From the Desk of Zoe Washington(39)

“Can you call her office at Harvard?” Trevor asked, keeping his voice low so Grandma wouldn’t hear us from inside.

“If I have to.” I opened the Harvard website on my phone and searched for Professor Thomas’s name. I found her phone number on her department’s page.

I tapped my finger on the number so my phone would start calling and then quickly put it to my ear before I could change my mind. It started ringing, so I got up and walked a few steps away from the house so Grandma definitely couldn’t hear.

Ring.

Ring.

Ring.

“Hello, you’ve reached the office of Professor Susan Thomas in the Harvard University math department. I’m away from my desk, so please leave a message, and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Thank you, and have a nice day.”

There was a beep at the end, so I had to think fast. “Uh, hi, um, Professor Thomas. This is Zoe Washington. I sent you an email last week, asking if you knew a man named Marcus Johnson. He said he met you thirteen years ago at your tag sale? I put his picture in the email, so can you please let me know if you recognize him? It’s really important.” I gave her my email address and phone number before thanking her and ending the call.

I’d gotten a little sweaty from the bike ride, but now I was drenched in sweat from talking on the phone.

I’d earned a second Popsicle.

“Do you think she’s ignoring me?” I asked Trevor a couple of days later. I stood on the edge of the driveway while he practiced shooting his basketball into the net above the garage.

He dribbled the ball for a few seconds and then took a shot. The basketball hit the rim of the net but then went in. “Maybe your email went into her junk folder,” Trevor said.

“And my voice mail too?”

He bit his lip. “I don’t know. Maybe she heard how young you were and didn’t want to get involved.”

“Well, that’s rude.”

“Yeah.”

I kicked a pebble with my foot. “This is so annoying. If she’s going to ignore my messages, then we have to go find her. She’ll definitely be around when classes start again next week. This is our chance. She won’t be able to ignore me if I’m right in front of her face.”

Trevor took another shot before asking, “But how are we going to convince our parents to let us go there without telling them why?”

“We won’t tell them. We’ll go without them knowing.”

But how?

“How about this,” I told Trevor, standing closer to him and speaking even softer. “We’ll tell our parents that we want to ride our bikes. Then we ride to Davis Square, take the T to Harvard Square, and then walk to Harvard’s campus. If we time it right, we can get there before her class ends. Then I can show her Marcus’s picture, see if she remembers him—which hopefully she will. And then I’ll finally know.”

“Do you think they’ll really let us be gone for that long?” Trevor asked.

“How long do you think it would take all together, for us to get to Harvard and back?” I asked.

Trevor pulled out his phone and opened the map app, so we could calculate our route. We decided we needed three hours to do everything.

I smiled. “Three hours isn’t bad! But that’s too long for a bike ride. Let me think.” I paced our driveway while Trevor shot the basketball into the hoop a few more times. He missed the first couple of shots, but made the last one.

I snatched the basketball from Trevor as an idea came to me.

“Hey!” he said.

“What if we ask our parents to go to the movie theater in Davis,” I said. “We can tell them we also want to get ice cream at the J.P. Licks. If they drop us off, we won’t even need our bikes, which will give us more time.”

Trevor smiled. “Good idea. I bet they’d let us hang out in Davis for a few hours.”

“Yeah.” Mom let me hang out at the mall alone before, with Jasmine and Maya. Davis Square, with all its restaurants and college students walking around, seemed like a safe place for us to spend a few hours. Hopefully our parents agreed. “Okay. Ask your parents tonight if we can go next Thursday. Professor Thomas’s class is from twelve to one thirty, so if we get to Davis at twelve thirty, that should be enough time to find her class before it ends.”

“My mom works the night shift on Thursdays, so she can probably drive us. We have to make sure we get back to Davis when she comes to pick us up,” Trevor said. “Or we’re dead.”

“We’ll totally be back in time,” I said with confidence. “We know exactly what we’re doing, and exactly where we need to go. This is going to work!”

The real worry that was lodged deep in my throat was that all this sneaking around wouldn’t be worth it in the end. That we wouldn’t find what we were looking for—the truth about Marcus’s innocence. Then I wouldn’t know if Marcus was lying to me.

But I had to stay optimistic.

I was still holding Trevor’s basketball, so I dribbled it a couple of times. Then I took a shot. It went right into the basket.

“Nice,” Trevor said. “Lucky shot.”

I turned to him and grimaced. “What do you mean, lucky?”

“I don’t know,” Trevor said. “I thought . . . I mean, I didn’t think you liked basketball. Or any sports. You always complain about gym class.”