Eve Hallows and the Book of Shrieks

by Robert Gray

  Here it comes, I thought, and I braced myself for what would probably be the insult of all insults.

  Much to my surprise, Carly Beth smiled. “Awesome,” she said. “I wish I had the guts to dress like you on my first day.”

  As we walked the halls, Carly Beth explained how the school worked and where everything was. Besides a couple of yes-no responses, I kept silent. The last thing I wanted to do was say something stupid and mess up what I thought might be my only chance for survival in this place.

  Carly Beth showed me the gymnasium, the library, my locker, and what she called the absolute best classroom of all—the cafeteria.

  “Let me see your schedule?” Carly Beth asked.

  I sifted through the stack of papers Mrs. Nutley had given me, not sure which one was The Schedule, but Carly Beth spotted it and pulled it from my hands.

  “Looks like we have all the same classes. That makes it easy.”

  I nodded. I wasn’t sure if I liked Carly Beth, and I didn’t know if she liked me, but that didn’t matter so much. At this point, I was just grateful to have someone around that didn’t seem to want to eat me.

  “Let’s see. First we got Math with Mr. Porter. He’s so boring, but he doesn’t care if you fall asleep in his class.” She checked the clock on the wall. “That class’ll be over in a few minutes. We should start heading to second period. World History with Mr. Alvarez. He’s boring, too, but he likes to watch videos with the lights out, which is always a good thing.”

  I nodded again, but this time added a smile.

  “Don’t talk much, huh?” Carly Beth said. “That’s cool. Everyone tells me I don’t shut up, so I guess we cancel each other out.”

  Bells blared throughout the school, and I covered my ears from the sound. Within moments, humans flooded the halls. Was that some sort of warning bell? Were the humans rushing to get their pitchforks and torches? Carly Beth seemed calm about the whole thing as she weaved through the crowd, so I mimicked what she did. Another bell sounded, and Carly Beth said, “Just the two-minute warning.”

  My hands dropped from my ears, and I nodded yet again. Couldn’t I do anything besides nod my head?

  We entered into a classroom full of facts and maps and profile pictures of, I guessed, famous humans, some I even recognized as ghosts that haunt my graveyard back home. Behind a desk at the front of the class, a frail little balding human sat. He wore thick-rimmed spectacles and a tee-shirt that read WE LEARN FROM HISTORY THAT WE LEARN NOTHING FROM HISTORY - George Bernard Shaw.

  “He wears a different shirt every day,” Carly Beth whispered. “Already October and I haven’t seen the same one twice.”

  She pulled me along to the front of the teacher’s desk. “Mr. Alvarez, this is your new student, Eve Hallows.”

  Mr. Alvarez’s mouth drooped open while his eyes collected my appearance. He shook off whatever trance he’d been in and tapped a paper calendar on his desk. “Miss Hallows, is it? You must be a real overachiever. Halloween isn’t for a few more weeks.”

  Laughter erupted from the humans behind me, and my cheeks began to burn in embarrassment.

  The teacher frowned at me and added, “Probably best if you sit in the rear. With that hair, I don’t think the other students will be able to see the chalkboard.”

  A wave of snickers followed me as I rushed to a seat in the back of the classroom and covered my face as best as I could with my hands.

  “What a jerk,” Carly Beth muttered, sliding into the desk to my right. “Don’t let him bother you. He’s a big can of sarcasm.”

  It was all part of getting used to the human world, I convinced myself, or at least I tried to convince myself. Only my first day of school. I had to expect problems, but still, couldn’t one thing go right?

  And then it did. Just as the last bell finished ringing, a boy dashed in and hopped into the only seat available—the one to my left.

  This human had a smooth, thin face with dusty brown hair scattered over his murky gray eyes. When he glanced at me, a rush of excitement charged throughout my body like flashes of lightning. He might’ve been a human, but that spark in his eyes, that casual grin, even the way he moved … It was all monster.

  “Oh, I get it. You’re protesting because the Halloween Bash was canceled,” the boy said. “Cool necklace, by the way.”

  I looked down and saw that my necklace was glowing again. That’s strange. Is it tied to my emotions somehow? I wondered. It only seems to glow when I have strong feelings about something. I tucked the necklace into my shirt. After all, I didn’t want some stranger seeing my emotions.

  “So what’s with the hair?” the boy asked.

  “I almost got detention.” I blurted this out so loud that Mr. Alvarez—who had already started lecturing about some old, dead person—stopped mid-sentence. He barreled straight toward me and leaned over my desk. His nose almost touched mine.

  “So, it’s detention you’re looking for. And on your first day. Tsk, tsk.” Then he rocked back on his heels and said to the gray-eyed boy, “And you, Warren. Isn’t it bad enough you were late? Do I have to tell your dad again about how insubordinate you are?”

  “No, sir, Alvie baby,” Warren said and waved away the teacher.

  “That’s mister—ah, forget it. I give up.” Mr. Alvarez threw up his hands as he returned to the front of the room, muttering something about the problems with today’s youth.

  “Time for Science with Mrs. Pepski,” Carly Beth announced.

  But I wasn’t listening. My head was full of Warren and had no room for anything else.

  “He’s cute, isn’t he?”

  “Who?” I asked and gave my best I-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about look as we entered into our next class, which reminded me a little of a mad scientist’s lab, except it was way too clean and bright.

  Mrs. Pepski seemed nice, if not a bit jumpy, especially with that weird twitch she got in her cheek and brows when she saw me. She spent most of the class lecturing to us on why white bread molds faster than wheat bread.

  It wasn’t long before whispers and mocking snickers buzzed around me. Some were new voices with fresh insults, but many echoed Mr. Alvarez’s comments: You must be a real overachiever … With that hair, I don’t think the other students will be able to see the chalkboard.

  Because there hadn’t been two seats available next to each other, I had to sit far away from Carly Beth. And with no one to talk to, I had a hard time ignoring the hecklers. I tried desperately to focus on the lecture about bread mold, but after a few minutes of that, I even found the jokes about me more interesting. Instead, I decided to spend the remainder of the class fantasizing about all the ways I could punish Mr. Alvarez. Lucky for me, I have a good imagination.

  I jumped from my chair when the bell rang and rushed out into the hallway to meet Carly Beth.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you, he’s the principal’s son,” she said during the walk to our next class.

  “Mr. Alvarez is McDougal’s son? But he looks so much older than the principal,” I said.

  Carly Beth laughed so hard she almost tipped over. “No, silly, Warren is Principal McDougal’s son.”

  Now it was my turn to nearly fall over.

  “You gotta be kidding me?”

  NINE

  EVERYONE GETS SICK OVER ME

  The day continued painfully slow, and by the time lunch arrived, pretty much every single human in the school had pointed and laughed at me. Some were on their third and fourth helpings.

  At least I had Carly Beth. When someone made a comment or pointed or laughed, Carly Beth would laugh or point back or say something like, “Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately? At least she can change her clothes. How do you plan on asking your parents for the money to fix that ginormous nose of yours?” That would get them walking the other way, rubbing at their noses or their giant nugget-heads or whatever Carly Beth decided to pick on.

  I could see why Carly Beth enjoyed lunch so
much. It was like a stress valve had opened up as soon as I walked into the cafeteria, and I felt more comfortable here than I had anywhere else in the school so far.

  My Mom had given me a bagged lunch, but I waited in line with Carly Beth anyway.

  “So, you’re serious about McDougal being Warren’s father?” I asked, still very upset over the news.

  “I swear,” Carly Beth said as she crossed her heart.

  “But Warren is … so not like his father. I bet he loves Halloween, too. I mean the school must close down for the whole week with all the parties and festivals and—”

  Carly Beth burst out laughing.

  I stared at her. “What?”

  “Eve, the school doesn’t close for Halloween. Heck, McDougal doesn’t even let us wear costumes that day. He thinks our attitudes reflect how we dress, and if we dress like monsters, we’ll act like monsters.”

  “What’s wrong with acting like a monster?” I asked.

  Carly Beth shrugged. “Ask McDougal. His school, his rules.”

  “But Warren? I know children can be a lot different from their parents, and all, but their gap is … ginormous,” I said, stealing Carly Beth’s word.

  With a sly smile, Carly Beth said, “You like him, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “You can admit it.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Whatever,” Carly Beth said, the smile still visible on her face as she scooped some orange macaroni into a plastic bowl and placed it on her tray.

  The cafeteria had several long rows of tables at the middle with round tables scattered at the corners. Carly Beth led me to one of the round tables at the far end near the windows—an area she called prime real estate—and she pulled up a chair next to two humans, a girl and a boy.

  The way the two humans at the table glared at me made me feel self-conscious. It didn’t help that I’d been sweating a lot in this outfit, and I could smell oily makeup-funk oozing from my pores. I expected their next reaction to be laughter—that seemed to be the norm around here.

  “Eve, this is Lucy Sanchez,” Carly Beth said.

  I gave Lucy a quick wave as I didn’t want my armpit funk to drift her way. She hadn’t laughed at me yet, and I wanted to keep it that way.

  “So you’re the one,” Lucy said. “Can’t believe you managed to get past McDougal’s talons looking like that. You’re like my hero.”

  “Thanks,” I murmured. Lucy’s hair was so silky black I wanted to use it for a pillow, and her lips were so full that I sucked on mine to hide them. “It’s, um, nice to meet you.”

  “And I’m Steven Humphrey Williford,” the human boy said, extending his arms wide. “But my friends call me Steve.”

  “What?—” I started, but Steve jumped to his feet and gave me a huge hug and twirled me around, and I didn’t know what scared me more, the fact that I smelled like an ogre and he was going to notice, or that he invaded every bit of space between us. When he put me down, I thought I was still spinning, or maybe it was the room. I couldn’t tell.

  “Don’t mind Steve. He’s a hugger,” Lucy said.

  Still woozy, I said, “Nice to meet you,” to the chair next to Steve.

  Now I knew three humans that weren’t determined to boil me in my own tears, so the day wasn’t a total failure. I liked them, too—Carly Beth and Lucy especially. Steve was impossible, but in a nice way, and he instantly made me feel at home when he took a carton of chocolate milk and connected a straw to his nostril. “Dare me to drink it through my nose?”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “How much you wanna bet?”

  “My lunch,” I said and dumped out my entire bag of chocolate bars, cherry-flavored jellybeans, and mini glazed doughnuts onto the table.

  Steve sifted through my lunch as if it were a pile of gold. “That’s your lunch?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You mean your parents let you eat that?” Lucy asked.

  “Let me? My mom packed it for me.”

  “Oh, that is so cool,” Steve said. He must’ve said the same thing five times before they entered the cafeteria.

  They being the three human girls from yesterday—the ones who had told me where to shop for school clothes. Those no-good liars, they were dressed completely different today.

  “That’s them,” I whispered. “The ones who told me I should dress like this.”

  Carly Beth glanced up, and I saw an odd expression on her face, a cross between disgust and maybe fear.

  “Figures,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “Stacey Maxwell and her cronies, Jasper Kinsley and Becca Sweetbriar.”

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “The three nastiest, rudest, most disrespectful girls you’d ever want to meet,” Lucy said.

  “Some even say that during a full moon they turn into blood-sucking vampires,” Steve added in a really bad ghoulish accent.

  I didn’t bother to correct him on his ghoulish, or that it’s werewolves who change under a full moon. I got his and Lucy’s point: These girls were bad news.

  Stacey and her cronies caught sight of me as they strutted through the cafeteria. They paused, and for a brief moment, I thought they felt bad about what they’d done to me. Just to make sure I didn’t have any false ideas about their intentions, they exploded with laughter and had to hold on to each other to keep from falling.

  Soon, the entire cafeteria shook with laughter, which didn’t surprise me. In this school, making me miserable was as contagious as the flu, and everyone—except for Lucy, Steve, and Carly Beth—had become incurably ill.

  I thought nothing in this stinking world could make me feel worse, but then Warren entered the cafeteria and headed right toward me. I didn’t want him to see me like this, but I couldn’t move. Part of me needed to know whether he would laugh, too.

  Warren stopped before he reached me. He stopped, in fact, right next to Stacey Maxwell and gave her a big hug. And then he kissed her.

  My jaw dropped. I would’ve rather he laughed at me.

  “I guess it’s a bad time to mention this,” Carly Beth admitted in a pained whisper. “Warren’s dating Stacey Maxwell.”

  When the final bell rang, I couldn’t get out of the school quick enough.

  “Tomorrow will be better. You’ll see,” Carly Beth said. “If you dress normal, I bet no one will even remember what you looked like today.”

  “Maybe I should bring a bag to put over my head, just in case.”

  “Good idea,” she said without hesitation. And as we exited the school—the cool breeze soothing my scorched face and sweaty neck—Carly Beth added, “So, what does a girl like you do after time served?”

  “What?”

  “What are you doing after school?”

  Before I could answer, a horn blared through the parking let.

  “What’s that idiot in the pizza van think he’s doing?” I heard someone next to me say. “He’s gonna run someone over.”

  I sank my head into my hands. It seemed to be my only defense lately.

  The pizza van pulled up right in front of me, and Dad put down the window. “Eve! We need to hurry! We’ve got customers waiting!”

  Customers? Oh, no. He didn’t expect me to work at the pizza place after spending all day at school, did he?

  And to make matters worse, a bunch of kids started yelling out, “Eve! Oh, Eve! It’s time to make the pizza!”

  I forced a smile and said to Carly Beth, “I guess I have to work today.” And held back tears as I rushed into the van.

  Of course, Dad couldn’t leave the parking lot any slower, and everyone got a good, long look at me as we left.

  “So, how was your first day of school?” Dad asked.

  “Could’ve been worse. I could’ve been drenched in oil and then set on fire.”

  “Oh, Eve, don’t be so dramatic.”

  There was no sense in arguing. My parents didn’t understand embarrassment, anyway.

  “H
ow’s your first day being a business owner?”

  “It’s … interesting.”

  It sounded to me like he was leaving something out about his day, too. I gave him the same courtesy of not prying, but he didn’t get the hint.

  “Humans are an ornery bunch. And impatient. This one old lady attacked me after I gave her her pizza.”

  “Attacked you?”

  “She was my first customer. I had a hard time getting the oven going, because the instructions were in Umbrian and it took me forever to translate. That is until I realized the English instructions were on the other side. Anyway, by the time the pizza finished cooking, the woman was all red in the face and yelling at me about how she didn’t think she was gonna live long enough to eat it. Then after she took a bite from the pizza, she spit it right out and told me that it tasted so bad she wouldn’t feed it to her dog, who is blind, deaf, and has fits of seizures. When I told her the pizza would cost $250, she leaped up and tried to stab me with her knife.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “It occurred to me she might work for The Source—that old woman certainly had a violent streak in her—so I attempted to tie her to a chair, but she hit me with her purse.”

  “Why didn’t you change into a dragon or something?”

  “And let her see me change? We’d be out of this town so fast … that would’ve been adorable.”

  I shrugged. It didn’t sound so adorable to me. “So, how many customers have you had since?”

  “Just her. But the manual says we should expect a rush between five and seven, because that’s when humans like to eat dinner.”

  “And how many pizzas have you made so far?”

  “There was the one, but it was a little too crispy, I think.”

  I thought back to the scavengers in the school cafeteria. They ate like possessed fiends. “You’re expecting a rush of humans, and we don’t have a single thing for them to eat? I’m no expert, but that sounds bad.”

  “It gets worse.”

  TEN