Read The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman for Free Online Page B

with a galloping, snare-rolling drum figure and a really sweet, slippery eighth-note bass line. And the vocal—the vocal was insane! The lyrics were garbled and buried in the mix, further distorted by the record player’s tinny old speakers. But it didn’t matter
what
this girl was singing. The
way
she was singing it was out of control. The vocal was delirious, a series of mad whoops, passionate and atonal and intense.
    Is this Sleater-Kinney? Tenny thought, trying to place the singing voice. Sidemouse? L7 maybe? He wished he’d been paying attention.
    And then it got even better. There was this long, strangled cry—“Waaaaa!”—as the song leaped into a bridge section, which was accented by a wicked buzz-saw guitar part. The bridge came to a walloping crescendo, and the song ripped back into the chorus. Then the chorus repeated; then it modulated; then it modulated again, as the rest of the band started singing—howling, really, Tenny thought
—howling
a punching, choppycountermelody against the lead vocal line.
    Tenny turned to the kid sitting next to him, who happened to be lanky, bespectacled, ultraserious Victor Glebe. Tenny had never spoken a word to Victor through six years of elementary school and two years of middle school. “Oh my god, dude,” Tenny said to him now, “this is
awesome.”
    Victor, who was carefully organizing his photographs of Mr. Happy, the diving dolphin at Stinson Aquarium, looked up with a furrowed brow. “Yes,” he said solemnly. “Awesome.”
    At the front of the room, Bethesda stood bobbing her head nervously to the record. “You can call it overrated, tell me everything has faded! ” sang Little Miss Mystery. “But it’s not so complicated! It’s not so complicated!
Waaaaa!
”
    “Well,” said Mr. Melville when the three-minute song ended. “That was horrible.”
    “That song, sir, is called ‘Not So Complicated,’” said Bethesda, ignoring his opinion, “and it was recorded in 1994 by Little Miss Mystery and the Red Herrings. Here they are around that time.” Suzie’s sister, Shelly, acting as visual assistant, displayed a photograph from a RedHerrings profile in
The Fabulist,
which Bethesda had taken to the 24/7 Kinko’s yesterday and blown up to poster size. “Part of the band’s deal was that no one ever knew Little Miss Mystery’s true identity.
    “But I …,” Bethesda continued, dropping her voice into a dramatic register,
“do
know.”
    On a nod from Bethesda, Shelly revealed a second blown-up picture, this one of Ms. Finkleman from last year’s yearbook.
    The effect was immediate, and exactly as Bethesda had hoped. Mr. Melville’s class exploded with excited chatter.
    “That’s crazy!” shouted Todd Spolin.
    Lisa Deckter gasped loudly and clapped her hand over her mouth.
    “Whoa! ” hollered Chester Hu. “Is that—”
    “It is,” said Haley Eisenstein. “It totally is.”
    “Whoa!” Chester hollered again.
    In the magazine picture, Little Miss Mystery wore a battered black leather jacket and black leather boots; her nose was pierced and her hair was a mad tumble of black and red streaks. Ms. Finkleman, in the yearbook shot, wore glasses, a nondescript beige jacket, and had no piercings of any kind, not even earrings. But theface—it was the same face, and Bethesda could tell that everyone in the room could see it: Ida Finkleman was Little Miss Mystery. Even Mr. Melville was nodding slowly, impressed, his mouth slightly open beneath his thick white mustache.
    “Whoa! ” shouted Chester a third time.
    “How did you figure this out? ” asked Violet Kelp.
    Quickly Bethesda explained about the scrap of paper with the mysterious code, and how (with a little help from her dad) she had figured out that the “code” was really a set list. Bethesda skipped over how she got ahold of the code in the first place and didn’t make eye contact with Kevin McKelvey, who was sitting in the fourth row in his blue blazer.
    “Oh, and there’s