The Chaos Read Online Free PDF Page B

had happened to Auntie Mryss. What was Dad’s word for ghosts, again? Oh, yeah; duppies. But if it was a ghost, what the rass was it a ghost of? It looked like a disembodied animal’s head, a cross between a dog’s and a sea horse’s, all covered in short fur. “Hey, Ben; are you a good dancer?”
    “Pretty good.” He snickered. “Better than Stephen, anyway. Guy dances like somebody Tasered him. Thing is, though,” he continued, “I’m good, but Glory’s right; you’re genius. You dance like . . . well, not an angel. Not with those skanky moves you got going on. But, like, I dunno, like dance is a language, and you were born speaking it.”
    I did mention that I love Ben, right? “But is it really so hard to do what I do? You just listen to the music, and you move.” To demonstrate, I did a slide step into a running man.
    “Tell that to Stephen.”

CHAPTER THREE
    FIVE THINGS ABOUT YOU THAT LOTS OF PEOPLE DON’T KNOW
     
    1. I like hanging out with my dad’s crazy cousin Maryssa. Sometimes I think she sees the Horseless Head Men too, except she can’t really be seeing them, because they’re not real. They’re coming from my brain, but I don’t know what they are. Which is weird. After all, they’re my hallucination, so you’d think I’d know what my own brain’s cooking up, wouldn’t you?
     
    2. I actually used to think my mom and dad were kinda cool. Not anymore. Nowadays, they’re both just harsh. I’m never gonna forgive them for what they did to Rich. They may have ruined his whole life! It’s one thing making me wear those old-lady clothes and giving me a curfew, but calling the cops on your own son?
     
    3. I’m scared. All the time. I keep waiting for some girl who’s cooler than me to start whispering about me behind my back. Then the other girls will start it, and the boys will follow them, and then I’ll be so dead.
     
    4. I keep having nightmares. And they do things to me.
     
    5. I think I may be going crazy.
     
    “Pangaea,” I said to Ben as we walked down the school corridor to the girls’ change room, “sounds like it’d be a neat name for a band.”
    Ben waved a dismissive hand. “Whatever. I just think that’s more a geography topic than something for history class, that’s all.”
    “That’s ’cause you’re failing geography. I keep telling you, you should let me coach you.” We walked around Lester Romero, who’d dropped to his knees in front of me, announcing loudly to anyone in earshot that he would work hard and give me all his money, if I would only give him one kiss. I was still wearing my shorts from dance practice. I pretended I hadn’t heard him. Lester was the class clown. In school, I guess everyone has their own way of protecting themselves. But I bet that Lester’s wasn’t getting him a whole lot of play.
    Ben said, “Lester would be cute, if he stopped playing the fool like that all the time.”
    “I think Pangaea is both history and geography. Can you imagine the whole world when it was one giant continent? And there weren’t any birds, just pterosaurs, and the seas—well, the sea, there would have only been one—was full of plesiosaurs and mosasaurs? Isn’t that cool?”
    Ben was still looking back at Lester Romero. “That’s just like you, girl. Guy right in front of you here and now, begging foryou, and you’re on about something that was, like, twenty gazillion years ago.”
    “Two hundred fifty million years ago. Besides, I smiled at him, didn’t I? It’s not like I cut him totally dead.”
    “You, my friend, can be a total geek sometimes. Why do you even know what a mosasaur is? Hey; what’s going on?”
    We stopped at the small crowd of kids gathered in the hallway just in front of the girls’ change room. “Out of the way, please,” said a man’s voice from behind us, loud and terse.
    We stepped back in time to let three paramedics run through, pushing one of those collapsible stretchers on wheels. They yelled for