Free The Yearbook by Peter Lerangis

You were just spying on Stephen? Trying to get me to like you?”
    I tried putting my arm around her. “No! That’s not it at all. I … I didn’t mean to upset you.”
    She edged away. “I’m not upset,” she said with a strange calmness. “Why should I be upset? I mean, classmates are dying, corpses are swimming in our water system, there’s a hole under the school, our yearbook was sabotaged, you’re busy checking out forty-year-old Communist conspiracies, and my boyfriend is seeing someone behind my back. What’s the big deal?”
    “Ariana— ”
    With a choked sob, she got up from the bench and ran toward her house. “Leave me alone.”
    I followed at a sprint. “I know how you must feel, but — ”
    She spun around. Her eyes were murderous. They froze me in my tracks. “You don’t have a clue how I feel, David. But I see through you. And I think what you’re trying to do is sick.”
    “I don’t understand — ”
    “I’m sorry I ever asked you to be on the staff. You’ve spent two months staring at me, but I never thought you’d stoop to this. You leave my private life to me !”
    “But —but — ”
    I sputtered as she disappeared around the corner. Her footsteps echoed hollowly in the bleak evening.
    David Kallas, Master of Tact.
    I stood there until my ears became numb with the wind. Then, slowly, I headed home.
    My body tensed as I approached the construction site. Smoke was billowing from it now, and I craned my neck to see inside.
    The smoke was seeping out of the pipe, escaping upward through the junk in the rotted-open part.
    The shoe was gone, of course. But where?
    I sat at the edge of the hole. I had seen a foot disappear into a pipe. I had to make sense of it somehow.
    I asked myself a basic question: What does a pipe do?
    Carry fluids.
    How do the fluids move?
    From a higher to lower position … from higher to lower pressure.
    So, an object in the pipe — say, a body — would move for the same reasons a liquid would.
    Okay, so maybe we had not seen the Foot of the Living Dead. Maybe it had been your garden variety corpse moving to the laws of physics.
    Gee, what a relief.
    I climbed down into the hole. Using my hands, I cleared out the junk I could see, taking care not to reach into the pipe. Then I lowered my head to look inside.
    A billow of smoke rushed around my head, and I came face-to-face with a pair of small eyes.
    “Agggh!” I bolted upright.
    Footsteps skittered down the pipe, toward the Ramble.
    A rat. No big deal. It must have felt worse than I did.
    I let my heartbeat settle, then asked myself another small question:
    What happens to the contents of a pipe?
    They are carried to a dumping place, which in Wetherby is usually the Wampanoag River.
    I ran into the Ramble before I had the opportunity to think about what I was doing. Rain had started, and my feet slipped off slick, wet branches.
    I found my way to the boulder near the drainpipe. This time, no fuzzy head poked its way out of the water. I leaned out over the river and saw nothing but the gaping black circle of the pipe and some refuse underneath.
    As I stood up, the rays of the setting sun caught a shiny object in the muck near the pipe. I walked over, reached in, and pulled out a gold high school ring.
    The name RACHEL GREEN was carved on the inside.

Chapter 17
    “S O HOW EXACTLY WOULD you date a prehistoric mummy?” asked Mr. O’Toole in first-period physics the next morning. “Mark?”
    Rosie looked up from his doodling. “Um … ask very nicely?”
    The class burst into laughter.
    Me? I was barely paying attention. It had been a horrible night. I’d managed to track down Chief Hayes, who had been eating dinner at Arby’s with his family. (They were the only customers. The rest of Wetherby had been in hiding every night since Rick had been found.) While they stared at me, chewing away, I had showed him Rachel’s ring and explained what had happened.
    He had told me not to call the Greens or John