Free In a Flash by Eric Walters Page B

there.”
    â€œWe keep going back to this security and police thing. If I get arrested, I’m going to kill you.”
    â€œIf you kill me, you
would
get arrested. Murder is a crime. This isn’t...well, not really.”
    We cut through the women’s clothing section, and suddenly I was surrounded by racks and racks of colorful lingerie and bras. I felt strange and lowered my eyes. I didn’t want Julia to see me staring at them...but I didn’twant her to think that I wasn’t interested in them...but I didn’t want her to think I was
too
interested in them in some sort of strange, cross-dressing, perverted way or—I bumped into a rack and it almost tipped over.
    Julia snickered. “You know if you break it, you gotta buy it.”
    â€œFunny, really funny,” I said. As I steadied the rack, a few bright orange and pink bras fluttered to the floor. I thought about picking them up, but I really didn’t want Julia to see me handling bras. Besides, there wasn’t time.
    â€œCome on,” I said. I pushed past Julia, and she fell in behind me.
    Breaking free of the lingerie, we came to the homewares, and off to the side was the bedding section. There were beds and blankets and sheets and duvets and, best of all, bins filled with pillows.
    And that wasn’t all. There were kids wearing baseball caps standing around in the section—and more coming from all sides, converging on the beds.
    â€œAnd you thought nobody was going to show up,” I said.
    I looked at my watch. The second hand was sweeping up toward twelve—twenty seconds to go. I walked over to the bins holding the pillows and stopped.
    I started to count. There were at least fifty, no sixty, maybe seventy and more still streaming in. About half had their baseball caps on backward; the rest wore the bill to the front. Perfect. There was almost exactly the same number of people on both teams.
    I looked at my watch again. Five seconds. I popped the whistle into my mouth and blew as loud as I could—and then I was smashed in the back of the head.

chapter two
    I grabbed a pillow from the bin, turned around and swung it at my attacker—it was a girl. She ducked under my swing, hit me with a second shot and danced away to start swinging at somebody else.
    All around me there were dozens and dozens of people engaged in a gigantic free-for-all pillow fight!
    â€œHere, take this,” I yelled at Julia as I tossed a pillow to her.
    She looked at me and opened her mouthto say something, but before the words could come out she was hit in the side of the head. She staggered and toppled over, landing on a bed!
    I should have cheered—after all, she was on the other side, the backward hats—but I was worried about how she was going to react.
    She jumped back to her feet. Her expression quickly went from shocked to angry. Making Julia angry was never wise. She leaped across the bed and started swinging at the person who had hit her.
    I came to the defense of the guy she was attacking—after all, he
was
on my team—and hit Julia on the arm, knocking the pillow out of her grip. Before she could retrieve it, she was hit by two other people.
    I ran around a display case and started a battle with two guys, catching one with an upper-cut that knocked the baseball cap off his head. He looked surprised, and then he laughed and put his hat back on his head.
    Two girls were jumping on a bed and exchanging hits and giggles. Finally one ofthem jumped off, and the second trailed after her. The two of them took glancing blows from other people as they ran across the department and disappeared into women’s wear.
    There was playful combat everywhere. I didn’t have much time to look around, but there had to be close to a hundred people around me, yelling, laughing and swinging their pillows.
    On the edges of the battle other people watched. There were grown-ups holding their kids by the hand or