Free Philip and the Superstition Kid (9781452430423) by John Paulits Page A

kitchen and open the back
door.”
    “ Yeah! Good. That’s good,
Leon,” Emery agreed. “You have the worst triskaphebium anyway.
What’s a little more bad luck to you?”
    “ True, true,” Leon moaned.
He slowly rose, and walked around to the front of the
house.
    Philip and Emery listened through the
screened window on the kitchen door. They heard the doorbell ring.
They heard vampire girl babbling something angrily at Leon, but
couldn’t make out the words. A few moments later Leon slid out of
the kitchen door and closed it behind him.
    “ She hates me,” Leon
moaned.
    “ Doesn’t matter,” Emery
said, smiling. “You did the job. Come on, Philip.”
    Emery reached for the doorknob. It wouldn’t
move.
    “ Leon! What did you do?
Did you unlock the door?” Emery cried.
    Leon shrugged. “It opened for me.”
    “ Leon,” Philip burst out
angrily, “you gotta do something with that little button. Lots of
doors open from the inside and not from the outside. Oh, Leon, you
boob. We’re right back where we started.”
    Leon gave Philip a hurt look.
    “ Go do it again,” ordered
Emery. “Go, ring the bell again, and this time do it
right.”
    Leon rose and slumped off muttering, “I’m
not a boob. . .”
    Philip and Emery waited. They heard the
doorbell. This time they could hear what vampire girl was saying
because she was shouting.
    “ Didn’t I just tell you to
get upstairs and stay in this house? Get up there. How’d you get
out there again? You got wings or something? You like being outside
so much, you want me to put a dress on you again and make you stand
on the lawn? Get up there. And don’t let me hear a peep from you
the rest of the night.”
    “ I think he went
upstairs,” Philip whispered.
    “ That’s okay. Vampire girl
must have been watching him,” Emery whispered back.
    Philip and Emery leaned against the house
and waited.
    Five minutes passed and then they heard the
rapid clip clop of Leon coming across the kitchen floor. The
kitchen door flew open and bounced back, slamming shut.
    “ Okay, I’m back,” Leon
said triumphantly. Then his face exploded in panic. “The button. I
forgot the button. Try it. Try it.”
    Philip grabbed for the doorknob and turned
it. Nothing.
    “ Leon,” Emery seethed.
“How could anybody be as bad luck as you? It’s impossible. You must
be from Badluck Planet or something.”
    “ The thirteen steps,”
Philip reminded Emery.
    Then Emery remembered about Leon charging up
the stairs with the dress waving over his head.
    “ What thirteen steps?
What? What?” Leon asked.
    “ You went up thirteen
stairs,” Philip said, slumping back against the side of the
house.
    “ No, no. When Miss Vampire
chased me upstairs now, I was careful. I did eleven steps. I
did.”
    “ Not when you ran up the
stairs with your dress on before that,” Emery said gloomily. “I
watched. We counted. Thirteen.”
    Leon realized his mistake. “Oh, no.
Everything happens to me.” He slumped back against the wall.
    “ Now what?” Emery
muttered.
    No one had an idea until Philip said,
“There’s only one thing to do.”
    Emery looked doubtfully at Philip.
    Philip explained. “If we can’t go in the
back door, we’ll have to go in the front door.”
    “ Oh, great,” Emery said
sarcastically. “She’ll scream at us and then call my mother to say
we snuck out. My mother’ll ask me how we got out. Vampire girl will
tell her we couldn’t have gone out the front door. I’ll have to say
we went out the window. My mother’ll go crazy . . .”
    “ All right. All right,”
Philip interrupted. “That wasn’t what I meant. Leon.”
    Leon lifted his head and stared gloomily at
Philip.
    “ Now what do I gotta do?” he asked forlornly.
    “ You gotta knock on the
front door again.”
    Leon moaned. “She’ll kill me.”
    “ Then you have to push
vampire girl or kick her or something and get her to chase you. Get
her to chase you all over the house. Get her to chase you