Ninth Key Read Online Free PDF Page B

whispered into his ear as I went by, “that you two practiced safe sex that night at Kelly’s pool party. I’m not ready to be a stepaunt yet.”
    “Shut up,” Dopey yelled at me. “You…you…Fungus Hands!”
    I put one of my fungus hands over my heart, and pretended like he’d stabbed me there.
    “Gosh,” I said. “That really hurts. Making fun of people’s allergic reactions is so incredibly incisive and witty.”
    “Yeah, dork,” Sleepy said to Dopey, as he walked by. “What about you and cat dander, huh?”
    Dopey, in out of his depth, began to look desperate.
    “Debbie Mancuso,” he yelled, “and I are not having sex!”
    I saw my mom and Andy exchange a quick, bewildered glance.
    “I should certainly hope not,” Doc, Dopey’s little brother, said as he breezed past us. “But if you are, Brad, I hope you’re using condoms. While a good-quality latex condom has a failure rate of about two percent when used as directed, typically the failure rate averages closer to twelve percent. That makes them only about eighty-five percent effective against preventing pregnancy. If used with a spermicide, the effectiveness improves dramatically. And condoms are our best defense — though not as good, of course, as abstention — against some STDs, including HIV.”
    Everyone in the kitchen — my mother, Andy, Dopey, Sleepy, and I — stared at Doc, who is, as I think I mentioned before, twelve.
    “You,” I finally said, “have way too much time on your hands.”
    Doc shrugged. “It helps to be informed. While I myself am not sexually active at the current time, I hope to become so in the near future.” He nodded toward the stove. “Dad, your chimichangas, or whatever they are, are on fire.”
    While Andy jumped to put out his cheese fire, my mother stood there, apparently, for once in her life, at a loss for words.
    “I —” she said. “I…oh. My.”
    Dopey wasn’t about to let Doc have the last word. “I am not,” he said, again, “having sex with —”
    “Aw, Brad,” Sleepy said. “Put a sock in it, will ya?”
    Dopey, of course, wasn’t lying. I’d seen for myself that they’d only been playing tonsil hockey. Dopey and Debbie’s fiery passion was the reason I had to keep slathering my hands with cortisone cream. But what was the fun of having stepbrothers if you couldn’t torture them? Not that I was going to tell anyone what I’d seen, of course. I am many things, but not a snitch. But don’t get me wrong: I would have liked Dopey to have gotten caught sneaking out while he was grounded. I mean, I don’t think he’d exactly learned anything from his “punishment.” He would still probably refer to my friend Adam as a fag the next time he saw him.
    Only he wouldn’t do it in my presence. Because, wrestler or not, I could kick Dopey’s butt from here to Clinton Avenue, my street back in Brooklyn.
    But I wasn’t going to be the one to turn him in. It just wasn’t classy, you know?
    “And did you,” my mother asked me, with a smile, “feel that the student government meeting was as bitching as Brad seems to think it was, Suze?”
    I sat down at my place at the dining table. As soon as I did so, Max, the Ackerman family dog, came snuffling along and put his head in my lap. I pushed it off my lap. He put it right back. Although I’d lived there less than a month, Max had already figured out that I am the person in the household most likely to have leftovers on my plate.
    Mealtime was, of course, the only time Max paid attention to me. The rest of the time, he avoided me like the plague. He especially avoided my bedroom. Animals, unlike humans, are very perceptive about paranormal phenomena, and Max sensed Jesse, and accordingly stayed far away from the parts of the house where he normally hung out.
    “Sure,” I said, taking a sip of ice water. “It was bitching.”
    “And what,” my mother wanted to know, “was decided at this meeting?”
    “I made a motion to cancel