Minerva Clark Gets a Clue by Karen Karbo Read Free Book Online

perfection.”
    The audience smirked—I knew that look!—and a clap of thunder hit us, as if a giant had dropped a bowling ball right onto the roof.
    DeMaio jumped, startled. He was saying, “beauty of perfection.”
    Then it was like a black curtain came down in front of a stage, only the curtain was smack in front of my eyeballs. That’s the last thing I remember: the word “perfection” and that window-rattling thunder, before everything went black.

- 5 -
    WHEN I OPENED MY EYES I thought I was in my room. But the bed wasn’t my bed. It was too high. The light in the room was low and the air smelled funny, sour but clean. The bed was surrounded by white curtains. Then Mark Clark’s face was in front of mine. He bent over me. He said, “Thank God.”
    Quills stood at his shoulder, tugging at his short crayon-yellow blond hair. “Jeez, Min, you scared the living sh—snot out of us.”
    Morgan stood up from where he sat in a chair on the other side of my bed. He’d taken off his earflap hat. Unlike the rest of us Clarks who had thick reddish brown hair, Morgan had a mess of wispy dirty-blond curls that were plastered against the sides of his head, giving him amean case of hat hair. “I’ll get the doc,” he said, slipping through the curtains.
    Was I in the hospital? For some reason, my teeth hurt, as if I had just had my braces tightened and gotten new elastics.
    Mark Clark took my hand. He looked … Could he have been
crying
?
    â€œWhy am I here?” I asked. Someone had taken off my shoes and socks. For some reason, I kept thinking, “Perfection.”
    Perfection?
    Mark Clark must have known I was all right, because he clicked into semilecture mode and started giving me some long sciencey explanation about how the Narino Gallery was in a one-hundred-year-old brick building and had one-hundred-year-old electrical outlets. The building was struck by lightning and there was a power surge, which is when too much electrical power is forced through the lines, and then somehow, because I was hooked up to Mark Clark’s fractal-making laptop, the electricity surged into me. It didn’t help that I was wearing my purple Chuck Taylor high tops, with their thin soles, which allowed the electricity to zap right on up to the top of my brain. Or something like that.
    Then Mark Clark said that he had tracked down our parents, or tried to. Charlie was tied up with some biglawyery business deal in New York City, but would call the next day to see how I was, and if he needed to cancel the conference or the summit or whatever it was, he would cancel it and come straight home. Deedee was in some mountains somewhere on a yoga retreat and couldn’t be reached at all.
    Dr. Wong came through the curtains, with Morgan right behind him. He had very warm hands and short spiky black hair. He looked more like a snowboarder than a doctor. He asked whether any part of me was numb or tingling. He looked inside my mouth and asked me to say, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.”
    â€œWas I electrocuted?” I asked.
    Quills laughed a little and Mark Clark gave him a look. “If you were electrocuted you wouldn’t be here, Minnie Mouse.” I hated when Quills called me that.
    â€œWhere would I be?” I asked.
    â€œPushing up the daisies! Singing with the choir invisible,” said Quills. I knew that meant dead.
    â€œIt was an electric shock,” said Dr. Wong. “You’re going to be all right. Not to worry.”
    Then Mark Clark and Dr. Wong started doing that adult thing where they talk over your head, as if you’re not there. They talked about what medical tests I should take to make sure I was okay.
    Dr. Wong asked me some more questions about how Ifelt. Mostly, I felt peaceful and weirdly empty of the normal thoughts that filled up my head all the time. When the lightning hit the building, I had jerked