The Bermudez Triangle by Maureen Johnson

start the meeting with him missing. Jeff’s claim to fame was that he made piles of cash selling stuff online—making him Alexander Hamilton High’s resident entrepreneurial genius. He was so famous for doing this, he’d actually been banned from bringing his laptop to school, since he used to spend most of his time monitoring his auctions. (He had what Avery called “fetal motherboard syndrome": he had to be touching some kind of online device at all times or he became skittish.)
    For the next twenty minutes Georgia talked nonstop about a torrid affair she’d had with a handyman that her parents had hired and how they’d spent most of the month of July making sweet handyman love in the back cottage. (The whole thing sounded unlikely; then again, you never knew with Georgia.) Devon read his e-mail, but Nina knew that he was listening. It had to be hard to tune out this conversation. Nina noticed a slight shift that might have been a stifled laugh as Georgia described one encounter where she had to work around her lover man’s tool belt.
    Jeff chose this moment to finally come running through the door. His hair had grown a lot over the summer—it was almost down to his shoulders. He’d also dyed it a particularly bad shade of blond, Nina noticed. This might have been to cover up the fact that he was pale as a ghost and probably hadn’t been in the sun for the last three months.
    “Am I late?” he asked.
    “What do you think, Burg?” Georgia threw open the three notebooks that she had spread out on the table in front of her and clapped. “Okay! Rundown of the year. September is freshman welcome week. October is homecoming and the hayride. November is the Thanksgiving food drive, the sophomore dance, and freshman rep elections. December is the toy and clothes drive and the holiday dance. January is nothing major. February is black history month and the Valentine’s Day dance. March is women’s history month and the junior prom. April is the senior prom. May is Senior Day, which the juniors will handle.”
    She took a breath and moved over to another book of notes.
    “We’ll have time- and stress-management workshops, suicide prevention skits, and college application preparation sessions. Coffeehouse is every other week. Each one needs a current event or specific topic for a theme. That’s it, along with some other stuff. Nina talks now.”
    “Okay,” Nina said slowly, taking out her final project from the summer (“Good Council: A Strategic Plan for Alexander HamiltonHigh”), which she’d chopped down into meeting-friendly notes. “We’ll start with the September activities. Freshman welcome week.”
    “Haze week,” Jeff said, keeping one eye on his phone. He had made no attempt to hide the fact that he was somehow monitoring an auction.
    “Right,” Nina said. “I was thinking, though, that we could plan some other stuff. Have workshops every afternoon about different aspects of high school. How to study. How to handle peer pressure. Things like that.”
    “People are going to haze anyway,” Devon said.
    “That may be true,” Nina said. “But if we held events that freshmen could go to, they’d be less likely to be targets. Plus we could give them some good advice.”
    “Everyone loves haze week, Neen,” Georgia said. “Nobody’s going to go to five days’ worth of
workshops
.”
    Jeff had totally detached himself from the conversation. Devon shifted around in his seat and pulled on his earlobe.
    “What?” Nina asked.
    “Nothing.”
    “If you have something to say, say it, or we won’t get anywhere.”
    “This is student council. We’re not the guidance department. We’re not running classes.”
    “So we shouldn’t try anything new?” Nina asked.
    “We’re already busy,” Devon said. “Can we just get through what we have to? Maybe talk about extra stuff later?”
    Jeff seemed very pleased by what he was looking at.
    “What are you selling?” Devon asked.
    “
Donnie