Free Panic by Lauren Oliver

herself and tomatoes she’d grown in her garden. Heather was afraid to sit down at the table, since she was so dirty, but Anne set a place for her, so she did. She thought it was the best thing she’d ever eaten.
    “Hey there, cowgirl,” Bishop said when Heather slid into the car. He still hadn’t changed out of his pajama pants. He made a big show of sniffing. “What’s that smell?”
    “Shut up,” she said, and punched him in the arm. He pretended to wince. As Heather rolled down her window, she caught a glimpse of herself in the side mirror. Her face was red and her hair was a mess and her chest was still wet with sweat, but she was surprised to find that she looked kind of . . . pretty.
    “How was it?” Bishop asked as they began thumping down the drive again. He’d gotten her an iced coffee from 7-Eleven: lots of sugar, lots of cream, just how she liked it.
    She told him—about the runt pig that had ballooned to a huge size, the horses, the chickens and roosters. She saved the tigers for last. Bishop was taking a sip of her coffee and nearly choked.
    “You know that’s totally illegal, right?” he said.
    She rolled her eyes. “So are the pants you’re wearing. If you don’t tell, I won’t.”
    “ These pants?” Bishop pretended to be offended. “I wore these just for you.”
    “You can take them off just for me,” Heather said, and then blushed, realizing how it sounded.
    “Anytime,” Bishop said, and grinned at her. She punched him again. She was still fizzy with happiness.
    It was a twenty-minute ride back to downtown Carp, if the Motel 6, the post office, and the short string of greasy shops and bars could be counted as a downtown, but Bishop claimed to have figured out a shortcut. Heather went quiet when they turned onto Coral Lake, which couldn’t have been more inaccurately named: there was no water in sight, nothing but fallen logs and patchy, burnt-bare stubs of trees, because of a fire that had raged there several years ago. The road ran parallel to Jack Donahue’s property, and it was bad luck.
    Heather had been on Coral Lake only a few times. Trigger-Happy Jack was known for being consistently drunk, and half-insane, and for owning an arsenal of weapons. His property was fenced in and guarded by dogs and who knew what else. When his fence came into view, pushing right up to the road, she half expected him to come banging out of his house and start taking potshots at the car. But he didn’t. Several dogs came running across the yard, though, barking madly. These dogs were nothing like Anne’s. They were skinny, snarling, and mean-looking.
    They had almost passed the limits of Trigger-Happy Jack’s property when something caught Heather’s eye.
    “Stop!” she nearly screamed. “Stop.”
    Bishop slammed on the brakes. “What? Jesus Christ, Heather. What the hell?”
    But she was already out of the car, jogging back toward a sagging scarecrow—at least, it looked like a scarecrow—dumped on the ground, leaning back against Donahue’s fence. Her stomach was tight with fear, and she had the weirdest sense of being watched. There was something wrong with the dummy. It was too crudely made, too useless . There were no farms this side of Coral Lake, no reason for a scarecrow, especially one that looked like it had been dumped from the trunk of a car.
    When she reached the scarecrow, she hesitated for a second, like it might suddenly come to life and bite her.
    Then she lifted its head, which was slumped forward on a spindly stuffed neck.
    In place of features, the scarecrow had words written neatly, in marker, on its blank canvas face.
    FRIDAY, MIDNIGHT .
THE GAME MUST GO ON .

dodge
    THE CROWD WAS SMALLER ON FRIDAY NIGHT; THE atmosphere tense, unhappy. Nervous.
    There was no beer, no music, no bursts of laughter. Just a few dozen people huddled silently fifty feet down the road from Trigger-Happy Jack’s fence, massed together, lit up white-faced in the glare of the bouncing