Hide and Shriek

by Alison Hughes

  Copyright © 2018 Alison Hughes

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hughes, Alison, 1966–, author

  Hide and shriek / Alison Hughes.

  (Orca soundings)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-1873-6 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1874-3 (PDF).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1875-0 (EPUB)

  I. Title. II. Series: Orca soundings

  PS8615.U3165H53 2018 jC813'.6 C2017-907672-8

  C2017-907673-6

  First published in the United States, 2018

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933728

  Summary: In this high-interest novel for teen readers, four friends get caught in a deadly game of hide-and-seek. A free teacher guide for this title is available at orcabook.com.

  Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed this book on Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover images by iStock.com/Floriana (front) and

  Shutterstock.com/Krasovski Dmitri (back)

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  21 20 19 18 • 4 3 2 1

  Orca Book Publishers is proud of the hard work our authors do and of the important stories they create. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it or did not check it out from a library provider, then the author has not received royalties for this book. The ebook you are reading is licensed for single use only and may not be copied, printed, resold or given away. If you are interested in using this book in a classroom setting, we have digital subscriptions that feature multi user, simultaneous access to our books that are easy for your students to read. For more information, please contact digital@orcabook.com.

  For Sarah, Max, Vivian and William

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  An Excerpt from “The Thing You’re Good At”

  Chapter One

  Chapter One

  The others can’t decide if it’s better to hide or to be “It.”

  They’ve argued about it, tossed around pros and cons. On the one hand, hiding’s more fun, more creative. But on the other hand, It has the power. It is the hunter.

  Hiding is definitely more my style. I’m little, for one thing. And quiet. I can stay very still, not moving a muscle. You should hear the others when It gets blindfolded, shouts, “Go!” and starts the countdown. Crashing all over the place, banging into things, thumping down the alley. Like a herd of elephants. Honestly, if you’re It and you just listen, you can pretty much figure out exactly where they all go. That’s what I do when I’m It. Listen.

  But when I’m hiding, I use the other hiders’ noise as cover. Part of my strategy. You can slip in anywhere if you’re quiet and careful. And here’s a tip. The very best hiding spot is within a few feet of the person who’s It. I know it sounds crazy. But it’s not. That spot is pure gold. But you have to hide while they’re still counting—during the count, from one to maybe thirty, while the others are making their finding-hiding-spots noise.

  It takes guts. There’s a whole count from thirty to one hundred, seventy double beats, when the noise of the others has died away. By then you have to have found your hiding spot and stay absolutely still. That’s when you actually hear your heartbeat whooshing. And your breathing sounds way too loud. You start telling yourself that It will rip off that blindfold, look you right in the eye and the game will be over. But so far, so good. The strategy hasn’t failed me yet.

  I shake it up, of course. I mean, you can’t hide right near It every single time. Obviously. And even though my sister, Tess, says it’s practically cheating, it’s not. It’s not against the rules.

  The only rules of our hide-and-seek club are:

  No leaving the yards or the back alley on our street

  No going inside

  No breaking into anywhere or locking gates behind you

  No moving spots once you’ve hidden

  No cheating on the count to one hundred

  No cell phones

  We don’t play the kind of hide-and-seek where you have to race whoever’s It back to home base when they find you. All that yelling “Home free!” and the wild sprinting, the scuffling, the collisions—that’s all for children. I’m glad we don’t play that way. It is undignified for teenagers. Plus, Tess, Cam and Dylan would outrun me every time.

  Our game is based on skill, not just speed.

  Tess is still annoyed about that one time I lay against the bottom of the fence she was leaning on. The fence was home base, and she was blindfolded and counting to one hundred. I crawled in while the boys were sprinting down the alley. And I stretched out right in front of her, practically at her feet. My only cover was a few long, prickly weeds. I turned my face to the fence and waited. That was a gamble. That one tested my nerve. I wouldn’t have done it with Cam or Dylan. I don’t know them so well.

  But I’ve watched Tess be It so many times. I’ve watched her for years. She follows a pattern. She’s impatient. She does the count leaning against the fence, like most of us do. We usually start in the same spot, at the fence right by the Reillys’ garage. I don’t know why we picked that spot, but it’s where the game always starts.

  When Tess does the count, she gets more and more restless as it goes on. She hates having to be still. She can’t wait to hunt. She’s a natural It. Like Cam. Both action people. Runners. They suck at hiding, by the way.

  By eighty, eighty-five, you can see she’s just dying to seek. At ninety-five she’s already turning away from the fence. At ninety-eight she’s grabbing the bandanna. And at one hundred she yells, “Ready or not, here I come!” She yanks off the bandanna, tosses it aside and starts running.

  Anyway, that one time, Tess never saw me lying there right at her feet. She turned and ran, exactly like I predicted, looking to either side of her. But never behind her. I was the last one found, lying there in the alley right where she started, against the fence, right out in the open. The hide-and-seek club, all four of us, laughed a lot at that one. Well, it took Tess a little while to laugh. First she whined about the spot being unfair, against the rules, just plain stupid. But she joined in eventually.

  I think that might have been the day when everyone started to respect me as a full member of the club. Maybe that’s when they saw me as me, Emily, not just as Tess’s little sister, the fourteen-year-old (almost fifteen) in a group of sixteen-year-olds.

  They already knew I was small and freakishly flexible. They knew I could hide in places they never could. Some of the places have become legendary in the hide-and-seek club. The spare tire. The potato sack. The window well. The overturned wheelbarr
ow.

  What they didn’t know was that I also have guts.

  Good thing too.

  I was going to need them.

  Chapter Two

  “It’s pathetic,” said Cam, lying back in the school field. “A curfew. For the whole stinking city. Correction—for the kids in the whole stinking city.”

  “Stupid,” agreed Dylan, shaking his dark head. He plucked at some grass, ripping it up by the roots. “Anybody hear why?”

  “City Council said there’s been an increase in ‘suspected criminal activity,’” said Tess. She curled her fingers into air quotes.

  “Suspected criminal activity,” said Cam. “Whatever that means. What does that mean? Do they mean that break-in at the gas station? Or those keyed cars on Fifth Street? Or drugs, or something that hasn’t happened yet, or what? Anyway, seems like locking up the kids just clears the streets for the suspected criminals and their activities. It’s pathetic. Childish.”

  “Eleven o’clock. Who goes to bed at eleven?” said Dylan.

  I would literally have died rather than admit I usually go to bed long before eleven. I get up early.

  “You just have to go home at eleven,” said Tess. “Everyone under seventeen. Just home.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They can’t make you actually go to bed. Can they?”

  “’Course not!” snapped Cam. He always answers in a very impatient way that makes you feel stupid for asking. “Think. Obviously they couldn’t come into your house and force you into your bed. What’re they going to do, hold your eyes shut? Still. It sucks.” He looked up at the sky.

  “What does your dad say about it?” asked Dylan, glancing at Tess and me. He was ripping up quite a pile of grass over there.

  Tess and I glanced at each other. This was tricky. Dad is a city police officer. And while he doesn’t discuss everything with us, he has his opinions. Opinions, he tells us often enough, that “don’t leave this house.”

  “I think he thinks it’s something to do with The Scumbags Down the Street,” Tess blurted. Tess! That was definitely blabbing outside the house.

  “You’re just making that up,” I mumbled, shifting uncomfortably. “She’s making that up,” I said to the boys. They weren’t paying any attention to me.

  Cam called the people who moved into the small brick house on the corner The Scumbags Down the Street. They’d only been there a few months. We didn’t know for a fact that they were actual criminals, or even deadbeats, really. Their scumbaggery was not based on anything we had actually witnessed.

  They just seemed wrong. They weren’t a family like most of the other people who lived on the street. They were just a few random people. Nobody actually knew who really lived there and who was just visiting. Different people just came and went. They didn’t seem to be related.

  There were green garbage bags covering the side and back windows, and thick curtains up front that were never drawn back. The backyard, where their pit bull howled, was a wilderness of weeds. The house, yard, garage and even their stretch of the back alley was a no-go zone for the hide-and-seek club.

  But it wasn’t a no-go zone for me personally. Outside the club, I took my time walking past that house. I spied on it, saving any little fact I learned to bring back to the club. The others were usually very interested.

  I didn’t tell them that I saved pieces of meat for that pit bull. I fed him secretly through a hole in the fence, usually after dark. He was always hungry, poor thing. I told him he was a nice dog, a good dog. He was. He was a total sweetie. He couldn’t help being big and muscled and kind of scary-looking. You can’t help being what you are. His owners also weren’t his fault. I’m sure he’d rather have had a good, kind family. But let me tell you, he wasn’t mean. He was lonely. Just thrown out there in that yard like he was garbage.

  So anyway, I’d been keeping an eye on him since they moved in. Someone had to.

  “Something to do with them? I knew it! Something how?” Cam demanded, sitting up. “Drugs? Is it drugs?”

  Tess shrugged, shaking her head. Like she knew (which she didn’t) but couldn’t really say more.

  Cam didn’t bully Tess like he bullied me. He’d have weaseled more out of me if the others hadn’t been there. He’d fire questions at me, fix those intense, scornful blue eyes on me. Soon I’d be making stuff up just to impress him or get him to go away.

  “It’s drugs,” Cam said with decision. “I knew it. It’s drugs. They’re dealing.”

  “Losers,” said Dylan. “Ruining it for the rest of us.” He chucked handfuls of grass into the wind.

  “Yeah, ruining it for everybody,” I agreed, trying to catch Dylan’s eye. Dylan was a mystery to me. An exciting mystery, like a book you didn’t want to put down. I looked at him, at his ruffled dark hair, his olive skin, dark eyes with long, thick lashes, the rumpled T-shirt. Nervously plucking up grass. Tess told me once that Dylan’s family was, as she put it, “not satisfactory.” He only went home to sleep, she said, looking kind of sorry for him.

  “They can only ruin everything if we let them,” said Cam softly.

  “We can’t—” I started to say, but Cam talked right over me.

  “Look, we have the Hide-and Seek-Club: Night Version every Friday night, right? We’ve done that for, like, months now. Why should we stop? Bunch of losers selling weed? Forget that. The cops will be watching them. We’d never get caught. It’s not like they’re going to be hiring a new fleet of cops to police this curfew. They’ll just rely on the old slackers who don’t care if good kids have a little fun. Not your dad, of course. Not old Danny boy.” He glanced at Tess.

  “I’d like to see you call him ‘old Danny boy’ to his face, Cam,” she said. “Because you’re all Right, Mr. Chang, anything you say, Mr. Chang, sir when you actually talk to him.”

  Tess still called Cam an idiot and a jerk sometimes, but there was something between those two. You could tell by the teasing tone in their voices. You could practically feel it. I was still getting used to this and, to be honest, trying not to find it gross. Cam was like a brother. At least, that’s how I always saw him. He and his mom had lived beside us since I was about four years old. We’d all grown up together, in and out of each other’s houses. He’s in most of our childhood pictures. Tall, blond Cam with tall, pretty Tess, her shiny black hair straight and perfect. And off to the side there’s a small kid with scruffy pigtails, scowling. Me.

  Dylan stood up, grabbing his jean jacket. “So we’re still on for tomorrow?”

  “Obviously,” said Cam. He pushed himself to his feet and reached down to pull Tess up.

  “I’m in,” said Tess. Our parents—Mom’s a nurse—both worked shift on Friday nights. Tess and I were trusted to take care of ourselves, to be responsible. It was supposed to be a night where we got homework done or watched a movie together. Tess was supposed to stay home and “hang out” with me. It was our “girls night in,” as Mom called it. She always bought us a frozen pizza to share. I think she liked to think that we gave each other facials, painted our nails and watched old episodes of Gilmore Girls. I think she envied us.

  Mom and Dad would freak if they knew that as soon as they were gone we slipped out of the house and ran around the dark neighborhood. Tess and I felt guilty, but Friday-night hide-and-seek was way too exciting to miss.

  And now, with this curfew, there was way more of a chance of getting caught.

  “I’m in too,” I said. “Obviously.”

  Chapter Three

  “What now?” Cam asked. He sounded impatient. “We’re not going home yet. My mom’s not home until, like, two.” Cam’s mom worked as a bartender at the MacTavish Hotel downtown.

  It was just after midnight on Friday. We were officially rebels—out after the eleven curfew. Only it didn’t feel all that different. Somehow it should have felt wilder, more exciting, to be breaking the rules. But it just felt the same.

  We were sitting in a line with our backs against the Boykos’ fence, lo
oking into the blackness that was the school field at night. Dylan, Cam, Tess and me. I wished Dylan had sat next to me. But he slid down there on the far side of Cam. Two people between us.

  It was dark, the only light being a single bulb a backyard away. Even though Tess and I had our hoods up, I was cold. I snuggled a little against her, and she slipped an arm around me, rubbing my shoulder.

  We’d already done the full game—four rounds of hide-and-seek, each of us taking a turn being It. But somehow nobody’s heart had been in it tonight. It was like we were going through the motions while our minds were somewhere else. It wasn’t that the game hadn’t been interesting. Hide-and-seek in the dark is always more intense than regular hide-and-seek. Scarier too. If you’re It, you only get a tiny, pen-sized flashlight to help you seek, and the hiders just grope their way blindly with the help of random back-door porch lights.

  That’s why Cam started the Friday-night game in the first place—to toughen us up, to take it all up a notch. Weed out the weak. And that’s when Tyler stopped coming—after the time he cracked his head and bled like crazy. I think Cam thought I’d stop coming too. But he was wrong.

  In tonight’s highlights, Cam had tried to hide behind a metal garbage can but had accidentally kicked it over. It rolled and crashed around, making a huge racket. What with the noise and him swearing, he was an easy tag for me. Tess had screamed when the flashlight fell on Dylan’s open eye as he lurked between the two big rocks at the end of the alley. That one’s been done before, but not for a while. And I was apparently an easy spot for Dylan as I lay (uncomfortably) along the top of the fence. I had wondered when I thought of the spot if the porch light would ruin it. It had.

  Anyway, Dylan had walked right over to me and danced the flashlight over my face.

  Nice spot, but I got you, kid, he’d whispered. There was a smile in his husky voice. Best moment of the night.

  And now here we were, sitting miles apart, with Cam and Tess in between us.