Mom felt so bad about abandoning me with Mr. Death, she was doing practically anything I wanted. Except canceling the move to Vegas. Believe me, I tried. So instead, the next night I asked Tripp over for a sleepover.
Mom doesn’t let me have Tripp over for sleepovers very often, because this is how they usually go:
5:00 p.m.: Tripp arrives.
5:19 p.m.: Dad has to find his hammer to fix something Tripp broke.
6:00 p.m.: Dinnertime, during which Tripp devours everything in sight while simultaneously ruining everyone else’s appetites by talking about something totally not dinner appropriate, like foot fungus or the longest snot he ever sneezed out or how good Heave is at turning his eyelids inside out.
6:30–9:00 p.m.: Dad. Hammer. Various places around the house.
9:00 p.m.–dawn: Mom repeatedly comes into my room to tell Tripp to stop talking/stop bouncing a ball against the wall/stop jumping on the bed/stop making that noise/stop … just stop.
So normally I don’t even bother to ask, because I kind of feel sorry for my parents when Tripp is around. He seems to be an awful lot of work. But I was dying to tell him about my night in the Death Lair.
He surprised me in my bedroom, where I was getting a head start on an epic fort.
“Hey,” he said, hanging his head upside down over the fort entrance.
“I didn’t hear you fall,” I said.
“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t?”
He shook his head.
“You made it all the way up my stairs and into my room without falling?”
He nodded, grinning.
“Are you … okay?”
“I’m great!” he said. He tossed his sleeping bag onto my desk chair and crawled into the fort with me. “So what’s the big story?”
“I had to spend the night with the zombie.”
Tripp’s mouth dropped open. “You mean …?” He pointed over his shoulder toward Mr. Death’s house. I nodded. “And …?”
So I told him all about my night at Mr. Death’s house, from Comet eating my shoe until Mom rescuing me. I told him about the space room and the way Mr. Death had flipped his lid when I’d messed it up. Tripp hung on to every word.
“You think he’s gonna come after you? Like, for revenge? Turn you into one of them?” He cocked his head to one side and rolled his eyes upward, letting his tongue loll out while he groaned, zombielike.
“Of course not.” Actually, I kind of did, just a little bit. In fact, it was pretty much all I’d thought about since it happened. “Do you?”
“Nah, zombies aren’t revenge seekers. They just go after the smell of fresh face.” He lapsed back into his zombie pose and groaned louder. “Faaace! Neeed faaace!”
I threw a pillow at him. “Cut it out, it’s not funny!”
“Faaace!”
I bounced a stuffed bear off his forehead. “This is very serious, Tripp. He lives between us, you know. He’s your next-door neighbor, too.”
“Yeah, but nobody wants to come to our house. My mom calls us ‘neighbor repellant.’ Yummy faaace!”
He made a move to grab my shoulders, his teeth bared, and in jumping back I knocked down the blanket that had been my fort wall. “That’s it!” I yelled, and launched at him.
We wrestled for a while, until Mom burst into my room, looking panicked, holding Dad’s hammer. “What’s broken?” she asked.
We sat up, our faces flushed and sweaty, and gazed around the room.
“Nothing,” we both said in surprise.
After dinner, we waited for the sun to go down and then took CICM outside. Tripp ate a Popsicle while I flashed the lights toward Mars, the buzz of the cicadas in the trees rising and falling around us.
“So where were you last night?” I asked. “When I was at Mr. Death’s house.”
“Nowhere,” Tripp said casually.
“You weren’t home. Priya checked.”
“Oh, that. I was out.”
“Out where?”
“I forget.”
“You forget where you were? How does someone just forget where they were one day ago?”
He took a big bite of Popsicle. “I don’t know, I just forgot.”
This made no sense. This was strange behavior, even for Tripp, who was strange enough to begin with. “What are you hiding?”
He slid the last of his Popsicle into his mouth and fumbled the stick off the eaves. Comet caught it in the air and ate it in two chomps. “Did you see that?” he asked. “That dog is awesome! You should put him in the circus!”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “And now you’re evading.”
“I’m not evading anything. I’m just enjoying my Popsicle while taking in nature.” He gestured toward the woods and then jumped. “Dude! Look!” He pointed to the woods again.
At first I didn’t see it. “You’re just trying to change the subject,” I said, but no sooner had the words left my mouth than it all came into focus.
The woods were staring back at me. Slowly, with shaking hands, I turned my flashlight toward a line of bushes. Two eyes glinted back at me from within a black hoodie, perfectly still and surrounded by vegetation at the edge of the trees. Mr. Death’s cheeks rose with a slow grin when I lit up his face. Quickly, I clicked the flashlight off, my heart pounding.
“Is that …?” Tripp whispered.
I nodded. “I think so.”
“He’s watching us,” Tripp whispered. “Why is he watching us?”
“He’s not,” I said. “He’s just … setting traps. Rabbit traps.”
Tripp turned to me. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I know,” I said.
“He’s planning his next meal is what he’s doing. He’s scoping out the best way to get up here and get us while we’re sleeping. Does this window have a lock?”
Suddenly we both became very interested in window craftsmanship. We climbed inside and inspected the locks at the top of my window, making sure they were secure. When we finally decided they could probably mostly keep out a zombie, Tripp went over to lay out his sleeping bag.
I clicked the flashlight back on and, trembling, shone it back into the woods.
Mr. Death was gone.
So was any chance Tripp and I would sleep that night.
Where was Mom with her hammer when I needed her?