The Midnight Twins by Jacquelyn Mitchard Read Free Book Online Page A

Merry shouted.
    All of them could see vivid angry outbursts rocketing up from every window. They heard the whistle and saw fountains of red, gold, green. Next came the staccato of strings of firecrackers and the deep gutturals of cherry bombs.
    “Cool!” Adam shouted, over the screams of the younger children. “Is this why you were going on about the fireworks? Is it a surprise?”
    “Adam Brynn!” Mallory shouted, noticing that Hannah and Heather were now crying hard and clinging to Merry. “Look at how much you scared the little kids. I told you, no fireworks!”
    Adam’s freckled face was a map of shocked betrayal. “Me? Those aren’t mine! I don’t know what they are!”
    All six of them ran out the front door, but the girls couldn’t focus: Fireworks were exploding behind the house, too, in the rock garden, near the back door.
    “I don’t see anybody!” Mally yelled.
    “Me neither!” said Merry, trying to keep both Hannah and Heather from simultaneously climbing her like a jungle gym. The fireworks weren’t corner-store sparklers, but big, deafening, semi-pro, the real thing.
    “Should we call the fire department?” Merry asked over the din.
    “They don’t seem to be doing anything, just exploding,” Mallory shouted as they herded the kids back onto the porch. “Adam, swear on Mom’s head, you didn’t know a thing about this?”
    “I swear. I asked David Jellico to get fireworks for me ten times, and he wouldn’t!”
    Merry’s cell phone began to vibrate in her hip pocket and to play “Song of Joy.” She answered: It was Will Brent, wishing her a happy birthday.
    “I can’t talk,” she said. “Some neighborhood idiot set off a mess of fireworks, and it’s not even midnight!” She glanced up at Mallory. “Me too,” she said quietly. Mallory smirked. Then the telephone inside the house began to ring and they ran for it. By the time the twins got everyone back inside and explained to their grandmother that what she was hearing through the receiver was not a gunfight on Pumpkin Hollow Road, they were too exhausted to do anything but flop down into the big couch under the front window.
    Merry thought of it first.
    Why had Gwenny called?
    It wasn’t near time for her to come over.
    “What’s up, Grandma?” she remembered asking.
    “I was thinking about those fireworks,” Grandma Gwenny had said.
    But no one had told Grandma Gwenny about the fireworks until after she called.
    She could be as strange as they were.
    “Don’t worry,” Grandma had said. “It was just a prank. No one is hurt. Right? You’re sure? I’ll be there soon.”
    “No one is hurt. But you sound funny. What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing,” Gwenny Brynn said. And she told herself, Be still, Gwen, it’s nothing! But she knew it was something . . . though not what the something was.
    “What was all that about?” Meredith asked. “Did you arrange with Grandma to call?”
    “Not me,” Mally said.
    “So what do you think that was? Who did it? The neighbors?”
    “I don’t even think the neighbors are over there. Their house is totally dark.”
    “Maybe they were inside making out.”
    “And then they jumped up from making out and decided to set off eighty million fireworks all around the house of the people next door?”
    “There is that,” Merry admitted.
    “It was probably Will,” Mallory ventured, knowing even as she said it that Will Brent was as likely to pull off a scary practical joke as the girl at the Video Box was likely to be polite.
    “You know it wasn’t.”
    “Well, he called right then!”
    “He knew it was the time I was putting the little kids to bed. Well, almost time. He’s at Lizzy White’s party. He knew it was a time when I could talk. I should call him back.”
    “Do you have to? Right now?”
    “No,” Merry said finally. “He can wait. You’re supposed to let guys wait.”
    Mally asked, “Are you hungry?”
    “Only so I could eat my own leg. Maybe Grandma will bring