Free The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy by Diane Stanley Page A

dinner table, and especially when you have a guest.
    â€œI don’t know what to do about the food situation,” I said to Zoë after dinner, while Mom was washing the dishes and Dad was on the couch, sleeping off the four thousand calories he had just ingested. “If this goes on for another two and a half days, they’ll have to admit us to the hospital.”
    Zoë thought about it for a minute, then looked up at me and smiled. “Mom’s going overboard because she hasn’t seen us in a while. She wants to give us a treat. We need to make her feel okay about cooking healthy food. And I know just how to do it.”
    Later that night, before we went to bed, we took Mom aside and told her that Cal had recently lost a lot of weight—which was, in fact, the truth—andthat she really needed to watch her diet. A master stroke on Zoë’s part, I must say! Mom was totally sympathetic and her feelings weren’t hurt at all. I predicted that on the following night, we could safely expect broiled skinless chicken breasts and steamed broccoli.
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    Brooklyn had promised to come by the house on Friday morning—we were such a regular trio that Cal and I missed him already—and I’d invited Beamer to join us too so he could meet my new friends. I’d been looking forward to it all week. Only now, coming home had strangely unsettled me. Suddenly I was terrified that Brooklyn and Cal would find Beamer ordinary—the way they probably thought my parents were loud and my house was messy.
    But the thing that worried me the most was that I might see Beamer through new eyes too. What if I actually felt embarrassed by him in front of the others? What if I didn’t like him anymore? The very thought made my stomach flip. He was the best friend I’d ever had.
    Brooklyn arrived first, around ten.
    â€œOmygosh!” I croaked as I opened the door. He’d had a haircut; the dreads were gone.
    â€œBrooklyn, why?” asked Cal. “They looked so cool!”
    â€œToo fussy,” he said, passing his hand over what remained of his hair. “Too—defining. I am not, after all, my hair.”
    â€œYou put it so well,” I said. “You must be a writer.”
    He would never admit it, but I suspected the haircut had had something to do with his PD video. Probably he’d noticed (or his counselor had pointed out) that the dreadlocks were kind of flashy. And the more I thought about it, I realized that they were the first thing you noticed when he walked into a room. With his new look, you couldn’t tell right off what sort of person he was. You’d have to talk to him awhile to find out that he was a poet. I had never considered this before—how strange it had been for Brooklyn to go around advertising himself to the world like that. Yeah, the more conservative look had definitely been the way to go.
    Beamer was due any minute, and since I already had hair on my mind, I remembered how he tended to go for months and months between haircuts, till he got all shaggy and hippie-like—then he shaved it all off and looked like a Marine recruit for a while. He had, basically, no vanity whatsoever about his appearance. This had never bothered me before. I used to tease him about it because I thought it was funny. Now I realized that he was sending strange messages about himself to everyonehe met: This is who I am, a person who doesn’t give a flip about how he looks. I wondered if there was some subtle way I could get this across to him without hurting his feelings.
    Just then the doorbell rang and Beamer blew in like a storm.
    I’m not sure I’d ever seen him that keyed up before. He reminded me of his dogs, the way they would jump up on him and dance in circles and bark hysterically whenever he came home in the afternoons. Beamer didn’t bark, of course, but he talked too loud and hugged me within an inch of my life. He greeted Cal