“Hey, Jendra!” called Lien Hua with a smile. She was dancing around the room, shaking her butt. “Ready to do your ceremonial dance? Tina’s got the toupee.”
“And the dentures,” said Jamey Fitzhughston darkly, pulling them out of the lunch box.
“Gross!” I exclaimed. “Put those away! They’re disgusting.”
“Jendra,” said Tina in a reprimanding tone. “Are you trying to say our sacred ceremony is disgusting?”
“Well,” I said slowly. “That wasn’t what I was saying, but . . . yes.”
Tina sighed and tossed her hair. “Well, we weren’t asking for your opinion,” she said shortly. “Now come over here so we can start the ceremony.”
“I’d rather not,” I told her.
“What?” Tina acted shocked that I would question something she said.
I tried to work up my courage. “I said I’d rather not,” I repeated. “Tina, I don’t know how to tell you this, but . . . uh . . .” Finally I just spit it out, saying, “I don’t want to be a part of the cheerleaders’ conclave anymore.”
“What?” Tina screeched. From its sacred place inside the glass case, the pompon seemed to stir. Then it started to glow with a strange green light. The room got even warmer than usual, and I began feeling really scared. The whole glowing thing made me remember that freaky dream—the dream about Athena and Ares in the science room, and I started getting kind of worried. I mean, what if it was true?
“Nothing,” I said hastily. “Nothing.”
Tina smiled slowly, and the pompon settled down. “Well, that’s good,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you getting any crazy ideas. Jendra, that could be dangerous.”
“Yeah,” said Jamey Fitzhughston sinisterly. “We wouldn’t want to have to do to you what we did to Chrystal.”
“What you did to Chrystal?” I repeated, taking a step back.
“Jamey!” Tina exclaimed, glaring at her good and hard. “Stop. You’re scaring her.”
“Hold on a minute,” I said. Now I was getting really worried. “I thought you said the guys on the basketball team were harassing Chrystal and made her leave.” Just as I said that, I remembered that in my dream Tina had said, “We shouldn’t have tried to frame the basketball boys.”
“Tina,” I began hesitantly, not quite sure how to put it. “Were you completely honest with me about what happened to Chrystal?”
“Let’s not talk about that right now,” Tina said as she tossed Mr. Talbert’s dentures back and forth between her hands.
“No, I think we should talk about it right now,” I told her, feeling really suspicious. “If you guys did something sinister to Chrystal, I think I have a right to know. I mean, after all, I am her replacement.”
“All right,” said Jamey with an evil chuckle, “we did. There. Are you happy now?”
“No!” I exclaimed. I turned in the direction of the door, but Tina stopped me by grabbing my arm.
“Jendra,” she said. “Don’t get the wrong idea.” Her voice sounded friendly, but her fingernails were sharp, and they were really digging into my skin.
“Ouch!” I yelped. “Tina, let go of me!”
“You can’t leave yet!” Tina insisted. “Jendra, you don’t understand. We had to get rid of Chrystal. She turned her back on the conclave. She was going to betray all of our secrets.”
“What secrets?” I whined, trying to twist out of her grasp.
“Well, we wouldn’t tell you now,” said Jamey Fitzhughston, like I was totally retarded. “You just said that you wanted to leave. Besides, Chrystal did more than that. She also stole Ares. She stole him, and she threw him into the furnace. I saw her with my own eyes. She was a traitor.”
“Yes,” Tina agreed. “She was a traitor to the conclave, and that’s why we banished her to another dimension.”
“Another dimension!” I exclaimed in horror. “You banished her to another dimension just because she stole some stupid pompon?” Just then I made a chilling realization. “Mr. Talbert was on to you, too, wasn’t he? He figured out that you were the ones who stole his pants that day, and the ones who got rid of Chrystal. And so, you’re the ones who—”
“Of course,” said Jamey. “You didn’t believe that old a-light-fixture-fell-on-his-head story, did you? That’s the lamest excuse Tina’s come up with in a long time.”
“Tina!” I confronted her.
Tina sighed in exasperation. “Well, Jendra!” she justified. “We have to have a sacrifice! The pompon must be appeased!”
She turned to face the back wall, and I noticed for the first time that somebody was tied up in the corner. He wasn’t wearing his toupee or his dentures, but still I was pretty sure it was Mr. Talbert.
“I don’t believe this!” I yelled. “You weren’t planning a memorial ceremony for Mr. Talbert at all. You had a much more sinister reason for needing his toupee and dentures. You were planning to banish him to another dimension.”
“Sure,” Jamey said. “Well, that or kill him. We were going to flip a coin.”
Then suddenly I realized something else. The Twinkies. “You poisoned the whole basketball team with Twinkies, didn’t you?” I said. “To make it look like they all took the day off so they couldn’t be blamed for Chrystal’s disappearance, which made them look doubly suspicious. And that means that I gave Mrs. O’Donnahee a poisoned Twinkie, too. It made her sick! And that’s why you didn’t want me to eat that Twinkie!”
“Well, that,” said Tina, “and plus Twinkies are really fattening. Did you know that Twinkies have a shelf life of twenty years? Now, honestly, Jendra, do you really want a big yellow hunk of saturated fat sailing through your veins? I saved your life!”
“Why, so you could sacrifice me?” I screamed theatrically.
“No,” Tina said, trying to calm me down. “Why would we want to sacrifice you, Jendra? We only sacrifice traitors.”
“And is Mr. Talbert a traitor?”
From the back corner Mr. Talbert was looking really worried.
“Mr. Talbert,” said Jamey, “is a threat to our survival. We have to sacrifice him to appease the pompon. Don’t you understand?”
“I understand you’re all a bunch of psychos,” I said, starting for the door again. I finally managed to twist away from Tina, but when I got to the door, I found that I was blocked by an invisible wall.
Running’s no good, said the voice inside my head. They’ll only chase you. They might even push you into the canal. And then you could drown.
“LaKaisha will never let you out,” Jamey said ominously. She sounded really evil, and now I was starting to get scared.
“LaKaisha, let me go!” I screamed, banging into her temporarily transparent body with my fist. I’m telling you, LaKaisha must have been the girl of steel or something because she never budged an inch.
But then, when I looked past LaKaisha to the doorway, I saw a sight that horrified me, in every imaginable way.
“Leah!” I exclaimed, my eyes bugging out of my head.
Standing behind me, in the doorway, in her pajamas, wet from head to toe, was my best friend Leah Livingston, looking a little sleepy—and a lot scared!