Free My Zombie Hamster by Havelock McCreely Page A

it was for squirrels or something.
    But nobody called out the mayor on this. Well, a few people tried, but then his offices said they didn’t have time to deal with that because there were more important things to worry about. The pet crisis was getting worse, they said, and more than two hundred pets were missing. I had no idea it was so many. The mayor issued a proclamation saying that all pets were to be kept indoors until they could figure out what was going on.
    I knew what was going on.
    Anti-Snuffles, that’s what. He had a lot to answer for.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 21
    Still doing my detention at school. Mom was going to cut it back to a few days, considering what happened, but I told her not to. It made her look even tougher, and I got more sympathy from my classmates.
    One of those people giving me more sympathy is Erin Deacon. She’s in my class and is—well, she’s, um, she’s beautiful. I’ve liked Erin since she moved here last year. She used to live in New York City, but when the deadbeats broke through the wall around the city her parents decided to move somewhere safer.
    She’s really cool, knows a lot about the world, and her stories of the day the deadbeats got intoNew York are amazing. The National Guard out on the streets. Running battles. Helicopters strafing the ground. It sounds like something in a Michael Bay movie.
    Anyway, she passed me a note after class broke up. It said, “I think you’re really brave. XX.”
    XX. Hmm. Is that vague or not? I mean, it’s not definitive, is it? She might sign all her notes like that. And she didn’t say “I think you’re amazingly good looking,” or even “I think you’re cute.” No, it was “I think you’re brave.”
    Is she just being nice? I don’t have anyone I can ask. Nobody knows I like Erin. I can’t tell Charlie. She’ll just make fun of me. Calvin—well, I’m not even sure he knows the female species exists. There’s Aren, but I once heard him talking about how love was nothing more than a—let me see if I can remember—a “biological imperative, a chemical command meant to ensure the future of the species.”
    Yeah, I’m not sure any of them would understand.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22
    2:30 p.m . Charlie wasn’t at school today, so I stopped at her place on the way home.
    She was huddled on the couch beneath a blanket, watching reruns of
Friends
on TV. She didn’t look good. She was really pale and sweating. “What happened to you?”
    “No idea,” she said. “Must have caught something out in the nature.” She said the words “the nature” as if it was something alien and evil. “Shouldn’t you see a doctor?”
    “I’m going tomorrow.”
    “Okay. Well, I’ll see you around. No offense, but you look really sick, and I don’t want to catch whatever it is.”
    “Thanks, buddy.”
    “No worries,” I said, then hurried home.

    3:00 a.m . Well, that was interesting. I was asleep earlier tonight when I got a text message from Charlie.
    “On roof. Need company.”
    I got out of bed and slid the window up, leaning as far out as possible where I could just see Charlie’s house. Their garage was attached to the side of their house, and Charlie was sitting on its roof, wrapped in a thick blanket. She saw me and waved.
    I ducked back in and threw on some clothes, then dragged my own blanket off my bed, sneaking downstairs and out the back door. I climbed over the fence, then hopped onto the woodshed and up onto the garage.
    I sat down next to Charlie and pulled the blanket over my shoulder. She was staring up at the moon.
    “How you feeling?”
    “A lot better, actually.”
    I looked at her closely. She still looked really pale. Like, white as snow pale. She had stopped shivering, though.
    “You should still go to the doctor. You look terrible.”
    “Gee, thanks.”
    And then she got a bit weird. She started talking about the old days, about our time in preschool, that kind of thing. About the time Calvin got lost in the