Chapter One
The Freekos
Jack and Allen didn't help matters much. Picking on me and all. Just something brothers do, I guess. Call you names. Pound on you. And worst of all, ditch you. Now, it's one thing to get ditched because you're whiny or slow or a bigmouth. It's another thing to get ditched because you're a girl.
Things started looking up, though, when Jack decided he'd ditch Allen too. Billy and the boys were always ditching their little brothers, and Billy being Jack's best friend, Well, you know how it is.
So Allen and I started hanging around together more, and one of the things we did a lot of was spying. Spying's great fun. It gets the blood pumping, "ba-boom! ba-boom! ba-boom!," right up in your ears so you almost can't hear anything else.
Everyone knows that when you go spying, you've got to wear dark clothes, and most people think that's because you want to be able to hide, which is true, but dark clothes also put you in the mood, and there's nothing better than being in a spying mood.
One night we tossed our beanies out the window and told Mom we were going across the street to the school to play hide-and-seek with some friends. She said that was just fine without even looking up from her knitting, and Dad was busy wrestling with the wiring of a lamp, so it was no problem slipping by him.
Allen wanted to go clear down to the Spook House, but I convinced him we ought to see what was happening over at the Freekos'.
The Freekos were easy to spy on, and we never felt bad about doing it because they weren't very nice people. They hated us way before we ever "thought" about spying on them.
When I say spying on them was easy, I mean easy. Normally we spy onpeople doing stuff in their yards. We don't go looking in just anyone's windows! But the Freekos didn't have drapes, so you could go right up to the window and peek inside. Now, you may think that's not very nice of us, and you're right, but you have to understand that when you've got neighbors like the Freekos, you find yourself doing stuff you know you shouldn't, and pretty soon you just get carried away.
Anyway, Allen and I peeked in the front windows and then in the kitchen window, but we didn't see anybody, and it's not much fun spying on a sink full of dishes. So we looked over the back fence, and boy did that make our eyes pop open! Freeko was lying on his stomach by the pool in a pair of old underwear and he wasn't moving. Not at all.
Allen looked at me and whispered, "Is he dead?"
Well, he sure looked dead to me, and all Iwanted to do was get out of there. I whisperedback, "I don I t know!" and was just about to say weshould leave when Allen started to climb over thefence. I grabbed him and said, "What are you "doing?""
He looked over his shoulder. "Don't you want to find out if he's dead?"
We went around the pool over to where Freeko was. Well, it's not a pool like you're used to thinking of It's got water in it, but you wouldn't want to swim in it unless you were a snake or a frog or something that liked slime.
Anyhow, we got up to Freeko and looked at him for a couple minutes trying to figure out if he was breathing or not. That wasn't easy to do, because he was lying facedown on the cement. I tried to get inclose to Freeko's face to see if there was any air going in and out, but all I could really see was his stubbly cheek. Everything else was kind of smashed into the cement, which made me think that maybe he was dead, because no one could actually sleep like that.
Then Allen poked him with his foot. Freeko groaned and rolled over, which spooked me so bad I almost fell into the pool. Freeko kind of sputtered and started snoring real loud, his stomach going up and down, up and down, with little rocks from the cement kind of stuck to it.
Allen looked at me and said, "Why's he sleeping out here?" but before I could come up with an answer, we heard the sliding glass door open and had to scramble and hide behind a trash can.
Well, Fattabutta came swooping out of the house wearing one of her muumuus. She poked Freeko right in the ribs with her foot and cursed at him something fierce. Freeko mumbled but went right back to sleep, so Fattabutta picked up this booze bottle that was bobbing in the pool and used it to scoop slimy water on him.
just then we heard Dad calling, "Jack, Carolyn, and Al-len!" which made my heart stop. We couldn't go anywhere with Fattabutta right there.
So we were still watching Fattabutta splashing and cursing and waving the bottle around in the air when it came again, "Jack, Carolyn, and Al-len!"
just as Freeko was getting up on his feet, we heard, "Carolyn! Allen!" and Dad was sounding prettymad.
The minute Fattabutta was in the house, we climbed over the fence, popped down into our own backyard, and raced for the back door. I tried to catch my breath and act normal, calling, "We're home!"