Read Online Sammy Keyes and the Cold Hard Cash by Wendelin Van Draanen - Free Book Online

the room, saying, “Uh, yeah…I’m sure that’s all right…you know, as long as you can vouch for them….” She looked at me suddenly and smiled. “Well, Casey’s a no-brainer, of course. Billy too.” She raised an eyebrow my way. “They’re probably already invited.”
    I cringed and looked away. She’d been telling me to invite Casey to Brandon’s pool party, but for some reason I just hadn’t done it. Something about mixing the old with the new felt…uncomfortable.
    Or maybe it was something about having Casey see me in colorful underwear that was making me uncomfortable.
    Slightly!
    But it was too late now. The deed was done.
    And once again I’d come out a Casey-calling coward.
    When Marissa hung up, she put her hands on her hips and craned her neck toward me. “I can’t believe you never called him!”
    “Stop that!” I said, looking away. I eyed her and muttered, “You look like a vulture.”
    “Yeah? Well, you’re a chicken!”
    I sighed and toed the floor with my high-top. “Look, I just want to play water hoops. I don’t want to worry about—”
    “Being with friends? Having a little
fun
?”
    “Looking like a dork!” I said, facing her straight on. “Like I want him to see me in a bathing suit? Soaked?”
    “You look great in that suit! And you look great soaked!”
    I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. Look, can we go
do
something? How about the movies? We could sit Mikey up front…?”
    Marissa frowned. “No cash, no credit, remember?”
    I spread my arms out and looked around. “In this whole house, you can’t scrape together enough money to go to the movies?”
    She shook her head. “Isn’t that pathetic?” She hesitated. “Maybe I could sell CeCe some knickknacks?”
    The McKenzes’ “knickknacks” are expensive works of art or, you know, outrageously priced blobs of glass. There’s one that Mrs. McKenze calls the Kraval that I’m afraid to even
breathe
near. It just looks like a hollowed-out crystal basketball, but apparently it’s worth a fortune.
    Anyway,
the point is, there was no way Marissa would ever take any of the McKenzes’ knickknacks to CeCe’s Thrift Store. It would be, like, a death sentence. So very casually, I said, “I could buy us tickets.”
    Marissa’s eyes bugged. “How much money do you
have
?”
    I laughed. “I worked for André this morning, remember?”
    “Still!” She cocked her head a bit, then laughed. “Well, sure! Let’s get Mikey’s leash and go.”
    “His
leash
?”
    Turns out, she wasn’t kidding.

TEN
    The McKenzes don’t have a dog, so why they even had a leash was a mystery to me. But then Marissa explained that it’s how Mrs. McKenze used to keep tabs on Mikey at amusement parks and stuff, so he developed a positive association with the leash.
    Or something.
    Whatever, he really didn’t seem to mind. He just let Marissa clip it to a belt loop of his jeans, and off we went.
    From Marissa’s house to the movie theater was all downhill, so walking Mikey there was no problem. We actually had a good time. Plus, it was nice and cool in the theater, the movie was funny, and we ran into Dot and her brothers, which was fun.
    Afterward I made a quick detour to the Senior Highrise to switch Mrs. Wedgewood’s laundry into a dryer while Marissa finished wiping out the rest of André’s money by bribing Mikey with a Double Dynamo ice cream from Maynard’s Market.
    But when we finally started the trek back to Marissa’s house, Mikey started rattling off complaints. “My feet hurt. I’m tired. I’m thirsty. It’s too far….”
    “Come
on,
” Marissa said, clipping the leash back on.
    “But I’m tired.”
    “How can you be tired? We’ve barely even started!”
    “I’m thirsty!”
    “You just had an ice cream!”
    “But I
am
thirsty!”
    “Maybe if you hadn’t hogged all the popcorn at the movies, you wouldn’t be thirsty!” Marissa grumbled, dragging him along.
    “But I
am,
” he said, then pulled a total