My Friends Are Dead People by Tony Ortiz Read Free Book Online

anxious. “Jesse! Come on!”
    “ Why are you so . .
.”
    I finally knew why. Katie’s old Mexican
friends, Jean and Monica, were approaching us. I had never met the
girls, but Katie had talked about them once. They were older than
us. Jean was seventeen, and her sister was sixteen.
    “ Cat, wait up!” said Jean,
who was thin as a stick and wore tomboy clothes. She caught up with
us, breathing heavily. “Hey. I know you said you didn’t wanna see
us again, but it’s been two years and . . . because you wanna be a
perfect little angel now doesn’t mean you gotta freakin' ignore us.
Right, Moni?”
    Jean waited for her younger sister to catch
up. Monica was just as skinny, with short black hair streaked
purple. She walked up to us and spat in Katie’s face.
    “ You never dropped off my
comb!”
    “ Don’t d-do–” I
stuttered.
    Monica swiftly pulled out a switchblade and
pressed it to my neck. “Shut up, you dweeb!”
    “ What the hell you
doing?!” yelled Katie, pushing Monica in the chest.
“ Don’t touch him! ”
    I had never seen Katie like this. She looked
scary. She stepped up an inch away from the blade now pointing at
her face.
    "¿por qué? Is he your boyfriend?"
    Katie wiped the spit off her face with the
palm of her hand. "No, but he's my best friend."
    Jean lowered Monica's blade and pushed me
aside. "Cat, we ain't friends anymore. Leave or there's goin' be a
problem."
    "I said don't touch him!"
    Jean flicked out her blade. "¿Qué?"
    "You know what I said!"
    As if suddenly struck by a bolt of fear,
Jean dropped the blade. But it wasn’t because of Katie. There was
an enormous bat-like creature flapping overhead. The creature
landed coolly in front of Jean, putting himself in-between us and
the sisters. He had a long snout, pointy ears, gray skin and wings
like a dragon, and a tree branch for a left arm. A tiny brown
spider crawled up the side of his normal arm and rested on top of
his shoulder.
    “ You girls run home now,"
he ordered.
    Jean and Monica just stood there staring at
the creature, looking too scared to move. He flared out his giant
wings, which got Monica moving. However, Jean remained. As she was
about to walk backward, his wings curved around her.
    “ I decided I’m not going
to let you go anymore. You can stay put.”
    Tears streamed down Jean’s cheeks. The
creature never glanced our way, all the while glaring down at Jean
like an angry parent.
    “ Go to the fence and stick
your head through it.”
    Jean shakily waddled to the fence and poked
her head through a hole in it.
    “ Now bark.”
    And Jean did. She barked away like a wounded
hound. Under different circumstances, this might have been very
amusing, but now Katie and I looked on in shock.
    “ Do you understand you’re
only a kid? Get moving.”
    Jean couldn’t stop barking. Either she was
too scared to or couldn’t hear him. This was truly a horrifying
sight. She was crying and barking at the same time. The bat flicked
one of his wings out, and she snapped out of it and staggered off
in the same direction as Monica. And then he began to follow her.
He followed her all the way to the end of the street and even
turned the corner after her.
    I didn’t know what to think. Was what we
just saw real? Did this have something to do with the werewolf?
    Katie and I sat down on the curb. I hadn't
realized, but my hands were shaking.
    “ You think that was a–” I
said, getting cut off by Katie.
    “ That was no
costume.”
    “ It was like the
movies.”
    “ Yeah. Do you believe in
Satan?”
    “ That wasn't Satan. Satan
wouldn't have rescued us.”
    “ I know. Just wondering if
you believe in that kind of stuff . . . you know, weird
stuff.”
    I couldn’t believe we were having this
conversation. I knew ghosts, goblins and warlocks didn’t exist, and
Katie had agreed, too. But what we had just experienced together
seemed so real that I wasn’t sure what to think. Everything that
had happened today felt real.
    “