Free Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyes by Wendelin Van Draanen Page B

Butt are being really quiet, but then the third girl says, “It's gotta be her, Puffy—who else?”
    Camo Butt gets right in the third girl's face and points at me, saying, “You think this snow bunny's got no ears? She ain't down with us! What are you thinking!”
    The third girl kind of cowers back, but Brown Lips steps up and says, “Stall it out, Puffy.”
    Puffy-butt doesn't calm down, though. She stays right in the Quiet One's face, saying, “You gotta learn to watch your mouth,
chola
, or that
vato loco
's gonna bust a cap in
you
.” She glances at Marissa and me and hisses, “What if they're trying to mess us over, huh? Then what?”
    “We're … we're not trying to mess you over,” I tell her. “We're just trying to find her so we can—you know—
return
something.”
    “Oh yeah,” says Camo Butt with her hands on her hips. “What?”
    Now my brain is screaming, Don't tell her. Don't tellher! But really, I'm confused. I mean, what's left to lose? Pepe's mother's missing and no one's got any idea who she is or where she is, and Officer Borsch is never going to be able to find her from my description.
    But Pepe's mother's face flashes through my mind. She hadn't wanted Snake Eyes to know—not at any cost. So I say, “Something… valuable.” Then I add real fast, “To
her
, anyway.”
    “Well,” says Camo Butt, “we're not missin' none of our homegirls, so we can't do nothin' for you.”
    She turns to Brown Lips and mutters what sounds like, “Let's go check the palace,” then they all shuffle off across Morrison.
    Very slowly, Marissa lets out a deep breath, one that I think she'd been holding the whole time we'd been talking to them. Then she whispers, “I don't want to go to high school.”
    “What?”
    “Ever. I swear, I thought junior high was scary, but this is over the top. Can you imagine being on campus with
them
?”
    “Seems kinda like dealing with Heather Acosta to me. Only those guys were nicer.”
    “
Nicer?
Sammy, that Puffy girl was like Heather times ten! Did you see that little wrist action of hers? Any minute I was expecting her to slice you up with a switchblade!”
    We headed up Morrison, along the high school grass toward Broadway. And we were just about
at
Broadway when I got an idea. “Marissa?”
    She looks at me. “Oh, no. What.”
    “Well, I was thinking.”
    “I knew it. I'm never going to get home tonight, am I? I'm never going to get to pitch in the Sluggers' Cup tournament because you've got some harebrained scheme that's gonna get me sliced and diced and left for dead, am I right? Why don't I just step out in traffic now and get it over with?”
    I laughed at her. “Ma
ris
sa!”
    “Well? Am I right? What do you want to do? Go
back
through gang territory?”
    “No! I just want to go to the library.”
    “The … library?” “Yeah. The high school library. Do you think it's open?”
    “This late? I don't know,
may
be. Why do you want to go there?”
    “I've got an idea, that's all. It won't take long—come on.”
    “But Sammy…”
    “Look, I checked out the fields with you, and we wouldn't be doing this at all if you hadn't decided to take that wonderful shortcut through Tigertown.”
    “All right,” she grumbled. “All right!”
    So we ran across the grass and onto the high school campus and asked the first person we saw where the library was. “Right over there,” he said, pointing.
    “Is it open?” I asked him.
    “Yeah.”
    “Thanks!” I said, running toward the library.
    “Wow,” Marissa whispered, pushing her bike beside me. “He was cute!”
    I laughed. “You're never going here, remember?”
    We thwonked through the library turnstile and headed straight for the librarian's desk. Right away I knew the man reading a newspaper behind the counter was not a librarian, or if he was, he wasn't a very good one. First off, he wasn't old enough. I mean, to be a good librarian, you need to be, well, old enough to know about books. Lots