Cornelia Bennett
Hey guys! Cornelia here, reporting from the Bennett house. Holy cartography! From the map leading us to the bathroom of Arcadia, to the first edition book in the library to here, we are barreling down Amanda’s yellow brick road at full speed! I was a little confused about the photograph also (and by the way, “The Bragg Wing” is actually on the plaque itself, not just written on the picture), good thing JinxTheRipper , SarahB, and trumpetgirl made the connection to Bea. But there’s no way my brother and his friends could make it to Baltimore on a school night to snoop around the hospital Spy Kids-style like tiffany923 suggested. Between parental units and hospital security—it would never happen.
Good thing they have me. “You don’t have to be inside the building to get the inside information.”
Hal’s eyes lit up, “You really think you could do that?” They were all staring at me like Scooby wanting his Scooby snack.
“Get into the John’s Hopkins medical database?” I gave my best no-big-deal shrug. “Sure. I can hack it.”
I started right away. Callie, Nia, and Hal camped out in my office (ok, my room) while I spent the afternoon feeling like I was the computer geek in one of the Ocean’s whatever movies. Although cuter I hope. . . Breaking down the firewall was more challenging than I expected. Each combination I tried turned out to be a dud. So, I get to thinking, Amanda never leaves us clue-less, maybe she gave me something I can use. And that’s when it hit me: the map! I used an online map of Orion to find the coordinates of each highlighted place on Callie’s hand-drawn map and punched them in, not expecting anything to happen. It was taking a while to show up. While I was waiting, I perfected my self-portrait, because hey, Hal is not the only artist in the family. I took a look at the results. Ok, maybe he is . . .
Just as I was dotting on a few more freckles, and muttering, “sunscreen, sunscreen, wherefore art thou . . .” And as if those were the magic words, three windows popped up on my computer. We were in! Thank you weird Amanda numbers!
Suddenly the whole gang was huddled around my computer as I pulled up Rossiter, Beatrice’s file. Most of the medical stuff was way over our heads, like almost everything that you hear on Grey’s Anatomy. But one of the last pages was a receipt, and at the bottom of that receipt was a signature, and that signature was JACK BRAGG. As in Chief Jack Bragg.
“Look!” Hal pointed to the very bottom of the page. It read, “Donor has requested to remain anonymous.”
Callie gasped.” I had a feeling Heidi’s family was covering this up.” We never really got a straight answer about what happened to Bea. After Callie confessed to Heidi’s mom, only the rumors that floated around school offered any insight.
“OMG, have you heard?” Traci, apparently writing off my behavior at lunch yesterday to PMS, was jumping up and down with excitement about her news, and I tried to feign at least mild interest. Even under the best of circumstances, I wasn’t one for jumping up and down over anything before nine a.m. And my life lately was most definitely way too confusing to qualify as the best of circumstances.
“Heard what?” All around us the population of Endeavor was slowly starting its day, but it seemed to me there were more than the usual number of people whispering in small groups gathered and talking in hushed voices. I perked up at the possibility that it might have something to do with Amanda but then realized the odds of Traci hearing something about her before I did were so low as to be nonexistent.
“Okay, you know Bea Rossiter?” she lowered her voice on Bea’s name.
I felt a sudden wave of dizziness reached for the nearby wall of lockers. Luckily, Traci was too pumped to notice.“Well, these really fancy plastic surgeons at Johns Hopkins have donated their time to her case. Can you believe it?” As if it weren’t already flawlessly framing her face, Traci ran her hand through her hair. “They’re going to, like, rebuild her face. Like that girl on . . . what was that soap we used to watch, the one with the hot doctor?” Traci squished up her nose in concentration, then shook her head. “Whatever—anyhoo, she’s about to go from super-freak to super-chic!”
“Wow, that is so . . . amazing!” My mind was racing. Was it just a coincidence that this was happening the day after my conversation with Heidi’s mom?
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