There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around Read Online Free Page A

the only one left in the classroom. She was wearing a construction-paper headband decorated with a bird beak and was snarfing down the last crumbs from a box of animal crackers. Her lips were bright grape-Kool-Aid purple.
    "Come on," I called to her.
    "Wait a minute," Vicki said, tipping the box upside down over her mouth. "There's still some in here."
    "Take it with you," I told her. "Mom'll be mad
if she has to park the car and come in looking for us."
    Vicki walked down the hall, inhaling into the animal cracker box as though she hadn't eaten in a week.
    "Let's take the elevator," I said.
    The elevator's so slow, you can run from the second floor all the way down to the basement and back faster than the elevator can make it to the first floor, but Vicki was walking so slow and leaving such a trail of cookie crumbs, I thought it'd be faster.
    The only people still in the second-floor hallway were some presenters from "Visiting Old Rochester." "Visiting Old Rochester" is one of those one-day courses that your parents make you take. It's like a local-history career day, going from the Indians to George Eastman founding Kodak, with the teachers dressed in appropriate costumes and telling all about "themselves." Still hanging around were a French fur trapper, a nineteenth-century suffragette, a pioneer child, and Abraham Lincoln, talking together. Not that I have any idea what Abraham Lincoln ever had to do with Rochester, New York.
    The elevator finally came and we got in, and I began punching the CLOSE DOOR button simply for something to do, because nothing can speed up that elevator.
    But just as the doors slowly began to close, someone called, "Wait up, please," and I stuck my foot out between the doors.
    "Thanks." It was the teacher dressed as the suffragette. She set her sign— RIGHTS FOR WOMEN —on the
floor and leaned against the wall, waiting for the elevator to start.
    Behind me I heard Vicki drop her animal crackers box on the floor.
What a slob,
I thought. I turned to yell at her before the teacher did, and found her pressed up against the back wall, her face white around the Kool-Aid purple of her lips. "It's her," she whispered. She dropped to a crouch, covering her head for protection. I didn't need to ask who "her" was. But how
could
it be her?
    The teacher stared at Vicki. "Are you all right, sweetie?" She was young, like most of the teachers at the museum seem to be—probably too young to have kids of her own. Vicki had her face buried in her knees, and she started making a little whimpering sound. The teacher looked at the floor indicator—it still read "2," and it was hard to tell if we were moving yet—then she looked at me. Her expression said, "This little kid isn't going to have some sort of strange fit in here, is she?"
    "It's all right, Vicki," I said. "This isn't her. This is just one of the museum teachers. Look at her."
Look at her and reassure me
was what I meant, but Vicki stayed where she was, in her defensive crouch.
    The light over the door finally shifted to "I."
    I took a firm hold of Vicki's jacket at the shoulder, standing between her and the teacher. Just in case. Not that I'd do much good defending Vicki from a woman who could go through walls and invade dreams.
    Vicki continued to whimper.
    The teacher continued to look—I thought—like she was praying no emergency would occur that she'd have to cope with.
    When the doors finally opened, I hauled Vicki to her feet. I was ready to push her past the teacher, but the teacher was out of there even faster. Maybe she thought Vicki was going to throw up on her. She didn't even say anything about the dropped box of cookies. She practically ran into the school office.
    I hustled Vicki outdoors.
    Mom beeped her horn and we scrambled into the backseat of the car.
    "You two look like you've seen a ghost," Mom said as she pulled away from the curb.
    I could see into the building, and there was no sign of the teacher