Free The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar Page B

stupid horoscopes.
    Still, he had to admit it is pretty strange for a sack of flour to suddenly fall on your head. That kind of thing doesn’t usually happen.
    He thought about talking to his dad about his problems—telling him about what they’d done to Mrs. Bayfield, and then about all the things that had happened to him. Maybe his dad would be able to findsome kind of logical, scientific explanation for everything.
    Except he was too ashamed to tell his father that he helped steal a cane from a poor old lady. And he would be too embarrassed to talk about all the things that had happened to him. His dad probably would just tell him to go apologize to her.
    Besides, what kind of scientific explanation could there possibly be? No, science had nothing to do with it. There were only two possible explanations. Either he was cursed or he was a stooge. It was one or the other.

20
    H E DECIDED to tell his friends about the curse. “Do you know Felicia Bayfield?” he asked on Friday at recess.
    “Who?” asked Larry.
    “I know her,” said Mo. “She’s this old, spacey lady who wears a lot of funny clothes.”
    “Sounds like Tori Williams,” said Larry. He and Mo laughed.
    “She’s a witch,” said David. “She murdered her husband. She removed his face.”
    “Ugh!” said Mo.
    “He lived for a while,” said David, “but you can’t live too long without a face. But his face is still alive. It’s hanging on a wall of her house. She put it in some kind of special solution to preserve it. And she talks to it, and it talks back.”
    David didn’t like saying mean things about Mrs. Bayfield, but he had to convince his friends she was really a witch. Little did he know that one day his own face would be hanging on the wall of her house.
    “I wonder what a person would look like without a face,” said Larry. He thought a moment. “Wouldn’t there just be another face behind it? How thick is a face?”
    “Real thin,” said Mo. “Thinner than paper. And behind it you just have blank skin that you could almost see through, with holes where the eyes, nose, and mouth used to be.”
    “Like a ghost,” said Larry. “Except you’re alive.”
    “A Doppelgänger,” said David.
    “What?” asked Mo.
    “I don’t know,” said David, shaking his head. “Remember when I said I thought I was cursed?” he asked. “Well, it wasn’t like you thought. Mrs. Bayfield put a curse on me. She said my Doppelgänger will regurgitate on my soul.”
    He started at the beginning. He told them about how he had helped Roger, Scott, and Randy steal her snake-head cane, except he made it sound like he was the one who led the attack.
    “… Then she said in a really creepy voice, ‘Would you boys like some lemonade?’ Except I don’t think it was really even lemonade.”
    “What’d you do?” asked Larry.
    “You didn’t drink it, did you?” asked Mo.
    “No. As I was pouring it in my glass I pretended to trip, then I knocked her rocking chair over and poured the lemonade right on her face!”
    “All right!” cheered Mo.
    He didn’t want to tell them that he really just stood around while the other boys knocked her over in her chair and poured lemonade on her head. It wouldn’t make sense. Why would she put a curse on him if he had just stood there while everyone else did everything?
    “I tossed the empty pitcher away,” he said, “but it accidentally went into her window. It broke the window and the pitcher.”
    The more he lied, the more he got into it. But at the same time he felt a horrible sense of guilt right in the pit of his stomach. It only bothered him a little at first, but the feeling grew, like Pinocchio’s nose, with each lie.
    “Roger, Randy, and Scott ran away with her cane, but I stood over her. Her legs were up in the air. If you think her clothes are weird, you should see her underpants!”
    “You saw her underpants!” exclaimed Larry.
    “What’d they look like?” asked Mo.
    “It was like