Monsterville Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Christine Reida

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews and articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are from the author’s imagination, and used fictitiously.

  Sky Pony Press books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.

  Cover illustration by Susana Diaz

  Cover design by Georgia Morrissey

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5107-0733-7

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0736-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my love, the honey badger

  CONTENTS

  ACT ONE

  Scene One: A Creepy Welcome

  Scene Two: The Effects of Monster Spotting

  Scene Three: Return to the Woods

  Scene Four: The Monster Trap

  Scene Five: Monster Games

  Scene Six: Traumatizing Experiences

  ACT TWO

  Scene One: A Monster Interview

  Scene Two: Human Games

  Scene Three: Dress Rehearsal

  Scene Four: Monster Discipline

  Scene Five: Night Escape

  Scene Six: Blue Remembers

  Scene Seven: A Brilliant Idea

  Scene Eight: Monsterville Explained

  Scene Nine: A Wish for Blue

  Scene Ten: Blue’s Real Name

  Scene Eleven: Curtains Up!

  Scene Twelve: A Convincing Disguise

  Scene Thirteen: Keeping Watch

  ACT THREE

  Scene One: Six Hours Left

  Scene Two: Five Hours and Forty-Five Minutes Left

  Scene Three: Five Hours Left

  Scene Four: Four Hours and Forty-Five Minutes Left

  Scene Five: Four Hours and Fifteen Minutes Left

  Scene Six: Three Hours and Forty-Five Minutes Left

  Scene Seven: Two Hours and Forty-Five Minutes Left

  Scene Eight: Two Hours and Fifteen Minutes Left

  Scene Nine: One Hour and Fifty-Five Minutes Left

  Scene Ten: One Hour and Forty-Five Minutes Left

  Scene Eleven: One Hour and Fifteen Minutes Left

  Scene Twelve: Forty Minutes Left

  Scene Thirteen: Thirty Minutes Left

  Scene Fourteen: Twenty-Six Minutes Left

  Scene Fifteen: Twenty-One Minutes Left

  Scene Sixteen: Sixteen Minutes Left

  Scene Seventeen: Fourteen Minutes Left

  Scene Eighteen: Eight Minutes Left

  Curtain Call

  Lissa’s Film Glossary

  ACT ONE

  SCENE ONE:

  A CREEPY WELCOME

  If my life had a soundtrack, right now banjo music would be playing. When we pulled into the rocky driveway of our new house in Freeburg, Pennsylvania, all I saw for miles around were corn, cows, and woods. It was a miracle my cell phone still worked because I felt like I’d fallen off the face of the planet.

  “We’re here!” Dad crowed, pivoting in his seat to give Haylie and me a crazy grin. Which fit, considering he was bonkers for making us move from New York City to the sticks. I’d say he’s having a midlife crisis, but he’s not old enough yet.

  Haylie kicked her legs in her car seat. “Lissy, help me!”

  “Lissa, help your sister,” Mom said, like I hadn’t heard.

  “One second, Hails.” I unclicked my seat belt and opened my door. The glare of the sun hit me in the eyes and I ducked as I went to rescue Haylie.

  “Are there cows?” she asked as I lifted her up. Her blonde hair tickled my nose while she squirmed, trying to get a better view.

  “Not here,” Mom said, “but next door there are. And piggies, and chickens, and—” She looked at me to finish the sentence.

  “Dogs?” I asked, playing along. Even if this place was the bane of my existence, I wanted Haylie to be happy.

  “Yes!” Mom clapped her hands and grinned at me, her smile widening when Dad looped his arms around her waist. I turned away from the sight of them kissing. Like there’s anything grosser than your parents making out.

  I put Haylie down and shaded my eyes to look “next door.” It was the equivalent of a city block away—a backdrop of wooden buildings and animal pens against a line of trees. It looked like the scenery in a low-budget 1950s newsreel about farm life.

  Dad moved to unlock the back of the U-Haul. “Hey everyone. We can go inside to check out our new house, and we don’t have to worry about anyone stealing anything!”

  “What about coyotes carrying our stuff away?” I grumbled.

  “Coyotes?” Haylie’s blue eyes lit up.

  “There aren’t any coyotes out here.” Mom shot me a warning glare. “Nothing dangerous at all.”

  “You know, Mom, if this were a movie, you just doomed us.”

  Cardinal rule in movies: never say somewhere is safe. It’s an invitation for disaster.

  “Life isn’t a movie, Lissa.” It wasn’t the first time she’d told me that.

  “Well, mine definitely isn’t. It’s so boring, it would be the biggest box office bomb in history.” I ignored Mom’s warning look as I took a box from the U-Haul and walked up the cracked sidewalk to our sagging front porch. “Watch your step!” I called over my shoulder.

  Haylie raced to catch up. “Lissy! Look!”

  She pointed at the garden framing the porch. It was overgrown with grass and long stalks of thorny plants that choked the purple and pink bursts I assumed were legitimate flowers.

  “A secret garden,” I told her. “Secret meaning that to anyone looking, it’s a dirt plot full of weeds.”

  Haylie waded through the weeds and picked a pink blossom. “I’m going to make a bouquet for our new house,” she announced. She grabbed a handful of flowers and joined me on the porch, her cheeks as pink as the flowers. “Look!”

  The flowers were wilted, drooping from the heat and lack of water. I took one and lifted it to my nose, inhaling the scent. “Nice,” I lied.

  Dad came clomping up the stairs with a stack of boxes. I rescued the top one. It was mine.

  “Those are petunias. Aunt Lucy always loved petunias,” he said. Aunt Lucy was the mysterious relative who had left us this house in her will.

  This gift created the perfect horror movie setup: free house from mysterious relative equals death.

  Aunt Lucy wasn’t really mysterious—just a stranger. I’d only met her a few times, so when Dad told us about the house, my reaction was, “Lucy who?”

  Haylie waved the flowers at me again, and I looked down at her. “Tell you what, Haylie. These stems are too short for a vase. Want me to put them in your hair instead?”

  Her smile was blinding. Four-year-olds are so easy to please. “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  “Okay, keep your pants on.” I kneeled on the porch and opened the box my best friends, Casey and Taylor, had filled with
things to make sure I didn’t forget them. Like that was possible. I pulled out the bedazzled bobby pins Taylor had stuck in a makeup bag of “essentials.” “Here, hop up on the railing and I’ll make you beautiful.” I waved the bobby pins at Haylie.

  She perched on the wooden railing, and I went to work pulling up strands of hair and fastening them with bobby pins. I stuck flowers wherever I could.

  “Done!” I announced when I ran out of pins. “You look like a movie star.”

  Haylie giggled and felt her head. “I have flowers in my hair!”

  “Flowers everywhere …” Dad sang in a baritone voice. He and Mom were already on their third load of boxes. He nudged open the front door with his foot and disappeared inside again.

  “Come on, Hails,” I said. “Let’s go check out the new digs.” I took a deep breath, picked up my box, and headed into the house.

  I’d seen pictures of it before, but those didn’t account for the mildewy smell. The place wasn’t huge, but it was much bigger than our apartment. The house was a one-story, with a living room that opened into a dining room and then a kitchen. The bedrooms were in the back—three of them. Haylie and I would share a connecting bathroom.

  “Look at all this space! And furniture!” Mom patted the coffee table. Aunt Lucy’s furniture was clunky and dark.

  “Yeah, lucky us.”

  The whole place felt alien. I already missed our condo’s plush carpeting, and the cream-colored walls, and our kitchen counter with stools where Taylor, Casey, and I hung out and talked while scarfing down pizza.

  I was one hundred percent sure that we couldn’t get pizza delivered out here.

  I carried my box down the narrow hallway and into my bedroom at the far end, setting it down on the bare floor. The box looked lonely all by itself.

  “Lissa!” Mom called from the living room. “Look at the sky! It’s going to storm! Help us get all this stuff in quick.”

  Sure enough, when I went back out to help, the temperature had dropped. The air had this calm, still feel to it, and I wondered if we were about to have a tornado. Maybe if one came, it would whisk me away to somewhere better, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

  Mom, Dad, and I rushed back and forth across the front yard, moving boxes from the U-Haul and dumping them in the living room. We finished just as a huge crack of thunder sounded, followed by a low rumble. Big, fat drops started to fall, tapping against the windows. A loose shutter slapped against the side of the house.

  I looked around the living room. Our stuff was everywhere—kitchen table in pieces on the floor, movies in boxes, Mom’s tall Chinese vases wrapped in bubble paper.

  “Well,” I said. “I guess I’ll go to my room.”

  “No!” Dad clapped his hands. “This is our first evening in our new house. Stella, get the sparkling cider I put in the fridge. I’ll scrounge up Scrabble. We’re celebrating!”

  Mom and Dad genuinely thought we had a reason to. They’d grabbed at the chance to move to the country, going on and on about how good it would be for Haylie and me.

  For the next few hours, we sat on the hardwood floor of our new dining room, playing Scrabble while Mom and Dad tactfully ignored my prison-themed word choices. Dad won because of his roughly four thousand IQ points.

  When I finally went to my room for bed, I felt like a visitor there. I missed my favorite red blanket, which was still packed away somewhere. Boxes of clothes and books crowded the floor, and the walls were bare.

  Crawling under the covers, I listened to the rain hitting the windows and pretended I was back in our apartment—the sound of the rain is universal. I imagined I was lying underneath my old ceiling with the glow-in-the-dark stars I’d stuck to it when I was ten. If I listened hard enough, I could almost hear the city traffic.

  I’m fantastic at pretending, but it still took me half the night to fall asleep.

  Little kids have security blankets. I had my box.

  As soon as I woke up the next morning, I dug into Taylor and Casey’s present. I’d been avoiding it, afraid I’d start bawling over the contents like a an over the top actress in a bad chick flick. (Like there’s any such thing as a good chick flick.)

  Along with a bunch of nostalgic stuff, like pictures and a signed playbill from Wicked, it had things I could use: a makeup bag so I could do my own makeup (since I wouldn’t have Taylor to do it for me), a St. Mary’s T-shirt, a pair of white sunglasses with purple lenses, a package of my favorite gummy bears, dangly earrings, and a blank journal for my screenwriting ideas.

  I touched the purple cover of the journal, trying not to think about what I was missing at St. Mary’s. Especially the fall play. The whole seventh grade would be preparing for it without me, even though I had written it. I’d won the sixth-grade playwriting contest at the end of last year.

  If I’d stayed in NYC, I would have gotten to direct my very own play under the supervision of Roland Reed, the semi-famous TV writer St. Mary’s was bringing in to help. He could have gotten me a job on a hip television show that needed a kid writer, which would have led to my first Golden Globe, which would have been the first step toward becoming an Oscar winner in multiple non-acting categories.

  Instead, I’d be hanging out in cow country, doodling in my journal.

  Thanks a lot, Mom and Dad.

  They promised we’d go back to see my play. I couldn’t decide if that was thoughtful or cruel. I mean, it was literally a display of what I was missing out on.

  I put the notebook back in the box and closed the lid. After I got dressed, I headed down the hallway for breakfast. Mom was already in the kitchen, unloading appliances from a box and arranging them on the linoleum counter. She paused to hand me a package of Pop-Tarts.

  “That’s all I could find. And the store in Freeburg isn’t open yet.” She reached up to pull her hair into a ponytail.

  “Here’s an interesting factoid,” I said as I ripped open the package. “The grocery store on our old street was always open.”

  “Right, so there was more time to rob it. Three times last year.”

  “Nuh-uh. The owner probably staged those robberies for the insurance money.” Mom squinted at me. “Seriously! I’ve thought about it a lot.”

  I peered at our backyard through the dirty kitchen window. “Are we just unpacking all day or what?”

  “Well, it needs to be done. But you can explore if you want. Or maybe go meet the neighbors.”

  “What neighbors?”

  “The Griggs. They have a boy your age. And another in high school.”

  “Great.” I figured I was obligated to be friends with them. Freeburg seemed like the kind of place where you had to be friends with anyone who lived within a five-mile radius.

  “I’ll start unpacking. And planning the redecorating,” Mom said excitedly. “We can do anything we want! Imagine it!”

  I scanned the kitchen, taking in the 1970s style of everything, including the yellow refrigerator. Back home, we had marble countertops and a stainless steel refrigerator that filtered water and made ice.

  Maybe we could remodel this kitchen to look just like our old one, and I could pretend we’d never moved. I’d just never leave the house. If I did, it would be like in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, where the main character opens her front door and falls into an alternate reality complete with a desert populated by killer sandworms.

  Freeburg was my alternate reality.

  “Great. Well, I guess I’ll go exploring,” I said. “Just, you know, roam around. Maybe check out the woods. Bag a deer, build a cabin.”

  Mom slit open a box with some scissors and pulled out our coffeemaker. “Hello, friend,” she said to it, then waved me off. “Yes, go explore. But be back in an hour. We need your help.”

  I stuck my feet in a pair of flip-flops and headed outside. Even though the sun wasn’t all the way up yet, it was already hot, sweat dampening my back under my T-shirt.

  A noise at the end of our driveway caught my attention—th
is RRRrrrrrr! RRRrrrrr! RRRrrrrr! that kept getting louder.

  I craned my head toward the noise, and five seconds later, a really pale kid on a red four-wheeler with square headlights came flying down the road. He wasn’t wearing a helmet.

  Maybe it was kind of mean, but I thought that was funny. It was like, Oh, Freeburg’s so safe and crime free so let me find ways to hurt myself all on my own.

  With nothing better to do, I walked to the end of our long driveway to check the mailbox. It was gray and the flag had been snapped off. I’d probably need a tetanus shot after touching it.

  As I reached for the mailbox door, the RRRrrrrrr! RRRrrrrr! RRRrrrrr! started up again. A second later the pale kid came catapulting back over the hill, the four-wheeler’s headlights glinting in the sun. He screeched to a stop in front of me.

  “Hi,” the kid panted. “You Lissa?”

  “The one and only.” I wasn’t surprised he knew who I was. A new neighbor was probably as exciting as it got on Mine Haul Road.

  “Sorry about your aunt. She was really nice.”

  “It’s okay,” I said awkwardly, because it’s always uncomfortable when people say they’re sorry for you. “I only met her twice. My dad says I look like her, though.”

  “That’s cool.” He pointed down the road at a white farmhouse. “I live right there. I’m Adam Griggs.” He stretched to shake my hand hard. His palm was sweaty.

  “So you’re the one in high school?” I asked, discreetly wiping my hand off on my jean shorts. He looked really tall, even sitting down.

  “Ha, nope. I’m in seventh grade. With you, right?” He smiled, and it occurred to me that even though he was way pale, he had very blue eyes and extremely white teeth. I always notice eyes and teeth.

  “Yup. Livin’ it up in the one-room schoolhouse.”

  Adam looked at me kind of hard, and I almost apologized. Instead, I pretended to be interested in checking the mail. The door screamed on rusty hinges and opened to a whole pile of junk—yellowed newspaper ads and big white envelopes. I closed the door without taking anything out.

  “Didn’t see anything you liked?” Adam asked.

  “I’ll grab it later. I was going to explore. Maybe in the woods.”