My Dog's a Scaredy-Cat Read Online Free Page A

his forehead. He had a bleeding scar pasted to his cheek. He had bleeding bandages wrapped around his arm. He had bleeding knees, bleeding elbows, bleeding toes, bleeding guts. He was, as I had always thought of him, an open, disgusting sore.
    â€œUnlike yourself,” I said, “I have used my creativity to come up with an original, if smelly, costume.”
    â€œYou stink like a garbage Dumpster,” he said.
    â€œFor your information, I am a dining table in a great Italian restaurant.”
    â€œWhat’s that got to do with Halloween?” the Great Brain asked.
    â€œI think Hank had a very clever idea,” Ashley spoke up. She was dressed in a dolphin costume, which she had covered with turquoise, gray, and white rhinestones. She waved one of her fins at me and whispered, “If you walk around a little, the air might tone down some of the smell.”
    â€œAn Italian restaurant!” McKelty shouted. I guess the idea had finally seeped through his thick skull into his brain. “That is so lame. Only a kindergartner would think that’s funny.”
    â€œI’m a kindergartner,” Mason said. “And I don’t think it’s funny.”
    â€œSee that! Not even a dumb five-year-old thinks it’s funny,” McKelty hooted.
    â€œYou’re very mean,” Mason said to McKelty, and ran back to where the kindergartners were gathered.
    â€œGood riddance,” McKelty hollered after him. Then he turned back to me. “Check me out, Zipperhead. My Halloween costume is cool. Blood and guts. That’s where it’s at.”
    â€œI think Nick’s costume is the greatest,” Joelle Atkins chimed in. You have to think everything Nick does is the greatest if you want to be his girlfriend, which I can’t imagine anyone but Joelle ever wanting to be.
    â€œOf course you do,” I said to her. “He’s bleeding everywhere and you’re dressed as a Band-Aid.”
    â€œI am not a Band-Aid,” she said. “I am a cell phone. Can’t you see the numbers written on my back?”
    Joelle is totally in love with her cell phone. She walks around with it strapped to her wrist at all times, which is weird, because no one ever calls her. I guess she’s hoping someone will. It didn’t surprise me that her costume was a cell phone. She turned around and sure enough, there was a cell-phone number pad constructed on her back.
    â€œI bet if you dialed her number, there’d be nobody home,” Frankie whispered to me.
    I didn’t even have time to laugh, because just then I heard Emily calling me from across in the school yard. I looked around and saw her on the handball court where the fourth-graders were lining up. She and Robert were leading the pack in their flu-germ costumes. They both waved at me, looking really proud of themselves. Geeky as they were, you have to give them credit for bravery and originality. There wasn’t another flu germ on the playground, except maybe the real ones living in Luke Whitman’s nose.
    Suddenly, Emily and Robert bolted out of line and ran up to the little stage that had been set up with a microphone for Principal Love.
    â€œHi, everyone,” Emily yelled into the microphone. “We’re flu germs.”
    â€œDon’t come too close,” Robert added, “or you’ll catch us! Get it? Catch us!”
    Then he snorted his geeky hippo laugh into the microphone. The microphone made it sound way geekier than it is in real life, if that’s possible.
    â€œYou two are disgusting!” McKelty shouted out. “You make me sick. Get it? Flu germs make me sick!”
    A bunch of kids laughed. Emily looked really hurt, and poor Robert just looked confused. I felt red-hot anger rise up from the bottom of my tablecloth all the way past my butt chair and into my head. Who did that McKelty think he was? I mean, it’s one thing if he wanted to embarrass me in front of