Doll Bones Read Online Free PDF Page A

backyard, and I whipped a branch at him. The branch got him good, right above the eye. He was bleeding like crazy, so even though he started it, I was the one who got in trouble. I stomped on cracks all up and down the block. And the next day, she slipped in the garden and sprained her ankle.”
    “No way,” Leo said. Zach could see him mentally filing that away with all his other oddball stories.
    Poppy laughed. “It’s not like she actually broke her back. I mean, it was just a coincidence that she fell. But it scared me at the time. I thought I was some kind of powerful enchanter or something.”
    “And you avoided cracks for years after,” Alice said. “Remember that? You would be crazy careful, always putting your feet sideways and going up on your tiptoes and stuff. You swerved around like a Roomba robot ballerina.”
    “Roombarina,” Zach said automatically. For some reason, words were funnier smashed together.
    “Roombarina,” Alice echoed, spinning on one toe and then stumbling a little. “Exactly.”
    “That’s a good portmanteau,” said Leo. Zach nodded, the way he usually did when he had no idea what Leo was talking about.
    They passed the old Episcopalian church with the big spire as they headed down Main Street. They walked past the barbershop, the pizza place where Zach had birthday parties when he was little, the bus station next to the post office, and the big old graveyard on the hill. Zach had followed this exact route many times, his fingers curled in his mother’s when he was little and then gripping the handlebars of his bike when he was older, and now on foot to and from school. This was the town he’d grown up in, and even though it was small and a lot of the stores on Main Street were closed, even though windows were boarded up and rentals went unrented, Zach was used to the place.
    He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, which was a real stumbling block in imagining running away.

     
    “That stuff is real,” Leo said. “For a while, my parents moved us around a lot, and there was this one apartment we lived in that was haunted. I swear—when the ghost was in the room, the air would get really cold, even in the middle of summer. And there was one spot that was always ice-cold. You could put a space heater on top of it, and it wouldn’t warm up. That’s where somebody died. The landlady even said so.”
    “Did you ever actually see the ghost?” Alice asked.
    Leo shook his head. “No, but sometimes he would move things. Like my mom’s keys. Mom would yell for the ghost to give them back, and then, nine times out of ten, she’d find them right after. Mom says you have to know how to talk to ghosts or they’ll walk all over you.”
    Poppy smiled like she did when she was anticipating revealing something exciting—a twist to a story, a shocking turn, a villain’s big move. Her cheeks were pink from the wind, and her eyes were bright. “Have you ever heard this one? When you drive past a cemetery, you have to hold your breath. If you don’t, the spirits of the newly dead can get in your body through your mouth and then they can possess you.”
    Zach shivered, the hairs along his neck rising. Without meaning to, he imagined the taste of a ghost, like an acrid mouthful of smoke. He spat in the dirt, trying to untaste the idea.
    “Ugh,” Alice said into the silence that followed the end of Poppy’s story. “You made me hold my breath! I was totally just trying not to inhale. Anyway, we already passed the graveyard—shouldn’t you have told us the story before we passed it? Unless you wanted us to get possessed.”
    Zach thought again about the night before and the feeling of something right behind him, breathing on his neck, something that was about to reach out and grasp for him with its cold fingers. The story was like that, grabbing hold of him and promising that he’d think about it every time he was near a graveyard.
    Poppy kept smiling. She made her eyes really