Fabulous Five 007 - The Kissing Disaster Read Online Free Page B

anymore, she thought. I don't
have time for them anymore, either. That's life. No, she corrected herself.
That's junior high.
    After school, everything went just the way she had planned.
She sauntered into Bumpers, trying to look totally casual. Out of the corner of
one eye she could see Beth and Katie sitting at a table. They had spotted her,
too, and Katie was waving in her direction.
    "They probably just want me to come over to their table
so that they can have someone to ignore," Melanie grumbled under her
breath.
    Shane also spotted her just then. "Hey, Melanie,"
he called out. "Come on over."
    Even though Bumpers was noisy, Shane had shouted so loud
that Melanie was sure her friends had heard.
    Shane was sitting with four other boys from the seventh-grade
football team: Tony Sanchez, Keith Masterson, Bill Kingman, and Randy Kirwan,
and he was telling them about the cow's-eyeball project when she walked up.
    ". . . and then old Dracula gets this big bowl of
eyeballs out of the fridge and starts plopping them into the pans on everybody's
table, and when he gets to our table . . . hey, Mel. Tell them what happened
when he got to our table."
    Melanie felt herself blushing. "It was gross," she
said with a nervous laugh. "Let's change the subject, okay? We could talk
about the seventh-grade dance."
    "Sure," said Shane, looking apologetic, but the
other guys wanted to hear more about the cow's eyeball.
    "Come on, Melanie. Tell us what happened in biology
class," said Keith.
    "You can talk about it," insisted Tony. "It's
all over with now."
    Suddenly Melanie realized that she had their complete
attention. She glanced quickly toward The Fabulous Five's table to make sure
they had all noticed that she was in the spotlight with five gorgeous football
players, but Beth and Katie were still by themselves. Where were Jana and
Christie? she wondered. Then she spotted Christie and Jon at the order counter.
Well, anyway Beth and Katie had noticed her. And so had a lot of other kids
sitting around at nearby tables. Laura McCall and her three friends were
glaring in her direction. Taffy Sinclair and Mona Vaughn had actually gotten up
from their table and were standing close enough to hear.
    "Well," she began, feeling like a movie star
giving her first live television interview, "as Shane said, Dracula just
plopped that great big gruesome eyeball into the pan on our table. It
was actually staring at me!" Melanie added for effect.
    "Yew!" cried Mona.
    "Did you throw up?" asked Bill Kingman.
    "No, silly," said Melanie. "I just . .
."
    "Well, I almost did," interrupted Shawnie Pendergast.
Melanie hadn't even noticed that she was nearby, but Shawnie immediately began
telling everybody how she had had to run out of the room the day the project
was announced.
    Gradually the crowd around the table got bigger as more and
more kids heard bits and pieces of the conversation and came over to listen.
Shane and she talked the most, telling in great detail about the bluish-black
gel on the backs of the eyeballs and the sickening smell of formaldehyde that hung
in the air and about Dracula's standing over them in his black, shiny toupee.
    Melanie tried to keep tabs on each of The Fabulous Five, but
she missed seeing when any of them left. Still, it had been a wonderful
afternoon. She felt more popular than she ever had in her life. Kids were
crowding around her, clamoring to ask questions and hanging on to every word
she said. And it wasn't until after Shane had walked her home and said good-bye
that she remembered she had forgotten to borrow his notebook and copy his notes.

CHAPTER 6
    It was midnight before Melanie finally finished her homework
and switched off her bedside lamp. She was beat. The meeting of the decorations
committee had been fun, especially since Derek Travelstead had paid a lot of
attention to her, but it had lasted far longer than she had expected. That was
mainly because Taffy Sinclair had had so many crazy ideas—such as decorating