“So what happened to your ghost?”

Zoe, Bernard, and I were minding our own business in our spot on the playground when Ralph swaggered over. Wearing his bow tie, of course.

“Why do you care?” asked Bernard.

Ralph shrugged. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you had a ghost or a snake in your house.”

“We chased the ghost out of the house,” said Zoe. (We’d decided that was our official story, and we were sticking to it.) “We’re certified ghost hunters now. We’ve even got these.” She handed him our official ghost-hunter certificates. She was the one who made them, but Ralph didn’t need to know that.

“What matters is that we were prepared,” she said when she gave them to us. “And if there HAD been a ghost, we would have been ready for it.”

“Would we have?” Bernard had asked, looking skeptically at the ghost-hunter certificate.

“Definitely,” said Zoe. She’d even made a certificate for Lucy, who had hung it up on her wall next to her karate trophies.

Ralph frowned at the certificates. “This doesn’t prove anything,” he said. “I still think Sam Wu-ser is a big scaredy-cat baby.”

I stepped forward. “I am NOT,” I said.

“Are too,” said Ralph.

“Just wait until tomorrow,” I said.

I knew what I had to do.

There was only one way to prove to Ralph, my class, and the whole world that I wasn’t Scaredy-Cat Sam.

After school that day, I went up to my room to put my plan in motion. It was a plan that required extreme bravery, but I was ready.

I went right up to Fang’s tank. “All right, Fang,” I said, staring him down. “It’s just you and me.”

“I’m here, too, you know,” said Lucy. I didn’t want to risk getting Fang out of his cage on my own, so Lucy was there just in case he decided to make another run for it.

I reached into the tank and picked him up the way the pet store owner had showed me. He wrapped around my arm. It was terrifying. But there were no incidents.

“I think he likes you!” said Lucy.

“I think he’d like to eat me,” I said, because I still wasn’t totally sure that Fang wouldn’t eat me if he had the chance.

I put him in the special travel container my parents had bought just for this very occasion.

“Make sure the lid is on!” said Lucy.

Butterbutt wandered in and started to attack my feet.

“Lucy! Get Butterbutt out of here!”

“Come on, Butterbutt,” she said.

I brought Fang’s special container up to my face so we were eye to eye. “I’m counting on you,” I said. “And if you are going to eat anyone, make sure it’s Ralph. NOT me, okay?”

Fang stuck his tongue out a couple of times.

I was pretty sure that meant yes.