Grand & Humble by Brent Hartinger Read Free Book Online Page B

flailing, but it wasn’t helping. Without warning, he sucked in a mouthful of water; it felt like someone jamming a solid rock down his throat. He continued to sink—and no one was coming to his rescue!
    Harlan jerked his fingers from the pointer like he’d touched them on the burner of a stove. Somehow, the action also stopped the premonition in mid-image.
    “Harlan!” Amber said. “What are you doing?”
    “Nothing!” Harlan said, feeling himself flush. “I’m done! I told you, my fingers are cramping!”
    “We’re not done! The pointer was still moving! ‘H 2 O danger Tub’? That doesn’t mean anything !”
    “Well, you’re definitely done now,” Jerry said. “Once you take your fingers off the pointer, you break the spiritual connection.”
    Amber sighed. “Okay, so let’s do it again.”
    “No!” Harlan said.
    “Harlan—”
    “I’m not doing it!” he shouted. “You can’t make me!” Had he meant to slap the Ouija board like that? In any event, the board flipped up and the plastic pointer went flying across the room.
    The room fell absolutely silent. Every eye was on him; even Ricky was too surprised to speak. Harlan knew that the only way to redeem himself in the eyes of Amber and their friends was to say something, make it seem like his outburst had been a joke.
    But Harlan couldn’t think of any jokes. He wouldn’t have been able to choke the words out even if he had. And it wouldn’t have mattered anyway—he saw that now. He was too pale, his breathing was too rapid. People had to see the panic in his eyes.
    He just kept sitting there stupidly, with everyone staring right at him. At the same time, a car alarm went off somewhere on the street outside, and it caused the neighbors’ dogs to start howling. It sounded like the baying of hungry wolves gathering for a kill.

MANNY
    The wooden stairs creaked under Manny’s feet.
    “Manny?” his dad said, below him in the basement. “Is that you?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “I’m coming down.”
    Talk to him, Manny thought. That’s what Elsa had said. Talk to his dad. But what exactly would they talk about? That his dad had reacted strangely that one morning when Manny had told him about his nightmare? Maybe his dad really had remembered that he had some errands to run before work.
    No. It was more than that. He’d been fine before Manny told him the dream. It was something about this particular dream—something Manny had said. It had meaning to his dad. There was something his dad wasn’t telling him.
    Manny found his dad in one corner of the basement,rooting through a rack of cluttered metal shelves. The basement was unfinished, windowless, with walls of bare concrete; the air smelled of spray paint, Christmas spice, and dried aquarium mold.
    “Hey,” Manny said.
    “Oh,” his dad said. “Hello.” The shelf had his attention, not Manny—not that that was necessarily such a bad thing.
    “What are you doing?” Manny said. It seemed important to sound casual.
    “Looking for some of that green florists’ foam that you put at the bottom of a vase. You know, you poke flower stems in it so they’ll stand upright? I was positive I had some.”
    “Let me help.” Anything to avoid doing what he’d come down here to do. “Why do you need it?”
    “Oh, I got snookered into donating something for this silent auction. I can’t afford to actually buy anything, so I figured I’d make a flower arrangement.” This was just like his dad—both the donation and the flower-arranging part. Knowing him, his arrangement would even turn out great.
    His dad sighed and straightened. “Well, it’s not here.” He thought for a second, then glanced around the basement. “What else do we have thatI could fob off on the silent auction?”
    “Dad?”
    “Hmm?”
    But Manny couldn’t put into words what he was trying to say. He’d always been able to ask his dad anything. Why wasn’t he able to ask him about this? Maybe because he wasn’t