Life on Mars Read Online Free Page B

she was so much more beautiful than they were. So the sea nymphs tattled on her to Poseidon, who got upset, and, trust me, Poseidon is not a dude you want to get mad at you. Next thing you know, Poseidon was sending some monster to destroy Cepheus’s land. Basically the only way Cepheus and Cassiopeia could get out of it was to sacrifice their beautiful daughter, Andromeda, to the sea monster.
    So they totally did. I know, parents of the year, right? Why couldn’t they have been the ones bitten by the scorpion?
    Anyway, so they chained Andromeda to a rock and she would have been sea monster supper had Perseus not come along and seen how amazingly stunning and soft she was and fallen in love. Long story short, Perseus saved Andromeda and they got married.
    Sometimes, when I thought about that story, and about the beautiful and gentle Andromeda, I thought of Priya.
    And that was a new thing, believe me. And, no, I didn’t know where it came from, either.
    But I couldn’t help it. Priya started wearing these bracelets that clinked and clanked on her arm, and sometimes she bit her lip when she was thinking hard about an algebra problem, and all of it was very … Andromeda-like.
    But if you tell Tripp I said that, I’ll kill you.
    Priya lived across the street and two houses down, and her mom and my mom were best friends. Priya was also in our preschool class. She was the one who picked me up out of the sandpit and wiped the sand off the front of my shirt. And then she helped Tripp get up. And then she let us both share her juice box so we could get the sand out of our mouths.
    Tripp was so into licking the cookie crumbs off his fingers, he forgot to look up and stubbed his toe on Priya’s front porch step, pitching him forward into the door. So instead of knocking like normal people, we knocked like
ka-thud boom!
But Priya was every bit as used to opening her front door to a just-tripped Tripp as I was, so she didn’t notice.
    â€œWhat’s up?” she asked. She was holding a marker and had a smudge of orange across the bridge of her nose.
    I pointed to the moving van. “We got new neighbors,” I said.
    â€œSo?”
    â€œSo, I have to tell you guys something. Come on.”
    They didn’t ask, just followed me across the street and back down to my house, where we went up to CICM-HQ (minus CICM, since it was technically broken and Comet had probably peed on the magnifying glass by now, because Comet peed on everything unusual he found in the backyard).
    I told them all about what I’d seen the night before—the old man in the black hoodie. The bag of body parts he was carrying. The box of more body parts or perhaps implements of torture of seventh-grade children. The way he scowled at me from beneath his hood, his eyes all shadowy like a vampire’s.
    â€œSo you think he’s a vampire,” Priya said disbelievingly.
    â€œNo.” (Maybe.)
    â€œA monster?”
    â€œDefinitely not.” (Definitely maybe.)
    She rolled her eyes. “So you think he’s a … what? Serial killer?”
    I forced out a laugh. (Yes. Yes, yes, absolutely, definitely, without a doubt yes.) “No.”
    â€œI know what he is,” Tripp said. “He’s a zombie. The undead. And inside that box was a shovel for him to dig himself out of his grave. And the bag was full of human faces.”
    â€œExactly,” I said, because sometimes my mouth moves before my brain can catch up.
    â€œOne, that’s disgusting,” Priya said, holding up a finger. Younever wanted to argue with Priya when she started listing points in one-two-threes, because usually by the time she got to four, your argument was cooked. She held up a second finger. “Two, why would he need to carry around the shovel when he’s already outside of the grave?”
    â€œTo pull the dirt back in on himself when he’s done eating the faces. Duh,” Tripp said.
    â€œAnd