When we were in third grade, Lauren and I had a thing for Nancy Drew books. We would pretend to be Nancy and her best friend Bess, the crime-solving duo. (Care to guess who got to be Nancy and who was stuck being boring Bess?) We decided we didn’t have to pretend. We would open our own detective agency, Wood & Worthington Incorporated. Her name had to go first. After all, she pointed out, it was only fair to go in alphabetical order. We made agency letterhead and business cards on Lauren’s dad’s color printer. We passed out our cards to neighbors and posted a sign at the Meijer’s and waited for the cases to pour in. Not too bad for being eight and a half. Our first mystery, the Case of the Missing Library Book, came from my mom.
My mom was missing a copy of Veggie Fun, a vegan cookbook. It was a high-stakes case, because every day that it went unfound the library was raking in another day’s fine. Lauren leaned back in my desk chair, balancing one of her pink, glitter spiral notebooks on her lap.
“We should make a list of suspects,” Lauren said, spinning the pen between her fingers.
“It could be Ms. Tarton’s dog, Peanut. He’s always burying stuff in the backyard.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Lauren wrote Peanut down in her notebook with a big number one by his name. “Does Peanut have any history with books? Any witnesses who might have seen him chewing on a book or something?”
“Not sure.” We went back to thinking. Crime solving was a lot more work than it looked like in the books.
“Has he bitten anyone?”
“Peanut? No. He’s a really nice dog. Plus he’s a wiener dog so he’s only like six inches tall. I’m not sure he could bite anything important. He goes to the hair salon most days with Ms. Tarton, so he’s not even around most of the time.”
“Remember what Nancy says—just because someone looks like they’re innocent doesn’t mean they are.” Lauren waved her finger in my direction. I tried to picture Peanut as a hardened criminal. We each went back to trying to think of another suspect. One thing our neighborhood was missing was nefarious characters. “Maybe we should do a stakeout and try and see if there are any clues.”
A stakeout seemed way more fun than hanging out in my room, so we went prowling around the neighborhood. We ended up in the park that backed up to the Tartons’ backyard. Peanut was wandering around the yard, barking at birds as they flew through the sky. Peanut was nothing if not an optimist. We got down on our hands and knees so we could sneak up closer to the fence and observe him at close range. It was possible that if he didn’t know anyone was watching, he would disclose the secret lair (or hole) where he had hidden the library book.
The leaves rustled as we crawled forward. Lauren looked over her shoulder and gave me a face to be quiet. I almost started giggling because she looked just like her mom did when she would stomp down the hall to Lauren’s room and beg us to “Please keep down the volume. This is a home, not a trailer.” We weren’t really sure what being in a home versus a trailer had to do with anything, but we would always shush up. Lauren’s mom wasn’t the kind of parent who liked to tell you something twice. That was when it happened. I took another crawl forward putting my hand down in a pile of mud brown leaves. I felt a sudden hot pain in the palm of my hand.
I yelled out and yanked my hand back. Peanut let out a howl and ran over to the fence near us, barking his alert. Sticking out of the palm of my hand was a large carpenter nail buried into the flesh. I knew it was bad, but I knew it was really bad when I saw Lauren’s face. Her eyes were wide and she looked a bit nauseated. I pulled the nail out with my other hand and blood welled up and poured down my wrist.
“Oh my gosh,” I cried, looking at all that blood, my blood.
Lauren whipped off one of her shoes and scrambled to get her sock. She wound it around my hand, squeezing slightly. I’m not sure they covered sock triage in Girl Scouts, but it worked.
“It’s going to be okay. We’ll go get your mom.”
“She’s going to be mad at me.”
“No she won’t.”
“Yes she will,” I said, somehow sure this would be the case. I started to cry in tandem with Peanut’s howls. I felt a fresh wave of pain with every beat of my heart. Lauren looked around on the ground, kicking at the piles of leaves and then bent down to grab the nail. Without hesitating she stabbed herself in the palm. Her wound wasn’t as deep as mine, but it was longer and it started to bleed instantly. I stopped crying and looked at her in shock.
“Now we’re in trouble together,” Lauren said, grabbing my hand, the bloody sock between our palms giving a squishy noise as we shook. “And we’re also blood sisters. That’s better than real sisters because we did it by choice instead of just being born that way. So you don’t ever need to worry about stuff, because I’ll be there. I’ll figure out something with your mom. And then someday you’ll do something for me.”
I remember thinking at that moment that there was no one cooler than Lauren. I was sure she would be my best friend forever. Heck, we were blood sisters. Of course, in fairness, at that age, I thought Pop-Tarts were the height of good cuisine, so it’s clear I wasn’t a great judge of quality.
My mom drove us both to the emergency room for tetanus shots. Lauren was in the front seat telling my mom this elaborate story to explain how we both managed to puncture our hands at the same time. My mom didn’t seem to be buying it, but she wasn’t mad either. She had washed each of our hands out at home and wrapped them in clean dishtowels for the trip to the hospital. I was hoping for stitches because I thought they would make me look cool. I sat in the backseat holding my arm in the air the way my mom had told me too. My mom braked quickly when someone cut in front of her in traffic, and the missing library book slid out from under her car seat.
Case solved. Whatever happened between Lauren and me was still a mystery.