A Musical Mayhem

27 - Arielle (Part 1)

Okay. So. To be honest, I didn't really like Ivy. The reasons why?

1. She was kind of snotty.

2. She also played the flute, which, for whatever reason, only made me think worse about her.

3. She kind of seemed sus, for a reason that I wasn't exactly sure of. I don't know, like maybe she was up to something.

4. I was pretty sure she liked Claude. As, like, more than a friend, even though all three of us literally only recently met each other. I didn't know why I cared if she did or didn't, though. And I didn't know why I had gotten so upset when Claude had told me that he possibly liked Ivy.

But now, I had to deal with her, because Bree, Flynn, Claude, Ivy, and I were all riding rental bikes to Paris's Eiffel Tower.

Yeah. Kind of a long story.

But here we were now, taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower and swooning over the view of it. I honestly didn't even know why Ivy had just happened to show up and had decided to tag along, but she hadn't been bratty to me or anything, for now. And since Claude obviously seemed to like her back, who was I to stand in their way? It wasn't like Claude had ever liked me that way, anyway.

"Okay, now what?" Flynn asked, smirking. Had he always been this annoying? Or was it just because I was in a pretty rotten mood in general today?

"I dunno, we just look around," Bree replied absentmindedly. "Isn't just the view of this enough for you, Flynn? Or, should I say, Cheesebrain?"

Okay, so, that was apparently Bree's nickname for him now. Even though I was pretty sure I had read the word "Cheesebrain" somewhere in one of those Geronimo Stilton books when I was little. Anyway, Bree was doing a pretty good job being nasty to Flynn. That's what he seemed to like, though, strangely enough.

"Wait," Ivy suddenly interrupted. I did an instinctive eye roll in my head, but something in the tone of her voice somehow made all of us turn to her, even though everything around us was just loud.

". . . Who is that?"

We all whipped our heads around, trying to pinpoint where Ivy was staring. I followed her eyes to a spot near the Eiffel Tower, but I didn't see anything.

"Where, Ivy? Who?" Bree said, alarm in her voice.

"Wait, he's gone now," Ivy said, shaking her head and burying her forehead in her palm.

"What did he look like?" Claude asked, in that wonderful voice of his that I always just loved hearing. That just made me despise myself even more. Why did I even care about something like that? Normal friends didn't care about how "wonderful" each other's voices sounded.

"He was wearing this, like, ridiculous black onesie or something. With a black mask, covering his entire head, and hair, and everything. He . . . he was watching us," Ivy said, rubbing her temples.

We all perked up after hearing that, because based on Ivy's description, the person who was watching us was the one and only . . . Masked Guy.

"Just watching us? Was he doing anything more?" Flynn asked, looking around.

"No, but, I don't know, he had . . . binoculars with him or something." Ivy said this as if she were reading a confusing article and was asking a question but didn't even know what the question was. "I think he was spying on us. I have no idea who he is, but I'm getting really creeped out right now. No matter what my sense of style says about me otherwise."