Free Halifax by Leigh Dunlap Page A

awesome? I finally found the me I always knew I could be!”

CHAPTER NINE
    Rom sat at his table in the library. He watched the librarian, studying her and her habits, watching her as she watched him. Watching her until she grew bored with him. She finally turned away and looked down at the crossword puzzle on her desk.
    Rom seized the opportunity to peruse his penguin backpack and the seemingly bottomless pit of entertainment opportunities it held for him. It was filled mostly with toys strewn amongst the odd pencil or candy wrapper. Rom pushed aside the Magic Eight Ball he had used to destroy their old house, a Pez Dispenser with a scary clown’s head, a container of dried up Play Dough, a Yo-Yo, a binocular-like red Viewmaster, and a plastic bear-shaped honey jar.
    He continued to search for something, moving things aside, jostling them around, peering into the backpack as he occasionally looked up to see if Ms. Goodman was watching him. Finally, beneath his blowtorch Barbie with her now charred and hairless head, he spied what he had been searching for. It was a half eaten bag of gummy worms. Rom reached in to retrieve them and accidentally brushed his hand against a bright yellow rubber duckie at the bottom of the backpack. The rubber duckie let out a loud “quack” and its eyes began to glow red. Rom ducked just as a beam of light shot out of the duckie’s eyes and past Rom’s head. The beam whizzed across the room, hitting the ceiling, and burning a Frisbee sized hole in the panel high above the librarian’s head.
    Ms. Goodman looked up at the sound of the “quack” but didn’t notice the smoking hole in the ceiling above her. “Is there a problem, Mr. Halifax?”
    “No,” Rom said, trying not to look at the hole but finding it almost impossible not to do so. He pulled a gummy worm out and began chewing on it nervously. “No problem over here.”
* * *
    And Izzy had thought this was going to be fun.
    From her vantage point at the entrance to the gym the scene before Izzy looked more like a cheerleading competition than a basketball game. The Westminster cheerleaders almost cowered in fear as the Lexham squad flipped and spun and danced around them. They were an annoying, sparkly and smiling gaggle of energy.
    A basketball game was being played somewhere behind the cheerleaders. Farrell stood near the side of the court waiting for the inbound pass from one of his fellow players. He hadn’t seen much action thus far in the close game. Actually, he hadn’t seen any action at all other than running up and down the court as the other players went out of their way to keep the ball out of his hands—and those were the players from his own team. Finally, he was waiting to get the basketball as it was brought into play, but Andre jumped in front of Farrell and took it for himself, running down court and executing a text book lay up, scoring two points to put Lexham up by two.
    Normally this would have driven Farrell crazy. He would have been interested in nothing but proving himself and defeating his enemy. In the case of basketball, the enemy was Andre, but there were more important things to consider and his attention, like Izzy’s, was on the cheerleaders. Knowing something was wrong, however, didn’t necessarily mean knowing why it was wrong.
    Farrell caught Izzy’s eye and motioned to the side of the court where the cheerleaders were trying their best to whip the Lexham fans into a frenzy. Izzy spotted Carolyn Holcomb among their numbers and worked her way down the edge of the court towards her. In the few days since Izzy had last seen Carolyn, she seemed to have mastered all manner of cheerleading stunts and was now atop a pyramid of girls raising her arms in the air to form a
V
. She screamed out “Go Nimrods” and tumbled down as the pyramid collapsed in an orderly fashion beneath her. She rolled to a stop at Izzy’s feet.
    “Carolyn?” Izzy asked, looking down on her, alarmed. “What the