Traps and Specters (4 page)

Ella's heart sank. “Huh?”

“I'm not about to let you kids walk to school in the middle of a hurricane.”

The back door swung open to reveal Richie, the cold, moist air fogging his giant glasses. He scooted his skinny rear end over, making room for Ella. Beside him sat Megan. In the front passenger seat was Noah.

“I …” Ella said. “I don't know. I kind of … I kind of feel like walking.”

“You mean
swimming
?” Richie said.

Feeling P-Dog shifting in her backpack, Ella lowered her eyebrows and tried to communicate her concern to Richie. “It's just … today's a
really, really
bad day for a ride.”

“Ella,” Mrs. Nowicki said, “if I let you walk in this rain while driving all your friends, your mother will never speak to me again. Now get in.”

Ella waited. She wanted to walk away but knew Mrs. Nowicki would come after her.

Richie patted the open seat beside him.

She slumped her shoulders and let the backpack slip down her arms. She plopped onto the seat, cradled the bag in her lap, and closed the door. Mrs. Nowicki sped off, her wipers groaning.

Richie looked at Ella's full bag. “Man—what do you have in that thing?”

Ella shot him a wry look. “A prairie dog.”

Believing it was a joke, Mrs. Nowicki chuckled.

But she was the only one.

CHAPTER 5

“Y
ou're kidding, right?” Richie said as the scouts headed up one of the long, winding paths of the concrete courtyard before their school's front entrance. Clarksville Elementary had a main building with three wings. Each wing housed two grade levels. Ten years ago, the old school building had been demolished to make room for a larger one, parts of which—the gym, the cafeteria, the media center—were over two stories high.

“Tell me you're not serious,” Richie pleaded. “Tell me P-Dog's not really in your backpack right now.”

Ella shifted the backpack on her shoulders. “Nope, no joke.”

Richie touched Ella's backpack, and when something wriggled, he pulled his hand back.

“She's not kidding, guys. I just felt P-Dog's head. Or his butt. It was something round, anyway. And it was moving.”

The friends pushed through the front doors of Clarksville Elementary, leaving behind the rain and a lineup of buses. They moved down one of the wings and stopped at Megan's locker. As Megan spun through her combination, Ella briefed them on the previous night. When she mentioned her confrontation with DeGraff, everyone's mouths dropped open.

“DeGraff!” Megan gasped. She peered over both her shoulders to make certain no one could hear them. “In your front yard … DeGraff! I can't … I can't
believe
this.”

“Well, believe it, sister,” Ella said as she shifted her backpack again. “He was knocking on my front door like a Girl Scout with cookies.”

Ella quickly told them the rest of the story: DeGraff, the prairie dogs, Solana and the zoo guards, P-Dog and how he'd wound up getting a ride in her backpack.

“Not good,” Richie said, shaking his head. “And I'm talking in a really major way.”

Megan shut her door and they walked the short way to Noah's locker. As Noah hung up his jacket, he said, “Okay, don't freak out. We have crosstraining after school. We just need to make it through the day—that shouldn't be too hard, right?” As he banged the steel door shut, the morning bell rang, scattering kids toward their classrooms. The scouts headed to Richie's locker.

“What am I supposed to do with P-Dog?” Ella asked. “Put him in my locker?”

“Not a good idea,” Richie said. “You can hardly breathe in those things—trust me, I know.” Richie was referring to how Wide Walt, the school bully, would sometimes squeeze him into his locker and shut the door when teachers weren't around.

Megan gasped. “He'd suffocate!”

Richie opened his locker. The inside walls bulged outward in the general shape of his body. When trapped in the steely confines, Richie knew how to wriggle into a comfortable position until someone, usually one of the scouts, set him free. Closing his door, Richie said, “Take your backpack with you. Keep it close—under your desk or something.”

“Are you nuts!” Ella said. “How am I supposed—”

But Richie and Noah were already walking away. As the boys turned to their open classroom door, Noah looked back to Ella and shrugged, saying, “What else are we supposed to do?”

“Great …” Ella said. She led Megan down the hall, opened her locker, and fed her belongings inside—everything but her backpack. Then the two girls squirmed through the thinning crowd of students and walked into Room 112, their split-grade class.

Mrs. Simons was rambling on about decimals and place values, scrawling large numbers across the whiteboard and dropping dots at their feet. Ella couldn't have cared less. All she could think about was the backpack beneath her chair. She kept touching it with her feet, each time breathing a sigh of relief. Though she knew Megan was watching the bag from across the room, she couldn't help but fear P-Dog would find a way to manipulate the zipper open and sneak out for a stroll.

Trying to think of something other than P-Dog, Ella looked over at the bulletin board beside the Word Wall. There were announcements about different things: a lost jacket, a lost necklace, the school play tryouts. Two posters were tacked to it. One promoted a reading campaign called “Reading Is Your Key,” and the other advertised the school Halloween party, a green-faced witch with a hooked nose saying, “Come to Clarksville Elementary's Halloween Bash! You'll have a
ghoul
time!”

The Halloween poster reminded Ella of DeGraff again, the way he had stood among the swirl of leaves in her front yard, his body a silhouette against the night, his fingers curled into half-fists, the wind beating his trench coat against his boots. The fright of Halloween had come early to Ella's household—and this year that fright was real.

Ella turned away from the bulletin board and watched the second hand of the clock sweep around in its slow, endless circle. Mrs. Simons changed subjects. History, maybe. Or government. When you were worried about a live zoo animal in your backpack, all the subjects seemed the same.

About an hour into the school day, Peter Wilkins approached the front of the room and accidentally hooked his foot in the strap of Ella's backpack, slinging it across the aisle. It came to a stop against the leg of Mackenzie McCarthy's chair, and everyone stared at it for what it was: something-that-did-not-belong. The only sound became that of Tana Quinn wetly chomping her gum.

Flushed with embarrassment and fear, Ella reached out into the aisle with her foot and snagged back the pack. She tucked it neatly beneath her chair and did her best to ignore Peter's dirty look.

When the students broke for recess two hours later, Ella took her backpack. Outside, the scouts headed toward the Monster Dome, avoiding the puddles left behind by the morning storm. On the climber's steel bars, a bunch of second graders were hanging upside down, their faces looking like turnips, red and swollen. The scouts gathered in a quiet area far behind the action.

Noah gestured toward Ella's backpack. “Everything okay so far?”

Ella zipped open her bag. P-Dog poked out his snout and gave the playground air a curious sniff, looking no worse for wear. Ella quickly palmed his head and pushed him back inside. “Sorry, P,” she said as she sealed the bag.

“I just thought of something,” Richie said. “What if P-Dog has to go to the bathroom?” When the scouts gave him blank stares, he felt the need to elaborate. “You know … the number two type.”

Ella said, “Then I guess things are going to get a little stinky.”

For the rest of recess, the scouts listened again to Ella tell her story of the previous night. Despite all they'd been through with the Secret Zoo, it still seemed unreal—DeGraff in her front yard, Solana and the guards chasing him down their streets. When the bell rang, the four friends merged into a crowd of children headed indoors. In the hallways, sounds echoed off the steel lockers and concrete walls. Ella made her way into class and slipped her backpack under her desk once more. She felt the bag shift as P-Dog squirmed into a new position.

Once everyone had settled in at their desks, Mrs. Simons started talking about something. Ella couldn't pay attention. Like a sports team with a narrow lead, she only cared about beating the clock.

When the class was dismissed for lunch, Ella jumped from her desk and scooped up the backpack. She followed Megan down to the cafeteria line, paid two dollars for a slimy concoction involving noodles and clumpy gravy, then took a seat beside Richie and Noah, where she put her bag on the table beside her tray.

Then, not a minute later, the worst thing that could happen happened.

CHAPTER 6

“W
hat's up,
dorks
.”

The voice, deep and menacing, had come from Wide Walter White, the worst bully in Clarksville Elementary. From between two long rows of tables, Walt strutted toward the scouts, his elbows batting the heads of a few seated students. Dave and Doug, his two cronies, followed and glared all around, daring anyone to attempt eye contact.