It would have been a typical day at Adler High, except that Mary Jo Mason disappeared yesterday.
Cops came and went all day. All the classrooms and lockers had been searched yesterday, along with every nook and cranny of the basement that was the haunt of the school’s creepy janitor. There were two squad cars parked at the front of the student parking lot at all times. It was hard to tell if they were always the same two cars. Every now and then, the school secretary came on the public address system and requested that some student or other report down at the main office.
I didn’t have to worry about being summoned. Mary Jo wasn’t a friend of mine—not many people were. I knew who she was; I’d seen her around. She was one of the Green clique, an annoying group of tree-huggers who constantly complained about how the school, and the school district, could be more environmentally friendly. But I had as much in common with them as I had with any of the other cliques at school. Tree-huggers, jocks, nerds, artsy-fartsy types—forget all of them; I was a clique of one, without much chance of adding on more members.
School gossip was running thick and fast today. Somebody had sneaked into the school and kidnapped Mary Jo. Or she decided to run away and marry some old dude from Greenpeace. Or Carl Brunner, the creepy school janitor, had done something awful to her…. Gossip never ends. It’s a cozy constant that helps you get through the day in high school.
Whether or not I wanted, I got the lowdown on Mary Jo from Melody Hansen, who was my best friend because she was my only friend. You could say she was my best friend by default. She was hopelessly shallow. She would talk, talk, talk, mostly about paltry things, and it was easy for me to tune her out. She was probably the perfect friend for me.
Without a doubt we were the two most unpopular girls in school. I never spoke with anybody, and if anybody tried to strike up a conversation with me, I just ignored them. I didn’t want anybody to get to know me, because I was sure nobody would like me anyway. I figured it is always better to be unpopular by your own choice.
Melody was a social outcast for an entirely different reason. The mere fact that her mother was the assistant principal in change of discipline drove a stake through the heart of possible popularity. Without even trying, she was condemned to be as popular as me, and I was only slightly more popular than vaginal warts.
