Big news, class,” Ms. Garcia says on Monday. She always wears precisely coordinated clothing—red sweater with black pants and red shoes or blue dress with blue high heels and blue earrings. Today she’s wearing lemon-yellow heels and a daisy-patterned dress. Despite her cheery outfits, she hasn’t smiled once during my whole first week at Poppy View Middle School. But today she does. “Field trip for the seventh grade coming up this Friday,” she says, passing around pink paper.

While I wait for the permission slips to come around, I think about Mercedes and our mission. The more I thought about going to find Francisco Gómez, the more it seemed like a bad idea. I wouldn’t dare tell Mercedes this, but I’m worried it won’t work. Even with my supplies, my Operation D.A.D. plans, and Mercedes’s allowance, I’m not sure. How will we find the right bus? The transfer? What about the walk to the campus? Even though we had talked through it all, I wasn’t ready to leave when Bob picked me up from Mercedes’s house on Saturday morning. It felt like we just needed to plan for one more thing.

When I got home, my mom, who was in the middle of painting the bathroom, asked about the sleepover.

“It was fine.”

She pulled a long length of blue tape and lined it up with the trim. Then she handed the tape to me. “Can you do that side?” I knelt on the bathroom tiles. “I knew you would make friends right away,” she said.

“Mercedes? Huh,” I say. I wouldn’t call her a friend.

The tape made a belching sound as my mom pulled it off the roll. “You know,” she said, “Mercedes is an unusual name.”

I shrugged, but my stomach churned as I wondered if my mom actually knew about Mercedes. I thought about Mercedes warning me not to get moms involved.

“Everyone thinks she’s named after the car,” I said, hoping random conversation might distract my mom.

She laughed. “I imagine they do. But Mercedes is a common Spanish name. In fact, I knew someone named Mercedes a long time ago.”

I squinted at her, trying to figure out what she knew. But my mom went back to taping, and I knew then that she doesn’t know anything about Mercedes Miller. And I knew that we had to go to find Francisco Gómez.

“Get your parents’ signatures in by Wednesday,” Ms. Garcia is saying, “or you’re not going.”

“Field trips are the best!” November calls out, pumping his fist.

“Permission slips and appropriate behavior, November Harris.”

“Sorry, Ms. Garcia,” November says.