The Lemonade Crime by Jacqueline Davies Read Free Book Online

like she was the leader of the free world. Jessie could sometimes be bossy at home, but Evan was used to seeing her on the sidelines at school. On the edge of whatever was happening on the playground. Eating quietly at a cafeteria table. Sitting with her hands in her lap at the all-school assemblies.
    Suddenly she was the leader. And it was weird.
    Evan stared at the twelve kids sitting in the jury box, and that was weird, too. If he looked at each kid, one at a time, all he saw were the faces of kids he'd known for most of his life. Nothing new. But when he looked at them all together, standing in the box that Jessie had made out of jump ropes, they looked different. Even Adam, his best friend in the world, seemed almost unfamiliar. They were the jury—the ones who would either hand him a new Xbox 20/20 or make him stand up in class and apologize in front of everybody. Suddenly, they didn't seem like the kids he'd known forever. They had turned into something much bigger.
    Evan's eyes traveled across the courtroom: to the witnesses all standing together behind the line of the jump rope, to the audience waiting patiently for the trial to begin, and to David Kirkorian standing at his milk-crate podium.
    And that was the weirdest thing of all. Every single one of the fourth-graders had shown up after school and put on a nametag. (Okay, so Malik had taped his nametag to his butt, but he was still standing in the witness box, ready to testify.) Everyone was waiting to do whatever Jessie told them to do. It was as if all of a sudden there was a whole new set of rules at school, and everyone—
everyone
—had agreed to follow them.
    Even Scott Spencer was sitting on his basketball. He had his knees spread wide, and he was drumming a beat on the ball.
Chook-uh-ta-chook, chook-uh-ta-chook, chook-uh-ta-chook.
He had that look. That Scott Spencer look. The look in his eyes that seemed to say,
It's all good. It's all cool. It's all mine.
    That was the thing about Scott Spencer. Somehow, some way, he always managed to spin things so that everything worked to his advantage. Evan remembered the time they were in first grade, playing in Scott's basement playroom. Scott's mom was at work. His dad worked at home, like Evan's mom did, but his office was all the way at the other end of the house, and it was soundproof ! Evan remembered how they used to play a game of seeing who could make enough noise to get Mr. Spencer to come out of his office. They practically had to set off a bomb to get him to come out!
    So that day, they were playing pick-up sticks for pennies, betting a penny on every game. At first Scott was winning, and Evan had lost about seven cents. But then Evan started catching up, and then he was ahead, and Scott owed him eleven whole cents, which seemed like a lot of money back then. "Hey, let's get a snack," said Scott, and they could have gone all on their own to get something out of the kitchen, but instead Scott went to his dad's office and asked him to bring them something in the playroom. And of course when Scott's dad saw that they were betting pennies, he ended the game and made Evan return everything he'd won. "Betting isn't allowed in this house," he'd said. But Evan had thought to himself,
Losing, that's what's not allowed.
    Evan looked at Scott. Evan wasn't a fighting kid. He'd only gotten in two fist fights in his whole life, and one of them had been with Adam, his best friend! Both those fights had been fast and furious, and then they'd been over. No hard feelings. Apologies all around. Everyone agreeing not to fight anymore.
    Why couldn't it be that way with Scott? What was it about him that made Evan's blood boil? That turned one thing into another—a fight about some missing money into a full-blown trial by jury? Evan opened his mouth to say something to Scott—
    Which is exactly when David K. picked up the gavel, banged it on the block of wood, and read from the top index card, "All rise!