Free Peeled by Joan Bauer Page B

only ones I knew how to play.
    Up, down, all around
,
    Apples begin from a seed in the ground.
    Juan-Carlos showed them the hand motions. He really got into this.
    “Arriba! Arriba!”
he shouted, which means “Up! Up!” in Spanish.
    We sang the song over and over. Then I read them the story of Johnny Appleseed’s love of apples, his total focus on one fruit, how his commitment to a dream benefited generations to come. I glared at Cantwell. “
Now
, everybody, it’s time for your snack!”
    The kids descended on the plate of apple brownies like moths to a light source. A little girl, Sara, ran up and hugged me. “You have a pretty face, Hildy.”
    I hugged her back. “You have a pretty face, too.”
    Missy Grimes marched up, a very complicated little girl. I used to babysit for her. She had a bandage on her elbow. “Hug me, Hildy! Hug me, too!” I gave her a big one.
    Missy’s eyes were wide. “I saw something and it was big! Huge, even!”
    “Really?”
    I babysat Missy last summer and was exhausted by the experience. Missy claimed to see lots of big things—giant bats, enlarged worms, gargantuan bees—all swooping down to get her. Her parents were going through a nasty divorce. Mrs. Grimes kept calling me to babysit again, too. I’d been avoiding her.
    Missy grabbed both my hands. “I
saw it,”
she insisted. Then she lowered her voice. “I can’t tell the other part. But you can read about it!”
    “What do you mean?”
    “What do we say, children?” the teacher asked, beginningto steer the kids onto the bus with their apple bags.
    “Thank you!”
shrieked the first-graders of Banesville Elementary.
    I took Missy’s hand. “Missy, what are you talking about?”
    “It’s a secret,” she whispered, and ran onto the bus. She sat at the window staring out. She always seemed lonely.
    The bus pulled away.
    You can read about it.
    I didn’t like the sound of that.

Chapter 11

    “I hear up by Ludlow’s place there’s more coming,” Crescent Furl, owner of the A to Z Convenience Store, said to me. She had the headache medicines up front at the counter now—they used to be in the back.
    I grabbed a bottle of water from her refrigerator. “What do you mean?” I asked.
    Crescent sniffed. “All I heard is some talk.”
    To get Crescent to really talk, you had to buy more. I grabbed two Hershey bars, peanuts, a pocket Kleenex, and put five dollars on the counter. “Tell me.”
    Crescent rang up the order slowly. “It’s not like I’m some kinda telegraph center.”
    I smiled. “Crescent, you know everything going on in town.”
    She liked that. “I hear,” she said, “they saw another one.”
    “Another what?”
    “Another ghost,” she said ominously.
    “Who saw it?”
    “Didn’t hear who, just what.”
    A tired mother with four children came in. The kids were screaming, running everywhere. More people came in. The store was close to packed. Not the time to try to talk to Crescent.
    I didn’t have to wonder long.
    The Bee
hit the street with a special edition blaring the news.
ANOTHER LOCAL GIRL INJURED BY LUDLOW’S GHOST
CROWDS SURGE ONTO FARNSWORTH ROAD
    The name of the girl was being withheld “to protect the innocent,” but the girl went into vast detail about biking down Farnsworth Road and all that she saw in the upstairs room of the Ludlow house.
    “It was big,” she asserted. “Huge, even.”
    Specifically, it was a floating head, and after she saw it, a branch fell from a tree in the Ludlow yard and scared her, causing her to fall off her bike. She was taken to the emergency room and kept under observation into the evening. There was a spooky picture of the Ludlow house with a new sign front and center.

    There was a picture of Sallie Miner, too, under the heading “Are Our Children Safe?”
    What power was causing branches to fly off trees and attack children? That was another question
The Bee
pursued exhaustively, with help from Madame Zobek.
    “There is some