by MJ Ware
"That’s weird. I mean are the police looking for him or did he run away from home?" Bronte stopped and turned to me. Her blue eyes flashed angrily, and I wanted to kick myself for being such a jerk.
I stared down at the sand. "Sorry, that was a creepy thing to say."
"You’re allowed one creepy statement a day. But don’t make a habit of it." She tromped on and I could not stop from following like a stray puppy.
"Where are you headed?" I asked.
"Back to the rocks. I saw a pelican with fishing twine wrapped around its leg."
"That pelican flew off when you grabbed my ankle. Anyhow, that bird isn’t going to just let you walk up to it and unwind the string."
Her long hair had dried now and it bounced around her shoulders as she confidently marched back to the rocks. She reached the edge of the jetty and looked back at me. "I’m sure it returned because it needed help. You can stay here. I know you don’t like these rocks. Besides you’ll scare away the pelican with your nervousness."
I could feel my face heat but I wasn’t sure if it was anger or embarrassment. "Now you’ve had your one creepy statement of the day," I said.
She climbed up to the top rock and nodded her head once. "Now we’re even." She twisted around and hiked slowly across the slimy rocks. I watched her get further and further out over the water. A wave slapped the jutting edges of the jetty spraying her with a mist, but it didn’t stop her. Suddenly she crouched down, and all I could see was the top of her head. I felt like a total chicken standing on dry sand not taking even one step onto the rocks. But even the solid, cold lump of shame growing in my stomach didn’t make me move closer. Then I saw Bronte heading back to me.
"Told you the bird took off when I threw my pencils," I said smugly.
She held up her hand. A long piece of fishing string dangled from her fingers. That little line creased the side of her mouth as she smiled and pushed past me.
My mouth dropped open as I watched her walk away in her crazy red and white pajamas and long caramel colored hair. "She’s definitely different," I muttered to myself.
Chapter 2
I’d kept my cool about the green pencil even though it was really messing with my head. I didn’t want the new girl to find out so soon that I was a nutcase. I laid some of my pictures out over my towel trying to decide which one to finish. I stuck with the pelican even though I had barely outlined it before…. My gaze shot up toward the houses. No sign of her.
I was just getting fully into my picture when I heard Bronte’s voice again. "Could you hold this for a second?"
The sun blinded me as I looked up. Suddenly my fingers were holding onto a piece of string and from the way it was pulling against my skin, I figured it must have been attached to something. It was. A giant dragon kite was diving and swooping behind my head. I jumped to my feet.
"I need to find something for the tail so it flies better," Bronte called back to me as she headed for the trash can.
"But it’s not windy enough." My words began loudly then dropped off on the word enough when I realized how dumb I sounded. Wind or not, her giant kite was staying in the air almost as if its dragon wings really worked. Of course one minute of me holding the thing and it did a nose dive straight into the sand, spreading out like a deflated parachute.
"I just killed your dragon." She was hanging over the side of the trash can with the top of her body inside, digging for something. "That’s disgusting," I said. She’d added some things to her outfit. Her feet dangled over the side of the can covered in tall black gothic style boots.
She popped out of the can holding up a shiny piece of foil. Then with amazing ease, she walked back to my towel in the giant lifted boots. She was wearing a black vest laced up the front like women wore in the old days and a black mini skirt. A pair of tattered pink wings bounced between her shoulders with each step. It was sort of an anime gothic crossed with a Santa’s elf look, yet somehow, it worked on her. Her long hair hung in two braids down each side. With round blue eyes and a small nose, even her face matched the graphic novel look.
She reached my towel and it took me a second to find my tongue. "Sorry about the kite. Are those wings on your back?"
She looked back over her shoulder at them like she didn’t know they were there. "They help put me in a kite flying mood. My aunt is a costume designer in Hollywood so she sends me stuff all the time." She tore the foil into strips. It had mustard on it, which she wiped off on my towel.
"Gross. Now I have some stranger’s sandwich gook on my towel."
She totally ignored my complaint and continued to twist the strips of foil into silver twigs. She hiked back to where the kite had fallen and wrapped her shiny trash around the tail of her dragon. The little wings on her back vibrated up and down as she worked. I watched the whole scene wondering if I was really seeing it or if I was still asleep in bed.
A loud whistle from the shoreline startled me. I turned to see all three of my brothers with their boards propped in the sand. They waved at me. It looked like they were laughing. They were, of course, the last people I wanted to see.
"Who are they?" Bronte was standing behind me now squinting down to the shoreline.
I turned back. The kite was already high in the air with its new tail. "That is the Golden Baboon Club, better known as my brothers."
She stared at them for a minute and waved back enthusiastically. "What happened to them? Why are they so big and so blonde?"
Her question nearly knocked me on my butt. Most people asked what happened to me. Compared to my brothers, I was pretty scrawny and my hair was nearly black. I was the misfit of the family, and she asked what had happened to them. All of a sudden they were the oddballs and I was the normal one. My brothers’ laughter jolted me out of my wishful thinking. "A lot of bench presses, bicep curls, and a little help from Mr. Peroxide." I pointed to my own hair.
Bronte motioned to the shore with her head. "They’re coming this way,"
Great. I make a friend, and now she’s going to go crush crazy on one of my brothers. Most likely Jay because he’s considered the town’s major heartbreaker. My jaws clenched tightly as they got closer.
"Hey, Quinn, who’s your new friend?" Luke asked with that annoying grin plastered on his face.
Bronte handed me the kite string which made me even more nervous because now I had to face my brothers and keep her dragon in the air. She reached for Luke’s hand. "I’m Bronte."
Luke stared at her. In fact they were all staring at her with goofy, primate expressions like they were inside the monkey cage at the zoo staring out at the spectators. "Are you on your way to a costume party?" Luke smirked.
Beneath the long bangs, Bronte’s forehead inched together like she was confused by his question. "No, are you?" she asked.
A loud laugh exploded from my mouth. Luke’s fist crashed into my shoulder.
"Ouch!"
"How do you do that?" Bronte asked Luke.
"Easy. Like this." Luke clenched his hand into a fist, and I braced for another blow.
Bronte put up her hand to stop him. She waved her fingers near her neck. "Not that. I mean how do you make your neck to be the same size as your head?"
Now Jay and Ethan laughed, but my sore arm warned me to hold mine inside. I could see Luke’s lips forming the B word, but thankfully, Ethan grabbed his arm to stop him. Luke turned on his heels and lumbered away. The other two followed.
"She’s actually pretty hot." I heard Jay say as they got farther away.
Unable to wipe the grin off my face, I turned to Bronte. "That was sweet."
Not realizing it was possible, her blue eyes opened wider. "What?" she asked.
"You just slammed Luke. No one ever slams that jerk."
"I did?"
I didn’t know what to say. Maybe it was because she had such a doll-like face, but she looked totally innocent like she was not asking the question to be sarcastic. "You mean you were asking a serious question?"
She shrugged, but I was sure I saw a hint of that little line that creases the side of her mouth when she’s smiling.
"Sorry about Luke. He wasn’t always such a creep. He actually taught me to surf when I was little." Luke had taught me to do a lot of cool things like jump my skateboard off a curb, play notes on guitar and blow milk through my nose. But he stopped teaching me things when I stopped liking the ocean. I was a major disappointment to him, and I was pretty disappointed in him too.
Bronte glanced up the beach at her flattened dragon. "You aren’t much of a kite flyer, are you?"
"I’m not great at many things," I admitted.
Her eyes turned down to my towel. "If I tried to draw that pelican, it would have looked like a big gray blob on paper. Yours looks like it could fly off the paper and scoop up a fish."
I shrugged trying to be cool, but inside I was grinning like an idiot, an idiot with a new friend who could fly kites without wind, touch wild birds, and shoot down Luke’s monster ego with barely a blink of her long lashes. And somehow, in the little time I’d known her, she’d made me feel like maybe I wasn’t such a spastic loser after all.
Haunted: Book 4: The Ghost Miner’s Treasure
By Chris Eboch
Chapter 1
"Many dangers you face on this quest. Many trials." The old woman leaned over the table. A wisp of gray hair escaped from her bun and hung in her face. Light streaked through the dirty windows, making craggy shadows in her wrinkles. She stared down at the sticks and bones she’d tossed on the table, her mouth moving silently.
My stepfather, Bruce, stood across the table from her, leaning forward intently. She looked up at him and spoke. "What you seek is not easily found. There are those who would stand in your way. But you also have helpers."
She looked around at the rest of us. I thought her eyes rested on my sister, Tania, as she said, "Some good luck."
Her eyes met mine. "Some bad luck."
I shivered. Did she mean I would have bad luck? Or that I was the bad luck?
"What do you advise?" Bruce asked.
The old woman shrugged. "You will go. You will do what must be done. It is meant to be." Her eyes met mine again, intently. "But be careful whom you trust." Cold crept up my spine, though the room was hot and stuffy.
Bruce leaned forward and asked a question. Mom shifted restlessly and took a step toward him. I glanced at Maggie, the pretty production assistant. She met my look and rolled her eyes.
My breath exploded out. It wasn’t really a laugh; I just hadn’t realized I’d been forgetting to breathe. I grinned at Maggie, suddenly lighter. I’d gotten caught up in the atmosphere of the dark room and the spooky old lady. But Maggie had reminded me that I didn’t believe in fortune-tellers. Bad luck happened, sure, but no old woman could predict it ahead of time.
Of course, a year earlier I hadn’t believed in ghosts, either. Things had changed when my sister and I started traveling with Haunted, the ghost investigation TV show run by my mom and stepfather. I hadn’t yet seen a ghost, but my sister had. I hadn’t believed her at first, but I’d changed my mind after seeing her possessed, and all the other strange things we had faced.
Still, believing in ghosts didn’t mean I had to believe everything. I didn’t even know why we were talking to this fortune-teller. During the filming of the last show, Tania and I had proven that Madame Natasha, Bruce’s "psychic" guest star, was a fake. In the process, we’d accidentally made Bruce look like a fool and hurt the show’s reputation. We’d learned our lesson there, and Bruce had sworn off psychics. But here we were.
Maggie touched my arm and bobbed her head toward the door. I nodded and followed her, Tania at my side. We paused outside, blinking in the bright sun. Maggie’s dark curls tumbled around her shoulders. Tania looked small and washed out next to her.
Maggie shook her head. "You’d think he’d have learned by now."
"She’s different than Madame Natasha. More...." Tania bit her lip and looked back toward the door.
"Sincere?" Maggie asked.
"Creepy," I suggested. "I mean, Madame N was a creep, but this woman is just spooky."
"She does seem to believe what she’s saying," Maggie said, "which is more than I can say for Madame Natasha." She shrugged. "But what did she really say? Good luck, bad luck, nothing that can be proven or disproved. It’s generally a fair bet that some things will go right and some will go wrong. And of course a ghost won’t be found easily. We have yet to prove they even exist!"
I nodded, glad Maggie hadn’t noticed the fortune teller looking at me when she mentioned bad luck. Maybe it didn’t mean anything after all.
I wanted to smack myself. Of course it didn’t mean anything! I’d already decided that. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to turn superstitious.
"At least Bruce isn’t planning to use her on the show," Maggie said. "He can’t stop himself from wanting to believe, but he’ll be more careful about keeping the show scientific."
I nodded. I actually felt sorry for Bruce. It was hard to know what to believe. Sometimes I wished I could just believe the things I wanted to believe and not worry about it. But life is more complicated than that.
"So, can we look around the town while they finish?" Tania asked.
Maggie glanced left and right. The town of Vulture had one main dirt street, a few hundred yards long, and not much else. You couldn’t even drive through the town; you had to park in a lot by the entrance. A big wooden water tank and a windmill stood on top of the hill. Across the highway, a cluster of weird rock towers rose up in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.
"I don’t see how you can possibly get in trouble." Maggie winked. "Though who knows, you’ve surprised me before. Go ahead, I’ll tell your mom. I’m sure we’ll find you."
The old wooden buildings had been turned into stores, with a bakery, fudge shop, antique store, and a "general store" that sold T-shirts and postcards. "Some ghost town," I said. "I thought ghost towns were supposed to be abandoned. This looks more like a tourist trap."
"It really was an old frontier town, though," Tania said. "In the 1800s. Maggie was telling me about it. I guess nobody lives here now, they just come in to run the stores. And on summer weekends and holidays they do shows. You know, guys dress up as gunfighters and have shootouts in the street."
We looked at each other and shrugged. Maybe that would have sounded fun once, but now it seemed like kid stuff. We’d had a lot more excitement in our lives than watching grownups play-act and fire blank guns.
"Well, where do you want to start looking for the real ghost?" I asked.
Tania tipped her head to one side. "It wouldn’t take long to search the whole town. But first let’s think about what we know about him." She closed her eyes. "Jacob Waltz was born in Germany around 1810. He came to America about 1840 and headed west. He tried gold-mining in California before winding up here in Arizona in 1862."
She opened her eyes again, and I took over the story. "In 1869 he came into town with a sack of ore, almost pure gold. He went straight to the saloon, bought drinks for everyone, and bragged about the mine he’d found in the mountains. The newspapers picked up the story. For the next two years, Waltz lived off that gold and didn’t set foot in the mountains. He was probably afraid someone would follow him and find his mine."
Tania nodded. "But when his gold ran out, he went back to the mountains with a burro to carry his riches. Two months later, he was back in town—empty-handed. He couldn’t find the mine again. He spent the next five years looking for it, with no luck. He died at sixty-six, penniless, in rags, half starved. Some said he went crazy."
She looked sad, so I quickly said, "What’s the most logical place to look for an elderly ghost trying to drown his sorrows over losing his gold mine?"
We glanced down the street and looked at each other. Simultaneously, we said, "The saloon."
We walked past a tiny museum. I said, "You know, helping this ghost isn’t going to be easy
."
Tania shot me a look. "And the others have been?"
"Well, no, but that’s not what I mean. If you want to help him overcome whatever is keeping him here, you have to solve his problem, right? And his problem is that he can’t find his mine. So the only way to help him move on is to help him find the mine. But if he couldn’t, how are we supposed to?"
Tania scowled. She looks like a fierce kitten when she does that. "Maybe we could convince him that the mine doesn’t really matter." She sighed. "No, we know that never works. You’re right. We have to actually help him solve his problem."
I wondered why, after encounters with three ghosts, we felt like such experts. But it had been true so far. If a ghost had been worrying about something for a hundred years, a quick word of advice from us wasn’t going to change that. I said, "He could also be out now, wandering around looking for his mine. If he is, I don’t see how we’ll even find him."
"We have to! We have to make things right for Bruce and the show, to make up for what we did with Madame Natasha. I’d feel terrible if Bruce lost his show because of us."
"Me too," I said, "but I don’t think the ghost is going to show up just for our convenience."
"We have to find a way."
"Just try not to get me in too much trouble this time."
Tania smiled sweetly. "But if I didn’t get you in trouble, you wouldn’t have any fun at all."
She walked ahead of me up the steps to the saloon. The sad thing was, I kind of had to admit that she was right.
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Copyrights owners are as follows: Brother's Keeper by MJ Ware, Priscilla the Great vs. Christine the Mean by Sybil Nelson, Fair Price by Laura Lond, The Emerald Key by N.R. Wick, Mr. Kent’s Wall of Wonders by D.D. Roy, The Ghost of Vernon Avenue by Jean Cross, Grunge is the New Cool by Tess Oliver, Starboard Academy by Laura Keysor, Squamata’s Rumble by KJ Hannah Greenberg, & Sister's Keeper by Chris Eboch
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