Free Beware the Ninja Weenies by David Lubar Page B

said.
    I glanced at the faded carpet and peeling wallpaper in the hallway, and thought about the dinner we’d had last night. “You’re right. It’s probably not very good.” If we missed it, that was fine with me. I was ready to go back home and wash up. I still smelled like neem, but at least I had all my blood, and no itchy spots.

 
    THE VALLEY OF LOST TREASURES
    â€œ Mom, have you seen my roller skates?” Mandy called. She was on her hands and knees, halfway inside her bedroom closet, searching through a jumbled mess of overstuffed boxes and scattered clothing. The jungle of pants and dresses hanging from the rod above made the search even tougher.
    â€œDid you look in your closet?” her mom called from the kitchen.
    â€œGreat suggestion,” Mandy muttered. She sighed, backed out of the closet, and sat on the floor. Where can they be? She looked under her bed. The skates weren’t there. Lots of magazines, plenty of shoes, enough dust bunnies to stuff a pillow, but no skates.
    After another half hour of searching, Mandy gave up and called her friend Charlotte. “I can’t go skating.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI can’t find my skates,” she said.
    â€œYou can rent skates,” Charlotte said. “It’s not expensive.”
    â€œI don’t feel like skating today. I’ll go with you next time.”
    Mandy didn’t think it would be as much fun without her skates. They fit perfectly. And they were made of real leather. But maybe they wouldn’t even fit now. She hadn’t worn them in months.
    As Mandy headed downstairs, she thought about some of her other favorite things. She hadn’t been able to find her stuffed lamb last month when she was doing a multimedia biography for a school project. I haven’t seen Lammie in years, she thought. It wasn’t just the lamb and the skates. A week ago, she’d looked all over the house for a special pen her aunt had given her.
    As she reached the bottom of the stairs, she saw something glitter. Behind the steps, right by the door to the basement, she spotted one of her favorite hair clips. As she bent to reach for it, she realized there was no way it could have gotten there. It had been in a drawer in the bathroom cabinet. She’d put it there on Saturday evening, and she knew she hadn’t worn it since then.
    Something weird was happening. Mandy decided to leave the clip where it was. The next day, it was gone. She opened the basement door and switched on the light. She checked all the steps as she walked down, and then hunted around until she found the clip along the side wall, several feet past the stairs.
    It moved, she thought. It almost seemed as if the clip was going somewhere. Mandy wondered where a clip could possibly want to go. There was no way she could stay in the basement and watch it all night. Even if she waited, she had a feeling the clip would never move while she was looking at it.
    Maybe she could track it. She went upstairs and scooped a quarter cup of flour out of the canister her mom kept on the kitchen counter. She ran back down, half afraid the clip would have moved again, or maybe disappeared.
    But it was there. She sprinkled a dusting of flour on the floor around it. Now, if it moved, there’d be a trail.
    The next morning, Mandy checked the basement as soon as she woke up. She gasped when she realized the clip was gone. She could see signs that it had moved through the flour. She followed the streaky trail to the corner of the basement, beneath an old table.
    She crawled under the table and touched the wall. Instead of the cold hard feel of concrete, her fingers met something like velvet. She pushed her arm through. There was emptiness on the other side.
    Mandy crawled through the softness of the wall.
    It was brighter on the other side. She was in a large field of grass. Ahead, she saw all sorts of objects scattered across the ground.
    My