The next day, I answered the door to find Tripp crouched on my front porch rubbing his shin. I couldn’t count how many times I’d found Tripp this way—grimacing, massaging a knot on his head or sucking on a jammed finger or hopping around on one foot.
Tripp had a real name. It’s just nobody could remember it anymore. It may have been Roberto. Or maybe I just imagined it being Roberto because Tripp had freckles and red hair and he didn’t look anything at all like a Roberto, so thinking of him as a Roberto was kind of funny.
Actually, it may have been Jason.
Or Todd.
Once I asked his little brother Dodge what Tripp’s real name was and even he couldn’t remember. Come to think of it, he couldn’t remember what his real name was, either. But he did agree that thinking of Tripp as Roberto was funny.
It didn’t matter what Tripp’s real name was, anyway. Everyone called him Tripp. As in:
Tripped over the teacher’s desk on the first day of kindergarten and made her spill her coffee down the front of her dress.
Tripped and fell into the pond surrounding Monkey Island at the zoo on our first-grade field trip, causing the zookeepers to have to shut down Monkey Island for two hours so they could calm down the freaked-out monkeys. Which actually kind of made him a rock star for all of first grade.
Tripped on the first day of middle school and landed on a ketchup bottle, which squirted right into Amber Graham’s hair. He was officially no longer a rock star after that.
Tripped and broke his wrist/thumb/ankle/tooth/collarbone/sliding glass door/aquarium/Grandma’s prized china plate collection.
Tripp and I had been part of a best friend trio with Priya since preschool, when he fell into me and knocked me face-first into the sandpit. You would think being best friends with such a klutz would be embarrassing, but actually it wasn’t. I managed to look really graceful and cool while I was around Tripp. Like a gazelle leaping through the forest. Except that I’d found that comparing yourself to a gazelle leaping through things made people look at you funny and say that you’re weird, so I tried not to do it too often.
“I hit that thing,” he said when I opened the door. He pointed toward a moving van at the house that separated his house from mine. The house had been empty for months, ever since the Feldmans moved out. “I didn’t see it and I walked right into it,” Tripp finished. He stood, tested out some weight on his foot by bouncing up and down a little.
“You didn’t see that giant moving van,” I repeated.
He shook his head. “Sprung right up on me.”
I believed it. I’d seen surprising things spring up on Tripp many times before. Whole walls, for example.
He bounced a few more times, then smiled. “I’m good,” he said. “Do I smell cookies?” He pushed past me and walked into the house, following his nose toward the kitchen. “So who’s moving in? Hope he’s our age and has a motorcycle.”
The last thing on earth Tripp needed was a motorcycle.
We rounded the corner into the kitchen, where Mom was sliding warm oatmeal cookies off a cookie sheet onto a cooling rack. Tripp made a beeline for them, stumbling over a stool leg and almost taking the entire cooling rack to the floor with him but catching himself just in time.
“Hello, Tripp,” Mom said, completely unfazed. Mom was used to Tripp, too. I suppose once you see a kid take out the entire handrail on your basement steps, almost losing a few cookies seems like no big deal.
“Hey, Other Mom,” Tripp answered, cramming a cookie into his mouth.
“We’ve got new neighbors,” I said, picking up a cookie and sniffing it, then putting it back onto the cooling rack. “Have you met them?”
Mom shook her head. “No, but I think it’s just one man. Nobody your age.” She plopped more dough onto the cookie sheet in little mounds. If she didn’t stop, we were all going to turn into raisins. We would have to change our name to the Raisin Family. I would have to wear raisin pants, and every time I opened my mouth to talk, a raisin would fly out, and I’d just keep growing raisin-ier and raisin-ier until eventually I turned into a giant raisin monster and then Tripp would have to come after me, shooting an oatmeal cookie batter cannon at me from his motorcycle until I—growling, of course, because all giant monsters made of food growl—exploded and rained down tiny bits of raisins on the whole city.
Actually, that sounded kind of awesome. I picked up the cookie again and ate it in two bites.
“Does the new guy drive a motorcycle?” Tripp asked.
“I didn’t see one,” Mom said. “I think he’s a bit older.”
“Aw, man,” Tripp said, “just some boring old guy, then.”
“How do you know he’s boring? You haven’t even met him yet,” Mom said.
Tripp’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, you’re right. He could be mean and scary with gnarled-up fingernails and acid breath, and he could sleep in a coffin. That would be so cool!”
“Well, now you’re making him sound like a vampire, Tripp,” Mom said.
Immediately I thought about the guy I’d seen the night before. “Mom,” I said, “have you seen him? What does he look like?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t. I think your dad has. You can ask him later.”
I didn’t need to ask Dad. Deep in my gut, I already knew. The burglar in the hoodie I’d seen last night … was moving in!
I grabbed Tripp’s sleeve and pulled. “Come on, let’s go,” I said.
“Bot om ayting,” he said around a mouthful of cookie.
“You can eat it and walk at the same time.” I actually had my doubts about that. Tripp could do almost nothing and walk at the same time.
“Where we going?” he asked when we got outside on the sidewalk.
“To Priya’s,” I told him.
If you live in North America, you can see a V-shaped constellation in the fall night sky. It’s Andromeda, the Chained Maiden. Andromeda’s dad was King Cepheus and her mom was Cassiopeia, who supposedly ticked off the sea nymphs by getting all braggy that she was so much more beautiful than they were. So the sea nymphs tattled on her to Poseidon, who got upset, and, trust me, Poseidon is not a dude you want to get mad at you. Next thing you know, Poseidon was sending some monster to destroy Cepheus’s land. Basically the only way Cepheus and Cassiopeia could get out of it was to sacrifice their beautiful daughter, Andromeda, to the sea monster.
So they totally did. I know, parents of the year, right? Why couldn’t they have been the ones bitten by the scorpion?
Anyway, so they chained Andromeda to a rock and she would have been sea monster supper had Perseus not come along and seen how amazingly stunning and soft she was and fallen in love. Long story short, Perseus saved Andromeda and they got married.
Sometimes, when I thought about that story, and about the beautiful and gentle Andromeda, I thought of Priya.
And that was a new thing, believe me. And, no, I didn’t know where it came from, either.
But I couldn’t help it. Priya started wearing these bracelets that clinked and clanked on her arm, and sometimes she bit her lip when she was thinking hard about an algebra problem, and all of it was very … Andromeda-like.
But if you tell Tripp I said that, I’ll kill you.
Priya lived across the street and two houses down, and her mom and my mom were best friends. Priya was also in our preschool class. She was the one who picked me up out of the sandpit and wiped the sand off the front of my shirt. And then she helped Tripp get up. And then she let us both share her juice box so we could get the sand out of our mouths.
Tripp was so into licking the cookie crumbs off his fingers, he forgot to look up and stubbed his toe on Priya’s front porch step, pitching him forward into the door. So instead of knocking like normal people, we knocked like ka-thud boom! But Priya was every bit as used to opening her front door to a just-tripped Tripp as I was, so she didn’t notice.
“What’s up?” she asked. She was holding a marker and had a smudge of orange across the bridge of her nose.
I pointed to the moving van. “We got new neighbors,” I said.
“So?”
“So, I have to tell you guys something. Come on.”
They didn’t ask, just followed me across the street and back down to my house, where we went up to CICM-HQ (minus CICM, since it was technically broken and Comet had probably peed on the magnifying glass by now, because Comet peed on everything unusual he found in the backyard).
I told them all about what I’d seen the night before—the old man in the black hoodie. The bag of body parts he was carrying. The box of more body parts or perhaps implements of torture of seventh-grade children. The way he scowled at me from beneath his hood, his eyes all shadowy like a vampire’s.
“So you think he’s a vampire,” Priya said disbelievingly.
“No.” (Maybe.)
“A monster?”
“Definitely not.” (Definitely maybe.)
She rolled her eyes. “So you think he’s a … what? Serial killer?”
I forced out a laugh. (Yes. Yes, yes, absolutely, definitely, without a doubt yes.) “No.”
“I know what he is,” Tripp said. “He’s a zombie. The undead. And inside that box was a shovel for him to dig himself out of his grave. And the bag was full of human faces.”
“Exactly,” I said, because sometimes my mouth moves before my brain can catch up.
“One, that’s disgusting,” Priya said, holding up a finger. You never wanted to argue with Priya when she started listing points in one-two-threes, because usually by the time she got to four, your argument was cooked. She held up a second finger. “Two, why would he need to carry around the shovel when he’s already outside of the grave?”
“To pull the dirt back in on himself when he’s done eating the faces. Duh,” Tripp said.
“And three, zombies don’t eat faces, they eat brains.”
“How do you know?” Tripp challenged. “You’ve never even seen a zombie.”
“And you have?” Priya asked.
“Yeah, in like a hundred movies and stuff.”
I slapped my hand over my forehead. You always knew Tripp was going to lose an argument when he started adding “and stuff” to the end of his sentences.
“Seriously, Tripp, you watch way too much TV.” She turned to me. “But you can’t possibly really believe he’s a zombie.”
“All I know is he was very creepy. I’m pretty sure he’s related to the Grim Reaper. His name is probably Mr. Death. And he wasn’t just holding the box and bag, he was taking them somewhere. Out there.” I pointed toward the tree line. Priya’s forehead scrunched up as she considered it.
“Maybe it was just trash and he was littering,” she said. “He is moving in, after all. When my aunt moved, she had tons of trash.”
“Still a criminal,” Tripp said triumphantly. “Just like I was saying.”
Priya held up a finger. “One, a litterbug is not exactly the same kind of criminal as a murderer. And two, you weren’t saying he was a criminal, you were saying he’s a zombie.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to eat people’s faces, Priya,” Tripp said.
“Brains! Brains, not faces!”
They continued to argue, but I tuned them out, concentrating instead on Mr. Death’s house. I saw movement behind the curtains in one of the back rooms. I knew that room from going in and helping Widow Feldman move a TV once. Mrs. Feldman had always hung sheer white curtains back there, and when the weather was nice she’d open the window and you could see the curtain fluttering in the breeze. But now the window was covered with heavy curtains, and they were pulled together tightly.
But there was definitely movement behind them.
“You guys,” I whispered. But they didn’t stop arguing, so I said it louder. “You guys! Look!”
They both stopped, and all of our eyes were glued to the curtains as they went from slight fluttering to more notable rippling.
“Do you think he’s watching us?” Priya asked.
“What are you scared of, Priya, if he’s not a zombie?” Tripp asked, but you could hear it in his voice—he was totally scared, too.
“Shut up, Tripp,” I said. I squinted harder. Harder. Harder.
And then suddenly the curtain was yanked back completely, and Mr. Death’s pale face and penetrating eyes were staring right out at us.
We all screamed and grabbed at one another, then scrambled back through my bedroom window.
Well, Priya and I scrambled. Tripp … tripped.