Phantom of the Auditorium Read Online Free Page B

repeated. “Then where is everybody else?”
    I hesitated. This guy was scaring me so much, my legs wobbled. “We left,” I blurted out. “But we had to come back to get my jacket.”
    Behind Emile, I saw Zeke nodding, approving my lie.
    “How do you know about the trapdoor?” the janitor demanded in his sandpaper voice.
    I hesitated.
It’s strange that I’ve never seen him in the school building before,
I thought.
    “Ms. Walker, our teacher, showed it to us,” Zeke said softly. I could see that he was as scared as I was.
    The man leaned closer to me, squinting so that one side of his face was completely twisted up. “Don’t you know how
dangerous
it is?” he whispered.
    He leaned even closer, so close that I could feel his hot breath on my face. His pale gray eyes stared into mine.
“Don’t you know how dangerous it is?”
    Zeke and I talked on the phone that night. “That man wasn’t trying to
warn
us,” I told Zeke. “He was trying to
scare
us.”
    “Well, he didn’t scare
me
at all,” Zeke boasted. “I’m sorry if he got
you
upset, Brookie.”
    Oh, wow,
I thought.
Sometimes Zeke is such a phoney.
    “If you weren’t scared, how come you were shaking all the way home?” I demanded.
    “I wasn’t shaking. I was just exercising,” Zeke joked. “You know. Working out the calf muscles.”
    “Give me a break,” I moaned. “How come we’ve never seen that janitor before?”
    “Because he’s
not
a janitor. He is …
the PHANTOM!”
Zeke cried in a deep, scary voice.
    I didn’t laugh. “Get serious,” I told him. “It wasn’t a joke. He was really trying to frighten us.”
    “Hope you don’t have nightmares, Brookie,” Zeke replied, laughing.
    I hung up on him.
    On Tuesday morning, I walked to school with my little brother, Jeremy. As we walked, I talked about the play.
    I told Jeremy the whole story. But I left out the part about the trapdoor. Ms. Walker said it would be better if we kept it a secret until the performance.
    “Is it really scary?” Jeremy asked me. Jeremy is seven, and he gets scared if you say “boo” to him. Once, I made him watch the movie
Poltergeist
with me, and he woke up screaming every night for three weeks.
    “Yeah, it’s pretty scary,” I told him. “But not scary like
Friday the 13th
scary.”
    Jeremy seemed relieved. He really hated scary things. On Halloween, he hid in his room! I would never make him watch
Friday the 13th.
He would probably have nightmares till he was fifty!
    “The play has a surprise,” I added. “And it’s a pretty awesome surprise.”
    “What is it?” Jeremy demanded.
    I reached over and messed up his hair. It’s chestnut-brown, like mine. “If I told you that,” I said, making a funny voice, “it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?”
    “You sound just like Mom!” Jeremy cried.
    What an insult!
    I dropped him off at his school and then crossed the street to my school. As I made my way down the hall, I thought about my part in the play. Esmerelda had so many lines. I wondered if I could memorize them all in time.
    And I wondered if my old stage fright would come back. Last year, I had terrible stage fright in
Guys and Dolls.
And I didn’t even have any lines to say!
    I walked into the classroom, said good morning to some kids, made my way to my table — and stopped.
    “Hey!” A boy I had never seen before was at my place.
    He was kind of cute. He had dark brown hair and bright green eyes. He was wearing a big red-and-black flannel shirt over black sweatpants.
    He had made himself right at home. His books and notebooks were spread out. And he was tilting back in my chair with his black high-tops resting on the table.
    “You’re in my place,” I said, standing over him.
    He gazed up at me with those green eyes. “No, I’m not,” he replied casually. “This is
my
place.”

9
    “Excuse me?” I said, staring down at him.
    He blushed. “I
think
this is where Ms. Walker told me to sit.” He glanced around