Sherlock

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

This was the line that I reread, mumbling each "W" to drown out the dreaded bus wheels against the road. It was one of those irritating sounds you attempt to get used to, but it latches onto your eardrums and refuses to budge. Like an annoying doorbell or a complaining parent.

I closed the Sherlock Holmes book. It was supposed to be a nice break from Shakespearean romance. Instead, it made me think more. Thinking is never good for me. It gives my tiny person seizures.

I turned to my friendly reminder: four bright-blue beads separating the brown, grey, and black.

How did I end up on a public transport bus that smelled like animal poultry?

My revelation about Julia's bracelet and my involvement as the savior was only the first step. I realized my ability to plan and get away with stuff is limited. I mean, first, there was the attempted suicide. (Which Julia stopped because, for some reason, she didn't want me to die.) Then, there was the weird stuff with my brother. (I can't even remember why we're mad at each other. I don't think about him under my covers late at night while reading about British wizards.) Of course, we can't forget about the situation at the fairground that got me into this whole mess in the first place.

I turned to the one person I could count on.

Austin turned red(der). "Are you kidding me? You ditch me last weekend to go hang out with a bunch of people you've never met, and now you want me to help you?" (Apparently, we'd made plans to sit around doing nothing last Saturday. Oops.) "Ha! It's like you take me for a perky, forgiving lovey-dovey teddy bear. I might be big, but I'm not that big, and especially not in the heart."

My shoulders lifted with my arms. "Okay, I'll ask Stuart."

"No no no no no no, wait."

We devised a plan. Austin came home with me to convince my parents that I was making friends. I admit I was shocked. He let my parents speak, responded to their jokes with laughter, and kept his words per hour at only ten thousand. We had Austin mention his need to retake his ACT and a training session he wanted to go to. Dad paused before his fork got to his mouth, and Austin looked at me and grinned. He told me we had them in the palms of our hands.

He asked my parents if I could go to the prep course with him. The answer? "Yes." They didn't even question the fact that I had already taken four ACT prep courses online. And that the ACT was a month ago.

Because Austin wanted to make this a "white lie," he brought a study guide to read on the bus. Oh, the bus. The hellfire-on-wheels-rushing-down-an-active-volcano, big, bumpy, bland piece of public transportation.

Here's the thing about homeschooling, Canadian virtual schooling, or whatever it is you think I do: we still have to do all the work you do. BUT, and this is a big but, we don't have to ride the bus to school at six freaking thirty in the morning. See? Schooling at home prevents death from car crashes and disease by a hundred and fifty percent.

You can't argue that kind of science.

But Austin didn't want to drive his car all the way to the fairgrounds. We had to take a city bus (actually, several city buses) to get down there.

Let the nightmare begin.

"I've gotta admit, that was way too easy," Austin said.

"What?"

"Your parents. When I tried to lie about this to my mom, she saw through me like a macro-lens. But, with yours, I felt like I was talking to my cat. They would've taken anything I threw at them."

I dropped my head back to my book. "Give the news crew time to scope me out."

"Geez. I freaking hope not."

He stared at his stomach and played with the camera lens on his phone. Occasionally, he'd start talking to the people behind us.

I replayed the plan in my head. The fairgrounds were closing. Austin had said that was a good thing, and I verbally agreed. Who would steal an old bracelet buried in the grass? No one. You know, except us.

"You boys know it's closed, right?"

We nodded towards the bus driver and stepped outside the vehicle. The engine jerked and he reared from the mud pit of soiled fairground. My feet sunk into the ground with each step.

"Dude, this place is huge." Austin hobbled towards an area of dead grass where a booth used to stand, fingering through the dirt. "Like, what exactly is the plan here?"

I stood on my toes. The demon roller coaster had been torn down. A spirit rose through my chest.

"Let's split up," I said.

I'd meant for it to be a polite question. I don't think that's what happened.

Austin shoved me with unusual force. If he was a bowling ball, I was a plastic pin in the toys section with all the beans missing. "No way! The whole point of me coming with you is to keep you out of trouble. I'm sticking to you like blue cotton candy on…pink cotton candy."

"Right."

"Let's start over by any booths that are still getting wrapped up and go from there."

Wow, how didn't I think of that?

Sorry. I had to try sarcasm.

I don't remember quote-for-quote how the conversations went with Austin and the different booth people. What I do recall: zero results. The cotton candy man sent us to the bouncy house man, who sent us to the garbage dump man, who sent us to the face painters, who happened to be neighboring a talkative craftsman. He mentioned picking up many different pieces of jewelry, then offered us to look at his stash.

"This girl must be special then?" he asked.

My tiny person nodded, but I froze.

Austin sifted through several of the beads. "What did this thing look like again?"

Four bright-blue beads separating the brown, grey, and black.

Instead of answering, I joined Austin in the search.

"In my country, girls would kill for a man that cared about her jewelry," the craftsman said. He laughed a lot how I imagine a grandparent would.

I didn't ask what country the man was from. I know Dr. White would have encouraged me to take an interest. But it was hard to care about anything with Julia's bracelet on the line. If something ever happened to my watch, I'd lose my sanity too. Plus, Kyle would string my body on the empire state building.

The old guy droned on. Austin's ears tensed against his temples.

"...unfathomable pigs…"

Bead after bead swelled in my fingers.

"...cockroach…"

Blue, dark…no, yellow, but grey prisms. I shook my head. What was I doing here? Honestly. How did I go from making a distinct barrier between myself and others to traveling across New York state for some bracelet? The doctors' analysis was accurate: I'm not right in the head.

"Ben?"

When my eyes came into focus, they fell on a small particle wedged between two sausage fingers. So small, it could've slipped into my ear canal and doctors wouldn't have found it with a microscope. Its shade of blue was more vivid than any scene in Titanic.

Austin held the bead closer.

Before my tiny person could reject my actions, I snatched the blue bead from Austin's thumb. The way it spiraled, I could have been staring out at the waves of the ocean.

I should've known not to make the Titanic analogy. It's like breaking a mirror in the beauty parlor, bad luck all over the place when you don't even know what bad luck is.

"Dude, what's wrong?"

I snapped myself out of Shakespeare mode. Forcing my eyes into the pile, I quickly found shades that matched what I envisioned. Identical. I weighed the small pile of beads in my palm.

"Um…" I dared eye contact with the craftsman. It felt like looking into a windowless room at midnight. "Could I…um…buy…purchase these?"

Skin crinkled around the man's face. "Tell you what, Son. I can do you one better."

Did this guy's accent change over the course of five minutes? This has got to be a flaw in my storytelling technique. Suddenly, he was back with a bunch of unrecognizable tools. "You take these and you make the best darn bracelet the world has ever seen. Then you give it to her."

His arm was outstretched, a box in hand.

"Yeah, okay."

"She'll love it. Now, before y'all head out, can I interest you in anything else?"

The man had his hand on my shoulder.

Austin jerked in front of me and snatched the supplies. "We're good. He will. Let's go, Ben."

"Yeah, bye." My hand waved towards the man. "Um…thank you."

There was an arm around mine that threatened to pull me off my feet, but I stood still despite it. Somehow.

The man outstretched his fingers. "Have a nice night, boys."

Then we were on a bus again.

"Well, that was a waste of a perfectly great afternoon that I could've spent on video games," Austin repeated at my side. "That guy was off his nut. You're lucky I was here."

I allowed my forehead to nod as I slipped a blue bead onto the thread. Over the course of the journey, my lap had become a desk of its own for all the beads and strings. Austin's abnormally large head blocked my field of vision long enough to remind me where I was.

"You're not seriously going to make her a replacement, are you?"

My work jingled with a bounce of the wheels.

"Well, don't." His tone was a serial killer with a sharpened ax in his grip. "Trust me. Just leave it alone."

"Why?" I snuck on another bead.

A gargle roused in his throat. "I don't know why you suddenly care about stuff like this anyway. You were adamant just yesterday in making sure you were secluded from everybody. I mean, Stuart shouldn't have freaking jumped you, but still. Why the change of heart?" I opened my mouth, but he kept talking, "Besides, girls are extremely emotional, you know? You could have the same conversation every single day, and you'll never figure out what she's really thinking. Maybe she doesn't even know what she's thinking.

"And you just sit there, trying to figure out what to say, trying to tell her how you're really feeling, but instead, you're just left stuttering, trying to make sense of everything. Guys don't get to feel like that. Do you think you're ready to go jumping into that mess? With Julia White of all people?"

Once again, my lips were parted. But he liked the sound of his voice more.

"No, you're better off just leaving her alone. Let her figure it all out, because getting into that girl's life story, especially if you're going to try to trick her... It's just trouble."

I blew a string of hair out of my face. "Trick her?"

"Well, yeah, wasn't that the whole scheme?" Austin asked. "Make a copy, pretend it's the original, and be the big hero who gets the necklace back?"

Tiny person begged me to knock myself out with a boxing glove. Why hadn't I thought of that?

Austin's phone blared. It had a brown bear on it.

"Hello?" A heavy voice grumbled through. Austin sighed. "Yeah, Mom. You did what? I told you to let me take care of it. Just throw all that crap out."

My fingers paused.

"I didn't say that." Austin stared at himself again. He looked like Kyle when he used to figure out creative ways to pop the balloons in those game booths at the carnival. Without the serial killer twinkle in his eye, that is. "No. We made a deal. We wrote out a list and made a deal."

A few minutes later, he hung up, closed his eyes, and let his head fall on the backrest. Looking back, I wish I'd said something. Maybe I should've shared my true plans with him or proved any one of his theories wrong. In the long run, a lot of self-discovery and character development could have happened right here. I can still replay thousands of conversations we might have had to this day.

Instead, I sat there.

When the bus pulled in front of our final stop, I nudged Austin's shoulder and slipped the finished product into my pocket.