Buzz Kill

Book 2: Jane and Lila Pool

by J. Robert Lennon

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

When the shadowy circumstances of a relative's death are brought to light, Jane and Lila are plunged into the recesses of an underground drug operation with links to a burgeoning fascist movement. 

The Pool sisters have gone into business together: a down-home if unequal P.I. enterprise. That is, until Lila is tipped off to an explosive piece of news. An old friend of their Aunt Ruth's—a lawyer and academic who’d committed suicide years ago—believes that Ruth was murdered. Prior to her death, Ruth had represented a chemist who’d been struggling to patent a dangerous synthetic opioid. But once the client, Travis Nutt, was poised to lose, he went rogue and unleashed the adulterant as a street drug with the power of cartel funding behind him. Can the twins now bring this cult-like billionaire to justice?

Meanwhile, the rest of the Pool family is staying busy. Jane, newly divorced, and doing things for herself for a change, has been invited to attend a writers conference. Teenaged Chloe becomes the victim of a deepfake campaign, and secretly pursues her own aggressors. And old Harry has stumbled on a piece of unknown history that opens a door in his personal life. 

Buzz Kill is a high-octane, juiced up, elastically braided narrative of a ride that shows Lennon is at the height of his powers.

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320

Sample

Jane Pool was hunched over the computer keyboard in her home office, typing up notes on the most boring domestic-dispute surveillance case she’d yet drawn in her grim year of boring domestic-dispute surveillance cases. She’d been hired by a woman—the only kind of domestic case she would agree to take—to spy on her husband, whom she suspected of infidelity. “I know he’s cheating,” the client had told Jane, “he has to be.” But over the course of three weeks, it had become clear that it was the client, not the husband, who was doing the cheating, and the woman’s accusations were the product of wishful thinking, a desire to find a justification for her own behavior. The husband, a mild-mannered lawyer with a gentle smile and a graying tonsure, went to his office, met with clients, went to court, went to lunch, went to the office, met with clients, left the office, went to the supermarket, bought eggs (or bread, or orange juice, or salsa), went home. Innocently worked or read a book with his socked feet up on the coffee table while he waited for Jane’s client, also a lawyer, to come home. He did these things every day. On the weekends, he went fishing or played racquetball or tennis (weather depending) or worked or read a book with his socked feet up on the coffee table while Jane’s client had sex with a colleague at her office. The search was costing the client a lot of money, and she was becoming increasingly angry at the lack of results, and decreasingly tolerant of Jane’s insistence that these were the results, just not the results she wanted.

During their weekly videoconference the other day, her sister, Lila, ostensible equal partner in the business who, in her office five states away, seemed always to end up with the more interesting, adventurous, and lucrative cases, told Jane that she had better arrange to get paid before exposing the client’s infidelity to her husband.

“I am not planning to expose her to her husband, Lila.”

“Why not?”

“He isn’t our client! She is.”

“There is a greater client than the client,” Lila said, glancing at something off-screen, probably another screen displaying something more exciting than their meeting. “And that client is justice.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. “I do not recall that being on the business card,” Jane said.

“Of course not. Nobody would hire us.”

Before she started the company with her sister, she’d been the accountant in the history department of the nearby college where her father, Harry, taught, and hadn’t seen or spoken to Lila in a decade. She’d been unhappily married and felt like a disappointment to everyone around her, especially her daughter, Chloe, a precocious adolescent with a keen sixth sense for adult problems. Now she was divorced, working for herself, and on good terms with Chloe; Jane’s father was retired and worked alongside her as researcher and emotional-support elder, and her estrangement from Lila had come to a dramatic end with this business partnership. The two were fraternal twins and dissimilar in outlook, appearance, and expertise. And though they were once again, for the most part, in each other’s good graces, Jane could feel that old resentment creeping back—at Lila’s bullheadedness, her self-absorption, her unwillingness to relinquish even the slightest degree of control. Since the dust hadn’t yet settled on their uncomfortably illuminating reunion, and for the sake of the business, she had tried to tamp down her growing frustration with Lila, to keep the edge out of her voice when they talked.

But Jesus Christ was Jane bored. Notes complete, she leaned back in her desk chair and pressed her palms against her eyes. Words swam in her field of vision: Subject ate two-thirds of burrito, requested to-go bag for the remaining third. Lila’s last case—that is, the last one she deigned to inform Jane about—had involved tracking a stolen prototype sniper rifle to a wealthy collector’s mountaintop retreat and retrieving it for its owner in a daring heist, then stiffing the client, a hired killer, blackmailing him with his own collection of snuff pornography, and throwing the gun into the sea. Where did she find these cases? Jane once demanded. The cases tended to find her. How could she afford to alienate wealthy and dangerous men? The less Jane knew, the better.

Her thoughts were interrupted, mercifully, by the house-shaking entrance of her daughter, who flung the front door open with enough force to make Jane’s ears pop. “I’m home!” Chloe shouted, as though the place were a thirty-room mansion instead of the drafty twelve-hundred-square-foot ranch it actually was. Jane and Lila had grown up here, raised by their father in a manner Jane had generously retconned as benign neglect. The house had also been neglected, and since her divorce and the establishment of the agency, Jane had moved back and was trying to fix things and make improvements, occasionally with the help of her ex-husband, Chloe’s father, Chance, a stonemason and all-around handyman. Still, you could describe the house as rickety at the best of times, and Chloe’s presence made it feel ricketier still.

“Hi!” Jane shouted, also pointlessly. “I’m in the office!”

“Mailbag,” Chloe said, appearing in the doorway, holding a pile of envelopes and packages. She was thirteen, pale-skinned and fine-haired, with large piercing eyes and a charmingly lopsided face. She compensated for her congenital insecurity—an unfortunate inheritance from Harry, which Jane shared and wouldn’t admit to out loud—with a bumptiously theatrical overconfidence. Divorce had damaged their relationship, but it had improved steadily ever since, as Chloe watched her parents learn how to get along and as calm descended over both their households. About the divorce, Jane felt guilt but no regret. Life was better now for everyone.

“What is this all about?” Chloe asked now, holding up a padded envelope addressed to Jane that had been ripped messily open at one end.

“Why are you opening my mail?”

“It’s business mail, isn’t it? And I’m part of the business? It says Perks Locksmith right there on the address. And on the return address too.”

“It’s from Lila?”

“Unless there’s a third Perks we don’t know about.”

Lila’s arm of the business, the original one, was tucked away in a small town in Missouri and offered a range of services, among them the tracking of people and money, corporate espionage, government intelligence contracting, and IT security, including protection against cyberattacks or, depending on the client, the execution of cyberattacks. Perks had grown from Lila’s vocational training as an actual locksmith, hence the name. Jane had suggested that perhaps the East Coast satellite office should be called something different, to reflect what the business actually intended to do, but Lila had insisted on keeping the name, for reasons that remained mysterious.

Among the recent promises Lila had made was to help Jane find an office space and get it set up. Since their last conference call, Jane had been expecting a list of locations to check out and landlords to contact, presumably via email. But none had been forthcoming. This package bulged in the middle and bore the logo of an overnight shipping service.

“Give it here,” Jane said.

To her surprise, the return address wasn’t Lila’s—her actual location was, anyway, a secret to all but a few trusted associates—but one here in Nestor. Perks Locksmith, via Ten County Retail LLC, 2301 Linwood Drive, Nestor, New York. Inside, Jane found a resealable plastic bag full of keys, each bearing a paper tag on a loop of string. One tag read SPACE #27, another MAIN DOORS, another STORAGE.

“What on earth is this,” Jane said, her jaw tightening.

“That’s what I’m asking.”

She typed the address into her computer and up popped a map. “It’s out near the mall.”

“Is it our new office?” Chloe said, her voice excited.

“It had better not be. I want something downtown that I can walk to.”

“Well? What are we waiting for?”

The two drove north on the highway climbing above Onteo Lake while AM radio played a talk show about farming. It was early afternoon, an unseasonably cool midsummer’s day, and little clouds were moving briskly across a blue sky. A good day for sailing, it looked like; sailboats, flecks of white, moved on the lake’s surface like germs in a petri dish. Nestor was the tiny college town at the southern end of the lake, the dot of its exclamation mark. Sometimes Jane marveled at her return here, the place she’d grown up. Most people come home in the wake of a failed career, to care for an ailing parent, or out of simple love for the place that made them. Jane came home to confess to a killing, and ultimately to receive a prison sentence for voluntary manslaughter. Chloe had spent the first few months of her life in the nursery at the nearby Boynton Ridge Correctional Facility for Women and emerged into a marriage already doomed to failure. And yet, look at her now, a poised, eccentric, independent-minded young woman. Jane herself didn’t feel grown up—how could this child be hers?

Jane let her phone guide her to the College Heights exit, and then left, over the overpass and through the traffic light. The half-abandoned shopping mall came into view, and it was Chloe, squinting at her own phone, who realized: “That address isn’t near the mall. It is the mall.”

“It’s gotta just be the address of the landlord. She wouldn’t dare.”

As they pulled into the sparsely populated parking lot, a notification arrived on Jane’s phone: an encrypted text from Lila. There should be a panel van waiting, it read.

“Did she literally track us here?” Jane wondered out loud.

“Of course she did!” Chloe said, not bothering to conceal her delight. She was impressed with her aunt, and clearly regarded her as the more dynamic, fearless, and brilliant of the two sisters. But that was natural, wasn’t it? One’s mother could not be cool; it was a rule of adolescence. Jane had coasted awhile on having done time, a fact that she and Chance had once concealed from Chloe; for some months after learning the truth, Chloe would tell anyone she met that she had been born in prison. But the novelty had worn off and she had come to regard her aunt’s adventures as more compelling, more daring, more impressive than her mother’s. What Chloe didn’t understand was that Lila was also more selfish, more impulsive, less reliable. More ruthless, more violent.

“There!” Chloe was pointing to a featureless white delivery truck, parked near the main entrance, above which the mall’s tan lines spelled out the ghostly word SEARS. A skinny guy with a mustache was leaning against the driver’s-side door, smoking a cigarette. As they pulled up, he threw it on the ground and crushed it underfoot.

“Perks?” he asked as they emerged from the car.

“That’s us!” Chloe said.

“So where am I taking this stuff?”

“You’re probably going to be taking it right back where you got it,” Jane said.

“Happy to get paid all over again” was his reply.

They followed the guy through the double doors and into the dim confines of the mall’s main corridor. In Jane’s memory, this mall had never thrived; a few years ago it had almost shut down. Now it was showing weedy signs of life: Though every third storefront was empty behind its metal grate, the remaining spaces had spawned strange new businesses scattered among the few familiar retailers. Beside Claire’s, a mini–flea market. Nestled between Spencer’s and Talbots, a place called Only Canoes. (Inside, the inventory lived up to the promise of the sign, a vinyl banner dangling over the disused logo of the Gap.) The food court was half empty, too, but a couple of the chains had been supplanted by offshoots from local restaurants: Vegan Delights, Tofu Tom, Chickentown Deli.

“I guess we’re looking for number twenty-seven?” Jane said to no one in particular.

“Map’s over there,” the delivery guy said.

The glowing map kiosk was woefully outdated, but its colorful blocks were indeed identified by number, and 27 was up ahead, occupying a corner space. “There!” Chloe said, pointing.

They were greeted silently at the entrance by a woman who was applying the finishing touches to a vinyl logo on the glass front wall: a big gold key, anchoring the words

PERKS LOCKSMITH

“ALL OUR CUSTOMERS GET THE PERKS”

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Jane said.

The delivery guy headed to the truck, and the sign woman stood back to admire her work. When Jane asked if she was expecting to get paid for this, she was told she already had been. Of course.

A moment later Jane and Chloe were alone in the empty space—an awkward, lopped-off triangle equipped with a couple of countertops, some desks, a few room dividers, and a cluster of rotating display towers shoved off in a corner. A few random tools had been left behind under the counters: a tape dispenser, a box cutter. Everything was scratched, dented, and nicked, and everything was beige. This was what Lila regarded as Jane’s rightful place: a shitty storefront in a garbage mall. The sign on the door might as well have read FOREVER 36.

“Wait, what are the other keys for?” Chloe wanted to know.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Jane muttered, aware of how petulant she sounded, incapable of sounding any other way. A moment later Chloe was heading for a door in the back of the room, or really a hinged, flush section of carpeted wall. She opened it and stuck her head through.

“Oh my god,” Chloe said. “Backstage at the mall!”

Reluctantly, Jane followed her into a cavernous industrial hallway with a concrete floor and exposed steel wall studs threaded with thick wires. They wandered around, occasionally encountering some retail employee busily moving merchandise in a rolling canvas cart. They eventually arrived at a storage mini-warehouse, where they found a bunch of empty shelves, high and deep, allotted to number 27.

Back in the corner space, they were met by the delivery guy dropping off his first round of boxes.

“Wait, wait!” Jane said, waving her arms. “I don’t want this stuff!”

“Lady,” the guy told her with a sigh, “I don’t get paid until I send somebody a picture of all these boxes piled up in this space. I’ve got a shipping manifest and a rental contract that says it’s legit. If you want to pay me again later to come pick it up and bring it someplace else, you can, but…”

He let the sentence trail off and left with his hand truck to get more boxes. Fine. If that imperious psycho wanted to waste her money dumping a pile of garbage into an empty office, Jane couldn’t stop her. She wasn’t going to give her sister the satisfaction of occupying this awful space; she wasn’t even going to open the boxes.

From behind her, the stutter of packing tape, the guttural honk of tearing cardboard. “What the heck!” She turned to find Chloe with her hands deep in one of the boxes.

“Chloe!”

“What is this stuff?” The girl pulled out a couple of brass objects—key cores for door locks, Jane knew from her half-assed maintenance of her father’s house. As Chloe tore open the other boxes, Jane peered inside. They contained the typical inventory of a real locksmith shop. In addition to the cores, a laser key-cutting machine, blank keys. A utility box with picks, a tension wrench, a stethoscope like a doctor would have, and various other tools Jane couldn’t even identify. While Chloe marveled over these, the delivery man returned with another load, this time things Jane recalled seeing in Lila’s office in Missouri: an unbranded tower computer and an enormous monitor, a soldering station, a metal punch, a printer and laminator.

“She cannot be serious,” Jane said to no one in particular. “I’m not running a locksmith shop out of a shopping mall.”

“It’s fun,” Chloe said, holding up a rotating display stand for key blanks. “Like a puzzle!”

“I admire your optimism, Chloe, but no. This isn’t what we agreed to.”

A few minutes later, Jane received another text. “‘She’ll be right there,’” she read aloud to Chloe. “Who will be right here?” Her thumbs were poised over the phone’s keyboard, ready to issue a scathing rejoinder, but no. That’s what Lila wanted. Jane wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction.

Her question was answered a few minutes later in the form of a tall, lanky, broad-shouldered woman wearing aviator eyeglasses, her auburn hair pulled back in a low, tidy bun. For a moment, Jane just gawped in surprise; it was Chloe who took her head out of a box and said, “Oh my god, are you Loretta?”

“Ladies,” the woman said.

Loretta was Lila’s associate in the main office in Missouri. A former army staff sergeant who served in Afghanistan, she now maintained the front for Lila’s business, a sleepy antiques shop, and handled Lila’s travel arrangements, meetings, and schedule. Jane hugged her and introduced Chloe.

“So who’s minding the store back home?” Jane said.

“It’s peak bass season,” Loretta told her. “The sign on the door says ‘Gone Fishing.’ I think we’ll survive the lost income.”

“Well, sorry you wasted your time. We are not going along with this bullshit.”

Loretta was nodding. “I told her that’s what you’d say.”

“Like, what am I supposed to do here? I assume this locksmith stuff is supposed to be a front, like your shop?”

The woman shrugged. “I think mostly? With Lila, sometimes it’s easier to just go with the flow.”

“I am the damn flow! It’s a partnership!”

“You’re preaching to the choir,” Loretta told her, holding up her hands.

“And I guess you’re here to set all of this up?”

“And give you a few pointers.”

“Great. What, locksmith lessons?”

“I think you’re kidding,” she said. “But… you really could learn. Most people take a course, then apprentice. You already have all the stuff right here. You could teach yourself.”

“Come on, man!”

“Loretta!” Chloe said, behind her, excited. “What is this thing!”

Jane gazed around the room in despair as Chloe and Loretta chatted, wondering if she’d ever be permitted to feel like her sister’s equal, if the whole thing had been a mistake. At least in the history department, she’d had a clearly defined task that only she was authorized to perform. And she preferred, in most ways, her small, reliable salary to the largesse of Lila’s mysteriously deep pockets, likely the spoils of undocumented activity if not outright crime.

“I don’t get why it has to be an actual locksmith,” Jane said, approaching the two as they unpacked.

Chloe said, “Because it’s cool, obviously.”

Loretta laughed. Somehow this was what sent Jane over the edge. She kicked one of the boxes, and whatever heavy object was in there immediately sent a bolt of pain all the way up to her shoulders. “Fuck!”

They looked up at her, startled.

“Is this all some kind of joke to you two? I do not want to run a locksmith shop at a mall!”

Loretta stood, brushing off her hands. “I get it. I do. But… to your sister, this really is a good-faith gesture to get you up to speed with stuff she already knows. I know a… normal person would have discussed it with you first. But…” She gestured around the room. “Some of these tools you’re going to actually need. And it could be a good summer job for Chloe.”

“Seriously?” Chloe said.

“I mean… that’s up to your mom.”

Chloe pulled out her phone. “I already bookmarked a couple of videos. Like, the basics—duplicating keys, replacing… cores?”

“Right,” Loretta said.

Jane could feel herself weakening, getting pulled off balance, falling in slow motion into Lila’s now-familiar black hole of single-mindedness. It was like a drug, this blithe confidence. When they were young, the only kind of real ambition they could have outside of schoolwork was social—drawing people into their sphere. The two were never popular, but Jane knew how to cajole and persuade and, later, to flirt. Between the two of them, she was the leader. She was an actor and a charmer, and she liked attracting boys and men. The girls joined the theater club together, went to parties, made friends.

All of that culminated in the night their theater director roofied Jane and tried to rape her. He ended up dead, and the girls went on the run. They were sixteen. Eventually, Jane turned herself in and served her sentence at Boynton Ridge, but until then they learned to survive, to manipulate people, to take what they needed. And Lila emerged as the leader in this new, unfamiliar life. She didn’t need to be loved, and she didn’t have a conscience, or not much of one. Her risks tended to pay off, and she didn’t mind hurting people on the way to getting what she wanted. Jane never did figure out how to achieve balance with Lila; it seemed that one of them always had to be on top.

They’d reunited to figure out where their mother had disappeared to, and once that question was answered, they decided to go into business together. And Lila, it was clear, was still on top. And yet… Jane had to admit this location wasn’t without charm. Lila could probably have talked her into it if she’d tried. Plenty of parking, old folks speed-walking by, quiet music warbling in from the hall, all the hot pretzels your heart desired.

As if reading her mind, Chloe interrupted to ask for money—she wanted to go find something to eat. Jane handed it over and, checking her phone, noticed that somebody had called.

“So… should I get to work on all this?” Loretta asked her, pointing a thumb at the computer equipment in the back of the room. “Or are we pumping the brakes?”

Jane could only sigh. The fight was draining out of her. “Sometimes I want to kill her, Loretta.”

“I hear you,” Loretta said. “The first half hour of the drive out here was a one-sided screaming fight. If only she’d been in the car to hear it.”

“You drove? From Missouri?”

“That’s how we roll.”

“Fine,” Jane said. “If Chloe’s into it, I guess I’ll go along, for now.”

Loretta nodded, then headed to the computers, swiping a box cutter off the counter on the way.

Jane sat down on a folding chair and opened up the phone app. Some old-school stranger had left a voicemail, which the phone had attempted to transcribe. Jane hi its Shelly bees lean from ____ ridge I got out a couple weeks ago Annie dear help…

Surprised, she hit play and raised the phone to her ear. “Jane,” came a voice she hadn’t heard in years. “Hi, it’s Shelly Beasley from Boynton Ridge. I got out a couple weeks ago and I need your help with something. It’s kind of urgent. You said I should call you anytime so I hope it’s not an imposition or anything. Uh, that’s all, I guess… Call me back? It’s weird and complicated out here, man! Say what you will about Boynton, you always knew what was gonna happen next. Well, usually. Okay, bye.”

While her mother made a phone call, Chloe set out to explore the new digs. If you’d told her just a couple of hours earlier that she’d be spending her summer at the stupid mall, she would have laughed in your face. But the reality of the place had surprised her. She hadn’t been here since the frozen yogurt stand closed three years ago, and things had changed. It was weird now! Somebody must have taken it over as a rehab project and lowered the rents. Almost all the national chains that made a mall a mall were gone, and in their places were random people selling random things: drug paraphernalia, used sneakers. Clothes that made you look like an animal, which she suspected was a sex thing but didn’t want to ask anyone or look up. The “Snake Shop”?

The most shocking thing about the mall, though, was the abundance of hidden areas most people didn’t get to see. The illuminated maps were lies! There were whole rooms and corridors in between and behind the ones the maps let you see. Grandpa Harry had taught her the difference between misinformation—information that was simply incorrect or mistaken—and disinformation, false information given with the intent to deceive. The public mall maps were the latter.

Chloe explored as far as their set of keys allowed; she had access to about a quarter, she believed, of the mall’s secret corridors and chambers. Occasionally a passing retail employee or custodian would smile at her, but most people narrowed their eyes, and she had to hold up and shake the keys to prove her legitimacy. She was at the age—too old to be cute, too young to have responsibilities—when people unfairly suspected her of all manner of mischief. On the other hand, this was also the perfect age: she was young enough to have free time, old enough to be smarter than people suspected. What she would accomplish with these covert advantages was something she needed to figure out.

She slipped out the workmen’s door leading to an empty storefront and popped out into the mall proper from behind a giant GREAT DEALS COMING SOON! sign. Another piece of disinformation: she happened to know there was bupkes being readied behind that wall. In the food court, she got in line at the pretzel stand behind some high school freaks with a rat on a leash. Or maybe it was a ferret. Except for rabbits, rodents as pets seemed like a real statement to Chloe; it put you in a special social category where only other rodent folk resided. No, thanks.

Pretzel in hand, she headed for the seating area of the food court to kick back and stare at her phone. But she was distracted by a pack of loud girls blithely strolling by: Addison Kunstler and her smarmy pals. Addison was two things to Chloe: a rich girl with important parents, and her rival for president of the eighth-grade class. They both went to Tarbox Beals, the private school about an hour from Nestor that Chloe was required to attend for at least one more year and that her father’s mother, Grandma Susan, was paying for. (Her parents had been mum about who paid for what, she supposed to keep things chill in the wake of the divorce, but Grandma Susan was the kind of lady who always let you know when you owed her one.) Most of the kids who went there were from Rochester, but Addison was one of a handful of Nestorians who made the long commute. Her mother’s suggestion that they carpool was among the most appalling she had ever proposed, and Chloe’s straight-up tantrum had resulted in a rare reprieve. Chloe figured that was because her mother (1) sort of enjoyed the drive and didn’t want someone else’s child in her car anyway, and (2) disliked Addison’s mother. She did some money-related thing at Nestor College, and Addison’s father was a computer scientist who had developed some kind of valuable software. Addison made it sound like they were royalty or some such, though Grandpa Harry hadn’t heard of them. Of course, he was old and had just retired.

The funny thing about Addison was that they’d started out as friends when she arrived at the school last year. Chloe had been appointed by the principal to be her mentor for her first few weeks. This was a Tarbox Beals tradition: every new student got assigned a pal who was supposed to show them the ropes. Usually the kids were besties for a couple of weeks until the new ones found their rightful place in the social scene, but it wasn’t like that with Addison and Chloe. They really liked each other! It was a rare treat when a new Nestorian showed up at Beals; Addison used to come downtown and spend the day just walking around with Chloe. You couldn’t really do that in her neighborhood, Addison said; there was nothing to do, same as with her old town. She was talkative and funny, and they mostly complained to each other about boys from school.

And then something happened, Chloe still didn’t know what. Addison stopped texting her back and rolled her eyes at the lunch table whenever Chloe spoke. It wasn’t long before the other girls in that friend group began to follow her lead, and pretty soon Chloe was entirely on the outs with everyone she used to like, with literally no explanation. She resisted the urge to tell her mom, preferring to lick her wounds in private. But it was a hard time, and still a mystery.

Now Chloe followed the girls as they went into the rude gift shop, where the clerks flirted with them, and the jewelry store, where the clerks chased them away. They got coffee from Hot Beanz 2 and tried to shake free gumballs out of the gumball machine.

The school election was part of a yearlong civics unit. They chose the candidates in the spring, when the United States had its primaries, and elected a president in the fall, when the US had its elections. You had to make up a party to be in, with values and everything; Addison had run on the Security Party ticket, which was dedicated to improving the school’s computer system. If elected, she said, her dad would help. Chloe had created the Cooperative Party, which promised to get more kids involved with more stuff and get the parents to cough up money to create new clubs. Chloe knew the class president wouldn’t have much power, but it sometimes surprised her how many good things could happen if somebody just said out loud that those things were worth doing.

Anyway, Chloe and Addison had gotten the most votes in the primary and were supposed to spend the summer planning thei