3. Searching for Mrs. Sandler

SEARCHING FOR MRS. SANDLER

What followed was the world's worst scavenger hunt. The boy went to the reception area to ask the person behind the desk, but she spent like an hour talking to one of the zombies about a missing package, going into the back three times to search for it, until the boy was about to jump over the desk and find the dumb package himself, but he didn't because he suspected that this would fall under the category of making Mrs. Winston's job harder.

Someone incapable of finding a package would be of no help in locating Mrs. Sandler, he figured, so he went looking himself. He walked down a long corridor past a dining room and into a large sun-filled area full of tables and sofas and games and books. There was some exercise-in-chairs class happening that he wanted no part of. And anyway, he was pretty sure that Mrs. Sandler worked here, and all the chair exercisers were zombies. So he went back to the lobby and down a different corridor, this one full of offices. Most were locked, but one room, with a door plate that read PHYSICAL THERAPY , was open. Inside was a narrow table connected to several straps and pulleys. The boy thought it looked like a torture chamber.

Shuddering, he bolted from the PT room and back into the corridor, where he very nearly rammed right into a resident named Lois Stein, who was sitting in an easy chair, doing her daily crossword puzzle, with the help of a magnifying glass that made the eight-point font in the newspaper legible to her eighty-nine-year-old eyes.

"Young man, this is a residence, not a playground. Do not run in the hallways!" she scolded.

"I'm looking for Mrs. Sandler. Do you know who that is?" he asked. When she looked up, the magnifying glass enlarged her right eye, giving her the terrifying look of a cyclops.

"There's no one here by that name. We had a Mr. Sanderson once, but he died."

"But… but I'm supposed to find Mrs. Sandler. She works here."

"I can assure you, she does not."

"But Mrs. Winston…"

"Young man, I was a professor, a dean, a provost, and a president of a university. You may think that I have lost all my marbles, but I can assure you, they are intact. I make it my business to know the name of every single person employed here, and there is no Mrs. Sandler."

She turned back to her puzzle, and the boy stood there, feeling that awful heat rising up in him. He was supposed to take breaths when he felt like this. But if breathing could make people happy, shouldn't everyone be happy, because everyone breathed? Well, except maybe the zombies.

He doubled back toward the reception area. "Do you know Mrs. Sandler?" he asked another resident, this one named Elise Hadley. She scratched her head, sending her blond wig askew, revealing the sparse gray spiderwebs underneath.

Breathing hard now (and not feeling any better!), he took refuge in another open room. Slamming the door behind him, he bumped into a metal rack, spilling several white rectangles onto the floor. Flicking on the light, he saw they were diapers. Adult diapers.

He tore out of the utility closet and walk-ran back toward the lobby, skidding to a stop in front of a love seat, where the man Etta had been talking to before was sitting. "Mr. McGinity," he said, panting a bit. "Can you help me find Mrs. Sandler?"

Dickie McGinity tapped his long index finger to his temple as if deep in thought, which seemed like a good sign. "What's your favorite flower?" he asked.

"My favorite flower?" What did this have to do with Mrs. Sandler?

"I like forsythia," Dickie said, before gesturing to the lady next to him, the one the boy had seen holding her creepy baby doll. "Ginny likes tea roses."

"Would you like to hold my baby?" Ginny asked, thrusting the blanket-swaddled doll in his face. Up close it was even creepier. The painted-on face was worn off in places. One of the glass eyes was missing. He and his mom had once watched a horror movie about a killer doll that looked just like this.

This was supposed to be opportunity? Balderdash. This was punishment.

In the end, Mrs. Sandler found him.

He was in the courtyard, a square of grass surrounded by tables and chairs and a few barbecue grills and even a waterfall, which was pretty nice. A couple of the places he'd lived in with his mom had had postage-stamp-sized backyards, but never one with a waterfall.

Someone tapped his shoulder, and, still on guard against zombies and killer dolls, he yelped.

"Sorry," the shoulder tapper replied. "I didn't mean to scare you."

"Like you'd scare me," he fired back. Because this was just a girl around his age, wearing a plaid skirt, sparkly tights, and a T-shirt with a logo from the Fornax Force movies.

"Good. So, I heard you're looking for me," she said, tapping a clipboard with a blue Bic pen.

"No. I'm looking for Mrs. Sandler."

"There is no Mrs. Sandler here, but I guess I'm Ms . Sandler. Maya-Jade Spears-Sandler. Double-hyphenate, a mouthful, I know. That's why sometimes I just use Sandler. Anyhow, Ms. Sandler, that's me." She tapped herself on the chest. Her elbow was covered with a large bandage.

So many things confused the boy, starting with all the words she was saying, and her railroad train of a name, and her suggestion that she was in charge of him.

"Maya Sandler?" he asked.

"Maya-Jade Spears-Sandler," she said. "But you can call me Maya-Jade."

"Maya Jade," he repeated.

"No. Maya-Jade . With a hyphen."

"Isn't that what I just said?"

"You didn't use the hyphen. I can tell the difference if you're not using the hyphen."

Once upon a time, when he'd been a good student at school, he'd been an expert at grammar, understanding when to use that or which or who or whom . So he knew that you couldn't hear a hyphen!

"Do you work here?" he asked.

"Do I look like I work here?"

"Kind of." She was clearly a kid, but she held that clipboard with such authority.

"Duh! I'm twelve. My grandmother lives here. I'm just visiting."

"Oh, is your grandmother…" He struggled to remember the name of the lady who'd tried to give him her doll. "Ginny?"

Maya-Jade sighed heavily and rolled her eyes. "Ginny Koong is Korean. I'm Chinese. Big difference. And before you get confused and start asking me if all the Asians at Shady Glen are related to me, my grandmother is Vivian and she's white. I'm adopted. No, I don't know anything about my birth parents, and no, I don't know how to make chow mein or do karate. No, I don't speak Chinese, which is not a language but a bunch of different languages, like over three hundred. And I see just as well as anyone else. Any other dumb questions we need to get out of the way?"

A not-dumb question popped into the boy's head: Are you competing for bossiest person of the year? But he kept his mouth shut.

"Anyhow," Maya-Jade continued, "why are you looking for me?"

"Mrs. Winston told me to find you."

"Oh, do you have a grandparent here?"

"No," he said gruffly, because he did not have grandparents here or anywhere, at least none he'd met. "I'm volunteering." He said volunteering in the same tone he might've said diarrhea-ing . But Maya-Jade didn't seem to notice.

"Cool! Me too! I mean, my nana lives here, but I'm volunteering for the summer. I'm kind of the activities coordinator."

"You're volunteering here? On purpose?" He said this in a tone that he might've used to say, You're diarrhea-ing in your pants, on purpose ?

"Well, yeah," she said, and maybe this time she heard the diarrhea, because in a less bossy voice she added, "It's almost time for bingo. If you want, I can show you how to call it."

She tapped the clipboard again with her pen. It was like a little drumbeat to remind people she was in charge. And there was no way she was in charge of him.

"I don't need your help!"

"You'd be surprised. Bingo gets a little heated. Not as bad as trivia, but almost."

"Do you think I'm some kind of moron?" he asked, jaw clenching.

"With the way you're acting now, yeah, maybe a little," Maya-Jade said. Her voice was kind of jokey, but that made it worse. All morning he'd felt like a pot on the stove, the water getting warmer and warmer, but when she said that, the pot boiled over, hot starchy anger flowing out of him.

"Well, you're definitely a moron," he said. His tone was not jokey at all.

Maya-Jade's eyes widened in surprise. And hurt. It felt good to see it. Who was the moron now?

"Well, if I am, I'm the moron in charge of you!" She hugged the clipboard to her chest like it was a shield. "So you have to do what I say."

"No, I don't. You're just some stupid loser who has nothing better to do than hang out in this dump all summer."

At this Maya-Jade's lip quivered. "If you think it's so bad here, why don't you just leave?"

Leave. It was all he'd wanted to do since arriving. And though he'd just told her he didn't have to listen to her, Mrs. Winston had said that he did. So, without another word, he did just that. He stalked out of the courtyard, past the receptionist, through the double doors, and showed opportunity—and that bossy Maya-Jade—just who was in charge here.