“Someone who happens to be six years old and also happens to be named Boris came to Lily Putt’s twice in the last three days,” I said. “Here. I even took a picture of him.”
We were all sitting on the sofa in the library’s media center. I held my phone out so Bahar and Karim could see the shot I’d taken through the snack bar’s window that day.
Bahar nodded knowingly. “Yep. That’s Boris.”
“Taking pictures of strange little six-year-old kids is kind of creepy, Sam,” Karim said.
I put away my phone. “ ‘Creepy’ doesn’t even begin to describe Boris.”
I lowered my voice to the kind of whisper you’d use in one of those scenes where all the lights go out in a horror film. “I saw his mom and dad, too. I talked to them. I made them all Little Charlie’s Haunted Burgers. They eat real food. Well. I think they do, at least. I didn’t actually see any of them eat anything. They only said they liked it.”
“My theory is that Boris and his parents just absorb nutrients though their skin in the bathwater, which explains the milk and Diet Coke thing,” Karim said. Then I saw him typing on his phone another entry on the list of things he knew about the Monster People.
I kept my voice in a whisper. “Yeah. But they’re hiring me to cook dinner for them tomorrow night.”
“Dude. You’re going inside the Purdy House? To feed them?” Karim asked, horrified.
“I know. I don’t know what came over me, but when they asked if I could do it, and then told me how much they were willing to pay, I just couldn’t say no.”
Karim shook his head and made a kind of pitying click with his tongue.
“I’ll be there. I’m sitting for Boris again,” Bahar said.
“Karim, you have to be my helper. Come with me,” I said.
“Sorry. I don’t cook, Sam.”
“Please?”
“No.”
“I’d do it for you,” I said.
“No you wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t say yes to going inside that place. Not ever. What were you thinking?”
I put my face in my hands and rested my elbows on my knees. I was so confused. Maybe they had put me under some kind of trance-inducing spell or something.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” I said.
I was on the verge of tears, but no kid in a kilt wants to cry inside a public library. Maybe I’d ask Mom or Dad to call the Monster People and cancel the catering job.
But I could never cancel a cooking opportunity. So I just sat there and tried not to cry, unsure of what I’d gotten myself into, or what I was going to do about it.
“Hey, Karim, Bahar. Hey, Sam.”
None of us had even noticed that Brenden Saltarello had been there the whole time, watching a stream from a baseball game on one of the library’s computers.
Karim didn’t say anything.
Bahar said, “Hi, Brenden.”
“I like the kilt, Sam. Pretty daring,” Brenden said. “Maybe one day it’ll catch on here in Blue Creek.”
Then I wasn’t only miserable. I was also embarrassed. I should have changed into regular Texas-kid clothes before leaving the golf course, but I’d been too disoriented and confused by what had happened with Boris and his parents.
“Huh. Maybe,” I said.
I tucked my kilt between my knees and crossed my legs. I suddenly felt as though the entire world was looking at me, and it made me very uncomfortable. That was the thing about Dad’s kilt-wearing requirements: sometimes I entirely forgot that we were living in Texas, which was a very big state with an unsurprisingly small number of guys who wore kilts.
“Well, I mean, I’d wear one, I think, even though my family’s Italian. So there’s probably a dress-code regulation about that somewhere,” Brenden said.
“You could just call it a plaid mini-toga or something,” I offered.
Then Brenden Saltarello laughed.
I noticed that Karim was definitely not laughing. In fact, he was staring with the same squinty gunslinger eyes that Boris had used on me an hour earlier.
It almost seemed that Karim was jealous or something.
I just didn’t get any of this.
Brenden put on his headphones and turned back to the game he’d been watching.
Karim continued to glare.
Bahar looked at Karim, then at me, and shrugged. Then she mouthed: Someone’s got a crush on someone.
Ugh. This was all too much for me. I could feel the surface temperature of my skin rise by about ten degrees, and could only imagine I was redder than the deepest red on my Clan Abernathy tartan. And I couldn’t stop myself from wondering if Bahar had been thinking about having our usual iced tea again on Saturday, which was just a couple of days from now.
If we made it past Friday, that is.
“Uh. I really need to go home and put on some regular clothes and get some reading done for school,” I said.
It felt like the spiders were doing the wave around and around and around in my stomach.
Bahar said, “Wait. We have one last article. This is the best one, Sam. You’ll see why. It’s from 1994, and there’s someone you know in it.”
I didn’t want to know anyone who’d ever had anything to do with the Purdy House, but now I was stuck, and what had I been thinking? What was I possibly going to prepare for dinner for the Monster People?