Skeleton Man Read Online Free Page B

I’m not being tortured or anything. My uncle was kind enough to take me in. He’s just a little strange. Maybe I’m the truly strange one with my worries about being drugged and my blockading my door at night and imagining what might be happening in that shed. Too much imagination, that’s me.
    Ms. Shabbas has a little talk with me that afternoon. She asks me to wait behind when the rest of the class is leaving for gym. She’s worried about my behavior. “Is everything all right,” she pauses, “…at home?”
    What home? That is what I want to say. I want to scream and cry and have her hold me in her arms while I sob against her shoulder. But what good would that do? So I give her my patented sunny smile.
    â€œEverything is fine,” I say. “Really fine.”
    But Ms. Shabbas doesn’t smile back. “Really?” she says in a soft voice. Then she looks beyond that smile, right into my eyes as if she can see my thoughts. It’s not the way my uncle does it, not like someone stealing a part of me. It’s not even like an adult looking at a kid who’s being unreasonable. It’s the way atrue friend looks at you when they say they want to help you and really mean it.
    â€œNo,” I whisper. “It’s not.”
    And then I tell her. I don’t tell her everything because now that I’m in school, my fears seem a little foolish, and I don’t want her to think I’m being melodramatic. But I tell her how I feel, how weird it is in my uncle’s house, how I really, really don’t want to be there. She doesn’t interrupt or ask questions. She just listens, nodding every now and then. When I’m done I feel lighter, as if I’m no longer carrying a ten-ton truck on my shoulders.
    Ms. Shabbas lightly places her hands on my shoulders. She doesn’t say I’m being foolish or that I should grow up.
    â€œSweetheart,” she says. “Thank you for telling me.” She turns slightly to write something on a card that she hands to me. “Here’s my home phone and my cell phone. Call me anytime. Okay? We’ll keep an eye on this together, right?”
    â€œRight,” I say. And for the rest of the day in school things almost do seem right.
    But then I take one more deep breath and the school day is over. That’s bad. The only good thing is that it is Wednesday. That means I getto come back to school tomorrow and the next day before the weekend comes, which most kids love because it means we won’t have to go back to school for two days. Two whole days.
    I walk home because it takes longer than the bus. I stop at a fast-food place to eat enough to kill my appetite. I don’t have much money left, and I don’t know what I’ll do when it runs out. But I try not to worry about that now. There are other, more pressing concerns.
    Finally it is getting dark. I can’t avoid it anymore. I’m headed back to the house of doom.

5
Eat and Grow Fat
    Y OU MAY be asking yourself what life is like for me inside that house. Are there spiderwebs everywhere? Bats and centipedes and mold on the walls? Are there chains clanking down in the cellar and ghostly moans coming from the attic?
    No. Actually, aside from being dark and set back from the road, it isn’t really all that spooky a place to look at. It’s a hundred years old, but there are older places in town. And the house is full of modern appliances in the kitchen and the living room. Dishwasher, microwave, a television with a cable hookup. My uncle even hasa personal computer. I saw it through the open door of his study once. He spends a lot of his time in that room and I imagine he must be surfing the Net, visiting all the weirdest websites, probably.
    What makes that house strange is the way it feels when you get inside it. I saw an old movie once where someone walks into a room and then the door disappears and the walls start moving