supposed to. Spying had got me into so much trouble. Then we get called into breakfast and I lose Nene quick.

I was really mad while I was sitting in class after breakfast. We were supposed to read this story in the book about Lindberg and a plane across the ocean, but I had to read it twice before I could even focus on the story at all. All I could think about was how I was in trouble now because of the Ezekiel stuff and that wasn't even a mystery actually! Why had I even asked anything? I'm not really going to go to the casino. I have a mystery in my own neighborhood—wait, two!—that need solving and why should I get involved in casino stuff? I really don't like Ezekiel because he is a total brat.

That makes me think my work as a spy is causing me trouble. Why the heck did I do that? I wanted to find out about casinos, but it just led to a bunch of shit. Now people actually think I like Ezekiel who is one of the worst kids in my school. I only needed information.

I can't look people in the face. They seem to be discussing me and laughing. Every smile bugs me.

I realize at lunch that I will have to start being smarter about finding out information. I have to not ask direct questions but be more careful. If people think you are asking too many questions they start to get suspicious and think of how they can get you in trouble. I'm the kind of kid some other kids like to get in trouble. I realize that now. It has seemed that way before. Maybe this is training for being a secret agent or something. Or a kid detective.

Then suddenly I'm saying 'hi' to Esperanza. She walks by and stands near me for a minute because our teachers are late bringing the classes into the rooms at lunch and I have an impulse to tell her about my spying. It comes spilling out of my mouth. I saw her playing four square with Oseana and some other girls and I just want to say something cool.

"I'm playing that I'm a secret agent," I tell Esperanza.

Oh god! I'm saying this. Really I am! I can't believe what's coming out of my mouth right after the Ezekiel trouble! I must be wanting more trouble. I'm just looking for shit to mess me up with people. This is some kind of thing I'm doing to myself, I guess. Nobody is making me say all this crazy crap, it's just pouring out of my mouth uncontrollably!

"What?" says Esperanza. She pulls back from me. She has a frown on her face. She's sort of smiling too like she wants to laugh. She seems not to believe she heard me right.

And I go on talking! It's like I can't stop myself. "I like to pretend I'm a secret agent. You know, like James Bond in the movies." I'm kinda excited to let her in on my secret. Maybe she will want to play that with me?

"What! That's dumb!" Esperanza says this loudly and I can see that she really does think it's dumb. Other kids are listening in. I gotta get out of this quick! She is starting to laugh. Her arms are crossed on her chest. She has a way of chuckling and tucking her hair behind her ears under her glasses. She is doing that.

I stand there stupidly for a sec. Why did I even tell her this? Did I actually think she was going to help me with one of my mysteries? That would be great, but I know it was not going to happen. I would be lucky if Grandma and Quincy did anything either. "Oh, I was just joking really. I don't do that. Forget about it." I make a face shaking my head and sticking my bottom lip out like forget I ever said that, please.

"Why did you say that?" Esperanza is frowning at me and looking out of the corner of her eyes like I'm doing really weird stuff, which I am!

"I was joking! Forget about what I said." I pull on her arms. They're crossed on her coat. I want those arms to uncross! It looks like she's really mad at me the way she's standing there. I don't want anyone to see it. I don't want to see it.

"That's so crazy!" she says again. She shakes her head at me and yanks her arm away. "You're going super crazy you know. Some people say you are in love with Ezekiel."

"That's not true! That crazy Nene is saying it. She thinks I love him because I asked where his father works. It was because of what...Quincy wanted. He wanted to have tickets to a concert. My brother is such a pest. He thought Ezekiel's father would help him."

"That doesn't make sense, Trinity. You know?"

Esperanza runs away laughing. Maybe you could say laughing at me. She waves as she goes. I wave back sadly. Her teacher comes out the door with Mrs. Sturbridge, so we both have to go in.

Esperanza said I'm super crazy. Saying someone is super crazy is probably not too good. I'm really sorry for what I blurted out.

I don't know what made me say that to her after I had told myself I wouldn't. It was just something crazy that took over my mouth. I won't make that mistake again. I'm gonna control myself around people. I'm gonna be quiet and careful.

That was something James Bond did. I remember that now. He never says a lot and keeps his thoughts to himself. That's super wise. Especially with kids. I blew it, but she might have taken it all as a joke. Maybe she believed me. It was hard to tell. At least she waved at me when we went in. That was a good sign.

After school, I see Esperanza going off in some other girl's car. It isn't Oseana, but probably another girl is inviting her over to play or even sleep over. Maybe there's a party and I wasn't invited. It really is hopeless when we're in two different classes. I play a game on Grandma's phone the minute I get in the van so my eyes don't look up to see the car go by with Esperanza in it. At least that takes my mind off the crap that happened to me today. That gets my mind on another subject. Not my failures.

I glance up and see Ezekiel. Oh boy! Another of my messes.

When Grandma and me get home Quincy's already there. He's having a snack, of course. Stuffing his face is another way to say it, if you want to be crude about it, which I do.

I'm sitting in the front room after I put away my backpack. Today has been about the worst day ever. I want to do some more investigating about Juan to take my mind off the situations.

Out of the blue Quincy looks at the stack of James Bond movies that were his and says: "I used to think I wanted to be James Bond." He stares out the window at the yard and the houses behind ours as he eats crackers and peanut butter which he is crumbling all over the front of his black T-shirt and all over the floor and the top of Grandma's desk. He's wearing workout clothes with the name of a boxing gym on them, of course. He wears those a lot now because they aren't tight and he says he wants to exercise a lot to lose weight. The good thing is he's getting so tall the weight is starting to spread across him. I saw him trying to jump rope yesterday and he actually begged Grandma to take him to a real boxing gym this morning. I want him going there, because it would get him out of the house on the weekend and maybe I would have a chance to do some spying and take a shower! I never can do that because he is in there all the time.

I feel a little sorry about the way he says he used to want to be James Bond. It sounds sort of hopeless as though he realizes he's never going to be some of the things he's thought of when he was a kid. That makes me mad, though, to even have any sad thoughts about Quincy when he's so mean to me all the time. I don't want to think about him giving up on his dreams. I don't want to see him being pathetic. Being a little weak kid, a long time ago.

"You shouldn't have given up on being James Bond," I say.

"Oh yeah? You think I should still be thinking of spying and stuff?" More peanut butter and crackers are falling on his clothes and he just brushes it off like nothing all over Grandma's desk.

"Yeah, maybe. You might be having some fun. You're putting crackers all over Grandma's stuff."

"Oh well. What's a few crackers. Granny will just clean it up. So... what's your M.O. with the mysteries?" asks Quincy.

"What's that?"

"Your M.O. It means method of operation. The way you're going about solving mysteries."

"I'm finding mysteries in our neighborhood and I'm going to solve them. That's all." I roll my eyes at Quincy in a way. I can't believe someone is talking about this again on the same day when Esperanza made fun of me. But this time I definitely didn't start it.

"But what are you doing to solve the mysteries? Like steps and stuff."

"I write things down. In my notebook. I get the facts down. Then I go back and sit with them and I think about things. Like how they go together and stuff."

"That might not be James Bond stuff really, Trinity. That doesn't sound like it at all."

Now, instead of making fun of me like Esperanza did, Quincy is criticizing my methods! I defend myself. "Sometimes he thinks out mysteries. You see him thinking. At night in his apartment he sits and drinks vodka martinis and he thinks. That's how he gets his ideas to solve the case. I don't even think you watch the movies that well."

"Well, yeah. But lots of times it's only action he does. If he's thinking at all, it's about how happy he is being a spy and what girls he's gonna nail. Crap like that. See?"

"He doesn't look happy being a spy. Did you actually watch the movies? I don't think he's all that happy."

"He's not supposed to be happy. I guess. But he jokes."

"They aren't happy jokes."

"True that."

"They are like super sad jokes. I think he's figuring out the mysteries, because afterwards that's when he usually solves them. After he has been sitting around thinking at night."

"I never saw him write anything," Quincy points out.

"Well, yeah. Maybe not. I could be different about that."

"Do it your own way..." says Quincy, making it obvious he doesn't think I'm doing it right.

Some of those James Bond movies in the pile on Grandma's desk were Quincy's before they were mine. He liked watching those on his laptop computer and he bought them for himself. He sort of let me take them, not offering much of an objection just reminding me to remember he owned them, but Grandma and me could watch them as many times as we wanted. That was kind of nice of him. For a change. Makes a difference.

"I realized I wasn't going to be James Bond after a while," says Quincy. "You're gonna realize it too. Also, for you it's different. Girls are not detectives or James Bond, kid." Quincy walks back to his room and I follow him. I usually don't go into his room at all.

When Quincy says this, I feel so angry and I see a belt on his bed and pick it up.

He's still blabbing, "That's left to guys, mostly. Unless you were a fit girl, like Tank Girl or Wonder Woman, I guess. Someone like that gets to fight bad guys, but you are too fat to be any use in a battle. You could just stop a bullet. Or maybe fall on someone!" Quincy laughs so hard he closes his eyes. "That's a funny idea!"

"You don't need to be fit to think." I pull the belt back and whip it against his chair leg. I don't care if I mark it and get in trouble. Quincy is being disrespectful to me. He was fatter than me at the same age, and I know it! Grandma has pictures to prove it! I've seen them!

Quincy chuckles at my angry reaction. "Well, Trinity, the stuff James Bond does isn't mostly thinking anyway. If you watch the show he doesn't do that much thinking or writing things down. I don't think there's a notebook in any of the movies. Most of the time he fights people on the top of trains and swims in the ocean and crap like that. You'd have to drive cars fast, crash boats, and then jump onto moving trains. Do you actually think you can do that? I'm gonna be real honest. I've got my doubts, because you can't even get in at the van's sliding door. You don't have the strength to close the door or open it. It's funny watching you struggle."

"That's not true! I can slide it!" But he's right, I really can't. Maybe I better find a place to help me get stronger. "Well, James Bond does do a lot of stuff but maybe I can do some of that when I'm older. They have scuba diving training here." I know I'm saying something crazy, but I can't stop myself.

"Scuba diving! It costs a lot. You'd be bad at it." Quincy always says things in a dead pan voice. Then he cackles. "Scuba diving, sheesh. You really say some stupid shit."

"Mountain climbing. There's a place for that." I had heard about that. I really didn't think I would ever do it, but it sounded like a good idea. "And car racing!"

"Yeah? You'd be bad at all that, too. You'd be too scared to do that shit. And it costs a lot."

"Why do you say that?" I whip his chair again. I whip at the bottom rung so there really is no chance of the belt hitting him, but still I get the feeling that I'm getting back at him for being so evil to me. I'm so mad I don't even care if he tells Grandma about me whipping at him. He's really insulting me and I'm sick of it. "Why do you always say things like that to me? You always make me so mad! You say all this mean stuff to me. Today has been horrible."

Quincy does an outraged face at me. It looks very funny with his dark eyebrows and dark face. "You make yourself mad by being a fool. Stop that!" he put a hand out and tries to grab his belt away from me, but I pull it away before he gets it. "You don't like to swim, do you? Are you going to pretend you do like swimming now? You freaked out and quit swimming lessons! And you don't like heights at all. You scream and stuff on the lowest rides. Who are you fooling? You definitely quit swimming."

"So did you! You quit, too. Okay. I don't like some parts of swimming. But I like the underwater part." I bring the belt back and hold onto it as though I'm about to lash him. I'm tired of him saying I'm afraid of everything. It isn't true. I'm not that weak, either. He will regret saying that. I am going to make sure he says something different one day.

"You have to do the surface part of swimming to get to the underwater part of swimming, Trinity." Quincy says this quickly and starts laughing at his own good logic. He can really think of some fine stuff. In his opinion. His hand is on the controller, but the game is paused.

I whip his belt against his bed and let go. "Ack, you're so annoying! Why don't you do boxing, huh? Is it because you know you'll be bad at boxing? Is it because you're afraid to actually do it? All you do is wear the outfits." I say this, throw my hands in the air and leave.

"If you need help, call on me!" Quincy adds.

I don't know why he always says nice stuff right before I leave. It always makes me feel bad about attacking him. That's the way he's super sneaky. But I kinda wish I hadn't argued with him and insulted him about boxing because now I'm sure he's gonna start trying to annoy me. I don't think this James Bond thing is going to be the family activity that brings us together. Maybe those days are over forever. A certain person grew up to be a total bitch boy.

CHAPTER 9

That Friday afternoon there is something interesting about the Native American mystery. What it is is a clue to who might be the person Grandma was talking about.

I see a van. The color of it is coppery brown. On the side of it someone painted words that say "Che Guevara" and it has a drawing of a man with a beard. That is sort of important, maybe. The person who owns it supports Native Causes. Cuz it has a bumper sticker that says the name of a Native Center in Tucson. That could be the guy, right? It's possible.

I decide to see where it parks. I tell Grandma I'm going to play, but instead I follow where it turns.

It goes down a street I haven't been on in a long time. The van is parked parallel in front of a house so it's easy for me to go up to it.

I write down stuff I see on a page just for the van. That van has a little diorama on the dash of plastic Indians and a village of teepees and sand for the earth. I don't know what that means. There is a bumper sticker on the back that says something about Native people. I don't know the people driving that van, but it might be the guy who Grandma wants to meet.

Maybe it's nothing to waste my time on. Maybe it has no meaning at all. I write it all down anyways. It doesn't take me that long to get it written.

What else is there to do? I probably have to be home soon, so I better decide on something else for my notebook. I decide to look where the plastic flowers were. Where the memorial was outside the House of Isaac. For Juan who was murdered. That it got ripped up seems kinda freaky to me. And that was something worth looking at again. Because now I know he got stabbed.

So I toddle on down there with my notebook for a quick tour.

But when I get there I see something crazy again!

The flowers are back! The whole bouquet is back, wired to the fence in the same spot! The plastic flowers are a pink bunch and a blue bunch, the same exact flowers with yellow centers, and they are tied together with green wire. The flowers are faded and a little tattered by the wind. And I know those are the same ones that were there before! Someone got them out of the church yard and put them back after they were thrown into the House of Isaac's yard. And a cross is back! Someone made a new one with the same info but painted a little different! That means someone is tending the memorial. They saw the memorial was ripped up and they took the time to fix it. They must have gone over the fence to do that. Unless the House of Isaac people did it.

I stand there awhile looking at it, frowning, and then I go back home.

All the way home I'm thinking about what this means.

Someone came back and made the cross again and got the flowers and put the whole shrine back together. That had taken time and energy. Someone cared enough to come back! Now that I know that I've got to find out what happened to Juan and it can't wait another minute! It's time to do something about this and figure out what happened there. Someone really still cares about him and so I have to too. We can't let whoever messed up the memorial win.

Then I remember I have to go on the computer and look at more links about Juan. Grandma was looking at something online about our uncle that died. Ladora told her there was a thing online. And Grandma printed it out. What was it called? Obit! That was it. I have to find the obit for Juan!

Grandma said an obituary was the notice that the family wrote and now you could read those online. The one she read was in Remembrances. It had candles on the top of the website. And it was sort of brownish. But if the death was from a long time before, you might not be able to find the obit. Sometimes you could. I wondered about Juan's obituary notice. Did he have one written? Would it still be there for me to see?

Sure, the important thing to do now was that obit thing. There could be an obit for Juan! I could find it if I was on the computer. I could look up that name the same way Grandma had looked up our aunt's friend! If I type in the name of the guy I could find out how he died, maybe, if someone wrote an obit. But if they made the memorial they probably wrote an obit. Then I would have part of the mystery solved. If I take the name again and put it in the computer I might find if he was on Remembrances like that friend of my aunt. That is the obituary. Grandma said that.

But the two color flowers bothers me. Does that mean something? I have to think about it.

Pink is for a girl. That's what they say. And what's blue for? Well, blue is for a boy, maybe. That means something. Did the people who made the memorial only have this pink and blue bouquet? Or did they buy it special for a reason? Was he a twin? Did he have a sister? She could be the person who took care of the memorial. The obit would tell me that.

Sure, James Bond would take note of stuff about it. Maybe even write it down. I need to forget what Quincy says. He says shit a lot of times. James Bond would write it and he would probably see the answer right away without even thinking a long time. That's because he was talented in the spy business. I did not see an answer to this. Not right away and not after thinking on it.

It didn't say on the cross who made the cross and put the flowers there, but I think I know the person who made it wouldn't be the killer. I figure that is easy stuff to decide. The person who made it would be the mother, the sister or the wife of the man who was killed. The killer wouldn't come back to the place where they killed someone and make a shrine. That would be a silly thing to do.

But the killer might come back and tear the shrine apart. He might do that for sure. And that was what made me very, very nervous.

The thought gave me the creeps. I should be careful about being seen too often on that corner. Someone might notice me and figure out where I live. Then I'd be in real trouble.

I turn on Grandma's laptop. Just when I'm about to do the search for Juan's obit, Grandma comes in and said she wanted to use the computer. I nearly jump out of my skin, but she leaves the room so I have time to erase my search and close my notebook. I take it to my room.

I sit at the desk and write down that I needed to look for the obit next. I have to keep these simple clues in order. I have to figure out what the next step will be and then do it when I can. At any time a clue might help me put together facts and solve the case.

I wondered if he had an obit that I could read. Would it be something interesting that his family wrote about him? Was Juan an interesting person? Well, the police said he did get stabbed in the back. Now I know that. Which is something important about him. That wasn't an ordinary way to die. Maybe there is something there to think about. He deserved to have someone know what happened to him, didn't he? Didn't everyone deserve that? And what if his killer plans to kill again? Shouldn't I stop him?

And maybe if I can find the obit there's gonna be some clue in what they wrote about their brother. But I don't have time to do anything about my idea. It was too late at night and I don't want Grandma or Quincy knowing about what I am up to. Yet. Maybe I would tell them eventually if I think telling them will help me. But right now I don't want them to know what I'm doing because Quincy will make fun of it and tease me. Grandma might also.

And the big issue is they will take over things.

It will have to wait. I only have the fact that Juan was murdered. It makes me worried to think about that. It's creepy to think about something like that happening so close to me. Only two blocks away. Right there on Bonanza a few blocks away is where he died after someone stabbed him.

Did it have something to do with the House of Isaac? That is a strange place. I know nothing about the people who go there. Are they Hispanic? This Juan guy couldn't really be part of that. Maybe they didn't like him though. Maybe he was bothering them. Could any of them have decided to murder him?

But why leave him outside the church? Why murder someone and leave them right outside their own church on their doorstep? If they really didn't like him, they wouldn't do that. It would make the police have a suspicion of them. They wouldn't want that if they did the murder.

If I could see the people who went to that church I might know more.

I decide to go by and look at them some night to see if they are evil. I don't know how I'm gonna do it, but somehow when we're out driving around or something I'll take a look at that place.

That gets me thinking, but once I'm in bed I start worrying about things at school, especially the problems with Esperanza and Ezekiel, and I fall asleep without making a plan of how to see the church.

I wake in the morning. Saturday. A bird is calling. It has a funny cheap. I look out and at first I can't see nothing at all but just hear the cheap, cheap, cheap all the time over and over. But then I see it and it's a bright red cardinal in the next door neighbor's big old grapefruit tree. It's hopping around from branch to branch like it owns the whole yard and the tree. The cardinals like those grapefruits when they get old and ripe in the spring. Sometimes if it's cold they are in the yards digging into grapefruits that the woodpeckers opened already.

Then I see our next door neighbor who is an old white haired guy who's walking around with a cup of coffee watching the loud cardinal. He has a chair to sit on that's an old kitchen table chair with chrome legs which he covered on the bottom with cotton plaid fabric, sort of pinkish. He always says the coffee he drinks isn't real, it's chic-something. He has on a V-necked T-shirt and a flannel shirt that's green. Moccasins are his favorite shoes and he never wears socks. His hair is long and he smiles a lot at everyone. He has a friendly old fat cat named Lady. That cat is lying in the grass whisking its tail at the old man. It is all black except for a few white spots on its face where eyebrows would be. It has dirt on its face now and its licking its back and patting the tip of its tail whenever the cardinal screeches. "What's wrong?" asks the old guy, stirring the cat's fur around. "You don't like the red birdie?" He thinks that cat is his friend sometimes and you can hear him out there talking with the cat for hours.

So eight o'clock is the time of the House of Isaac church meeting. They meet every night at the same time. How am I gonna get out to see the church at eight? I really don't have an idea.

But then it comes to me. All I have to do is ride with Grandma when she goes to Zumba. That is over around eight and she's starting it today. I can say I want to watch her do Zumba. She keeps inviting me to the first lesson.

Quincy is supposed to go but he doesn't want to. He says there are only old women and he's not gonna exercise with a bunch of old ladies. He wants some hot chicks to join. That isn't gonna happen. And he hates the music, he says. I kinda hate it too. Too dumb. I gotta go if I want to see the House of Isaac at night.

So I tell Grandma I want to go along with her to Zumba tonight, but I don't want to do the Zumba, just watch. I'm just gonna read a book. She says okay and doesn't seem suspicious at all. That's good. Real good.

Zumba turns out to be really lame like Quincy said. Grandma's teacher is a nut who has rainbow hair and is about seventy years old. The other ladies are nice to me, but it is torture watching them trying to exercise to the music. They can't keep up!

It is kinda creepy in the El Rio Center at night. The windows up high are black and I can hear the wind. Grandma is there though. So I don't feel too afraid.

Then we drive back. And like I thought, she comes back by the House of Isaac! I hadn't notice that if I look at the door I could see the lights on and look at the people!

They're not Hispanic. The people are all black.

I don't see how a Hispanic man would offend them enough to have him killed. Didn't seem to make much sense. And this was definitely not his church or anything.

And they let the memorial be on their fence. I bet whoever put that there asked the church and they wouldn't have let the family do it if there was some kind of problem about him. It didn't make sense that his death had anything to do with the church.

Still, I feel frightened Saturday night. About Juan being stabbed.

Sunday and Grandma is real busy talking to her sister Gloria who came over to visit and hear firsthand what happened to her old boyfriend, the one that Ladora knew about out at the Indian Reservation Health Center.

They are sitting together in the kitchen and talking loudly. I can hear what they're saying, but I don't want to hear about that guy's troubles with drugs. Quincy has homework that he better do or he's gonna flunk another class and be in big trouble again. He might leave his room because he's doing something he doesn't want to do, but if he pulls his door open you can hear the carpet snagging and ripping before he comes out and that will give me time to cover up what I'm doing.

I ask if I can use the computer in a very la ti da way so Grandma won't get suspicious. Then I bring out my notebook and get ready to get to work. I type in Juan's full name. I'm not so good at typing but if I really concentrate I can do it. I hit enter and hope that there is an obit for his name. I got so interested reading the articles about him being stabbed that I didn't finish the whole search. I meant to look for obits.

The problem is my time on the computer is always limited by Grandma. I have to really move fast if I want to use the computer for any investigation. She just comes in and tells me to get off all the time. I don't like it when she does that.

Sure enough, he does have an obit on Remembrances! I click on it. The obituary is pretty long. I read it slowly. I'm gonna print it and so I set that up while I'm still reading. I put the printer on and stare at the screen some more. Then I read it online more all the way down and it says he was a loving son and brother. And a grandson. It doesn't say he had any children.

It then says something so weird. This is so strange. At the bottom it talks about flowers and the family asked people who were wanting to donate flowers to send money to the Tucson Center for Transgender Rights!

That word means something. Gender is like what?

Gender is what? I google it. Gender is if you're a boy or a girl.

Bam! That hits me. That means something really big. The person was born a boy, but maybe was a transgender? Wow. They wore the clothes of a girl, maybe, sometimes? That is very strange the way it says he had lived some of his life as a different sex. A girl who was a boy? A boy who was a girl? I have heard about it, but not really much. That's what it is. That is what I read. I keep reading it over and over. Trying to get it in my brain.

I'm not certain what it means.

The family was letting people know he was transgender, so there's that. They weren't trying to hide it at all. That means they weren't embarrassed. They probably are the people making the shrine and taking care of it. So they aren't the people who killed him. They care enough to give him a tribute and write an article about him.

This man was born a boy. That was why the bouquet on the memorial was pink and blue! The person making the flower bouquet wanted to make a point of that. They had blended the pink and blue flowers.

The killer has not been found.

So the person thrown on the street is a transgender person.

Or she came from our neighborhood. Maybe she wasn't thrown at all.

Was he dressed as a woman? It doesn't say anything about that in the newspaper articles I copied before.

It gives me something for my thoughts. Now I have a real mystery to solve. This Juan was killed and on our street or dumped there. The family made a memorial to him and put it on a fence near where his murdered body was found. Who murdered him? Why did they murder him? That's what I need to solve.

Monday morning arrives again and Grandma and me go to school. I'm almost afraid because of the Ezekiel love thing, but no one seems to remember it. Thank god.

I am bored during the reading because I finished the assignment early. We are reading about some rodeo things. Actually, rodeo already was, but so what, we still gotta read it. I got the whole graphic organizer done and approved by Mrs. Sturbridge. I'm done and I don't feel like going into the reading center which is in the corner. It's decorated like cowboys. I look at some crayfish we have in the room which is a science project. I write about them in my science notebook, but that's done pretty fast too. What's there to do? Nothing! so I start writing out the clues that I have so far. I want to read it to Quincy and Grandma sometime. If I work on my ideas when I present them to Grandma and Quincy, they will think I'm doing a great job and maybe they won't try to take the case away from me.

Why am I calling it a case though? It isn't one really. No one has actually hired me. I could pretend the family had hired me. That would be fun to pretend. When James Bond does stuff he can say he has a case because he works for the British Government. Who do I work for? I'm not even working for refugees which was what I thought of a few days ago.

No one wants me to find out what happened to Juan. But I know his family cared about him because they made the memorial. Also, the House of Isaac let the cross be on their fence. Would they do that if he did something that angered them? That doesn't make sense unless it's one person in the church. But the whole church thing seems to be nothing. I don't think it's gonna lead anywhere if I keep thinking about the House of Isaac. I have to focus on something else.

Then I am also writing the notes about the O'odham guy that we're looking for in our neighborhood, and my teacher Mrs. Sturbridge comes up behind me and pounces on my paper! She has long creepy fingernails. She wears leopard print shirts and her hair is tight against her head. I am so glad I didn't write anything about Juan! That would have been very hard to explain. I seemed to be doing a whole lot of explaining since I've decided to be a spying detective. I'm getting in trouble nonstop!

"Trinity Gardner, you will not write notes in class!" she announces.

She thinks I am writing a note to a kid in class! She snatches it away and takes it back to her desk to look at it!

I wrote the clues about the guy from the O'odham Alcatraz. I wrote "Look for guy from the occupation. O'odham Alcatraz." I don't know how to spell Alcatraz. All I wanted was to see in writing what I was thinking. Now Mrs. Sturbridge has it and she's looking really unhappy. She is a black lady with a huge jaw that looks like she could really kill you. When she gets mad it is unpleasant and she really lets the bad kids have it. But she isn't usually mad at me and is kind to me. She looks at it and seems to be considering what to do to me. I don't think I'm in big trouble, but something's gonna happen. Because Grandma works at the school, it's easy for her to talk to Grandma about what I do. I won't be in trouble at home though. Grandma knows what I'm doing, thank goodness, but Mrs. Sturbridge is not going to be easy to talk to.

At least it wasn't that ghost thing called Charlie they put on paper about asking yes/no from the ghost in the room. Mrs. Sturbridge hates that and if she finds that piece of paper she calls home right away and gets the kid in loads of trouble with their parents. She says that is the worst thing ever. I heard her say it is conjuring spirits of dead people. That probably wouldn't work anyway. I don't know what she's so worried about. The kids usually only do that at Halloween and not in the spring again unless there's something about a dead person in the neighborhood or something.

"Trinity, come to me here please." She is sitting there at her curving desk. Some dumb little kid from another class is working at the side of her desk because he was talking too much to other kids. He'd filling out a think sheet.

I get up slowly from the corner I sit in. Some of the kids are snickering at me for getting in trouble. I'm so mad at them for being laughing creeps. I hate it when people laugh at other people getting in trouble. It's not nice to laugh at someone getting in trouble. I never do that.

"Trinity, you have detention for not working on your work when assigned to work. Also, I want to talk to you."

I almost groan, but I know I can't do that or I'll be in really big trouble. Mrs. Sturbridge likes to make kids stay after school.

"What is the meaning of this?" she demands. She is holding the note and shaking it near her shoulder like she is drying it in the air.

"It was something I'm doing." I explain rather lamely. "It doesn't mean anything really."

"Okay. I'm gonna keep this note," she says quickly. "You may go back to your desk and do your work." She seems fed up, but planning something that will get me in worse difficulties. She seems disturbed by what I wrote. I guess it's the Alcatraz thing. I'm not sure why she thinks it's her business to take the note. I wasn't writing about something bad. I wasn't chit chatting with a kid. It's my project and she shouldn't try to stop it. I'm sorry she found the note, but it wasn't disrespectful or anything, just not working on what she wanted.

Later she is calling someone on her cell phone. She glances over at me, so I know it's about what she found. She's talking about me with someone! It isn't Grandma I figure. She wouldn't bother calling Grandma because she's here to cross kids at 2:45.

Suddenly, the door opens and Ms. Felix who is the Native American something or other for the school comes in and asks for me to go with her. She has hair in a bun. She always looks fed up at something, probably about the way the school treats her. She has a desk at the back of the computer lab. She sits there and talks to kids. They put up a bulletin board with things about Native Americans like little pictures and drawings.

They think I'm having some kind of Native American problem! Jeez!

We walk out of the room together. "Mrs. Sturbridge found this note and she's wondering what it's about." She is sort of laughing. That is a good thing because she is not taking it very serious.

"Oh, it's just something I'm doing." I explain. "It wasn't important. She thought I was writing a note to a kid in class. But it's not."

"Yeah, it's not a note. It's something you're doing?"

"Something I'm looking up. Studying like. On my own."

"You mean research?"

"That's it! I'm gonna research it. Grandma knows about it. So does my brother Quincy. He's really excited about it. All it is is us looking for the facts about Alcatraz. Like what happened and stuff. I think that I like that looking up stuff."

"Okay."

I smile at her. I just sit there smiling in a silly way. That's gonna get her off my ass, as Quincy would put it.

"Any particular reason?"

"Just cuz I'm interested is all. I like to hear about it. So does Quincy. We both like to hear a lot about it. That's all."

I tell her Quincy likes Native stuff and we're looking stuff up together. She falls for this because she doesn't know Quincy. I sure hope she doesn't talk to Mrs. Sturbridge, because she will certainly tell Ms. Felix that Quincy would not be researching anything. She knew him well and thought he was a terrible student and so he still is. She wouldn't believe Quincy would research something.

Actually Quincy probably would research something if he really was interested. He does that a lot. But probably not about the O'odham and Wounded Knee. About Assassin's Creed. But maybe he would research O'odham. He does like stuff about the tribe. Maybe he really would do research about the missing hero of the tribe.

So I have to have a meeting with Ms. Felix and talk about what I wrote. I make up a lot of bullshit about what it means. I hope they don't contact Grandma because she might make me stop what I'm doing and I really like thinking about something real.

Actually, Grandma would not do that to me. She would laugh. She'd say "what's wrong with research about Alcatraz?" Mrs. Felix would have to agree that there was nothing wrong with it. This lady doesn't seem that interested in her job. She just talks to me a while and then sends me back to class with some encouragement. I don't know why researching something would mean that I wasn't doing well at school. What bullshit!

Oh boy. This kind of thing always happens to me. Another lunch detention too.

CHAPTER 10

I'm doing my homework fast today and the reason is Jedidiah explained something about fractions that really helps me. I can tear right through those fraction problems because he helped me think the right way.

I finish the homework and put it in my backpack. Time to get the binoculars out again to practice focusing with them.

I am thinking of the binoculars as a sort of lesson or something, like I am at a spy school and someone is teaching me how to be a great spy. I have not used the binoculars in a bunch of days! More than a week! Not since I looked at A Mountain to see if it was hollow like the headquarters of the evil geniuses in James Bond movies.

I meant to use the binoculars more often, but I forgot about them all this time. Now is a good time to start again!

Grandma sees me come out of my room and tells me to go back in and finish my homework, because it is due on Friday, but I say it didn't take much time to do it (I'm getting better at fractions finally!). She makes me get it and show it to her. Then she nods. After I put my homework back in my backpack I come out and discover Grandma sitting on the front porch in the old chrome kitchen chair looking at the clouds and reading the grocery flyers which have come in the mail. As she reads them she puts them in a pile at her feet. When she finishes them all, she'll take them to the recycle bin or save the ones she wants to look at again. Grandma likes doing that when she isn't too busy. She does it outside when it isn't too cold.

"Hey, I'm going to the bank to get something done," she says standing up. She puts a rock on the grocery flyers she hasn't looked at and picks up the ones she doesn't want to put in the recycle bin. She starts in that direction and she has her keys out. "Look after Quincy," she says laughing a little. "Don't fight with him."

"Okay," I say happily. "I'm gonna babysit him. How much will you pay?"

"Nothing," she says cracking up. "You get nothing. Sorry."

Her being about to leave makes it easy for me to go back inside and open the closet door quietly. I get the binoculars out. I take them to my room, sneaking happily past the front window where I can see the van backing up. I figure I might keep the binoculars in my room all the time from then on, maybe in my desk drawer. Grandma won't care, she never uses those things anyway, and I clean my own room so she'll probably never see they've moved. I should have thought of this before. I should have been practicing with binoculars this last week.

Why did I forget about binoculars? Oh yeah, it was because Quincy and Grandma laughed at me about the people parked on the road to A Mountain. They always make jokes that got my mind off of the thing I want to do. I shouldn't let them bother me, but I always do get mad. I should learn to focus on what I want to do instead of what they say about me. They are always laughing at me, but at least I get to joke with Grandma about babysitting Quincy. Ha!

I unfasten the snap that holds a piece of leather on the closing of the binocular case. I reach in and pull the binoculars out. The lens caps pops off easily and I stow those in the binocular case. I like that word stow which was in a cowboy book at school. I place the strap over my head and on my neck. I take time to polish the lenses with the little cloth that comes with the binoculars. That makes them sparkle.

There is a little book that goes with the binoculars, which I ignored when I looked at the mountain, but this time I try to follow what the book says. It explains how to point the binoculars at something and bring an image into focus with some steps that I need to follow. I sit at my desk and play with the binoculars out the window, trying to find out if I can really see details like the antennae on houses and little windows far away. That kind of crap.

I binoculars work well. I see a bird on a wire. I remember I had to tell Grandma what I was doing with the binoculars last time because I didn't want her to think I was bird watching. Here I am—birdwatching! It is a cute bird, though. It is cheeping and grooming its feathers. Then the bird flies away.

Next, I try to focus on some kids playing in the backyard of a house to the east. I can see them when they stand still, but they are playing on a slide set so they aren't standing still very much. With all the running, I can't do much.

The old guy with the cat named Lady is out next door. He's sitting on his chair and tickling his cat with the bottom of his moccasin. It is easy to focus on his moccasin and the cat.

Then, I'm looking into the house that's right behind ours, and before I realize it I'm looking right into the house and what I'm looking at is a den maybe. Or a spare bedroom. And I'm seeing the bookshelves inside the house in this den. I can't see anyone in the house and no sign of anyone moving around, but there is a light on near the bookshelf which makes it a lot easier to read the titles on the books. The light is on a little table lamp that's shiny metal. The light makes it bright in there, and the sun is coming in too. The titles on the bookshelves are pretty clear to see if you look in the binoculars. They have a lot of books on those shelves and I'm surprised because they never seem like people who would be interested in being real good readers. People that yell a lot and drink a lot probably wouldn't read books it seems to me, but there are a lot of books.

The lady is always in the garden to get away from the man who yells at her so much, so I figure these would be books about gardening. What to grow in your backyard in the desert and that stuff. The binoculars aren't good enough that I can read all the titles on the book shelves, only some.

But the titles... I can see they aren't about gardening. Not at all. What they're about is a big shock!

The first book I see has the title Voices of Wounded Knee and then I see Like a Hurricane and After Wounded Knee. And Wounded Knee 1973: a Personal Account. And Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding. Ojibwa Warhorse and Ghost Dance II. What!

That is very odd seeing those book titles. These are all books about Native American rights and the siege at Wounded Knee and Alcatraz! And other occupations, like the one on the O'odham Rez. The one Grandma was talking about.

No one will believe this! This is really strange. Right behind us. This is super freaky.

Quincy and Grandma are not going to believe me unless I have the names of the books written down on paper. Even then they probably are gonna think I'm lying when I say these books were on the shelf of the house behind us. But maybe they'll believe me if I have the titles written down.

I don't want to take the binoculars from my eyes. Feels like those books are gonna disappear or someone will pull the drapes shut before I can copy the titles. I have to hurry. I take the binoculars down and get my notebook from the desk. My hands are sweating. I open a new page of paper and get a pencil from the drawer. I almost shut my own fingers in the drawer.

I put the binoculars back up to my eyes and refocus on the shelf. It's all still there. As plain as can be. It has to mean something, doesn't it? A guy doesn't just collect books about that for no reason.

I start copying down the titles slowly, looking in the binoculars and looking away at my paper. I'm writing the words in the notebook one by one and double checking them. It gives me a headache and my eyes hurt and feel stiff, but I keep on going. I can't stop because I might have to stop forever at any moment. They aren't going to believe me, but I keep at it. I don't want anything wrong in what I do because I'm going to have to explain this to Quincy and Grandma if I decide to tell them that I might have a solution. But I really think I might!

I finish all the titles I can see. I've got them all written. About fifteen have titles big enough to see in the binoculars. There are more that have smaller writing on the spines.

I feel my heart beat faster in my chest as I copy words. My stomach feels sick and excited. Now I'm having doubts about this. I could have the whole thing wrong, couldn't I? Maybe the title is just a funny thing that happened to be the same as the Native American thing Grandma is talking about, but not what I'm thinking. It could just be someone who has these books. It does make sense that people in our neighborhood would have books about Native American rights, because lots of us are native. But the books about Wounded Knee and Alcatraz are too close to what I'm looking for. Suddenly it all seems to be real. I have found it! I just know I have found what Grandma was talking about! I have found the person who is hiding in our neighborhood!

I copy these down carefully to make sure I can tell Quincy and Grandma about what I found. They aren't gonna believe that it's me that solved the mystery. Or have I? I still wonder about it.

I sit up. This is crazy. So crazy. No one is going to believe it. What's the chance that the guy we were looking for was living right behind our house all that time?

"Grandma! Hey, Grandma. You won't believe it! I found out something." I say this, but not very loudly. No one hears me. Then I remember Grandma went out for a quick run to the bank. Quincy has earphones on and he never hears anything I do in my room anyway. I even jogged once right outside his door and he didn't even feel it. I don't know how he didn't feel that. I'm awfully fat.

"You won't believe it! You both won't believe this!" I say this to myself. I'm so excited to imagine someone else seeing the same things I see. "I don't believe it." My voice comes out raspy and strange the way you think your voice is sounding in a nightmare when you try to call to people for help. But I'm not scared. I'm happy! So happy!

This makes up for all my troubles at school. All the detentions and the accusations that I loved Ezekiel. This is something I did on my own without Grandma or Quincy telling me what to do. This is something I figured out and it's really neat.

This is the house of the man who was important at Alcatraz and who occupied our reservation office! I'm suddenly sure of it. Just looking out my own bedroom window I have found him! The hero who is being hidden in my neighborhood. He lived behind me all that time! I try to see more of the books on the shelf. The binoculars go out of focus and the light isn't too good. I wait for the sun to come out from behind a cloud. The minutes go by. Any second they might decide to draw the drapes. If they close them soon, I might not be able to convince Grandma and Quincy of what I saw. I wonder if I should go to Quincy's room and call him in?

Then I focus the binoculars again. Sure enough, the books I can see are all about Native American people and troubles a long time ago for those people. That is so incredible that I can't believe how lucky I've been to choose to point the binoculars in that direction! It was kooky the way it turned out. Who would have thought the person we were looking for was living right behind us?

Well, I begin to have doubts again! It is possible that this is just something that is the same, but doesn't really mean the hero of the O'odham is living behind me. Something like that could happen, actually, couldn't it? But it isn't very likely that Grandma would mention that a person from the Native Occupations was in their neighborhood and then someone would just happen to have a collection of books about the same thing Grandma was talking about when she said someone close to us was a hero of our tribe. This clearly is the answer I'm looking for right outside my bedroom window!

Then there is the big question. Should I tell Quincy? Should I go get him and tell him? Should I tell Grandma too?

It seems to me first all they are going to make fun of me. They won't believe I could figure this out. They always mock my efforts and laugh. Even if later they agree I did a good job all I can remember is the first part because it hurts me so much. That's a good reason not to tell them. I know Quincy does like things about our tribe but he's going to find fault with what I've done so far. He's going to make me feel bad about what I've done. I don't know if I can take that.

Then they are going to take over. That's what Quincy always does. Grandma lets him do it too. She thinks he needs to take over because he doesn't feel good about himself. Hey, I don't feel so good either! That's what I want to say sometimes to her. Maybe I should get to do something for a change. That's the way I feel and I have tried to tell Grandma but she doesn't listen to me. She will stand aside and let Quincy charge forward. He will tell me what to do. He will ignore what I say. He will run the whole thing. That's the way he always is. He doesn't give me a chance to make an effort. If he actually finds what I've learned interesting, he will want to make it all his effort. If I don't have it solved, he will say I really didn't do anything. He needs glory so badly. He needs some recognition so much that he will trample anyone for it. I feel sorry for him, but I know that's the truth about him. He won't just stand aside and let me figure out the case.

Also, I don't know what I think about the fact that the man is so mean to that lady. If he is a hero, he's not a very nice one. Maybe he lost his way or something. I don't know that I would ever really want to talk to him. He really likes to hear himself yelling. He likes to tell her all her problems. He doesn't recognize any in himself. It makes me really sad to think the hero we are looking for is this mean guy.

Suddenly I don't want Grandma or certainly Quincy knowing this. He would be so sad to know that the hero was so bad. This is probably the worst reason I've thought of. It makes me the saddest. I thought when we found the hero he would be a really great person. This guy is not a good person. Grandma said that herself several times. She told me to stay away from him! She thinks he is a mean man. If he is the hero we're looking for, I don't wanna go talk to him. I don't wanna hear what he has to say about his times in the past. I thought it would be great to find this occupier, but now I only feel disappointed and sad. He has not been what I thought he would be. I thought he would be a great person, but a great person wouldn't run down someone else to make themselves feel better.

So what's the answer? I gotta make the decision right now because there's only minutes more when I can see into that room. If I'm gonna go get Quincy I kinda have to do it now. The lights gonna fade and who's to say it will ever be like that again. Maybe if the desk lamp light wasn't on I wouldn't have been able to see in the room at all. I could see that the books were brighter near the lamp. It seems like someone left that on by accident and it probably wouldn't happen again. I couldn't count on it, that's for sure.

The answer comes to me. It's partly no and partly yes. Maybe I should go a lot further on my own and then tell them later, once I have more information. Sort of get going and then lay it all out for them. See what they think. Then they can finish off some information for me and I won't feel so sad as though they have solved it for me. Maybe solve some of the issues but not take over the whole investigation. I want this to be me making the decisions. There's no way I'm gonna be powerful enough to make Quincy back off. It makes me sad to realize that even Grandma won't be able to stop Quincy once he wants to take over the whole investigation. He's gonna do what he wants. He's just so pushy. I'm going to feel disappointed if I quit now and they get to solve the whole thing. I know in my heart I'm gonna be so sad at that. Look how far I've already come.

So I'm not going to tell them anything yet. I want to present the thing when it's figured out almost 100%. Right now I barely have anything solved. All I know is the house behind me has some books that seem to be the same as occupations like Wounded Knee and Alcatraz, but I don't know what that means for sure. I don't know that the guy who lives there is the occupier person Grandma was talking about. Maybe he's hiding the Alcatraz person? Couldn't that be true? He could have a secret bedroom where the person is hiding?

While Grandma is gone I can try to look up the people who were at the Alcatraz thing. I could find the names. Maybe he is actually living there under his name that he had before. I bet he changed his name, but maybe not.

And I do exactly that as quickly as possible. I rush to Grandma's laptop and turn it on. I wait until it gives me the Internet. I look up the O'odham occupation and then Alcatraz. I copy out the names in my notebook. Only six names. And then I erase my search. The best thing would be to get pictures of them and see if the guy behind us matches the pictures! But I think of that too late. I will need the computer again for that.

Today is a crazy day for this research. I'm really going at it so strong and that is great. I can't stop now I have to keep going hard.

I go outside to our mailbox. One time I remember seeing our last name inside the mailbox lid. That would give me a clue if the man behind us has the last name of one of the people from the O'odham Wounded Knee. But first I want to know if our name is still there. I look around to make sure Grandma isn't coming down the street. Then I walk out quickly, looking in the direction she comes from. Sure enough, when you pull the mailbox open our last name is on the lid on a piece of orange plastic tape like a label maker makes. There it is! So if I walk around the block and open the mailbox of the house right behind me, I might find a name in there! The name might be the name of a wanted guy and then I'd have some proof, wouldn't I? It seems to make sense. But I know I spent too much time today with the binoculars. There isn't enough time to walk around the block before Grandma comes home. I start back toward the house, and that is very lucky.

Because just then I hear Grandma coming around the corner in the golden van. The engine is so loud you can hear it just before she turns the corner and I have to run back inside the house before she sees me. I hafta give up the search. For now. I hope Quincy didn't see me running in. I'm pretty sure Grandma didn't.

CHAPTER 11

I don't think I'll get a chance to go around the block until later today. Wednesday. I'll have to make up a lie to do it too. That won't be so hard. I have to lie a lot now.

And it was a long day. I had to serve another detention at lunch. This was the one about the note with the word Alcatraz on it. I feel really mad about that. I was thinking about history and I got in trouble. Boy that was dumb.

All during detention, I wonder if Oseana is making friends with Esperanza again. She is such a fickle friend. I mean Oseana, not Esperanza. They are probably out there right now having fun. I'm inside with the bad kids. I haven't even done anything that is bad. The other kids agree.

Also, I get in trouble in the computer lab because someone talks to me! And I get in trouble in the library when someone tries to follow me in the shelves and Miss Gretchen, our school librarian, gets fed up with the nonsense. She gets really mad sometimes because she's very old. She has heavy shoes on and she can barely walk. She is pale gray and tan. She wears those colors mostly and practically disappears. I saw her getting into her car at the disabled space of the teacher's parking lot and it was tan too!

Finally, the school day is over. I go home in the van with Grandma and when we pull in the drive I tell Grandma I'm going to see if Esperanza can play for an hour before dinner. Grandma agrees that I can try, which surprises me. Usually she says wait until Saturday to try to play, but I guess that's only in the winter when it gets dark faster. It's almost spring now.

Also, maybe she's trying to be nice to me. I haven't been talking to her that much. I didn't ask for anything when Quincy has gotten stuff at different shopping trips.

I make sure to look at the house behind us carefully before I leave because it's easy to get confused about which house is which when you're on another street and everything looks different. Also, the direction I'm looking will be different when I get there and the light will make things look different. The house I want has red colored trim on the edge of the roof. And it's made of bricks that have been painted white, but the paint is peeling near the bottom of the house. There are wooden fences on either side of the house and the pieces of wood that make the fence are woven like a basket. There are wooden balls on that fence at the top of every section. And there is chain link across the back of their yard, which is why we can see the lady working in her garden. I think the front yard is plain dirt with a big mesquite tree in the middle. And some kind of green plant is spread under the mesquite. I can't see what the plant is. At least two cars are in front of the house: a little low black truck with dark windows, and an old, old Volkswagen beetle that used to be yellow but is almost white now.

I walk in the direction of Esperanza's house in case Grandma is watching out the kitchen window. She likes to do that a lot. After I've gone the way I'm supposed to, I slip down the street behind our house instead of going to Esperanza's.

I'm going to open the mailbox of the house behind us where the hero of Alcatraz lives. When I get on the street I feel so scared. It feels like people are watching me walk by their houses. Peeking out behind the curtains or through the slats of old Venetian blinds. I also feel scared like when that green car with the Dirty Dude showed up. My heart is beating really hard, and my mouth is dry, but I keep telling myself all I have to do is open the mailbox and look inside to see the name.

I get up to their black mailbox and somehow I get the courage to pull the latch. The door hinge goes screech when the door flops opens and I'm really afraid someone will hear that and look out. If they see me, they'll probably think I'm stealing mail. So I pretend to put something in the box while I lean over to look for the name.

There is only one name written. It's on the same type of tape we have in our box. It's Garcia. I'm pretty sure that wasn't one of the names that I was looking for.

I slam the box closed and walk away really quickly toward Park. That way I'll be coming back the right direction from Esperanza's when I round the corner of my street.

I walk past the gate with the little horses. I never got around to making a picture of those. I walk past the church place too. I'm thinking of what I'm gonna do next to solve the mystery. This isn't gonna keep me from going on. I know I can figure this thing out. The books were really good clues. I just need some luck now and I can probably solve it.

Then, when I reach home, I walk across the front yard and up to the door. I come in and tell Grandma (who's making some spaghetti sauce) that I saw Esperanza with her mother driving away somewhere so I didn't go all the way to her house. I just gave up and came home. That explains why I'm back so fast. Grandma is fine with that.

I want to ask if I can please use the laptop and the printer. I would love to get on this mystery now. Maybe I can pretend to print something and secretly print the pictures of the O'odham occupation? But that seems risky and I don't feel so brave after walking around the block and doing that spying mission. I feel tired from the stress of opening that mailbox.

Back in my room I quickly check the name in the mailbox against the names I copied yesterday. Like I thought, none of them are actually Garcia. So maybe my whole theory is wrong. Could I be crazy? Could it be that I'm imagining this whole thing? Maybe Grandma has the whole thing wrong.

Grandma and Quincy and I eat dinner at separate places because he says he has to study and Grandma wants to look at something on her laptop. I play on her phone for an hour, but it bores me.

I go to sleep early thinking about different ways that I could be wrong. There seems to be lots of opportunities to make mistakes with this. I have to agree that lots of people could have those Native American books. Our neighborhood does have fans of Native American rights and rebellions. They might collect books like those and not be the person I'm looking for. But still, I think I'm right. I have a good feeling about what I'm doing. I don't know why I'm confident, but I am.

I go to school Thursday thinking about whether I'll get to use the computer at home again that day. This is a long day waiting for an opportunity to use the laptop without Grandma being around. I keep hoping during the day that something will happen to help me out. I just need about half an hour in the house alone. I don't want to risk having Quincy see what I'm doing either. He is not very trustworthy when it came to secrets. He is the type to turn me in if he sees anything unusual, and me looking up fugitives would probably be unusual.

It's rainy at school and when we go to Art, Esperanza's class is in Music. We get to trade classrooms outside and the rain is dripping down into the covered patio. Esperanza screams with me when some cold rain runs down her back. We are joking about the cold rain and jumping in puddles together when we have done all the exchanges between art and music. It is great to have her laughing with me again.

Then I get picked to be a substitute passer in class. That means I get to give quiet kids their backpacks at the end of the day. I like doing it because I get to move around the room and pick kids. They want me to pick them and I pick the kids who are nice to me, of course. I really like that job better than anything.

And the chance I want comes around when we get home. Grandma decides to take Quincy to Big Lots and see if they have any good pants his size. Quincy is eager to go because he wants some that are better looking so some of the girls in high school will fall in love with him, and I manage to say I don't need anything and can wait until another time so Grandma can concentrate on Quincy. If they had thought about that, it should have seemed suspicious because I always want to go to stores. Usually Grandma would have gotten all suspicious, but she was pretty certain Quincy was going to be difficult and she wanted to deal with him all on her own. I also beg too much, something I have increased just so Grandma would leave me home. They pull out in the van and I watch the van go down the street.

I hurry to get the laptop on. I can't wait long. I start the printer too. I look up the pictures one by one. It takes a while to get a photo of them, but finally I find it. The photo of the people at the siege of Alcatraz and the occupation of the O'odham Rez office. Then I send the photo to the printer and wait. I put the laptop back the way it was. I'm careful to erase my search and the minute it's done I carry the pictures to my room. I shut off the printer first though. I also find a good hiding place for the photo, which is in the pages of a dictionary. Grandma will not look in that because it is shoved at the back of my closet bookshelf. Then once I know where it will be hid, I take a look at it closely for a long time under my desk lamp.

The only problem is none of the men look like the man who lives behind us and their names aren't Garcia. Not at all! The face shape isn't the same. The eyes aren't the same. None of them look like him! They are totally different. I take some time memorizing the way the face looks. I hope my neighbor will come out soon so I can look at him. I have the binoculars ready. I sit at my desk looking out for him, but no luck at all. He doesn't come. Instead his wife is blundering around in the garden. She looks kind of drunk and mixed up.

There must be a flaw in my logic. I go through it all again slowly. Grandma had said there was someone who was in the siege of Alcatraz in the neighborhood. I had seen books about the siege in the house behind ours. A whole shelf of books. It was clear that they were interested in that topic and was that likely to just be random? That must be because they are the person we've heard about.

What could the answer be? Maybe the answer was Grandma was completely wrong. Maybe no one who was at Alcatraz lives near us. I think about that for the next hour along with glancing at the darn picture.

There is a good possibility that I'm wrong with this whole thing. Maybe sometimes even James Bond goes after clues that don't take him anywhere. That is a thing to learn. Then James Bond would give up and know the problem wasn't ever going to be solved. He has to admit that he has lost to the problem. It is just too hard for him to figure out. Maybe in the same way this problem is too hard for me. The problem is an old mystery and the problem is sort of dangerous too. At least for the person who is wanted and might not want to be found out even by a kid like me. I am not brave enough to go over and ring the doorbell to ask if they are the people who are hiding.

And why do I even care at all. It isn't going to make any difference for me or for them. Oh, but that does seem wrong. It is going to make a difference for me because I've decided that I'm going to solve the mystery and once I've decided that I want to make sure it goes on to the end and I really solve what I set out to solve.

I discover I'm not a quitter after all. I don't feel discouraged by not getting the answer. All the kids at school thought I couldn't keep going at anything, but they didn't know that I have plenty of patience for this. I have all the time in the world for being James Bond.

The answer is something in front of my face. Faces? Maybe I should look at the picture again.

I go to my closet and find the dictionary. I flip pages to where the paper is at. It is stuck on the page where the letter N began. There is the picture again and I examine the faces. What if they had plastic surgery! That had been in a James Bond movie. What if the face had been altered? I look at them closely.

No, that's not it.

The answer is staring at me. There is no more faces of the group. It has to be one of them.

Then I get an idea. The answer is he's one of them, but the man must have changed his name so if I get a good look at him maybe I can see that one of them is him. I have to get a good look at the man. That's what I have to do now.

Since the mailbox idea wasn't so hard I decide to use that idea again. I'll steal their mail and take it back as though we got it by accident! I need the man's mail from the box and then I've got to hope that he will come to the door if I ring the bell.

I will have to look at the faces and memorize them before I steal the mail though. That's important because I have to recognize which one of them it is while I'm talking to him.

The idea of stealing makes me nervous. But I'm going to give them the mail right away. It's going to be a fast job. I can get it done. I know I can.

Just then I hear Quincy and Grandma returning to the house, so I can't do anything about my idea.

I try to make myself feel less nervous all night and the next day, Friday, at school. I tell myself to get my nerves down and keep them down. James Bond isn't as nervous as this. He's probably cool when he steals mail. He does it like a breeze. That's the way I've got to be. Breezing past and taking the mail. Walking right up to the door and ringing the bell.

So I wait. For the time when the mail is coming. I tell Grandma I'm playing in the front yard. I watch the mail truck go past their house. I have to do this secret mission super fast. I have to have this done before Grandma notices that I'm not in the front yard.

I run around the corner and I run up their block. I open the mailbox fast. Take out a piece of mail. Now run! Up to the door!

I hope they didn't see me do it. It would be bad if they know I stole the mail.

Ring the doorbell and see if it's him!

It all seems like a great plan. A little scary to talk him face to face, but worth it if I discover we are really living behind a famous person. He is a hero to me, even if he is a bad person now.

The chime sounds weirdly behind the door. I'm feeling so scared about this, but excited too.

What if I recognize him immediately?

That will be so dope!

But I hear the doorknob turn and the door swing open inward and the woman is in the door.

"Yes," she says.

There's something strange about her voice. She stares at me coldly.

"We got some of your mail," I say.

"Okay," she says. She puts her hand out.

Then I realize I need to give the mail back. I hand the mail over and try to say sorry and things to make the time last longer. I'm hoping the husband will show up, but the door is starting to close.

She looks at the mail and closes the door in my face.

The man never comes near the door and I don't get a glimpse of him once.

Shit! Shit! I didn't get to see him.

I step slowly off the porch and start walking home.

Something about her seems so odd. I don't know what it is. The voice is weird. Husky, like she was sick or if she was a man.

I go home quickly. I go the other way, not to Park. It's a little faster going the other way usually, but I want a chance to relax and think before I go home. I don't want to see Grandma without being able to think about what just happened. I can go to my room, but what if she wants to talk to me?

I can think while I walk. There was something wrong with her. Her voice sounded all wrong. Her hair and face were wrong. Face was wrong.

No, no, face was right!

My heart stops for a moment. The famous person from the siege at Alcatraz is dressed as a woman, not a man. That's the answer! I have it. That's the face! The face from the siege is the face of the woman. I pull out the paper with the faces. And it's there!

Leo Francis Delmar! Leo Francis Delmar is living as a woman! And he is living in the house right behind us.

And I see the face of the man in the woman living behind us.

The woman is the man.

The woman is not a woman.

I'm not sure what's happening.

This wasn't what I expected and now I don't know what to do.

I walk into the kitchen. It smells real good like tomatoes and onions and it's warm, so warm compared to walking around on a desert afternoon when it's early spring. I am glad to get inside now and feel safe in my own house. At my desk. On my bed. I move around the kitchen nervously. That was a super scary thing to have to do. I go back to my room and actually hug myself at the desk. That was scary. I look at the photo one more time in the closet. There's no doubt. Leo Francis Delmar is living behind us and he is living as a woman!

Wow, Quincy's not going to believe this.

So I have solved the big mystery that Grandma knew. The only one she thought there was in the neighborhood. I think I know the answer to the mystery. I am probably the only person in the whole neighborhood, beside Leo, who knows he's there. It's a responsibility and a burden. I don't think I want to keep this to myself any longer. Maybe talking to Grandma will make me feel better about what I've discovered. Maybe she's going to see the flaw in what I've figured out.

I can barely sit through supper with the chit-chat going. Quincy is telling Grandma about the school lockdown they had today and how he saw the principal flying out of the school parking lot in her Mercedes Benz right before the lockdown alarm went off. There was a monitor locking the gate behind her, so no one else could get their car out of the school or come in. It was right at the end of school, so lots of parents were really mad that they couldn't park in the parking lot. And then he tells us about the short skirts of the principal of his school, and Grandma is laughing so hard at what he's saying. The principal wears skirts that are really, really short. That is so funny and horrible, but true. I've seen her myself and so has Grandma. That makes it even funnier. I am laughing at it too, but I really want to tell them what I know about the mystery. I have doubts about telling them, but I guess it's really time to do it.

When I think they have laughed enough, and when I'm about to explode with my news, I say, "I got something to show you. About the mysteries. Of the Alcatraz guy, the O'odham occupier. The ones I've been working on. I want you guys to see what I've done."

"What?" says Quincy.

"I found something out. I think it might be important, but I don't know until you look at it, Grandma." I say Grandma to bug Quincy. He makes a face at me, but doesn't say anything back, probably because he's too busy feeding his face. Spaghetti is hanging on his lips and he's slurping it in. And then I decide to be nice. "And Quincy."

He smiles. And shovels more food in. He has a drink of water. Grandma has taken sodas away from him and he actually hasn't complained. Maybe this time he's gonna take the diet serious.

"Can I go get it?" I ask. "I'm really done eating." I wipe my mouth with a pink paper napkin as I finish saying that. I get up and throw away the napkin and put my dish in to soak cuz Grandma has the soapy water made already.

"Right now?" Grandma asks.

"Yeah it's really bugging me. I'm mean it's weird. I want you guys to help me decide what to do or tell me if I'm right about what I'm thinking."

"Okay, go get what you want to show us." Grandma makes a triangle with her fingers after she dumps her dish in the water. Our dishes are plastic so you don't have to worry about breaking them. Our kitchen is so small you can spin around and put your dish on the counter or even in the sink without getting up. If you're sitting on Quincy and Grandma's side of the table, that is.

I go to my room. This is it. I'm going to let them in on my big secrets. I run and get my notebook. I'll come back for the paper with the faces and names of the Alcatraz occupiers if this goes well and they believe me.

I hand Grandma the notebook and I have opened it to the page with the names of the books that I saw.

"Okay, so what does this mean?" She is holding the notebook up in front of herself. Quincy is looking over her shoulder, still eating, and reading the titles hisself.

"I'll tell you. I can explain what I've done if I start with that," I sit down kinda hard in my chair. This is making me feel nervous.

"Okay," says Grandma.

"This is gonna be fun," says Quincy in a goofy voice. I know Quincy thinks I'm in trouble, but I also know by the way she's acting Grandma isn't angry at me or anything.

"These are the titles of the books I saw in their den." I read them aloud to Grandma and Quincy slowly. Grandma nods at the titles. She is rubbing her chin slowly. Massaging it around and around. "Those are the names of books," I say.

"Yes? That's what I hear," says Grandma. "What does it mean?"

Then I sit down opposite Grandma and Quincy at the kitchen table and tell them the whole thing about what I was doing and what I saw out of my window. "I saw those books in the house behind us. I used your binoculars. I wasn't trying to spy on them. I just happened to focus on a room. A lamp was on and it was getting darkish so I could really see inside their house. It was the house right behind us. With the people who fight."

Grandma sits there looking at me. Quincy scrunches up his mouth sideways.

"Hmm," says Quincy. "Lemme see." He pulls the notebook over to him and moves his empty plate and glass away.

He takes the list and puts his head down to see. Maybe he's starting to need glasses. Actually, glasses would improve his looks.

They look surprised. Grandma congratulates me on finding something. We debate what it means.

"This might not mean anything, you know," says Quincy. "But I agree it's kinda odd. You used binoculars?"

"Yes, binoculars. There was a desk lamp on so it was bright in there."

"So, one of the occupiers lives right behind us?" he says.

"Maybe so," says Grandma. "I don't know how we can see if it's him."

"Do we want to talk to them?" Quincy asks. "You said they aren't friendly."

"I think they aren't friendly," says Grandma. "I could be wrong."

"Maybe we should stay out of their lives," Quincy says. He pushes the notebook away with some sadness.

"Yeah, that's odd," says Grandma finally. "I think you have something. Maybe."

"That could be nothing, though," Quincy says. "A lot of people might have those books."

"Okay. I thought of that, but there's more," I say.

"Hmm," says Grandma.

"Wait. Wait," I say. "There's actually more and wait until you hear it."

"What do you mean more?" says Quincy.

"There's more you gotta know." I get up and start to leave the kitchen. "I have to show you something else."

"Look, I have these pictures. They are the faces of the people. I'll get the picture I printed out. You guys can look with me at them." I rush off to my room to get the picture I printed. I go quickly to my room and the closet. The picture I printed of the occupiers in still in the dictionary. I pull it out and go back to the kitchen.

I feel so great. This is the first time in years the three of us have worked together to solve a problem. Quincy usually won't get involved with anything Grandma and me try to do. We talk about stuff but he only wants to play his PS3. This is different because he's starting to take an interest in Native American things. He really wants to know about Native American uprisings and here's a person right here who knows about it all. What's he going to think about it being the woman I wonder? He might be really weird about it.

"So after I saw those books the next step was I printed out this article about Alcatraz. It explained who was wanted. I tried to match the names because, excuse me for lying to you Grandma, I went and looked in his mailbox. It wasn't the right name. But I decided it was probably him using a fake name so then I printed the photos of the occupiers and tried to match the faces to the guy behind us. It didn't work. He's not one of the wanted people at all."

"What? Let me see that." Grandma looks through the faces one by one. "Maybe he got older. Maybe that's all. I can see if it's the same guy better than you."

Quincy looks with Grandma at the picture I pointed to. "She's right," he admits finally.

"Wait a minute. I'm not done," I say.

"What?"

"So then I went to the door and I saw something."

"Wait, you went to the door!" says Grandma. "This is sounding dangerous. I told you not to have anything to do with that guy."

"Yeah, well, I did it anyways, Grandma. You can be mad at me if you want."

"What happened?" asks Quincy.

"Well, you aren't gonna believe me."

"Go ahead and try us," Quincy says.

"It's the lady," I say.

"What? What do you mean?" Grandma asks.

"The lady is this man. Leo Delmar." I tap the picture. "That one."

"The lady is the man? What do you mean?" asks Quincy.

"What are you saying?" asks Grandma.

"The lady who lives behind us used to be a man. Now he's living as a woman," I explain. "You know we talked about that once. You told us about that. I think."

"Oh, you mean he's changed his gender?" says Quincy.

"Yeah, I guess so. Or maybe just wearing clothes like that. I don't know for sure," I explain.

"He could be transsexual or just a transvestite. Or you could be completely wrong," says Quincy. "I vote that you're completely wrong."

"But it's the face. I know I'm right. That one! That face is the one," I point to the picture. "It's Leo Delmar."

Grandma and Quincy stare at the face.

"Well, I'll be," says Grandma finally. She lets her breath out and falls back in the kitchen chair as though she were punched. "I'll be..."

"Wow," says Quincy. He sets back in his kitchen chair too. "Boy, when you get involved in something, Trinity, it turns out to be a doozy."

"Don't blame me. You guys are kinda coming in at the end. I've been doing this by myself for a while."

"I'm glad we did come in. This is too complicated, too difficult for you. I don't mean you can't solve it, because you obviously did. I mean it's not the kind of thing a kid should be doing alone," Grandma says.

"Gee, this is sad. The guy is so mean to him. I mean her," Quincy says.

"It's terrible," says Grandma.

"I don't know what's going on though. First, we should see for sure if his face matches the pictures we have," says Quincy. "I want to see myself."

"I got a good view of her," I say. "I know I'm right."

"I could go over there with an excuse again," Quincy offers. "What if I take more mail and then bring it back to them?"

"Again? She's going to be suspicious."

"I could say I lost a ball in their backyard," I offer that.

"Good thinking! Then I could stand with you and take a good look at her. We could match her face up with the pictures. We can study the pictures until we think we know the faces." Quincy is excited. "I'll do it without you. That would be better," he says. "She won't see you again. I bet she doesn't know you're my sister. I wanna do it."

Grandma and I both look at him in astonishment.

"Really?"

"Yeah. This is really something," says Quincy. Now I think Quincy is looking forward to meeting this hero and he thinks we can't do anything about what we know. I don't think we should do anything. It seems like they want to be private. If we talk to them about what we know we probably won't be greeted happily.

We know she comes out usually around eleven to check her garden every day so the next day, Saturday, we wait. We had never really focused on her, but Grandma noticed this, because she was home in the day every day. It wasn't easy waiting until eleven to see her. I wanted to use binoculars to see her face, but Quincy and Grandma want to talk to her.

Quincy and Grandma get ready for the detective session by looking at her face in the picture for a long time. They discuss everything about her face. They look and look at the picture I've printed. It is a long preparation.

Then suddenly she's out in her garden behind our house. Quincy and Grandma go out quickly.

"Hi! Did you see a ball of mine? In your garden? I lost a ball." I can hear Quincy hollering that at her.

I feel crazy and nervous hearing him saying that lie. I hope she doesn't realize I'm related to Quincy. She might figure it out! We do look a little alike. She might get suspicious or if not her, then the guy. I hope he doesn't hear Quincy.

Grandma is following him out quickly and smiling. Maybe she will make things better if there's any trouble. She will know what to say, what excuses to make for us bugging them. Quincy might botch things up. He says a lot of wrong things all the time. I don't think he'd make a very good spy.

I'm in my room with the binoculars trained on the lady but I'm trying to focus them quickly and it's not so easy. I can't hear what's happening and try to use the binoculars at the same time! I want to look at the whole picture to see if Quincy and Grandma are actually looking at her.

I have the picture in front of me. The one of Leo Delmar. I can be even surer that I'm right if I have that picture while I use the binoculars. All I have to do is compare them.

Yeah, she still looks like Leo Delmar.

Then the lady's face moves out of focus. She searches around the garden for our ball. I can't focus the binoculars when she's moving so much. Then I hear Grandma and Quincy coming back to the house.

"It's him!" says Quincy bursting in the back door. "Oh my god, you were right!" Quincy is heading for my room.

I come out to meet him in the hall and we both walk back to where Grandma is, limping in the door.

"Yeah. I used the binoculars to compare. I knew I was right," I say.

"You were. You were right," says Grandma, coming in and sitting down heavily on the sofa.

"This is sort of incredible," says Quincy walking around for a moment and then sitting beside Grandma.

"It is."

"I thought you were wrong maybe, Trinity. I'm sorry, you were right."

"I knew I was. It really looked right when I was at the door. I didn't realize it till I got home."

It's been years since Quincy's actually sat out here with us. I can't believe this is happening! Having something to do in the spy realm has really helped him.

"Gee, I really wanted to meet him. I mean her," Quincy is talking to the air at the ceiling. Quincy really is sad. He's not making jokes. That's really weird for Quincy. He usually sits down and starts stuffing his face immediately with whatever is on the plate. I have the feeling this whole thing has made him think a lot and it's been good for him. I'm glad I let him have some involvement even if it was checking what I saw. It makes me feel bad that they doubted me a little, but I'm glad he got a chance to be involved. Maybe I've done something for him. "I don't think I could ever go over there and say anything to her," he adds. "It would be too pushy. I don't think they'd be happy."

"Probably not," says Grandma. "They were never friendly. I don't think saying we were Native would matter. They knew that before. They still didn't like us. If we say we admire what he or she did that might not make them happy either."

"They don't want to be recognized," Quincy says. "You think that's true?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe she would like us to say something?" I say.

"Probably not. That's the way they're acting. I guess we have to judge on the way they seem." Grandma took a sip of some old tea she had left on the coffee table. "They are telling us what they want."

"But maybe it's the crappy guy, not the hero of Alcatraz. How do we know what's really going on. He might tell her to keep down low. He might be controlling her!" I say.

"All the more reason for us to stay out of it. If he is scaring her then we don't want to get in the middle of that. He could come after us. We don't know what she wants. I don't see how we can decide. The best thing is to stay out. At least we know and maybe we can protect them without them knowing."

"Okay. I guess that's reasonable." I say.

Quincy nods.

In the early evening I hear the wind blowing outside and rain hitting our windows. Grandma is bugging me about me finishing that kit again. I'm so disappointed in it. I don't like hearing the rain bouncing off our house, either.

I wish I could go to the Dharma Center and see the temple. This rain must be flooding all the little streams of the fountains. I would like to take an umbrella and go see that, but everything is too wild. There's even thunder now and Grandma never lets me go out in that. I don't have good shoes for deep water.

The rain goes on and on. It seems to be hitting all sides because the wind is blowing so hard and swirling around. Our little house is super spooky even with Grandma and Quincy here with me. All the lights are on in here and still it is dark. The sky is darker and darker. I'm afraid to look out my window at the house behind us. I don't even want to see it. What if I look out and they're looking over here?

I finally peek from a curtain. There's nothing to see. That house behind us is dark. Are they gone or something? All the curtains are drawn; it's not usually like that.

I hope the man didn't notice we were the people living behind him and I was from this house. He might start to get suspicious of us and he is a violent person, Grandma says. Good thing I didn't try to go into their house. I was going to try to say something to get inside, but that was a dumb idea. Good thing I didn't blurt out what I know about Alcatraz. That would have been a big fucking mistake, as Quincy would put it. I don't want Quincy to try to go over there. That just seems stupid right now. We don't know enough to know if things are safe. I think the idea of a ball was even risky. They might be suspicious now. Why not just use the binoculars, but Quincy and Grandma wanted a close up look at her face. That was not a good idea, I think.

So all along it had been a woman. Grandma Warrior herself always talked as though it was a man hiding in their neighborhood. But I hadn't thought of it being a man who became a woman. I hadn't even considered that the famous person who was wanted for being so brave was actually now living as a woman. No wonder no one knew who it was. But I wondered how the rumor got out in the neighborhood that this person was living here. Somehow that woman must have communicated with someone from the local Native American community. Or someone recognized her.

Nobody thought of that. I never thought of that. Grandma never thought of that.

Would James Bond have thought of that?

And she lives with a man who is mean to her. Why does she stay with him when he is so mean to her? That's the question burning me up inside. It is so awful to have someone yell at you. Does she need a way out? I knew I wouldn't be able to do anything to help her. Grandma said leave them alone and she was probably right about it. It still made me feel awful.

Late at night. I lay in my bed listening to the hard rain pounding our roof and wonder what is going to happen over there to Leo. Will she be all right for much longer? Can we ever talk to her? I wonder if we can talk over the back fence if she is out in her garden. The man, Mr. Garcia, never comes out with her and gardens. If she would be there, maybe Quincy could talk to her. I want to tell Quincy that. I'm falling asleep trying to remember to tell Quincy that the next day. If he talks to her he can look at her face. Maybe Grandma can be there too. The two of them can make sure I'm thinking the right thing. Wait, they know I'm right. I'm forgetting what happened today.

At least I have solved a mystery. I have solved the whole thing and it feels very, very good.

CHAPTER 12

But there's something strange. I'm thinking of it the next day before I get up for breakfast. Oatmeal again probably. Blech.

Why is there that memorial with the blue and pink flowers so close to our house? What does that mean with the two colors? It means transgender, right? I figured that out a week ago. And I figured out that the man, Juan, had changed to a woman. But that's the same as the Leo the Alcatraz guy! so why is that in the neighborhood too? Why are there two transgender people in the same neighborhood two blocks away from each other? One of them is getting yelled at by a violent guy and the other one is dead. Does that make sense?

I still hear rain outside. It's dark and cold and drippy. I don't want to get out of my bed. I don't want to think about the other mystery, but something is making me do it. I hear a siren, but it's going away toward downtown. I hear a train coming through town. They've probably got the train barriers down right now.

I wonder how long the memorial has been there. That might mean something. Obviously someone takes care of it. It's been there for a while, I think. Not a whole year, probably, but a while, because I can remember it. At last Thanksgiving I remember it being there.

And someone ripped it apart. What did that mean? Why would someone want to rip it apart and throw the flowers away? That means someone is mad about the person who died having a memorial. That person doesn't want it to be. That person must have been very angry when they saw it. They wanted to rip it apart, including the cross. They must be an angry person.

Grandma knew when the people behind us moved in. She said the lady moved in later than the guy. The guy was never nice and he didn't have the lady living with him at first.

The person thrown in our neighborhood was maybe thrown from a car, but maybe walked and fell. What if they had been with someone here? And what I really mean is scary. What if they had been with the guy behind us? Maybe visiting. Maybe getting stabbed in the back. They might have gotten about as far as Bonanza if they ran from that house. And the murderer?

Maybe they followed Juan when he ran out. Maybe there wasn't any blood falling and so the police couldn't trace where Juan had been. Then no one saw the Garcia guy lurking in the shadows when the body was found and the police were called. He probably went home. Yes, maybe he saw Juan get found. He probably went back to his house and hoped no one knew where Juan had been. He cleaned everything up that was evidence. Somehow he got super lucky. He committed a crime and was never caught.

I know he did it. I am the only one who knows he did it. Grandma and Quincy only think he is cruel to our tribal hero. They don't know that Mr. Garcia, or whatever his real name is, might have killed someone. They don't know what I know. I have to wait until morning to tell them. I'm lying in my dark room worrying about it. Worrying about the drippy rain and the creepy sirens I keep hearing. Even the train whistle makes me shudder. What a cold thing he did to Juan. And he thinks he got away with it. He thinks he got away with a murder.

I might be the only person who knows, besides the victim who only knew for a few minutes while he tried to escape.

Shit. This is getting really scary. This is getting really real. I'm talking about a murderer now living right behind me. Before I was only talking about a guy who was hiding out and a dead body that ended up in our neighborhood. That was sort of strange, and a little scary, but this is very, very scary!

I wish I had started learning that Vietnamese defense stuff at the Dharma Center!

Juan might have been the friend of the guy behind us before. That means he might have killed Juan. He might be capable of killing the Alcatraz woman also. And we had vowed to protect her!

We might get our chance. We really might have to do some protecting. I wonder if Quincy and Grandma will be willing to do anything. Maybe they will want to talk me out of my idea. Maybe they will disagree about what happened to Juan. I have to tell them, though. And they didn't disagree about Leo, so that's something that helps me to go on telling them things. But what can we do? How would we make the situation better? I can't see how we will convince anyone about the murder. I am only thinking I know the answer because of coincidences. Quincy and Grandma might agree with me, but that's not good enough to convince the police. But, they might be able to follow leads if I give them the information that I have.

What if there was something linking Mr. Garcia and Juan? Maybe a phone message or something, or a friend or a bar where they met. They might have a mutual friend who forgot about Mr. Garcia. The police are only as good as the information they receive. If they don't know what I know about Mr. Garcia, they can't know that Juan might have been with him when he was killed.

This was getting too real and too scary! I have to warn Grandma and Quincy right away. This morning. Right after they get up. I can't wait any longer or the hero might be killed. I would feel guilty forever if I waited and someone got killed.

That's what was bothering me. Could there be a connection between the two? Would it seem likely that they were both here and unconnected?

I don't want to tell Grandma and Quincy in a way about the other death thing. I have been keeping that knowledge to myself, but finally I know I have to let them hear about Juan and the memorial and what I figured out. They would be able to help me. I mean I'm actually thinking someone is a murderer and the facts are leading that way. If I'm wrong, I want to know it. Being wrong would make me feel better.

The fact is another trans person had been near our house and had been found dead in the street. It taken me a while to figure it out, but I have figured it. I looked at his obituary online. It told me what I needed to know. Juan was a trans person.

How can this be a coincidence?

It didn't seem real. Maybe all along the two things were tied together and I was only just blundering forward into the reality of the connection. Two trans people in the same place. I want to tell Grandma and Quincy as soon as possible. This is very odd. They don't know what I know.

So I decide to tell them everything that I know as soon as they're up.

It's still stormy when I get up. The night before was super rainy. The clouds are so dark that A Mountain is almost the same color as the sky. The Catalina's have disappeared and a low white cloud is running across the base like a scarf.

Grandma is in the kitchen serving oatmeal. Quincy is up early for some reason.

"I have to talk to you guys about something," I begin. "You aren't gonna believe what I know, but I have to tell you." I don't know how else to start what I'm going to tell them. I may as well get it out and if they're gonna laugh, then so be it. I look in my oatmeal, but there's no courage there.

"What's that?" asks Grandma, sitting down in front of her oatmeal. The kitchen window is blue and black behind her with the white curtains framing that. Sprinkles are forming on the window already. The pace of them falling increases as I look at them.

"Is someone picking on you again?" she asks.

"No, it's about the mystery, sort of," I say. "I might have some other mystery that maybe ties in. I don't know what you guys will say about it. I'm just gonna tell you and see what you think."

"Okay," says Quincy reasonably. He is digging into his oatmeal.

"Go ahead and tell us," says Grandma.

"Yeah, stop the suspense. You were right before, so I'm gonna listen to you now." Quincy says this quiet, sort of under his breath, but it is the nicest thing he's said in a very long time and all of us can hear it. Grandma looks surprised to hear him saying anything nice.

"Well, it started with me looking at the shrine one day."

"What shrine?" asks Grandma.

"Huh?" says Quincy. "What are you talking about now?"

"The pink and blue plastic flowers over on Bonanza. Did you ever notice that cross with the flowers? On the House of Isaac."

"The what?" says Quincy.

"First, I thought the House of Isaac might have murdered someone, because I asked Grandma and she said they were conservative or something."

"Oh yes, you did ask me about them. I wondered why you were asking."

"Yeah, but then I realized it wasn't anything to do with them. You know there's a bouquet of flowers that's tied on the fence at the House of Isaac place?"

"Yeah, I know them, but what about them?" asks Grandma.

"Oh, do you mean that weird barn place that's painted gray?" says Quincy. "I've seen that place, sure. There are plastic flowers."

"Right. I just got curious about those flowers one day. I was pretending to be James Bond, you know, a secret agent and everything. He solves mysteries. I looked around here for something mysterious. So I wrote down the name and the dates of the body that was found on Bonanza. That's what's on the cross that's under the flowers. Pink and blue plastic flowers. Someone bought the flowers and also wrote on a white wooden cross the name of a dead person that was found there. Their birth and death. The cross was wired to the fence."

"Oh yeah! About Halloween, right?" says Grandma. "I remember that. The flowers and the white cross are still there."

"Right. Well, not exactly. You see, the thing is someone took them away. And split the cross in two and threw the flowers away. But the people who did that memorial put it back."

"What? Someone tore the memorial apart?"

"Yep," I say.

"Wait, someone died on the street?" says Quincy. "Right around here? On Bonanza?"

"Yep, they did. Or else I thought they were dumped from a car and they were already dead. So I decided to look up the name. On the computer. And I found it. I found a newspaper article and the thing you said, Grandma, about an obit when we went to Sells and that guy was dead. That guy you knew? Remember you were talking with Ladora about an obit, so I remembered what you did. I looked for the guy's history online like you did."

"You looked up that guy?" asks Quincy. "That's pretty smart!"

"Yeah. The newspaper article told me a person was found dead on Bonanza. On that date. It was a year ago. He was stabbed in the back with an ice pick. But the pink and blue flowers meant something. I knew they did. I went to the obit next, and it had what I needed."

"What? What did it have?" Quincy asks.

"Well, in the obit I found someone wrote that Juan, the person who died, was transgender. So I figured that out on my own. But it's really weird now."

Grandma and Quincy both frown at me for a moment as though they don't understand what I'd said. They say nothing. I can see them thinking the same thing I have been thinking last night. That the whole thing is kinda weird. How can two transgender people be only blocks away?

I let it soak in on them for a while. I don't try to explain it to them. If I do that, I will be suggesting the answer. I want to hear what they think the answer is. I want to know if they think the same way I do.

"How do you know that? That the guy was transgender," Grandma says.

"Yeah. What makes you say a crazy thing like that?" asks Quincy, but I see he's interested, maybe worried.

"The obit said 'Please give money to the Transgender Center of Tucson. Don't send flowers'," I explain. "That's what I read. It means he was transgender and that's what they wanted people to do. To support other trans people."

The two of them sit there. No one says anything. Grandma wipes her mouth with a paper napkin.

Finally, Quincy speaks. "I don't know about you guys, but that is just too much of a weird thing. How could another trans person get here? Why would another guy be here and get killed? Doesn't that seem...strange?"

"Yes, that's it!" I say. "It's weird. That's what I think."

"It is weird. It seems odd," agrees Grandma. "It's very odd. I don't think it would happen. It's not possible. There's something wrong. There's something linking them."

"Someone, you mean. Yeah, and you said the lady who is the hero only came less than a year ago, maybe after that person died. Maybe that person lived there before, but didn't...last...long," Quincy says, letting his voice trail off.

"I wonder," says Grandma. "It doesn't make sense unless that's true."

"It's definitely weird any other way. Transgender people aren't just popping up all over the place. It's not that common, is it?" Quincy asks.

"Fairly uncommon, I think." Grandma wipes her mouth with a paper napkin again and stared out the window. "You're completely sure of this?"

"After breakfast you can look at the obituary yourselves. I can find it again for you guys. I know how to find it. Wait! I printed it, too."

"Go get it," Quincy orders.

"Okay."

"Yeah, we're gonna all read that obit. If what you say is true, we might be on to something bad," Grandma says, sounding very worried.

I go into my room and go to where I am hiding my copy of the obit. I have it in the dictionary where I kept the picture of James Bond and the info about the Alcatraz occupiers. It feels really strange when I glimpse the house behind us and realize that what I have was going to make the house behind us seem like a murder house. I feel so creepy and worried. I make sure my curtain is completely closed and then I peek out at the house. That is ridiculous because he doesn't even know we know that his girlfriend is a man. Mr. Garcia is not going to come over the back fence and get me, but I am the one with the window looking out at his house. I am the one who saw all those books about the Native Occupations and figured out who really lives behind us. I am the one who stole their mail and rang their doorbell.

I get the obit out and bring it to the living room couch where Quincy and Grandma are now, waiting. Waiting for me to bring the creepy evidence. Quincy reads it out loud to Grandma and me. Grandma thinks while he reads. We double and triple check it. There is no doubt I am right about what I saw in the obit. It does say give money to the Transgender Center. And we have to explain that somehow. The only way to explain it is that Juan was transgender.

We all go to school feeling strange that day. It is weird thinking you might be living behind a murderer. After school on Monday night Quincy doesn't even ask about A.C. and he doesn't play his PS3. We're a house of silent people worrying about what we know. The guy who lives behind us lives with a transgender woman and the man who was killed only a block away was also a transgender woman. That just seems too weird to be a coincidence.

It's super strange knowing you know where a murderer lives and not being able or willing to do anything yet.

CHAPTER 13

I'm thinking about the whole mess when I get into bed. I haven't been in bed long. Usually I would dream of J. Bond at a time like this, but I don't want to look at his picture or nothing. The whole murder thing is too weird for me.

Grandma is sitting up. Of course Quincy is still up playing games so I realize it's probably not very late.

I think I can hear something. Actually, I don't know that I'm hearing something, but I think I am. At first I think it must be Grandma playing a TV cop show too loud or else someone has their window open with a cop show on. But it's a cool spring night after a big rain and no one would have their window open.

Then I think it is real voices of real people. They're arguing. Then I hear yelling and screaming in the arguing.

It's coming from the house behind us and it sounds scarier than usual. Someone is really yelling in an angry way. The other person is trying to talk sense, but they don't seem to be making things much better. The one that's yelling is getting angrier, but happier in a creepy way. It sounds like they made a decision that isn't very nice.

Then I start hearing the yelling better. Louder and easier to understand words. I get out of bed and put some clothes on. Quincy's door opens. I can hear the carpet snagging on the bottom of the door. When I step out my door, Quincy is already standing beside Grandma in the living room.

"Can you hear that?" asks Grandma, stopping her story and listening. "That sounds bad." Her face has the worried look she gets when she hears gunshots nearby at night or sirens or the police helicopter. Her face looked like that once when there was a deadly crash and when someone shot themselves in a home nearby.

"He always yells so much," I say. "I wish he'd stop it." I'm sure it's the voice of the guy behind us. You can tell the way he yells if you listen to it enough.

"Now we know who he's yelling at. It makes me really mad," says Quincy. "He should be proud to know her. All he does is yell. She's a hero."

The guy behind us is yelling again at the lady/man. He's saying mean things that you can only hear single words of like bitch and f-words because he says those louder.

It is getting even scarier sounding because there is the voice of the lady, fighting back against him. Then a door bangs really loud and Grandma moves quickly and opens our back door to see if we can do anything. She starts down the back steps slowly with her phone in her hand. I zip up my hoodie. Quincy and I follow her out, too. Quincy walks like he is in charge. I hope there isn't a gun over there because one of us could get shot from them screaming at each other so much. They might just shoot any which way if they're careless.

There's lots of yelling and screaming now! Whoever banged the door didn't get completely locked behind it or maybe that door didn't lock because they're back at it again. Grandma is peering over there.

I see another neighbor come out on her back stoop and look over to the yelling. She has her arms crossed on her chest and she shakes her head at Grandma and us. She turns around and tells her baby girl to go back. I see her husband taking the baby's hand and leading her back inside. He's on the phone. Maybe calling the police. I hope so.

Another neighbor opens their back door screen and comes out. They are wearing baggy pants and an old T-shirt. They look like they were doing their dishes because they have a pink scrubber in their hand still. They put the scrubber on the top of the porch railing and walk down into their yard. They never take their eyes off the house where the screaming is coming from.

Then a horrible scream comes out of the house! It's long and loud. It's a scream like a killing is happening!

The voice screams, "He stabbed me! He stabbed!" The last stabbed word goes real long.

Grandma pulls her phone out of her back pocket and then brings up the screen and quickly pokes 991.

Quincy runs to the fence of the other lady and calls, "What is the address of that house?" so maybe he can say the address for us to the emergency operator.

We get no answer. I think the lady is calling on her phone. She probably knows the address better than us.

There is more screaming coming from a bathroom. You can hear the echoing. Someone grabs the shower curtain and pulls it down. It sounds loud when the pole hits the tiles or the tub. I think someone musta opened the little window in the shower.

"Why don't they come!" shouts the lady behind us.

"I called," yells the man who led the baby in. He's outside now and the woman went in.

"I wonder if he killed her," says Quincy.

"I hope not, but it didn't sound good," says Grandma.

In a while we hear the ambulance and the police coming. The lady with the scrubber is talking with Grandma and Quincy at the back fence, then she goes out to talk to meet the ambulance. Grandma is relieved to hear the sirens. The screams are still coming and other neighbors are starting to stand outside. Nobody goes too close to the bathroom window where the screaming is coming from. It is the woman screaming "He stabbed me with an ice pick!"

Someone calls out, "Wait! Hold on! Help is coming! The ambulance is here."

Mr. Garcia is just sitting on the couch when the police come. They put all the lights on and we can see him. He's sitting there with his hands in his lap and he's smiling. He knows this time the murder has been discovered. He got away with one murder but not the second. The police handcuff him and take him to the squad car. They have to get him out of the house so the emergency crew can take out Leo without Leo being upset by seeing his would-be murderer.

The police arrive and the ambulance workers go in. You can see the emergency people wearing blue rubber gloves on their hands and carrying kits in. In a hurry.

Later they take her, Leo, away in the ambulance. We see her going out wrapped up and they shove her stretcher into the back of the ambulance and the doors close quickly. They are working on her the whole time. I guess they decided to take the ice pick out, but I'm not really sure.

We sit in shock on the neighbor's porch talking about what happened. We can't believe we were the neighborhood to have this happen to us. Then the police come out and we can see they have arrested Mr. Garcia. His arms are behind his back and he is marched out to a car.

Grandma thinks a while about what we know. She has to decide if it might help to keep that guy from ever trying to do that again to someone. She gets brave and walks over to tell the police, "Listen, there was another person found stabbed only a few blocks away from here. A year ago. And they were transgender. They were stabbed in the back. I need to talk to one of the detectives. I think we know something important." The police act like we're stupid or something. They say all the detectives are busy, but we can see some of them standing around joking with each other.

The detective we get taken to acts tired and not very interested. He studies Grandma for a little while as though he's deciding whether she is a good source or not. Then he says "okay, what do you want to tell me?" He takes down what she says as though he really doesn't believe it has much relevance and we're not sure if it means anything ourselves, but he writes the information down so that then he knows what we know about Juan. He's going to talk to the detective assigned to that case about any connection. He says he'll probably do it tomorrow. He won't forget. He'll be sure to remember. Quincy is the one making sure. He really wants this guy to be put away for a long time for stabbing the lady in the back with an ice pick.

Two days later we learn some more things. Mr. Garcia gets charged with murder of Juan and attempted murder of Leo who lived behind us. He had given Juan a place to live for a few days and then stabbed him with an ice pick except Juan left the house that night, no one heard him if he screamed. He walked several blocks without leaving a blood trail because he was bleeding inside him which is what happens with ice picks and then he died in the street. He was probably trying to get help but no one was outside; it musta been late at night. That guy Mr. Garcia living right behind us was the link between two things I just thought of as sort of interesting and put together in my notebook. He might have been followed by Mr. Garcia, but then he was found by the guy going to work. Mr. Garcia probably had hidden or gone back to his house. Maybe he was planning to finish Juan off if he didn't die. He actually thought Juan might have lived long enough to tell people that Mr. Garcia had stabbed him. But he didn't.

Though they showed Juan's picture around no one remembered him. The neighbors around Mr. Garcia had not seen him because he was only visiting there for a few days.

I couldn't believe the two things tied together so well like that. There was a link between those two mysteries which I had decided to investigate and that was just so strange, but there you have it. Sometimes you can't tell how weird time is gonna be until you live it.

Quincy and Grandma were as surprised as I was at how it turned out. Who would have believed that would happen? They didn't believe it was real. And I didn't either. We just barely worked on the mystery and it fell in our laps completely.

Well, maybe I worked more than barely. Grandma said I did a lot. Even Quincy agreed that I had done it all. This was one time when he didn't try to claim the glory. He realized he didn't do much of anything. I was the one that broke the case.

Was it good that I got involved? Yes, if I kept her or someone else from being murdered. But we hadn't seen the attack coming. We hadn't stopped what happened to Leo and we should have done better. If we had talked to her maybe we would have stopped what happened. Mr. Garcia seemed to think his transgender friends were disposable. He would have thought about what he did if he knew we knew Leo. But Leo might have stayed for years and been abused in other ways. Maybe we really did him a big favor by not interfering. It was too hard to figure out. My head was throbbing just trying to think about what could have happened.

I blame myself and also feel proud. I solved the mystery myself and it had been kind of hard. But I hadn't stopped the violence. I probably should have said something earlier, but maybe it wouldn't have made any difference.

"Was what we did good?" I asked Grandma.

"I'm not sure. Probably."

"We didn't stop what was happening but he's gonna be locked away for longer. And the family is gonna know what happened to Juan and why."

"Yes," says Grandma, "That will give them some peace. They must have been worried when the memorial was torn apart. I bet they wondered what that meant. Also, the detective did not have a solution to that case. That probably bothered him. Now the case is closed and we know what happened."

Things about the case bothered us. Quincy never got to talk to his hero Leo. And we didn't protect her at all. She was going to recover, but I didn't do as well as James Bond would have at keeping her from being hurt. James Bond usually keeps the main person in his movie from being injured. Well, sometimes they do get killed, though.

So I found out about the Alcatraz person, all right. What I found out was sort of shocking, actually. The famous person everyone was so proud of was not living as a man. He was a woman. And the thing was that I then realized that everything in the world was like that. All confused so that even if a woman was the important person that person would be changed into a man in the legend. It was like there was only one sex in the world that mattered and I saw clearly that I myself was part of the problem and maybe part of the solution. Nobody would believe I found the hero person and they were living as a woman. I had figured it out by looking at the situation the right way. The answer was easy when you went at it the way you ought to, carefully, slowly. I knew I was good at being slow. Everybody told me so!

Quincy might be better off. The whole thing seemed to give him something real to do. It has been a long time since he really was interested in something that wasn't a video game. He liked that we had done something together. He talked about it during dinner on and off for all this week. I was proud to hear him ask me to tell parts of what happened in my own words. It seemed like he wanted to hear it so he could tell it again, if necessary.

Grandma liked the idea of us working together, even though we hadn't really done so much together. It was a little bit of time we had spent with each other doing real things. She said we'd always remember this and I suppose she's right. There were times like when I was telling them at the table that I finally felt old enough and they respected me. This is a time when they have found respect for me. I haven't felt that much in my life.

And my idea about the world and women related to the person who was stabbed. That person was really not a man at all, but a woman inside his head. The whole thing was a fake job to keep people from knowing that he was happier as a she. That was why the sisters had made a pink and blue bouquet for his memorial. There was meaning in simple things which you saw and made note of. That is something I vow I'm not going to lose track of in all my life.

I have found out I'm brave and I can figure things out. I don't need scuba diving or shooting a gun or even Vietnamese martial arts class to solve mysteries. This mystery was all things I had to think about. I found out writing down things is not a dumb way to solve mysteries and maybe James Bond would do that if he were solving mysteries. I thought about all the things I'd done. A lot of it was super scary. I don't really ever want to think about some of it. If it had gone wrong I might be really screwed up. I might be dead. I don't think Mr. Garcia would be afraid to kill someone else. He had already killed one and was trying to stab another! He would have gotten rid of me if he could. Or Quincy.

I have found out a lot of things about being James Bond. It wasn't fun and some of it was scary. What if I had gone down to the church myself and met Mr. Garcia tearing the memorial apart? Or what if he had seen me writing down the letters from the memorial. Wait, wasn't there a black truck going by once?

Then I realize he probably did see me. I'm not happy to think about that. I'm sure he was the one that tore the memorial to Juan apart. He musta been out there raging and ripping the thing apart. He must have been crazed that night. It is a good thing that Leo could scream after he was stabbed. If he had been stabbed differently he might not have been able to scream. It's hard to say.

Mr. Garcia tore the memorial apart. That was dumb of him.

Solving this case might be the best thing I've done and maybe Grandma said it might be the best thing I'll do my whole life, but she hopes for more. It only attracted attention to the case, actually. But how was he to know a young girl and her family were going to take an interest in Juan. He probably thought Juan had no family or friends. He thought no one would miss Juan. He thought no one would miss Leo, either, but he was wrong.

I started learning Vietnamese martial arts at the Dharma Center yesterday with Pha Mui teaching me. And I saw the temple. It was fantastic! I know I don't have to know martial arts to solve mysteries, but it might help. I already have a good stance!

And I'm glad I did those spying things. I found out something that was good for me. I saw things the way they really were. That was part of seeing the world the right way for the first time. I'm not going to tell anyone about what I learned. Esperanza doesn't need to know anything. It is going to come right out in the way I act from now on. I know I have found what I need in being James Bond. The thing is the strength to go forward even when I'm afraid. I haven't conquered fear, but I can hold it back some.

Who knows, there might be another mystery in this neighborhood that needs solving! By me.

THE END

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Find other novels by Lorraine Ray on her Smashwords page. https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LoRay

Podcasts and audiobooks of some of Lorraine Ray's writing are coming in the summer of 2018! Look for the links on her Smashwords pages soon.

Find her on Wattpad and Goodreads.

Read her Smashwords interview at https://www.smashwords.com/interview/LoRay

