Read The Midnight Twins for Free Online Page B

here.”
    “But we have every number, in our pockets, up on the chalkboard, and next to the phone, for everybody from the pizza guy practically to the FBI!” Mallory protested.
    She glanced at her little brother, Adam, with a grimace.
    There was trouble on two legs. Adam had a gift.
    He was deep in whispered conversation with his cousin, Alex, a year younger, and Mally knew something was up. Nearly eleven, Adam was a devious little creature. Maybe he had convinced Kim Jellico’s brother, David, to give him fireworks. She knew Adam had asked. Kim had told them. And Mally had seen David just the morning before. He was cruising past the forest road near their house where Mally took her run. He didn’t seem to be going anywhere and it was break, so why wasn’t he asleep like a normal guy? Almost out of breath, Mally yelled out a warning to him: No way was he to give Adam fireworks! David just laughed.
    “I’d never give fireworks to a little kid, even a little kid like you,” he said. But David was a guy and prone to idiot jokes.
    Mallory would never forget him popping up at Kim’s bedroom window with a black nylon stocking over his face the night of Kim’s eleventh birthday sleepover. The girls all screamed, and Kirsten Morgan went hysterical (although Kirsten Morgan was always going hysterical).
    Mally was the only one who didn’t scream. She went outside and got up in David’s face, yelling at him that he was a freako idiot. David wasn’t even with his friends. He was alone and he was fourteen, old enough to know better. Merry called Mallory a jerk for yelling at David on Kim’s birthday. But Merry would have forgiven David if he’d thrown a small hand grenade into the open window. She said boys were just immature.
    She always got limp around David, looking at him from under her eyelashes. Like he would notice Merry in ten million years!
    What if Adam had fireworks all strung together under the front porch right now? Adam did stay over with Alex the night of the party, only two days ago.
    “Let’s play hide-and-seek outside!” Mally announced as soon as all the parents were disposed of. Her little cousins Hannah and Heather, who were five and four, clapped their hands and ran for their coats.
    “We’re too big for hide-and-seek,” Adam announced with elaborate apathy.
    “You’re too scared you can’t beat me,” Mally teased him. “You’ll never be able to run as fast as I do. I’m an athlete!”
    “Can so,” Adam said.
    “Can not,” Mally answered. “The tree is goal and I’ll give you to a hundred. Hannah, go back and get your boots on. It’s freezing out here. One game!”
    Once she was finally (supposedly) counting, Mallory got down on her hands and knees and crept a few feet under the porch. There was what appeared to be the world’s largest collection of cracked old Frisbees under there, and a bike pump, and a feral cat that winked at her and disappeared, but nothing that looked like rockets or bombs. Behind her, she heard Adam shriek gleefully, “Home free!”
    They played eight or nine games, using up more than an hour. Then they played flashlight tag for another half hour.
    That ended when Hannah got lost in the neighbor’s grape arbor—two acres over, as there were only two houses on the long road.
    To placate Hannah, who was whining big time, Meredith made hot chocolate and Mallory set up a DVD on the life cycle of a lion cub for the little girls. Alex and Adam went up to Alex’s room to play Mally’s skater and soccer video games—as well as the Doom Slayers game her mother didn’t know about. Mally didn’t dare tell on Adam, who would tell on her right back. That had been the big whispering secret with Alex. Well, her mother hadn’t asked her, point-blank, “Mallory, do you own an exceptionally violent computer game?” Had she? And so, strictly speaking, Mallory wasn’t lying.
    An hour later, the little cousins began to nag to put their party hats on.
    “It’s a