Joshua Dread Read Online Free Page A

as he slammed into a row of lockers.
    Joey looked from Brick to me, his eyes wide with shock. “How did you …,” he muttered. “That’s not possible.…”
    For once, Joey and I were in complete agreement. My brain buzzed with confusion. Somehow I’d just knocked the biggest kid in school into a locker without even raising a finger.

4
    It’s perfectly normal
to feel strange and different .
    O ver the previous few months, there’d been other instances like this. Weird, unexplained events happening around me. Like when I’d been in the middle of a math test and my pencil had exploded in my hand. Or the time, a couple of weeks after that, when I’d been on the floor playing a video game and I’d felt something burning. Dropping the controller, I’d scrambled to my feet. That was when I noticed the burn mark in the carpet right where I’d been sitting. And it had been shaped exactly like my butt.
    Our health teacher had told us that our bodieswould be “experiencing many strange and wonderful changes.”

    Joshua’s best friend and neighbor, Milton, is a huge fan of Captain Justice … and curly fries. Just watch out when he gets too close to a hover scooter .
    For some reason, I didn’t think this was what she’d had in mind.
    I spent the next couple of periods in a daze. Something weird was going on, and I needed to figure out what it was.
    During lunch, I sat down at an empty table and tried to re-create the surge of power I’d felt earlier. I shut out all the noises around me and strained my concentration. At first nothing happened. But then I felt it. A slight tingle in my fingertips. My heart pounded as a buzz of energy spread down my arms, and then—
    “Are you okay? You look like you just swallowed a bug.”
    Milton set down his lunch tray beside me. All the focus fizzled away. I wasn’t even sure that I’d felt anything at all.
    “Hey, Milton,” I said.
    With his mouth half full of macaroni and cheese, Milton launched into a detailed replay of the fight between my parents and Captain Justice. “And the way Captain Justice destroyed the remote device with his Spear of Freedom!” Milton heaved a forkful of macaroni like it was a holographic spear. “Did you see Dr. Dread’s face when the weather suddenly got better? He looked like such an idiot!”
    I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. It was bad enough I had to listen to my parents get insultedon the evening news and in the hallway of my school. Now I was hearing it from my best friend too.
    But what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t exactly go around defending the Dread Duo.
    Suddenly Milton stopped talking. Looking up, I realized what had caught his attention. The Cafeteria Girls had just sat down at the other end of our table.
    There were four of them. Seventh graders. Pretty in a too-much-makeup kind of way. They’d been sharing a table with us for the past two months (not that they’d ever noticed us), and somewhere along the way Milton and I had begun calling them the Cafeteria Girls (not that we ever told them that). They immediately launched into their usual activity—criticizing everyone in sight.
    “Check out Jenny Allen’s haircut!”
    “Is that a pimple, or is James Wendler growing a second head?”
    “Look at Maria Rodriguez’s shoes! What did she do? Steal them from a homeless astronaut?”
    They went on like this for the next ten minutes or so, commenting on the clothing, appearance, and grooming habits of everyone who passed through the cafeteria. Sitting so close to them gave Milton and me access to all the gossip and trash talk Sheepsdale Middle School had to offer.
    “Who’s the new girl?” One of the girls pointed across the cafeteria at someone I’d never seen before.
    “Sophie Smith. Sixth grader.”
    “Did you hear what Daniel Clark said about her?”
    The rest of the Cafeteria Girls shook their heads.
    “Daniel’s older brother works for a moving company that helped Sophie Smith and her