Touch of Fear ▸ House of Anubis [2]

chapter twenty. house of vertigo

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            "Hopscotch is like dancing," Amber informs Fabian and me in the halls at school. Neither of us have ever been very good at it, but neither of us are very good at dancing either. "If you can dance, you can play hopscotch." Fabian and I share a simultaneous doubtful glance. "You can't dance, neither of you."

            Pathetic.

            "Well, I'm—" I glance at Fabian. "I'm sure I'm a better dancer than him."

            Nina joins us and says, "I've been looking up hopscotch online. It goes way back. There's dozens of different kinds of grids. Loads of different versions of rules..."

            "It makes no sense," Fabian states. "Hopscotch? Seems kind of crazy for a middle-aged mastermind, doesn't it?"

            "He had a little girl," Amber points out. "Two of them. Little girls love hopscotch."

            I nod, taking Lily's diary out of my bag. "Lily even wrote about it. She and Sarah loved it. Said he used to draw the grids for them." I flip through, trying to find the entry from, but then I glance back up and notice that both halves of Fabina look like a lightbulb just lit above them. "What is it?"

            "Of course, the—" Fabian starts.

            "—dollhouse," they finish in unison. The dollhouse must have a clue as to the rules to this particular game; it helped us get through that dead end, it has to do the same for the hopscotch. Nina decides, "We'll stake it out after dinner."

—

            "You're the Chosen One," Amber says dryly as Nina pauses, her hands on a folding table in the lounge, where we're helping set up the masked ball, "yet you can't figure out a foldout table."

            "Sorry," Nina apologizes, voice barely audible.

            I set down my banner, going over to help her while noticing where she's got her eyes. Fabian and Joy are talking on the stage. "Don't worry about it, Neens. That boy's only got eyes for you," I assure her. Nina glances at me and back to them. So I add pointedly, "Heart eyes. Trust me."

            "And at 7:30PM precisely," Sweet announces, still going over the schedule for the gala, "representative of the student body makes speech. Fabian, Fabian, that's you."

            Nina, Amber, and I (mostly Amber and I, since Nina's still distracted) successfully manage to get the rather shiny table open and set up as Fabian steps up to the microphone, index cards in his hands to rehearse his speech for tomorrow night. "Um, welcome everyone," he starts, but then the microphone emits a screeching feedback that causes me to throw my hands over my ears in an effort to block it out.