She stopped in front of her. “You don’t have friends.”
“Ouch,” Cass said.
“So what did you do?” the teen pushed. “Who did you piss off? Am I going to get a call? Is Pop getting a call?”
“No.”
What poured out of the older teen next was an explosion of panic and borderline hysteria. “Because if Pop gets a call, I’m going to get really upset. There’s already so much going on and Stevie’s already stressed out. I had to calm her down this morning because she’s worried about taking the SATs. I don’t know why. We all know she’s going to blow them out of the water, but you know how Stevie is, so if you’ve already been kicked out—”
“Would you stop! Nothing’s wrong! We’re just hanging out. Me . . . and my friends.”
Eyes narrowing, she leaned back and studied Max. “You . . . and your friends?”
“Yeah. I have friends now. It’s junior high.”
“What kind of friends?”
“Friends.”
“What kind of friends, Max?”
She shrugged. Sighed. “Honey badgers.”
“Honey badgers. You managed to find a group of honey badgers in the middle of this town?”
“They’re not a group. We just happened to be on the same bus.”
“That seems strangely unlikely.”
“You make it sound like I set this up! I’m thirteen! Even I couldn’t manage to arrange something like that. This is just—”
“Luck? We’re MacKilligans. We don’t have any luck.”
“I do. And I found friends who get me.”
“You mean friends who’ll get you in trouble.”
“No. They won’t! I promised you last night, no more problems.”
“Did you bring scorpions to school?”
“No.”
“Then where are they? I looked for them in the case under your bed and didn’t see them.”
“I had breakfast.”
It took Mads a second, because they really didn’t look alike, but she realized that this teen was the sister Max had been talking about. Her sister. They weren’t stepsisters either. Half, maybe, but they were definitely blood related. They had the same shoulders. Like fullbacks for the Detroit Lions.
The teen looked over Max’s honey badger “friends,” and that’s when Mads saw Cass hide the lunchbox with the remainder of Max’s scorpions behind her back. She almost frowned at that move, confused. Why was Cass protecting this girl? Yeah, they were all honey badgers—well . . . Mads was only half honey badger—but they barely knew one another. Why would they get involved in all this drama?
“So you guys are close?” Max’s sister asked.
“Close enough.”
“Then what are your friends’ names?” the teen questioned. It was like an interrogation.
Max gestured at each of them and correctly remembered their names, “Emily, but we all call her Tock. Cass. Mads. Nelle. With two Es.”
“Uh-huh.”
The teen opened a random backpack, which turned out to be Tock’s, and checked out her notebooks. They were completely empty, so she searched out her wallet. It was black and closed with Velcro. It had several forms of ID in it. She also found several passports for different countries. Slowly, the teen looked up at Tock with one raised eyebrow. Tock merely shrugged and asked, “What?”
The teen put everything back in the bag and stood, handing the pack to Tock.
“So what are you and your not-causing-trouble friends planning for today?” the teen asked. But before Max could answer with some lie, the teen pointed her finger at Mads. “You tell me.”
Mads blinked and simply replied with the truth. “Basketball tryouts. After school today. That’s my plan.”
“Our plan.”
The teen faced her sister. “See? You always go too far, Max MacKilligan. Because even Stevie wouldn’t buy that line of bullshit.”
“It’s true.”
“You? You expect me to believe that you are going to basketball tryouts? To try out for basketball? You?”
“Why do you say it like that? I can play basketball.”
“First off, you’re a munchkin. And second, you hate team sports. You hate gym. And when Stevie tossed a tennis ball at you, you slammed it back at her and threatened that if she ever threw a ball at you again, you were going to remove all her teeth.”
“She chucked that ball at me—”
“It was a toss.”
“—and she started it. But none of that means I dislike team sports. I am absolutely dying to be a team-sports girl. In the wonderful world of . . . um . . .”
“Basketball,” Mads prodded.
“Right! Basketball.”
“Name one basketball player,” her sister tested. “Any basketball player.”
Mads, trying to help while the teen had her back to her, lifted up her leg and gestured to her foot. Specifically the Nike Air Jordans she was wearing. Everybody knew Michael Jordan, right? Even people who didn’t know anything about basketball knew that man. Mads had no idea why she was trying to assist this lying kid, but now she felt as invested in this situation as Cass, who was still hiding that stupid lunchbox behind her back.
And even the others were trying to assist by gesturing to Mads’s Jordans and mouthing Michael Jordan over and over again.
But the confused look on Max’s face told Mads that the kid had no idea who they were talking about.
Her sister, with an exaggerated roll of her eyes, began to turn away when the kid suddenly burst out with, “James!”
The teen turned back around and waited.
“Uh . . . La . . . LaBronnie James.”
“Who?”
“LeBron James,” Mads corrected. “But close enough.” When the teen stared at her, she lowered her still raised leg and said, “He’s on the Cleveland Cavaliers. A rookie, but a pretty decent player.”
You know . . . for a full-human dude.
“See, Charlie?” Max pushed her sister with a big smile. “I love the basketball.”
“Great!” the older teen pushed back. “Then I’ll see you guys this afternoon. At the tryouts. Can’t wait to watch you all try out for the team!”
Without another word, Max’s sister got back into the overloaded convertible, and with another smile and a wave, she told the teenage girl in the driver’s seat to go.
Once they’d driven far enough away, Tock threw up her arms in frustration. “Why do I have to go to tryouts? I don’t want to play basketball!”
“You have to come! She’ll be expecting all of us,” Max said.
“She’s not my sister!” Tock blinked, then asked more calmly, “She is your sister, right?”
“Yes, she’s my sister. Racist!”
Tock’s jaw tightened and she looked at Mads. All Mads could do was quickly look away. Because she had to laugh. Tock appeared part Black, so the accusation was pretty funny.
“And you people don’t know my sister,” Max went on. “She’s crazy. If we’re not all there, then we all die.”
The group gawked at Max for several long seconds, and then Cass asked, “Why would we all die?”