Hoax for Hire by Laura Martin

Author:Laura Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

I awoke confused. I’d fallen asleep as the sun was coming up, and it appeared it was coming up again through my window. I stared at it for a second, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Maybe I was wrong and it was going down? It was nearly impossible to tell. There was no way that I’d slept twenty-four straight hours. Was there? It didn’t seem entirely impossible. I did feel better physically at least. The nauseous feeling of exhaustion was gone, and except for the fact that I was still wearing the muddy clothes I’d been taken to the police station in, I felt pretty good. Which was wrong because of course nothing was good at the moment. Dad and Gramps were in major trouble. And, oh, we’d been robbed.

I rubbed at my eyes and glanced at my alarm clock, hoping for some sort of clue. It was apparently seven thirty. Seven thirty at night or seven thirty in the morning? My mouth felt like I’d been licking the bottom of someone’s shoes, and I smelled like the old shoes I’d apparently been licking. Somehow I found my feet and stumbled into the hall toward Curtis’s room, hoping he could tell me what time of day it was. His door was open, and I walked in, stepping over the pile of dirty clothes and discarded textbooks, but what I thought was a sleeping Curtis under a tangle of covers was actually just his pillow and some rumpled sheets.

“Curtis!” I yelled as I headed back down the hall. The kitchen was empty too; the remains of a half-eaten pizza sat on top of the oven. My stomach let out a hungry snarl at the sight, further convincing me that I really had slept for twenty-four hours. I poked at the pizza experimentally. The cheese was ice cold, but I ate a piece anyway. It was either that or my left arm, and I was pretty attached to the arm. “Curtis!” I called again around my mouthful of rubbery pepperoni. “Where are you?”

Our house wasn’t that big, so I poked my head into the garage to make sure the tank was still there. I took the opportunity to give the gouge in the steering wheel the stink eye before turning to look out the window again. The sun was still in limbo, and I couldn’t tell if it was going up or going down. Weirdest feeling ever. Like waking up and not being able to tell if you were on the ceiling or the floor.

I walked back into the house, this time pausing long enough to microwave one of the pieces of pizza before eating it. This time it was too hot, and the roof of my mouth got a good scalding before I swallowed and let the pizza sear my throat on the way down. That’s when I noticed the light on in the basement. Hadn’t Curtis had enough of that depressing sight?

I headed down the basement stairs, and their familiar creak echoed weirdly off the bare walls.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.