“Get lost already.”
“I’ll just walk with you then.”
I stopped. “You will not walk with me! You will not go anywhere with me! You will leave me alone! For good. Forever!”
“You don’t seem your usual loving self,” he said, laughing. “Having a bad hair day? You should be used to that by now.”
“Trevor, it’s over. Your games and mine! You don’t have to harass me anymore. We’re even. We’re even for all of eternity. Okay? So just get out of my face!”
He ran after me when I stormed off.
“Are we breaking up? I didn’t know we were going together, baby. Please don’t leave me,” he begged, jokingly.
I walked quickly past the school fence and scurried down the sidewalk. I had five minutes to get to Armstrong Travel.
“I can’t live without you!” he said sarcastically, catching up. “Are you mad because I never gave you black roses? I’ll make it up to you. I’ll get you new clothes—from the graveyard.” He howled with laughter. “Just don’t leave me, babe!”
“Cut it out!” I was fuming. He probably had two hundred dollars in his back pocket and I’d have to work for eons in a place I hated because of his stupid antics.
“Just tell me where you’re going!”
“Trevor, quit it! Get out of here! I’ll get a restraining order if I have to!”
“Do you have a date?” He wasn’t going to give up.
“Go away!”
“You’re meeting someone?”
“Buzz off!”
“Do you have an interview? An interview…with the vampire?”
“Get out of my face!”
“Are you going to…work?”
I stopped. “No! Are you totally crazy? That’s so lame!”
“You are! You’ve got a job!” He danced around. “I’m so proud of you, my little gothic baby has found herself a job!”
I was fuming inside.
“Trying to better your life? Or are you paying Daddy back for that fancy little tennis racket?”
I was ready to hit him and this time send his head flying off into the distance instead of a can of spray paint.
Just then Matt pulled up. “Trevor, dude. You said you’d be on the steps. I don’t have time to drive all over town trying to find you. We have to go.”
“Good, your baby-sitter found you,” I said.
“I’d offer you a ride to work, but we have places to be,” Trevor teased.
As the Camaro whizzed off I looked at my watch. Great! My first day of work and I was late.
10
Working Ghoul
Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, and a Hawaiian sunset loomed behind the reception desk at Armstrong Travel, a constant reminder that there was life outside Dullsville, and that excitement was very far away.
The only thing exciting about working at Armstrong’s was the gossip. Under normal circumstances, I found the scandals of the town quite boring—the mayor seen cavorting with a Vegas showgirl, a local TV reporter from WGYS faking an alien abduction story, a Brownie leader embezzling earnings from the cookie bake-off.
But now life was different—there have been Mansion family sightings!
Ruby, the perky partner, filled me in on all the latest. She’s like a walking National Enquirer.
“It’s still a mystery what the husband does”—referring to the Mansion family—“but he’s obviously wealthy. The butler does the grocery shopping at Wexley’s on Saturday at exactly eight o’clock P.M. and picks up the dry cleaning on Tuesdays—all dark suits and cloaks. The wife is a tall pale woman in her mid-forties with long dark hair and she always wears dark sunglasses.”
“It’s like they’re vampires,” Ruby concluded, not knowing about my fascination. “They’ve only been seen at night; they look so ghoulish, dark, and brooding, like they’re straight out of a B-movie horror flick. And no visitors have been inside that house. Not one. Do you think they’re hiding something?”
I was hanging on Ruby’s every word.
“They’ve lived there for over a month,” she continued, “and haven’t painted the place, or even cut the grass! They’ve probably even added creaky doors!”
Janice laughed out loud and ignored her ringing phone. “Marcy Jacobs was saying the same thing,” Janice added. “Can you imagine? Not mowing your lawn or planting flowers. Don’t they wonder what the neighbors think?”
“Maybe they don’t care what the neighbors think. Maybe they like it that way,” I interjected.
They both looked at me in horror.
“But get this,” Ruby said. “I heard that the wife was at Georgio’s Italian Bistro and ordered Henry’s special antipasto…without garlic! That’s what Natalie Mitchell says her son said.”