Sammy Keyes and the Killer Cruise by Wendelin Van Draanen Read Free Book Online Page B

hogging the shots. It got so bad that after the third game, I put down my paddle and said, “Isn’t that frozen-yogurt dispenser around here somewhere?”
    “Good idea,” Marissa says, sliding her paddle across the table.
    JT looks shocked. “Already? I was just warming up!”
    “You and Kip can keep playing,” I tell him, but Kip puts his paddle down, too, and says, “Frozen yogurt sounds great!”
    So we all wind up getting yogurts, but the whole time we’re hanging out, JT seems like he’s not real happy. Like he’s thinking about something else, or wishing he were somewhere else, or … I don’t know what. And then Marissa’s in the middle of telling a very funny story, about the time she got stuck on top of a chain-link fence thanks to you-know-who, when he actually gets up in the middle of a sentence and says, “I’m gonna head back.” He looks at Kip and says, “See you at dinner,” and takes off.
    Marissa’s jaw drops and just dangles, but mine’s still working fine. “Wow, what a jerk.”
    Kip snickers.
    That’s all.
    Just snickers.
    Finally, Marissa asks, “Was I talking too much?”
    Kip shakes his head. “The story’s great. Go ahead and finish it.”
    “Uh, no,” she tells him.
    I move over next to her. “Hey, it was totally not you.”
    “Totally not,” Kip says.
    “So what’s his problem?” I ask Kip. “He was acting like a jerk when we were playing Ping-Pong, too.”
    Kip looks from me to Marissa and back. And finally he says, “Kensingtons don’t talk bad about each other in public.”
    My eyes bug out at him. “But they can act bad and that’s okay?”
    He gives a shrug. “Look, I don’t like the way he acted, either, but those are the rules and I’m a Kensington.”
    I can tell he’s thinking something else because he gets kinda cloudy, but he doesn’t actually
say
anything else. So finally I stand up and yank Marissa along. “Well, good luck with that.”
    “Yeah,” Marissa says. “Good luck with that.”
    Neither of us even looks back. And as we’re marching along, I’m thinking how it took Marissa
forever
to get over this jerk named Danny Urbanski, and if she’s going to be whining and pining over another jerk on this cruise, I’m going to
throttle
her, when she says, “You have nothing to worry about.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t care if I never talk to him again.”
    We’re at the stairs now, and as I start down them, I grumble, “Famous last words.”
    She grabs me by the arm and yanks me back. “He may be cute, but I’m done with jerks.”
    I just stare at her a minute, then break into a smile. “Hallelujah.”
    When we get down to the Deck 10 landing, I nod over at the Royal Suite and say, “I know you were all hypnotized by JT, but I was kinda freaking out when we were in there. I felt really trapped.”
    “It
was
a little weird.”
    And then the Royal Suite starts to open.
    I grab Marissa and duck out of view.
    “What?” she whispers with her eyes bugged out.
    I couldn’t really explain it. Something about the door opening freaked me out. Like the alien hive sensed we were there and was going to try and suck us back inside.
    “What?” Marissa whispers again. She looks up and around the corner, back at the hive, and then all of a sudden she’s yanking me down the steps. “Quick!” she whispers. “It’s JT’s parents!”
    Well, obviously, she didn’t want it to seem like she was spying or on the lookout for JT. So I barrel down the steps to the ninth floor with her, but there’s a slight problem with our escape plan.
    JT’s family is staying in a cabin down our same hallway.
    “Quick!” Marissa says again as she swipes her sea-pass card in our door lock and swoops us inside. But since I can’t stand being inside and not knowing what’s going on outside, I leave the door open enough that I can hide behind it and peek through the slit by the hinges.
    “What are you doing?” Marissa whispers.
    “Shh! Hide!”
    So she