Michele Jaffe

Bad Kitty

Roxy was a little depressed that none of her guesses about what we were making (lie detector, mousetrap, diorama) were right, but she got over it when I bought her a churro and let her choose which shoes we'd buy to get the box. By 7:30 we were back in my suite with everything we needed to make an at-home latent fingerprint fumer, and we hadn't even had to leave the Venetian.
  Little Life Lesson 26: Las Vegas is an EXCELLENT place to engage in amateur crime fighting.
  We spread everything out on the desk. I handed Roxy the Diet Coke and said, 'Drink this.'
  'I thought it was for our project.'
  'Drink. I need the can.'
  Tom came over and frowned at everything on the desk. 'OK, I get what the shoe box is for, but how does it work?'
  I got a piece of thread from Polly's sewing kit, put Roxy's new clear plastic 4-inch-heel mules on the floor and centred the box on the desk. 'We run the thread across the middle of the box and hang the mint wrapper from it using the paper clip. This second mint I'm doing has my prints on it, so I'll be able to see if the fuming worked.'
  Roxy handed me the empty Diet Coke can. 'What's this for?'
  Using the sharp edge of my flower ring, I cut the bottom half-inch off the can and flipped it over. 'We drop a little of the superglue here, into this indentation, then place it on the coffee warmer in the box. The coffee warmer heats the glue and makes it fume, and the fumes make hidden fingerprints come up.'
  'Cool,' Roxy said.
  'Totally Visa,' Tom agreed. 'But if we're putting glue on the coffee warmer, what is the mug for?'
  'We need a container of hot water in the box because humidity makes the prints come up better.' I put the mug in, made sure everything was in place, plugged the coffee warmer in, then put the lid on the shoe box.
  'How long does it take?' Roxy asked.
  'Ten minutes.'
  'Can we peek?'
  'No, the lid has to stay on.' But in my mind I pictured what happened, the way I'd seen it demonstrated in glass tanks. It was amazing - one minute there's nothing there, the next you can see all the prints of the people who touched something.
I wished you could do the same thing with people. Fume them and find out who had touched them to make them what they were. Like Jack. If he was evil, probably someone had done something to make him feel bad about himself. Or even Polly. Every guy she dated was like a less cute, less cool version of Tom. It was so clear to everyone but her that she and Tom were made for each other, but she refused to even think of him that way. There were some people, though, like the Thwarter and Alyson, who weren't influenced by anyone and who just did what they wanted and lived in their own worlds. They would not be so interesting to fume.
  But Jack . . .
  Stop thinking about him, I told myself. Bad Jas. But even if I had wanted to, I couldn't. Because our do-it-yourself fuming chamber worked great, raising a beautiful print on the mint wrapper. It looked like a thumbprint and had a tented arch, which is rare. And it matched the larger of the two partial prints on the note signed by him telling me to meet him at Madame Tussaud's. So there was no question that it was his.
YOU HATE HIM, I told myself. FOR REAL. YOU DO.
  I was working really hard on believing that when Polly and the Evil Fringed Henches returned.
  'Fingerprint?' Polly asked right away.
  Roxy was beaming. 'It's so cool!'
  I, however, was not beaming. I was barely even being. I could have modelled for a porcelain sculpture with the title 'I Hate to Love Him'. I was lying on my back on my bed with an arm over my eyes, the internationally recognized position of extreme mental anguish. 'The print matches,' I announced, struggling against the dark heaviness trying to engulf my soul. Which really is a lot of work, and possibly harder when you're lying down.
  'So?' Polly asked in a voice not at all sympathetic to my suffering.1
  I moved my arm just enough so I could glare at her with one eye. 'That means Jack was the one at Madame Tussaud's. The one who tried to kill me.'
  'Scare you,' she corrected. 'And that is all the more reason for us to go and find him.   But we have a lot of work to do.'
  I propped myself up on my elbows to look with both eyes. 'What are you talking about? Do you know where he is?'
  'No, but I know where he'll be in four hours.'
  'You should have seen it, Jas,' Veronique said. 'Polly told the man in the store that   Alyson and I were foreign-exchange students who met Jack at a casino and were supposed to go to his room but forgot where it was and did they know who he was and where he was staying and the man was so helpful.'
  'Foreign-exchange students?' I asked.
  'From Belgium,' Veronique said. 'Did you know french fries are really from Belgium?'
  'She wouldn't let us talk,' Alyson said.
  'I just wanted him to focus on how great you looked,' Polly told her with a smile that frightened me.
Alyson nodded. 'I guess it worked. I mean, he fully believed Jack would want to see us again.'
'Of course he did! We're bacon,' Veronique said. 'That's why he told us Jack had mentioned going to this party tonight.'
'The Play Nice winter line private launch party,' Polly said. 'Invitation only, tight guest list.'
  'And my dad is on a plane so he can't help,' Veronique said sadly.
  I was glad to know that Jack could take time out of his busy Reign of Terror and Kidnapping schedule for something important like an invitation-only VIP fashion show. He was a man with his priorities straight, that was clear.
  'I have an idea.' I sat up. 'We could sneak in as caterers.'
  Polly looked at me pityingly. 'You've been watching Hogan's Heroes late at night again, haven't you? Your television habits frighten me.'
  'OK, then what if we wait outside and waylay him? In the parking lot?'
  'That would be one way to do it,' Polly said in a tone that implied 'if we'd all had operations where our brains had been removed and replaced with Peeps marshmallow snacks.'
  While she was mentally comparing me to a marshmallow, she'd set two full-looking Walgreen's bags on the bed and was now digging around her backpack. Using as little of my precious energy reserves as possible, I slithered on my stomach towards one of the Walgreen's bags and tilted it towards me. I glimpsed something that looked alive but, before I could get a better view, Polly's hand came down like a barrier.
  'Get back,' she hissed.
  I got back. Polly can be scary when she's planning. And she was definitely planning.
Any doubts about that were extinguished when she looked up from her backpack, held up not one but two BeDazzlers in different sizes, and said, 'Here's what we're going to do.'
  Little Life Lesson 27: When picking a best friend, make sure she is not insane. One good warning sign to look for: if she says, 'We have everything we need to get into that VIP party right here,' while pointing at a BeDazzler, a cellphone earpiece, six stuffed bunnies left over from Easter, two Blow Pops and a large canister of Aqua Net hairspray.
  Little Life Lesson 28: Actually, travelling with a BeDazzler is a good warning sign all by itself.
  Little Life Lesson 29: And/or anything having to do with remaindered stuffed animals.
  'You're going to get us into a private party with this?' Alyson asked, sneering at the items on the bed. 'No-slash-way.'
  Polly laughed. 'Never underestimate the power of the BeDazzler. It's totally American Express.'
  'American Express?' Veronique said.
  'Don't leave home without it,' Polly explained.
  Score one for the Braille-speaking crowd. 'That,' I told my insane friend, 'was way MasterCard.'
  'We do our best,' Polly said humbly. Then she reached for the hem of the dress I was wearing and started cutting. 'This is about two years out of date and three inches too long. But we'll have it fixed in no time.'
  Little Life Lesson 30: Insane people should not have scissors.

Bad Kitty © Michele Jaffe, 2006. Published by Puffin Books.