I was eating my lunch in the bathroom the next day, at school, when there was a bang on the stall door. Somebody had come in the day before and just gone to the empty stall next to me, but this person banging on the door apparently wanted to use my toilet. Nervously, I tried, "I'm in here! Go to the other one."

"What're you doing in there?" came a familiar voice. "I got something to show you."

I climbed down from my precarious perch on the toilet and unlocked the door. When I opened it, Jay was standing on the other side, like I'd expected.

He motioned to the sandwich in my hand. "What've you got there?"

I glanced at it, feeling kind of embarrassed. "Peanut butter."

"Oh."

We just stared at each other for a minute.

"You wanna come outside? I got something to show you."

I looked over my shoulder at the toilet, then to my sandwich, and then to Jay. "Yeah," I agreed. "I'll come." On the way out, I tossed the remainder of my lunch in the trash.

Outside, kids were running around everywhere. It was recess time. I'd avoided it yesterday. Now, I was walking right into it.

"Did yeh see it on TV last night?"

I was distracted momentarily by the sight of a familiar person jumping rope over by the gym entrance—Maisie. I'd recognize that long shiny hair anywhere. "Huh?"

"Earth to Rob."

I frowned and turned back to Jay, irritated. "See what on TV?" Did I really even want to be out here?

"The graffiti. On the school wall."

My interest returned. "Oh, yeah! I did. I actually did. My Great Grandma—I mean, the Old Raisin—she had that show on, and we saw it. But I didn't get such a good look at it. Is that where we're going?"

"Sure! We can't go too close, though. They roped it off."

Jay looked over his shoulder, but not at me; he was making sure nobody was watching us. Then, he motioned me to follow him through some bushes, and we ended up in a secluded area, where the walls of the school wrapped around three sides of us. It was an area with a couple of benches and a few flowers planted, like somebody thought it'd be nice to have some outdoor seating. But it wasn't too nice anymore, because on one of the walls, the right one, was a huge black paint scrawl. It might not even be proper to call it graffiti, because it didn't look like much more than some random black squiggles. Like someone with a paint can had come and not known what to write, so he just went wild with a meaningless pattern. The paint covered a good number of bricks. No wonder it had been on the news; it would take the school a long time to clean it off.

"What does it say?" I asked, knowing that it didn't say anything.

Jay sucked in a breath importantly. "Nobody knows. Maybe some language from outer space. An alien might've come down and done it."

I almost believed him, as serious as he sounded, but then I shook sense back into my brain. "Aliens? Nah. I bet it was just some teenager trying to do something stupid."

"None of the teenagers I know ever do graffiti."

"Oh yeah? And how many do you know?"

"Tons. Lots and tons of them."

This time, I did believe him. "Well, then who could it have been?"

"Like I said, nobody knows."

"Yet."

"Yeah, yet."

He turned to me.

"I have a feeling this mystery needs somebody to solve it."

I looked around for a moment, but I saw nobody. So I pointed to myself. "Me? I mean, us? You want us to solve it?"

He shrugged. "You got anything better to do?"

Honestly, no. No I did not. "All right. I guess that sounds okay." The two of us just stood there, looking at each other. Waiting. I continued. "So . . . where do we start?"

Jay rubbed his nose. "Look for clues. We have to look for clues, first. That's always what detectives do. Like Sherlock Holmes and Watson."

"Can I be Sherlock?"

"Well, all right. I guess. But it was my idea at first."

"Well, Watson's really smart, too, you know." I didn't want to be him myself, so I had to make him sound good. "They're pretty much equals, anyway. And you'd get to have a cool mustache. Sherlock doesn't have a mustache"

He nodded. "I do like mustaches."

"Then that's it." I wanted to get going before he changed his mind. "Let's look around, then."

The two of us started rummaging through the bushes, kicking up rocks and dirt. We even went under the police tape to get a better look at the graffiti. Nothing really turned up, though, and then, because we were so wrapped up in our hunt for clues, neither of us noticed someone come up behind us until he spoke.

"What're you doing?"

I emerged from a small tree under which I'd been crouching and scrambled to my feet. Maisie's brother was there. Alex was his name. And there was another boy, too. He was from my class, but I didn't remember his name.

My face felt hot, looking at them. I didn't know what to say, so I looked to Jay, hoping he'd fill in—but he was staying hidden under those bushes. I turned back to the others; I had to say something! "I—we—I was looking for something."

"Yeah?" Alex scrunched up his nose, like I smelled. I thought he looked a lot like his sister. "What?"

"Something . . ." I said slowly, trying to buy time so I could think of anything else to say. Then it just came out, like a regurgitated chunk of lunch: "I was Sherlock, and he was Watson. We were playing . . ." My own eyes widened in horror at what my mouth was saying. Playing? Only kids played.

"You're pretending to be Sherlock?" snorted the other guy, whose name I didn't know.

My entire head felt like it was on fire. In fact, I was pretty sure in that terrible, painful moment that I was going to explode in flames, and my mind started to remember a similar feeling at a very different time, when I'd stood in front of my parents . . . but then—thankfully—the recess bell rang, putting an end to my near-meltdown. Alex and the other guy turned and walked away, and I just stood there feeling like I was going to barf, when all of a sudden I got this really weird feeling . . . like someone was standing behind me. Fast, I turned around, but all I saw were the bushes I'd been rooting under. Nobody was there. I stared; prickles chilled the back of my neck and all up and down my arms. I still felt like somebody else was there . . .

"Sherlock! You coming?"

I jerked back around. Jay was motioning toward me.

"Where the heck did you go?" He just stared at me, and my anger subsided. There was no point in being mad. "Yeah, sure, Watson. I'm coming." We walked in silence until he split off to be with the sixth grade, and I grudgingly returned to the eighth graders.

The rest of the day, I sat quietly through my classes, just trying to pretend I was invisible. Alex and his friend whose name I didn't know gave me weird looks a few times, but there was nothing I could do about that, so I just kept to myself. I debated in my head about whether I wanted to stay friends with Jay or not. He was a sixth grader, for crying out loud, and I was already having a hard time looking like someone who'd make a decent friend. On the other hand, I liked Jay. At least he wanted to do fun stuff. And besides, it wasn't like I was going to be stuck at Great Grandma's forever. I'd be going home as soon as the whole ordeal was over, and so it wouldn't matter if I made for-real friends anyway.

After school, Great Grandma picked us up again. Penny and I were waiting for her outside, but my eyes were also off looking for Jay. When I spotted him, I waved him over, and he came.

"Yeah? What is it?"

I stared at him for a second, then said, "You wanna come over?"

He thought about it, nodded. "Yeah, alright. I'll ride my bike, ok?"

"Sure."

Then he went off to get his bike, and Penny and I stood alone, again. There were kids all around, but not with us.

"You made a friend?" Penny asked me.

"No," I stubbornly replied. "He already was my friend. I met him before school started."

"Oh," was all she said. And then we saw Great Grandma's huge maroon car, pulling toward us like an anchor being dragged along the bottom of the ocean.