Nothing Special by Geoff Herbach

talked about Florida, but was mostly about a special carpet and delicious cigarettes. I’m supposed to follow any of that? I’m supposed to think someone with some kind of superior intelligence is leading me through a series of clues?
    Seriously, Randy Stone did not help communicate anything for Andrew. He just made me mad and what he said was pretty much unintelligible. For instance, that Fiddlesticks clue would be totally meaningless to anybody (not just dumb me). Fiddlesticks? A real place? How would I know?
    Then I read his third email again.
    I focused on this:
    3. And, finally, two weeks ago, when there was one other very significant non-Felton mention.
    What the hell did that mean?
    So, I did it myself. I Googled Reinstein, which I hate doing because there’s so much crap about me. And, yes, up popped a giant wad about me. A tremendous, ridiculous, confusing wad. Also, up popped a tiny little bit about my dad, which detailed how Steven Reinstein was an All-American tennis player at Northwestern University in the 1980s. But, really, mostly all of it was about me. There were like 75,000 hits. Was I really supposed to wade through these to figure out the tiny few that weren’t about me or my dad (or maybe Andrew on the honor roll)?
    Then I became very, very mad. Picture me shaking my fist in the air, crying out, “Andrewwwww!”
    He spent all his time gathering Google crap. When whatever website went up that had the non-Felton info on it, he received that alert that day. For me, finding that odd Reinstein mention was like searching for an ant with a weird-shaped thorax, but still just a single ant, in a giant freaking Mexican ant hill. Impossible!
    I almost called Jerri at her job. She was already gone for the day. She was at the Edward Jones office, where she works part-time. I wanted to yell at her for having created the terrible monster Andrew. I wanted to tell her that she’d been duped, and, according to Randy Stone, Andrew wasn’t even a percussionist (whatever that means). I picked up the phone, then stopped myself, because freaking out on Jerri did not appeal to me in the slightest. Repercussions? Crazy Jerri?
    I went back to Randy Stone’s new message.
    The outlook is not “rosy.” A rose of another name would not be named “Rose” Reinstein.
    With this, the child detective Randy Stone lights another cigarette, which catches fire and nearly burns his hands off. He hacks out his totally sick lungs, watches the smoke trail up into the tropical sky, and wonders if Andrew and Felton could even possibly be related, because Felton is so sadly dumb.
    That Felton figured out the lack of percussion instruction in Andrew’s present is a near-on miracle that should be taken to the Pope.
    Good day.
    P.S. Randy Stone knows not to tell Jerri because she might go crazy like last summer.
    Jerk, Andrew!
    What about his P.S.?
    Here’s me: Can’t tell. Can’t tell. Whatever Andrew is into might be bad enough to knock Jerri off her solid rock. What if Andrew is part of an apocalypse cult? What if he’s wearing long burlap robes and is taking hallucinogenic magical mushrooms that make him think his name is Randy Stone? What if he’s decided to grow roses in Florida? Wouldn’t that freak Jerri out, because he refuses to help in the garden ever? What does a rose of another name would not be named “Rose” Reinstein mean?
    ANDREW!
    I stood up. I looked toward the door, toward the freedom of the road where I might run…
    But, instead of just running around Bluffton and jumping up and down like a monkey and cursing Andrew’s name, I paused, breathed, sat back down, and Googled “Rose” Reinstein.
    Every result that came up on the Google page referred to me, except for the very first one. I stared at this result. It was an obituary from the Fort Myers News-Press dated March 29 (the same week when everything went bad for me—and you, I