Footer Davis Probably Is Crazy by Susan Vaught

even though I didn’t really want them to. I sat there staring at my list and listening to myself breathe and feeling my heart race, then stop, race, then stop.
    Then I got busy with strikeout.
    1. Old Mr. Abrams got shot, and nobody knows who shot him. MOM OR CISSY SHOT HIM WITH A SHOTGUN. WHY?
    2. The Abrams farm got burned to the ground, and nobody knows who set the fire . MOM OR CISSY SET THE FIRE. WHY?
    3. Cissy and Doc might be dead or alive, and nobody knows where they are.
    4. Mom might have been WAS there.
    5. I might have been WAS there.
    6. Somebody might have been watching us while we searched. THE SOMEBODY HAD SHOESJUST LIKE CAPTAIN ARMSTRONG.
    7. I might be PROBABLY AM crazy.
    When I finished, I saved it under REALLY PROBABLY CRAZY LIST . Then I closed the file, shut the laptop, and put my head down on its warm lid. When people solved mysteries on TV, they didn’t keep getting bigger questions and worse stuff to worry about, did they?
    I was pretty sure I had some answers now.
    The problem was, I didn’t want any of them.

Critical Thinking: Serial Killers Don’t Wear Plaid
    Footer Davis
    5th Period
    Ms. Perry
I. Hypothesis
    Serial killers don’t wear plaid shirts. Is this always true, sometimes true, partly true, or false?
II. Evidence Collected
    I looked at all the pictures in a dictionary of serial killers, then searched 1,354 photos online. A few serial killers might have been wearing plaid, but I couldn’t tell for sure. Serial killers seem to prefer button-ups with T-shirts underneath, or jail jumpsuits, unless they are Russian. Russian serial killers wear really freaky-looking stuff, even in jail. Most serial killers have stupid nicknames people shouldn’t give them, like Black Angel and Deathmaker and the Giggling Granny. Those names make them sound like heroes or comic-book characters, not something scary and evil. They also have bad hairdos, and some have moustaches that look like they belong on clowns. One serial killer dressed up like a clown. Ifyou type in “serial killer” and search for it, you get about 164 million hits. If you type in “God,” you get more than a billion hits. So at least the world hasn’t gone “totally BLEEPing insane” like my neighbor Captain Armstrong says.
    Serial killer dressed as a clown. This is a good reason not to like clowns.
III. What I Learned from This Report
    1. Russian serial killers are stranger and uglier than walruses, and God is still more popular than maniacs.
    2. My hypothesis that serial killers don’t wear plaid is sometimes or always true.
    3. The guy watching the school from across the street at the store is probably a creep, not a serial killer, because he wears plaid shirts.
    PLEASE SEE ME AFTER CLASS.

CHAPTER
9

Thirteen Days After the Fire
    If I had a brain tumor, it was growing very slowly, because I was still alive and having to go to school. That sucked. Not the being-alive part but the school part. I wasn’t much in the mood for school. I never was when Mom had to be away.
    â€œI was supposed to see Ms. Perry yesterday after class, but I didn’t go,” I admitted to Peavine on Thursday as we sat behind the scraggly bushes next to the school, doing surveillance on the creep at the convenience store. He was back again, wearing plaid and eating his lunch and staring at kids out at recess. “Think she’ll send me to the office?”
    â€œShe might. You know she’s strict.” Branches and leaves covered most of Peavine’s face, but when he glanced at me I could see the bright blue of his eyesthrough the brush. “What’d you do to tick her off this time?”
    â€œShe didn’t like the paper I wrote.” The guy across the street chomped on his hot dog. He ate a hot dog every day. I wondered if he put the same stuff on it. That would be boring, and probably more like a serial killer than a creep, since