Amos Gets Famous Read Online Free Page B

police arrive, and we tell them the reason we’re here is that we’re trying to warn Melissa. The burglar is arrested, and your name is cleared. Simple.”
    “I hate that word.”
    “What word?”
    “
Simple
. You use it with everything, but nothing ever turns out to be that way.”
    “Amos—”
    “I hate it, too, when you say my name that way. ‘Amos.’ As if you’re talking to a lamp pole. You always say
simple
and it isn’t, and you say
Amos
when you really don’t expect …” He trailed off and turned.
    In back of them, in the bushes, there was a rustling sound, and a small figure with long arms appeared. It walked with a rolling gait across the lawn and stopped below a different second-story window from the last time. With an easy jump the figure leaped up to hang from the windowsill by one arm. He used the other arm to reach up and open the window. Then easily he swung up and into the house.
    “The burglar,” Dunc whispered. “He’s in.”
    “Dunc …”
    “I’ll go call the police.”
    “Dunc …”
    “You keep watch, and I’ll be right back.”
    “Dunc …”
    “What?”
    “That’s Melissa’s room. The one he climbed into. That’s her room.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because I come by here sometimes. Well, lots of times. It’s only twelve blocks out of my way in the opposite direction on the way to school, and I know it’s her room because I’ve seen her in the window. It’s about a hundred and thirty-six point four feet from the street to her room.”
    Dunc stared at him. “ ‘About’?”
    “Well, exactly. I used a tape measure one time when they were on vacation.”
    Dunc shook his head. “That doesn’t change anything. He’s still in there, and I still have to run for the police.”
    “No. There’s no time for the police. We have to get in there and save her.”
    Amos turned to run for the house and promptly stepped on the rake, which was lying in exactly the same place that it had been lying last time. The handle came up as it had before, perfectly, and caught him vertically exactly between the eyes. The damage might not have been so bad except that he was still wearing the pink sunglasses and the glasses were drivensolidly into his forehead, while the side pieces slammed back and into his temples. It was about like having a vise close instantly on his head, and he stopped dead, his mind blown completely blank.
    Dunc moved around him. “Come on, Amos. You’re right. Let’s get in there.”
    Amos nodded. “In there.”
    Dunc stopped next to the wall below the window.
    Amos walked toward him, a half-smile on his face.
    “Come
on
.” Dunc grabbed him and jerked him up against the wall, turned him to face outward, climbed up his front side by stepping in on Amos’s belt, which pulled his pants halfway down, then on his shoulders and head and up to grab the sill. Amos stood smiling peacefully the whole time.
    Dunc clambered into the window, reached back and down, and caught Amos by the back of his T-shirt. With a heave he pulled Amos up backward into the room. Amos stood in the darkened room, smiling quietly to himself, his pants around his knees.
    Melissa slept quietly not six feet from him. Amos had no idea she was there.
    He had no ideas at all. The inside of his mind was totally blank.

.10
    Time has a way of being elastic. Candy goes like lightning, and a math test can take a whole lifetime, and the time that Amos stood smiling in Melissa’s room could have been two minutes or two weeks. It didn’t matter.
    Amos was unconscious.
    His eyes were open, but they didn’t focus. They stared out and out and out, and he was smiling, but it meant nothing, just a reflexive lift of the sides of his mouth.
    Dunc, on the other hand, was acutely aware of where he was and what was happening.
    He looked around the darkened room, heard Melissa’s even breathing, and saw her form inthe shadows. He did not see the burglar, but he could see light from a nightlight in