Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls Read Online Free PDF Page B

become especially insane toward me since her brother and I got together. And it’s bad enough to have sweaty hands on your own, but when you’re holding hands with someone else?
    That’s just
embarrassing
.
    So when Casey asks, “What’s wrong?” I slip—or more like
slurp
—my hand out of his and wipe it on my tattered shirt. “Your sister’s here.”
    He looks around. “Heather is? Where?”
    “Right over there,” I whisper, because she’s only about twenty feet away, standing off to the side of the dirt driveway that leads up to the haunted house.
    “Where?”
    Just then Marissa and Holly grab me and whisper, “Is that
Heather
?”
    “Where?”
Casey asks again, so I nod at the bloodsucker convention and say, “Right
there
. In the fishnets.”
    Heather turns her head to blow out cigarette smoke, and when she sees us staring and realizes who we are, she freezes. Then Tenille and Monet see us and their faces immediately go, Uh-oh.
    For a second it’s like time stands still. Then, without flinching a muscle, Heather drops her cigarette.
    It’s sly.
    Controlled.
    Like, cigarette? What cigarette?
    She doesn’t even bother to grind it out with her boot.
    Without moving my lips, I ask Casey, “She doesn’t know you know she smokes?”
    “I
didn’t
know.”
    I want to say, You didn’t? Where have you been? but then he says, “And she sure didn’t look like that when she left the house.”
    I kinda shrug. “Uh, neither did you?”
    “Yeah, but she was dressed as Red Riding Hood.”
    “
Heather
was?” Then under my breath I say, “She’s more like the Big Bad Wolf.”
    “And she told Mom she was going to a party at Tenille’s house.”
    Now, I may not believe in vampires, but all of a sudden there’s another streak of lightning and crack of thunder, and if eyes could flash red, Heather’s did. She marches over and gets right in Casey’s face. “If you narc, you are so dead, you hear me?”
    Billy laughs. “He’s already dead, can’t you see that?”
    Heather ignores him and tries to stare Casey down, but Casey just shakes his head and holds her gaze. “You’re an embarrassment.”
    “No,
you’re
an embarrassment. You’re a dweeb and you hang out with dweeby losers.”
    Their eyes stay locked for another few seconds, and then Casey steps around her and heads over to Heather’s little pack of friends.
    “Hey!” she calls. “Where are you going?”
    But Casey just keeps on walking, and when he gets to her group, he tells the rocker guys, “She’s thirteen. You got that? Thirteen.”
    Their eyelinered eyes bug out and they look at each other like, Whoa. Then one of them says, “Thanks, man,” and they both glance at Heather like, We are so out of here, and take off.
    “I hate you!” Heather screams in Casey’s face. “Stay out of my business! Stay out of my life!”
    “I’d like to,” he tells her, “but when you see a toxic spill, it’s kind of your duty to try and contain it.”
    “What?” she screeches at him.
    “You’re toxic, Heather. You need, like, caution tape all around you.”
    “Yeah? Well you need caution tape all over your mouth!”
    Casey just rolls his eyes and walks away.
    She grabs him and says, “I’m serious. If you narc, I will kill you!”
    Casey stops and turns to face her. And real calmly he says, “You’ll kill me. Really.”
    Heather goes a little shifty-eyed, then snarls, “Narc and find out.”
    He stares at her a minute, then walks away.
    “Do you want to leave?” I whisper, because I don’t know if he’s mad, or shocked, or embarrassed, or maybe a combination of all of those, but I can tell he’s pretty upset.
    He shakes his head. “No. Come on. Let’s go.”
    So we start toward the haunted house, and as we’rewalking along, Billy says, “It must totally
bite
to have her as a sister,” and does his best vampire look.
    Casey snorts and says, “Well, it definitely sucks.”
    Billy laughs. “Dude, we need to get you some