18 scaring for dollars
It’s a quiet, cool summer night and the streets are empty. I carefully make my way through the neighborhood, ducking in and out of the shadows.
I’m really good at ducking in and out of shadows. If I wasn’t so into monsters, shadow-ducking would be my second career choice.
The houses on Decatur Lane all sort of look the same, especially in the dark. I reach into my bag of tricks for a small flashlight and a scrap of paper.
I switch over to my night–vision goggles and start scanning the mailboxes for house numbers.
“Hot dog, there it is!” I whisper to myself as I dart across the street toward the Templeton house.
I feel my way down the boards of the tall fence . . .
. . . the gate is unlocked, just like Tommy said!
I duck into the shadow of the bushes (see, again with the ducking into shadows, because, like I said, I’m a total expert) and I peer out at the small sun porch where the sleepover is happening.
Now the boring part. The sitting and waiting for the lights to go out. But Tommy said that should be in about an hour, and he’s been right so far. So I settle down with my new issue of Hugo the Boy Zombie Wizard and wait.
Ten. Thirty. Fifty minutes pass. And then ping!
It’s showtime! I pull out the silhouettes and ready the turbo flashlight. Hopefully Tommy got the pole ghosts into position like he said he would. I start to crawl out from the darkness of the bushes.
And suddenly, I hear a snort. Then a deep, low, rumbling ggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrowwwwwwlllllll.
And I’m absolutely sure I would have remembered if good ol’ Tommy said something about . . .
That’s a bad detail to leave out.
Don’t get me wrong, I love dogs. And normally they love me.
So I squeeze up into a tight ball and get ready to be ripped apart. Though, seriously, can you really prepare for that?
And just like that, the dogs are gone! Disappeared! For a second I think maybe they were neverreally there. But no, I can still smell their doggie breath. Just no doggies!
“Sheesh, boy! You don’t know nothing about handling no hound dogs, do you?”
“Good thing we showed up when we did! Look that way to you, Jessup?”
“And how, Jasper! They was about to turn him into little bitty Desmond meatballs!”
“Ricky! What—” I gasp.
“Aw, your Mom called my grandma because she was worried about you,” Ricky says, rolling his eyes. “And I called everybody else.”
“Everybody?” I ask.
“All right, y’all, let’s be honest now . . . we all know the real tar that holds this old row boat together . . . ”
“Enough with the love–fest, already,” says Becky. “There’s a bunch of creepy nine–year–olds in there waiting to get the snot scared out of ’em!”