Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen (16 page)

I nodded. “Let's go.”

So we tore across town and managed to slide into homeroom just as the tardy bell was ringing. I was glad to see that Marissa was back from Las Vegas, but she was looking pretty tired in her seat across the room. I smiled and waved at her, then noticed Heather snarling at me from two rows up.

Now, Hudson's always telling me I should try killing Heather with kindness—that it's the only way of dealing with her. That's a tough thing to do, so I usually try to ignore her instead. And I don't know if it was because I
was all out of breath from running or what, but on impulse I smiled at her and gave a little wave.

And what I learned is that for such a smart guy, Hudson's clueless about people like Heather Acosta. I mean, talk about lighting a fuse! Heather sizzled and sputtered and had a mini spaz-out right there on the spot. And I could tell that any second she was going to explode in my direction, so I put my hands up and mouthed, “Chill!”

She mouthed something right back, and even though I couldn't exactly follow it, the meaning was loud and clear: She was gonna kill me. And no, she wasn't planning on doing it with kindness.

I rolled my eyes like, Oh right, then stood for the Pledge with the rest of the class. But inside, my stomach was churning. Heather may be mean, but she's also smart and sneaky, and that is one dangerous combination.

After homeroom I avoided her the best I could by taking different routes between classes and just ducking out of view when I spotted her in my vicinity. Then at lunch Holly and I pieced together for Marissa and Dot most of what had happened over the weekend. Marissa kept saying, “I can't believe I missed all this! I can't believe they made me miss your birthday! I can't believe you guys had so much fun without me!”

“Fun?” I asked. “You call digging up dead cats
fun?
You call losing your own cat
fun?
You call being thirteen twice
fun?”

She scowled and said, “Better'n babysitting Mikey.” And that's how it came out that pretty much all Marissa
did in Las Vegas was look after her little brother while her parents went to shows and out for drinks and to the spa. “Even when we went swimming,
I
had to keep an eye on Mikey. The only thing I did that was any fun was go see Darren Cole and the Troublemakers with my mom.”

“Darren Cole and the
Troublemakers?”
Holly asked.

Marissa laughed. “Yeah, I know. Apparently my mom had a crush on Darren Cole when she was young. The concert was pretty amazing, but that's basically the only fun I had.”

So I actually wasn't thinking about Heather at all. But then Dot clears her throat, “Ahem,” and that's when I notice that there's someone standing right behind me. “Oh hi, Casey,” I say, turning beet red.

“Hi,” he says back, then scoots his way onto the bench. “I was sorta waiting for a break in the conversation, but lunch is about over and you're still jabbering away.”

“What's up?” I ask, because I can tell something is.

He grins around at the other three, saying, “I suppose she's told you that she and the Evil One have the same birthday?”

My friends nod, but I say, “I wasn't gossiping about Heather! I was talking about—”

“It's okay! I wouldn't blame you if you
were
talking about my sister. You should have seen her after brunch at the Inn—she spun into evil overdrive. If I were you, I'd definitely watch my back.” He digs deep into his jeans pocket. “Which is why I brought you this.”

“What is it?” I ask, and he shows me—a miniature horseshoe.

“Give me your shoe,” he says.

“My shoe?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why my shoe?”

He rolls his eyes and looks at the others like, Is she always this cooperative?

They all laugh, so I say, “Hey! Stop that,” which just makes them laugh some more.

Then Casey says to me, “Worried you got stinky feet?”

“No!”

“So give it here.” He pulls my leg up so my foot's on the bench. And then—get this—he yanks the bow free and
fwip, fwip, fwip
, he starts unlacing my high-top.

I pull away. “Hey, what are you doing?”

He anchors my foot. “Trying to give you some good luck—would you quit fighting me?” Then he wags the horseshoe at me and says, “This is gonna stay right here on your shoe, neutralizing the bad luck that is thirteen.”

“But—”

“So which way should it go? This way?” He holds it against my shoe so the U end points toward my toe. “Or this way?” He flips it around so the U end is facing up.

“Uh…”

“Some people think having the horseshoe point up keeps luck from running out. Other people think it's gotta face down so its luck can pour over you.”

“Um…”

“Of course, people who bet on the horses think just touching a horseshoe makes you lucky.” He held his chin a minute, looking down at my shoe, then suddenly got to
work, threading the lace through nail holes in the horseshoe so that the bottom of the U faced the toe of my shoe.

“So is that gonna keep the luck from running out?” I lifted my leg. “Or is it pouring over me?”

He laughed. “I guess it depends on your perspective. Or position.” He grabbed my foot again and started threading the laces up the rest of my high-top. “Either way, it's got you covered. Plus, it's right where you can reach it, so basically this'll give you three-way luck.” He finished lacing, tied a snug bow, then smiled at me and said, “Happy birthday.”

I looked at him, then at my shoe. And honestly, I couldn't think of a thing to say. The horseshoe wasn't shiny. It wasn't fancy. It was kinda crude and almost rusty-looking. And if I'd seen it in a store window I would have thought, Who'd pay money for
that?
But looking at it on my shoe, I thought it was without a doubt the coolest thing anyone had ever given me.

But before I can figure out what to say, Holly says,
“Psssst,”
and nudges her nose across the lunch area.

And when I turn around, who do I see?

Sister Snot and the Snidettes.

“Oh no,” Dot moans. “Not them again.”

I look at Casey and say, “Lucky horseshoe, huh?”

He laughs and stands, saying, “Seriously. She won't be able to touch you.”

I laugh, too. “Yeah, right.”

“Believe!” he says all voodoo-like, then heads over to talk to his sister.

The minute he's gone, Dot and Marissa swarm around me like love-starved locusts. “Ohmygod,” Marissa squeals. “That was romantic beyond … beyond comprehension!”

“Shut up, Marissa,” I say through my teeth.

“That was so Romeo and Juliet!”

“Stop it! It's nothing like that! It was just a nice, you know,
gesture.”

Dot's shaking her head at me. “Oh no. He was dreamy.”

“Dreamy?
Dreamy?”
I scrunch my face and look from Dot to Marissa and back again. “I can't believe you're being so juvenile!”

Marissa snickers. “You are so in denial.”

“I am not!”

“Look, in the old days girls used to get pinned.”

“Pinned? What's pinned?” I was trying to keep an eye on what was happening between Casey and Heather, but my friends were running serious interference.

“Guys would put a pin—you know, a brooch or something—on a girl.”

“Yeah,” Dot says. “Or they'd give them a Saint Christopher necklace to wear…”

“A what?” I couldn't concentrate on pins or necklaces. Heather was shoving Casey…
hard…
but he was just laughing about it… walking away… and now… uh-oh, she was glaring at me again.

But that didn't stop Dot or Marissa from going on and on about signs of love.

“Some girls get a promise ring,” Marissa whispered.

“Or a class ring!” Dot giggled.

Marissa grinned. “
You
got a horseshoe!”

“It's not
even
the same thing!” I said, trying to avoid Heather's glare. “He gave me a rusted piece of bent metal!”

“But it's something of
his
—”

“That you'll
wear
—”

“Oh please!” I cried. “You've lost it, you know that?” I wagged my high-top at them. “It's a bent piece of rusty metal! With holes!”

But then Holly said, “I don't know, Sammy. And I've got to say, the guy's pretty gutsy. He gave it to you in front of all of us.”

“That's because we're just
friends.
He wasn't being all ‘dreamy' or romantic or… or…
stupid.
He was just being nice.”

Marissa giggled and said, “Maybe we should start calling you Lucky.”

“Shut up!”

“Yeah,” Dot chimed in, “Lucky Thirteen.”

“I mean it!”

Holly grinned. “Sounds right to me.”

I couldn't believe that Holly was joining in on this.
“What?”

She shrugged. “Well, first you win forty bucks, then you get your cat back…”

Marissa nodded. “And now you've been horseshoed by a really hot guy.”

That did it. I started whipping the laces out of my shoe, saying, “I give up. If you guys are bent on making this into something it's not—”

But Marissa and Dot
tackled
me, yanked my arms back, and retied my shoe. “We're sorry!” Marissa said. “We won't say another word about it. We won't mention it to an-y-bod-y!”

“Oh right.”

“We promise!”

We stared at each other a minute, and finally I said, “Really?”

They all nodded. “Really.”

“‘Cause you know it was just a nice thing for him to do and… and I can use all the luck I can get.”

“You can say that again,” Holly muttered. She was looking across the lunch area, so we looked, too. Casey was long gone, but Heather was still there. And from the way she was still glaring at me as she huddled up with her friends, I could tell that surviving the day with her was going to take a whole lot more than luck.

Vice Principal Caan has slapped a little junior high restraining order on Heather that supposedly keeps her from getting within twenty-five feet of me during school. So it was probably more that than her brother's lucky horseshoe that kept her from actually touching me. Oh, her eyes sliced and diced me during science, and she walked past my lab table about twenty times trying to get a good look at my foot, but at the end of the day I was still in one piece.

So after we said bye to Dot, who was riding home with her dad, Holly, Marissa, and I headed across town to take down the rest of the Dorito flyers. And we were just moseying along collecting them when we came to a phone pole where I found
another
flyer posted above mine. “Hey,” I said. “Check it out—someone else is missing their cat.”

The new flyer was actually a lot better than mine because it had a picture. The cat was a tabby named Zippy, with white-tipped ears and a black star between the eyes.

“Oh, he's so cute,” Holly said.

“Do you think it's that crazy cat lady's?” Marissa asked.
“You said you saw her on this side of town last night, right?”

I checked the phone number on the flyer. “It's not Psycho's number—I don't remember it exactly, but I know hers has three sevens in it.” I pulled down my flyer and muttered, “But what's the deal with missing cats?”

As we continued walking, Marissa said, “Maybe you're just noticing it more?”

“What, you think there are always dead cats in trash bins, we just haven't noticed them?”

“No. But people lose their pets all the time.”

“That's true,” Holly said. “The Humane Society gets calls all the time. And the pound picks them up, too.”

“But doesn't this seem like a lot?”

“You're always looking for the sinister,” Marissa said.

“We found dead cats!”

“But you got Dorito back, alive and well! And this little Zippy kitty will probably turn up, too. Cats go missing all the time! There's no cat-hater conspiracy. And no one's skinning them alive and putting them out as buffet food—that's just an old folk tale.”

“Oh, is that so,” I said.

And Holly snapped, “So we're supposed to think it's
normal
to find dead cats in the trash?”

Marissa put both hands up. “Hey, sorry! I'm just saying maybe they got hit by a car. Or ate rat poison.” She pushed her bike along, saying, “You know what rat poison does, don't you?”

“No, what?”

“It makes animals thirsty. They go crazy looking for
water. That's why people use it in their attics. Rats eat it, then they go outside looking for water and die.”

“How does it kill them?” Holly asked.

Marissa shrugged. “I don't know. It explodes their insides or something. The point is, there is no cat-killing conspiracy.”

“So you're saying you think finding dead, spazzed-out cats in trash cans
is
normal?”

Marissa stopped and looked right at me. “How should I know? I don't dig through trash!” The instant she said it she was sorry. “I… I didn't mean anything by that, okay? It's just not something I want to worry about. Dead cats. Dead mice. I don't like dead stuff.”

“Neither do I,” I said.

“Especially unnecessarily dead stuff,” Holly muttered.

So the three of us walked along, taking down posters in silence for a while. And almost every place there was a Dorito poster, right next to it was a Zippy poster.