"MD Spenser - Humano Morphs 3 Reading This Book May Be Hazardous To Your Health" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spenser M D)

the megaphone. Then he grasped Ezra firmly on the upper part of his arm and marched him out of the stands and back towards the concession area.
That's when he told Ezra that he was giving him detention after school every day for a week, cleaning desks.
When that week was finished, Ezra said he would never chew a piece of gum again for the rest of his life. There was nothing grosser in this world, he told us, then squatting down with a putty knife in one hand and scraping dried gum off the underside of desks.
"No, I take that back," he told Hayden and me. "There is one thing grosser than scraping dried gum off the bottom of a desk."
"What's that?" we asked. We should have known Ezra was setting us up.
"The only thing grosser than scraping dried gum off the underside of a desk is scraping off gum that hasn't completely dried yet."
"Eeeewwwww," I said, and made a face.
"Aw, come on, Abby. Here, I saved you a piece," Ezra said, and reached his hand down into his pants pocket.
I started to run away, but Ezra pulled his hand out empty.
That was Ezra.


Chapter Two
I had turned away from Amanda and Angela and their little gang of stuck-up cheerleaders, and saw Hayden walking back over to us.
"What was that all about?" I asked Hayden as he re-joined Ezra and me. "Since when is Chip your buddy?"
"Better known as Chip Off the Old Blockhead," said Ezra.
"I've got some good news and some bad news," said Hayden.
"What's up?" I asked.
"Well, the good news is that Chip invited me to join this club that some of the guys have. They call themselves the Cruisers, and they get together and just hang out. Chip's one of the leaders, and Brian and Kyle and Tony are all in it, too."
"And they asked youT said Ezra.
I understood his lack of understanding. Brian and Kyle and Tony were some of the guys that had been hanging around the cheerleaders when we'd walked up. Brian was president of the eighth grade class and was going steady with Maria; she even wore his ID bracelet.
These guys were like the cream of the eighth grade. And Hayden, even though he was my best friend - well, Hayden was like the skim milk of the eighth grade.
Why would the Cruisers ask Hayden to join, when they made fun of him and Ezra and me?
"Yeah, he asked me," Hayden said. "But here's the bad news. I have to pass the initiation test."
"How bad is this bad news?" I asked.
"I don't know yet," said Hayden. "But I'll know tonight. They told me I have to sneak inside that deserted factory on the outskirts of town. I somehow have to get inside there and find something and bring it back to them."
"What do you have to find?" I asked.
"Anything, but it has to be something that could only have come from inside the factory. Like, I don't know, a sign or some paper about what the factory used to make or something."
"The factory" was what we all called the enormous dark building that had sat, unattended, on a huge fenced-in lot for years.
We never went there, because there was nothing to do there and it wasn't on the way to anywhere else. About the only times we saw it, really, were when we were riding with our parents, driving out of town on the highway, just past the City Limits sign.
The factory was two stories high and kind of ominous looking. It had no windows and you couldn't even see a door from the road. A building with no windows at all is pretty strange.
It's as if it's trying to keep secrets.
Plus there was the fence. This wasn't any regular fence like the kind people put around their backyards to keep their dogs from getting loose, the kind that any 14-year-old with even a dab of athletic ability could climb with no trouble.
This was a fence abut ten feet high, and instead of being chain-link, like backyard fences, it was made of black metal poles, each about an inch thick, set very close together so you couldn't see in very well.
Once, a couple of years ago, I had been riding with my dad past the factory and had asked him what the building was. He said he had no idea, that it had been closed down when we moved to town. That was more than ten years ago, when I was only four years old.
"Are you gonna do it?" I asked Hayden. "Are you really going to go in the factory just to be able to join the Cruisers?"
"I'll have to think about it," Hayden said.
"Well, if you go, we'll go with you," I said boldly.
"Say what?" squeaked Ezra. "Excuse me, Abby, but did you just volunteer me for a mission at night that could be potentially dangerous, and one I get nothing out of?"
"If you don't want to go, Ezra, you don't have to," I told him. "But I thought it would be a nice supportive thing to do for Hayden, so he wouldn't have to go alone. He's our friend. And in case you haven't noticed, we're not exactly swarmed with so many friends that we lose count of them all."
Ezra looked kind of ashamed. I felt proud of myself for volunteering and being such a good friend to Hayden.
The morning bell rang and we walked up the steps and into school together, the three of us, ready to start another day at Messetup.
But as the day wore on, my bravery started turning to a bad case of nerves.
What in the heck had I signed us up for? Maybe Ezra was being chicken, but he had a point. Hayden was doing this to get into the Cruisers, but what were Ezra and I getting out of this nighttime mission into the old abandoned factory?
If anything, we'd be the losers. Because if the Cruisers really did let Hayden join once he completed the mission, we'd probably see less of him.
He'd have new friends. Cooler friends. Ezra and I would start looking like yesterday's lunch.
Swell. What had I gotten myself into?


Chapter Three