Free Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus by Kristen Tracy

control, and found a comfortable place to sit.
    “Can we go outside?” Samantha asked. She was wearing a big, red, puffy coat zipped to her chin. She’d wrapped her scarf around her head, leaving only her dark brown eyes showing.
    “It’s cold out,” I said, tossing potato chips into my mouth. I was comfortably seated in the middle of their enormous beanbag. And I’d turned on the Science Channel. A badger was chewing on a rotten log. Inside, he had found a thick wall of honeycomb. Bees were stinging him like crazy.
    “I’ll only be out for five minutes,” she said, batting her eyelashes at me.
    “Where’s Dustin?” I asked.
    “He’ll come too,” she said, slipping on her gloves.
    I didn’t think it was a great idea, but I didn’t think it was the worst idea in the world either. Because their turtle was inside. And so was the microwave. And their underpants. And all their glue. And everything else that was off-limits.
    “Don’t you want to watch the badger?” I asked. I pointed to the screen. That badger had a real sweet tooth. Even when the bees stung his pink gums, he kept biting at the log.
    Samantha looked at the TV and shook her head. “No,” she said.
    “Five minutes,” I said.
    I heard her boots pound down the hall. Had I been listening more closely, I would have realized that I heard one set of boots thumping out the door, and one set of boots being dragged out the door.
    You’d think that I would have gotten tired of watching that badger eat honey. But I didn’t. When Samantha came back inside, I knew that she had been gone for a lot longer than five minutes.
    “Your face is really red,” I said. “You should come sit down and watch this badger.” She stared at me hard, unblinking.
    “I guess we can watch something else,” I said, reaching for the remote. “Go get Dustin.”
    Samantha didn’t move.
    “I can’t,” she said, speaking through her scarf.
    “Why not?” I asked, rolling off the beanbag onto my hands and knees.
    “Because I don’t have the key.” Her brown eyes had grown very big.
    “What key?” I asked.
    “The Halloween key,” she said. One perfect tear rolled out of her eye and dripped onto her coat.
    “Did you lock him in a pumpkin or something?”
    She didn’t answer. Then I remembered. For Halloween all three of them had dressed up as sheriffs, and all three of them had handcuffs.
    “Does this involve handcuffs?” I asked, grabbing her by the shoulders.
    “After you arrest your bandits you have to cuff them.”
    My mouth dropped open.
    “You cuff them and then you stuff them,” she said.
    When you’re the babysitter, this is terrible news to hear. I left my change sock, threw on my coat, and ran outside. In the backyard, I could see a navy blue figure huddled beside the Bratbergs’ propane tank. My stomach flipped. They had a very big propane tank. It’s what they used to heat their whole house. “I hate being the bandit!” Dustin said, yanking on the handcuffs.
    Samantha had tightly clamped the cuff around Dustin’s right wrist, fastening him to the tank’s curvedmetal handle. Even after I took off his glove, there was no way to slip the cuff over his hand. Snot rolled like a little stream out of his nose. He swept his tongue across his upper lip, steering the stream into his mouth.
    “You’re not going to die. So there’s no need to eat your own snot,” I said. “I’ll get my mom. We have a saw.”
    I turned to run, but Dustin tugged on my coat.
    “If you saw metal, you’ll make a spark. I’m attached to a fuel tank,” he said. “What if you blow me up? Or send me to the moon?”
    He made a good point.
    “When’s the last time you had your tank filled?” I asked.
    “Just yesterday,” he said, gulping down air.
    “Are you sure?” I asked. Because I thought maybe he was trying to make the situation sound more dramatic. And as the babysitter, I thought the situation sounded plenty dramatic already.
    “I’m very sure. It was