Chapter 15

“Look who’s here,” Marion said as Cammy and Tracy walked into the lunchroom. Immediately a group of girls gathered. Marion jumped up and glanced back at me. “Aren’t you coming?”

It was like a rock concert. The only thing missing was the fainting. I could hear the girls talking several tables away.

“We thought you were dead.”

“Where were you?”

“How did it happen?”

“Were you scared?”

“How’d you get away?”

Mr. Forster came through and shooed everyone away, but as soon as he was gone, the noise returned with whispers, then got louder and louder.

A few minutes later Marion returned.

“Attacked by aliens?” I said.

“No, they said it was the guy who sits outside the Toot Toot. The weird one with the army jacket and stringy hair.”

I knew him. He sat in a rocking chair on the wooden sidewalk and slept or read. Once I saw him scribbling on paper as I walked by. He smelled like a wet animal—I guess because he slept outside—and I was surprised someone didn’t ask him to move.

“What did he do?”

Marion scooted closer. “Cammy said he grabbed them both by the wrists when they were headed home. He pulled them behind the row of shops next to the Toot Toot and into an old shed back there. He put duct tape on their hands and feet.”

“Why would he do that?”

Marion shrugged. “They said he was mumbling at them, real angry. Then he left, and they got away before he came back.”

Cammy and Tracy aren’t my two favorite people on the planet, but I felt sorry for them. That would have given me nightmares forever.

“The police have given the guy’s picture to the media,” Marion said. “I guess he was arrested before.”

Cammy and Tracy had a new group of kids around them and seemed to be telling their story again and again.