He nodded at her. Nothing too weird, thank God. At least there was one normal person on the bus besides her.
Sitting down, she gave blond guy another glance. But he wasn’t looking at her, so she couldn’t see if his eye color had gone weird again. But that’s when she noticed the girl with three different hair colors had something in her hands.
Kylie’s breath caught again. The girl had a toad. Not a frog—a frog she could have probably handled—but a toad. A huge honking toad. What kind of a girl dyed her hair three different colors and carried a toad with her to camp? God, maybe it was one of those drug toads, the ones people licked to get high. She’d heard about them on some stupid crime show on TV but had always thought they’d made it up. She didn’t know which was worse: licking a toad to get high or carrying a toad around just to be weird.
Pulling her suitcase up on the seat next to her just so no one would feel the need to join her, Kylie let out a deep sigh and looked out the window. The bus was moving, although Kylie still didn’t see how the bus driver managed to reach the gas pedals.
“Do you know what they call us?” The voice came from the seat where toad girl sat.
Kylie didn’t think she was talking to her, but she turned her head that way, anyway. Because the girl looked directly at her, Kylie figured she might be wrong.
“Who calls us?” Kylie asked, trying not to sound too friendly or too bitchy. The last thing she wanted was to piss these freaks off.
“The kids who go to the other camps. There’s like six camps in the three-mile radius in Fallen.” Using both hands she pulled her multi-colored hair back and held it there for a few seconds.
That’s when Kylie noticed the girl had lost her toad. And Kylie didn’t see a cage or anything where she could have tucked it away.
Great. She would probably have some freak’s humongous drug toad hopping into her lap before she knew it. Not that toads totally scared her or anything. She just didn’t want it jumping on her.
“They call us boneheads,” the girl said.
“Why?” Kylie pulled her feet up in the seat just in case a toad hopped by.
“The camp used to be called Bone Creek Camp,” the girl answered. “Because of the dinosaur bones found there.”
“Ha,” said the blond boy. “They also call us boners.”
A few laughs echoed from the other seats. “Why is that funny?” the girl wearing all black asked in a tone so deadly serious that Kylie shivered.
“You don’t know what a boner is?” Blond Boy asked. “If you’ll come sit beside me, I’ll show you.” When he turned around, Kylie got another look at his eyes. Holy mother of pearls. They were gold. A striking feline gold. Contacts, Kylie realized. He had to be wearing some kind of weird contacts that were doing that.
Goth girl stood up as if to join the blond guy.
“Don’t do it,” Toad Girl, without her toad, said and stood up. Moving out into the aisle, she whispered something in the Goth girl’s ear.
“Gross.” Goth Girl slammed back in her seat. Then she looked over at the blond boy, and pointed a black-painted fingernail at him. “You don’t want to piss me off. I eat things bigger than you in the dead of night.”
“Did someone say something about the dead of night?” a voice came from the back of the bus.
Kylie turned to see who’d spoken.
Another girl, one Kylie hadn’t known was there, popped up from the seat. She had jet black hair and wore sunglasses almost the same color as her hair. What made her look so abnormal was her complexion. Pasty. As in pasty white.
“Do you know why they renamed the camp Shadow Falls?” Toad Girl asked.
“No,” someone answered from the front of the bus.
“Because of the Native American legend that says at dusk, if you stand beneath the falls on the property, you can see the shadows of death angels dancing.”
Dancing death angels? What was wrong with these people?
Kylie swung around in her seat. Was this some nightmare? Maybe part of her night terrors? She pushed deeper in her cushioned seat and tried to focus on waking herself up from the dreams the way Dr. Day had shown her.
Focus. Focus. She took in deep breaths, in through the nose, out the mouth—all the while silently chanting, It’s just a dream, it isn’t real, it isn’t real.
Either she wasn’t asleep or her and her focus had gotten on the wrong bus, and darn if she didn’t wish she’d followed it onto a different bus. Still not wanting to believe her eyes, she gazed around at the others. Blond Boy looked at her, and his eyes were black again.
Creepy. Was none of this coming across completely off the normal chart to anyone else in the bus?
Turning in her seat again, she looked back at the boy she’d dubbed the most normal. His soft green eyes, eyes that reminded her of Trey’s, met hers, and he shrugged. She didn’t exactly know what the shrug meant, but he didn’t appear all that weirded out by everything. Which in some small way, made him as weird as the others.
Kylie swung back around and grabbed her phone from her purse and started texting Sara. Help! Stuck on a bus with freaks. Total, complete freaks.
Kylie got a text message back from Sara almost immediately. No, you help me. I think I’m pregnant.
Author Biography
Award-winning author Christie Craig grew up in Alabama, where she caught lightning bugs, ran barefoot, and regularly rescued potential princes, in the form of bullfrogs, from her brothers. Today, she’s still fascinated with lightning bugs, mostly wears shoes, but has turned her focus to rescuing mammals and hasn’t kissed a frog in years. She now lives in Texas with her four rescued cats, one dog—who has a bad habit of eating furniture, a son, and a prince of a husband who swears he’s not, and never was, a frog.
If Christie isn’t writing, she’s reading, sipping wine, or just enjoying laughter with her friends and family. As a freelance writer, Christie has over 3,000 national credits, as well as three works of non-fiction, including the humorous self-help/relationship book, Wild, Wicked & Wanton: 101 Ways to Love Like You’re in a Romance Novel. Christie writes humorous romances novels for Grand Central, as well as paranormal young adult romances under the pen name C.C. Hunter. Contact Christie—she loves hearing from readers—or learn more about her and her work through her website: www.christie-craig.com
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Murder Mayhem and Mama Page 40