Free Magic Nation Thing by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Paige was the kind of person who always had to be absolutely fixated on somebody. A year or two before, it had been Leonardo DiCaprio, and right after that it had been Britney Spears. But now she seemed to have forgotten all about singers and movie stars and instead had become totally fascinated by Tree. She talked about her all the time, not only about what a great detective she was, but also, of course, about how totally gorgeous and glamorous she was.
    At first Abby went along with Paige’s Tree gush sessions, but before long they began to bother her. A lot. She wasn’t sure just why, except that Tree had been her own private friend ever since she had begun working for Dorcas, and Abby had always known all the things about Tree that Paige was raving about. All the things except what a great detective she was, because she really wasn’t, at least not right at first. But now, to hear Paige talk, a person would think Tree was a world-famous detective and Paige herself was the founding president of the Tree Torrelli Fan Club.
    The picture thing was almost the last straw. Paige asked Abby if she had a picture of Tree, and when Abby admitted she did have an old snapshot, Paige insisted on seeing it. And then after she’d seen it, it somehow wound up on her bulletin board, right where she used to keep her favorite picture of Leonardo.
    But it was even worse when Paige began to find reasons for visiting the office of the O’Malley Agency—and of course Tree. Like the time Paige started asking about the books Abby owned, and when Abby mentioned that she had three of the Lemony Snicket books, Paige insisted she had to borrow them, like immediately.
    “Why?” Abby said. “I don’t mind loaning them to you, but…” She grinned. “But I’ll bet if you told your mother that you wanted to read the Lemony Snicket books, she’d buy you every one of them, like five minutes later.”
    “I know,” Paige said. “But then I’d have to wait until they came in the mail, and I want to start reading them right now. So why don’t we take your bus after school and I can just stop by your house and pick them up.”
    So Paige used her cell phone to call her mother from the bus stop to ask if she could go home with Abby, just long enough to borrow some books that she “really, really needed,” and her mother said she would check with Abby’s mother and call back. Then after about two minutes Paige’s phone rang, and it was her mother calling to say that Abby’s mother wasn’t in but that she had talked to Ms. Torrelli in the agency office, and it would be all right for Paige to go by to pick up the books she needed. And then she was to wait right there until her mother picked her up on the way to take the boys to their karate lesson.
    When they arrived at the O’Malley Agency, Paige spent about two minutes in Abby’s room, where she grabbed the Lemony Snicket books, and rushed right down to the office to hang around staring at Tree and asking her questions in a nervous, gushy way, as if she were talking to some totally famous person. Watching Paige make a fool of herself over Tree really got to Abby. She went from feeling irritated, when Paige asked Tree how she’d learned to be such a great detective, to being really exasperated, when Paige started in on how Tree looked like a combination of Jennifer Lopez and the Olsen twins. At first Tree had just seemed amused, but Abby could tell she thought the Jennifer Lopez-Olsen twins stuff was pretty embarrassing.
    By the time Abby finally got Paige out onto the front steps, where they were supposed to wait for her mother, Paige was raving that if she could look like anyone in the whole world, it wouldn’t be Jennifer Lopez anymore; it would be Tree Torrelli. At that point something snapped, and Abby did an incredibly stupid thing. What she did was to say to Paige, “Well, if you want to know the truth, it wasn’t Tree who figured out who the arsonist was. It was me. But I asked