Read Online Code Name Cassandra by Meg Cabot - Free Book Online

very much awake. “What gives?”
    When the light from my flashlight reached Lionel’s face, it picked up the tear tracks down his cheeks.
    “Why are you crying?” I demanded. But I knew. That thump I heard. Shane was in his bed, some feet away, but his face looked too sweetly innocent for him to not be guilty of something.
    But all Lionel would say was, “I am not crying.”
    I was sick of it. I really was. All I wanted to do was read my magazine and go to bed, so I could find Taylor Monroe. Was that so much to ask, after such a long day?
    “Fine,” I said, sitting down on the floor, my flashlight shining against the ceiling.
    Arthur went, “Uh, Jess? What are you doing?”
    “I am going to sit here,” I said, “until you all fall asleep.”
    This caused some excited giggling. Don’t ask me why.
    There was silence for maybe ten seconds. Then Doo Sun went, “Jess? Do you have any brothers?”
    Guardedly, I replied in the affirmative.
    “I thought so,” Doo Sun said.
    Instantly suspicious, I asked, “Why?”
    “You’re wearing boys’ underpants,” Paul pointed out.
    I looked down. I’d forgotten about Douglas’s boxers.
    “So I am,” I said.
    “Jess,” Shane said, in a voice so sugary, I knew he was up to no good.
    “What,” I said flatly.
    “Are you a lesbian?”
    I closed my eyes. I counted to ten. I tried to ignore the giggling from the other beds.
    I opened my eyes and said, “No, I am not a lesbian. As a matter of fact, I have a boyfriend.”
    “Who?” Arthur wanted to know. “One of those guys I saw you with on the path? One of those other counselors?”
    This caused a certain amount of suggestive hooting. I said, “No. My boyfriend would never do anything as geeky as be a camp counselor. My boyfriend rides a Harley and is a car mechanic.”
    This caused some appreciative murmuring. Eleven-year-old boys are much more impressed by car mechanics than people like … well, my best friend, Ruth, for instance.
    Then … don’t ask me why—maybe I was still thinking about Karen Sue over there in Frangipani Cottage. But suddenly, I launched into this story about Rob, and about how once this guy had brought a car into Wilkins’s Auto that turned out to have a skeleton in the trunk.
    It was, of course, a complete fabrication. As I went on about Rob and this car, which turned out to be haunted, on account of the woman who’d been left to suffocate in its trunk, I borrowed liberally from Stephen King, incorporating aspects from both
Maximum Overdrive
and
Christine
. These kids were too young, of course, to have read the books, and I doubted their parents had ever let them see the movies.
    And I was right. I held them enthralled all the way until the fiery cataclysm at the end, in which Rob saved our entire town by bravely pointing a grenade launcher at the renegade automobile and blowing it into a thousand pieces.
    Stunned silence followed this pronouncement. I had, I could tell, greatly disturbed them. But I was not done.
    “And sometimes,” I whispered, “on nights like this, when a storm somewhere far away douses the power, blanketing us in darkness, you can still see the headlights of that killer car, way off on the horizon”—I flicked off the flashlight—“way off in the distance … coming closer … and closer … and closer …”
    Not a sound. They were hardly breathing.
    “Good night,” I said, and went back into my room.
    Where I fell asleep a few minutes later, after finishing the box of Fiddle Faddle.
    And I didn’t hear another peep out of my fellow residents of Birch Tree Cottage until after reveille the next morning… .
    By which time, of course, I knew precisely where Taylor Monroe was.

C H A P T E R
5
    “I was so scared, I almost wet the bed,” said John.
    “Yeah? Well, I was so scared, I couldn’t get out of bed, not even to go to the bathroom.” Sam had a towel slung around his neck. His chest was so thin, it was practically concave. “I just held it,” he