“Sorry,” Sam spoke to the dark blob of faces all around him. Still blushing furiously, he ducked and began fumbling toward the aisle. Thomas groaned and Pippa whispered, “What are you doing, Sam?”
He was squeezing past Max when his toe caught on one of her shoes. Suddenly, he was pitching forward in the dark. Instinctively, he reached out to steady himself, grabbing the back of someone’s chair. There was a loud snap, as though a giant had just bitten off the world’s largest green bean, and then the chair was no longer steady, and a woman was screaming, and Sam was falling again.
The theater lights came on at once, and the screen went dark.
“Murder!” A woman was lying on her back, feet kicking the air, in the theater seat Sam had accidentally ripped free of the floor. “Murder! Theft! Help!” Her pocketbook lay beside her. It had popped open, spilling its contents across the floor.
Everything was confusion. People rushed over to help the woman to her feet. Ten people were talking at once.
“He went for my throat!” she was saying, wild-eyed. “He was after my purse!”
Sam had just climbed to his feet, and was about to apologize, when a man wearing wire-framed glasses swiveled in his direction.
“Hey!” the man squawked, lifting a finger to point. “It’s the kid from the news report! It’s one of them freaks from the museum!”
Sam felt time slow. He could feel the thunderous space between each of his heartbeats. One by one, as in a nightmare, the people in the theater turned to look. Sam wanted to run, but he was rooted to the ground.
Even the man’s voice seemed to have slowed, deepened, as though Sam were hearing him through a thick muffling layer of molasses. “It’s all of them!” the man said, as his finger slowly swept across the row of seats to encompass them all: Max, scowling; an irritated Pippa; and Thomas looking, amazingly, as if he were enjoying himself.
A new eruption of sound: time sped up again, and Sam was crowded from all sides. People were grabbing his shirt, firing off questions so quickly he could understand none of them.
“That’s our cue.” Max was beside him all of a sudden. She grabbed hold of his hand and he was so shocked, he forgot to squeeze back. “Out of the way!” she called, shoving and pushing. “Coming through!” She piloted him firmly toward the exit, plowing through the knot of people who had gathered, using elbows when she had to.
He was almost disappointed when they reached the street and the sunshine, and she released him. But at least there were no people pointing and yammering at him. At least he could breathe again.
“Wait for us!” Pippa burst out of the movie theater after them, and Thomas emerged a second later.
“What a waste,” Thomas muttered. “Frankenstein’s Revenge is supposed to be the scariest one.”
“You could have stayed,” Sam pointed out.
“By myself? No, thank you.” Thomas shoved his hands deep in his pockets and looked away. A little muscle flexed in his jaw, as it did when he was working a really hard trick, trying to squeeze himself into a shoebox or Chinese vase.
Sam realized, then, that Thomas was angry. “You enjoy it, don’t you?” He felt a little sick to say the words out loud. “You actually like being the center of attention.”
Thomas shrugged. “So?”
“They’re laughing at us, Thomas,” Sam said. He was shaking. He was angry, too—so angry he could break something for real this time, deliberately. “They think we’re freaks.”
“So what?” Thomas finally looked at him. “Who cares what they think? It won’t change anything. It won’t change us.”
Sam opened his mouth to respond but he was startled by a shriek. Pippa’s face was the vivid red of a ripe tomato, and she was glaring at Max.
“I don’t believe you,” she spat out. “You didn’t.”
Max had her arms crossed tightly. “I don’t know what—” she started to say, but Pippa lunged for her, and even as Thomas shouted, and Sam moved forward to separate them, Pippa had plunged her hands deep in the pocket of Max’s jacket. A second later, she was holding a battered woman’s wallet.
“You stole this,” she said, practically spitting the words, as though they were full of poison.
“I didn’t steal it,” Max said. She licked her lips nervously. “I found it.”
“Yeah, on the floor—when it fell out of that woman’s pocketbook,” Pippa said.
Max shrugged. “Finders, keepers.”
“You’re going to march right back inside and give it back to her,” Pippa said, waving the wallet threateningly in Max’s face.
Max swatted at her. “Get your hands out of my breathing space.”
“Don’t touch me,” Pippa said, swatting back.
“You ain’t my mother.”
“Aren’t! Aren’t! You aren’t my mother!”
“Well, you ain’t, either.”
Pippa made a low growling noise in her throat. Max’s fists were balled at her side. Both girls moved at once, lightning quick.