Read Haunted for Free Online

off when-” Rae stopped abruptly as Yana climbed back in the car.
    “Okay, who wants what?” Yana asked as Anthony pulled back out into traffic. “I got your Snowballs. I got your beef jerky. I got your Cheese Waffies. I got your M&M’s-plain, peanut, and crispy. I got your Corn Nuts.”
    A road trip with a girl who’s in love with the sound of her own voice. Excellent, Anthony thought.
    From the second he saw her, he’d known Yana would be a pain in the butt. Girls didn’t dress the way she did unless they wanted attention-a lot of attention. And girls who wanted a lot of attention were always a pain in the butt. If you gave them some, they wanted more. If you didn’t, they got all pouty. He couldn’t believe Rae and this Yana chick were friends.
    “So, how do you two know each other, anyway?”
    Anthony asked.
    “What, you don’t think I go to Sanderson Prep?”
    Yana replied, fingering one of the four earrings she had in her left ear.
    “Well, do you?” She wasn’t his idea of a prep school girl. But what did he know? It wasn’t like he hung out with hordes of them or anything. Rae was pretty much the only one he’d ever talked to.
    “No, Rae and I…” Yana hesitated. Anthony glanced in the rearview mirror and caught Yana looking at Rae, as if she was waiting for Rae to tell her what to say. What was the deal there? “Yana was a volunteer at the hospital where I was, uh, vacationing this summer,” Rae finished for her.
    She turned her head and stared out the window.
    Nice work, Anthony, he told himself. Now Rae’d probably spend the rest of the trip thinking about how it felt to be institutionalized.
    “You should have seen the place,” Yana said.
    Anthony shot her a glare in the rearview mirror. But either she didn’t see him, or she just blew him off.
    “The doctors and the nurses, they were as freaky as the patients. Remember the wig lady, Rae?”
    Rae laughed. A real laugh, not one of those fake ones people used to show that they weren’t bugged by some stupid thing someone just said. “The wig lady was this nurse who had pulled out most of her hair, strand by strand,” Rae explained. “She had a different wig for every day of the week. And she really believed that people thought it was her hair.”
    “It’s called trichto something, when you pull out your hair like that. I can’t remember exactly,” Yana jumped in.
    “Yana’s the one who found out what the deal was.
    She was always calling up personnel files on the computer and then telling all of us really personal stuff-like who’d taken a leave of absence to go into rehab for coke addiction,” Rae explained. “Did you know there’s a rehab place just for medical people druggies?”
    “I only did it because I didn’t think it was fair that all the info went one way. Like, why should some doctor get to know everything about Rae’s childhood but not have to ever say anything about himself?”
    Yana asked.
    “Oh my God. You should have seen these puppet shows Yana would put on,” Rae said, struggling to talk around her giggles. “We had these puppets that we used for therapy sometimes, and Yana would put on soap operas with them, using all the staff people as characters.”
    “That’s cool,” Anthony said. And he actually meant it. Maybe it wouldn’t totally suck having Yana along on this trip.
    Rae glanced over her shoulder. Yana was zonked out, with her head pillowed on Rae’s gym bag. “She’s asleep,”
    she told Anthony, careful to keep her voice low.
    “I figured,” he answered, his voice soft, too.
    “Either that or she fell out of the car. It’s been way too quiet from back there.”
    He sounded more amused than annoyed. Rae smiled as she leaned the seat back and stretched her legs out in front of her. The Yana magic had already started working on Anthony. It was pretty much impossible not to like the girl-unless you were a nurse whose personnel file she happened to have hacked her way into.
    Rae rolled