The Mysterious Case of the Allbright Academy by Diane Stanley

Author:Diane Stanley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

So, now that we had a sample of the brownie mix, Prescott said he could take it to his mom’s lab over the weekend and run a chemical analysis on it. While he was at it, he decided to check out our multivitamins, too. His cover story, as far as his parents were concerned, would be that he was finishing up a chemistry lab assignment.

“But you’re not taking chemistry,” I said.

“Yeah, but Mom doesn’t know that.”

“She doesn’t know what classes you’re taking?” I was astonished. My parents knew the name of every teacher I had (before I went off to Allbright, anyway), when I had a math test, what book we were reading in English, what sport we were doing in PE—the whole nine yards.

“My parents don’t really get into the details of my life,” Prescott said. “As long as I make straight A’s and take the most advanced classes and get medals on awards day, they’re happy.”

“Won’t they notice, when your report card arrives and it says ‘biology’?”

“Nope. ’Fraid not. They’ll just check to make sure I got all A’s.”

I felt truly sorry for Prescott just then. From the sound of it, he was little more than a life accessory to his parents—like the right house or the status car or the degree from the best university. Prescott excelled at the things they valued most. He rounded out their successful lives. “Our son? Oh, yes, he took the science, computer, and Latin prizes at school—but then he always does.” A few years down the road they’d be mentioning that he was at Harvard or Yale. And later still that he was at work on his doctorate from MIT. But as for the actual living Prescott, they didn’t pay much attention to him.

That said, at this particular moment it was actually very convenient that he had such clued-out parents. He could just walk into his mom’s lab at Johns Hopkins and use the equipment and the chemicals and get help from the lab assistants. And no one would bother asking questions.

Now, while Prescott was trying to figure out what had been added to the brownie mix, Cal and I had our own job to do. We spent the weekend at my house, preparing look-alike bags of ordinary commercial mix for Brooklyn to take over to the kitchen and substitute for the Recipe Variant II. Unfortunately, this meant making up a cover story to tell my mom too, which made me feel even squirrellier than I already did. I just kept reminding myself that I was trying to save a lot of kids from eating Recipe Variant II—and with any luck, nail those scumbags.

What I told Mom was that Allbright was involved in a community-service project—taking brownie mix to homeless shelters and soup kitchens. This story was slightly less ludicrous than it sounds, because Mom knew all about the famous healthy Allbright brownies (the school sent a basket of them home with each of their students at Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks—and of course we now knew why).

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