Touch of Fear ▸ House of Anubis [2]

chapter thirty-five. house of fronts

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You're telling me you used the phrase just before you and your two idiot best friends set a wild goose loose in the hallway?! I missed that because you got annoyed with me?! Anubis laments his missing the goose incident. I'm quite glad he missed it, otherwise I'd be distracted with stupid remarks about how we're all idiots. Which we are.

Right now, we're idiots with Mr. Sweet trying to put the goose back in its cage. He slowly opens the door to his office, where the goose has been calming down. "Ready, Lewis, Clarke, Adams?"

Alfie and Jerome say together, "We were born ready, sir," while I reply, "'Ready' is my middle name, sir."

"Good chaps, and lady," Sweet adds with a glance to me. "Three, two, one."

Sweet and Alfie run into the office with the cage shouting unintelligible things. While those two are distracted trying to get the goose back in its cage, Jerome drops to the floor and starts looking for the gem. I, however, stay at the door directing curious students away by saying, "Nothing to see here, just three men trying to get a goose in a cage. Nothing you can't catch in a film or something." But that ends quickly when Jerome grabs my leg and pulls me down to the floor. "Dude!"

"Where is it?" he asks. "It was right there, wasn't it?"

"It can't have gone far," I reason, "unless it grew legs and walked away, which I doubt it did."

But he's right. It was right here where we are right now, and now it's not. Maybe the goose knocked it underneath the desk or something, but I don't see any kind of gem on the floor. I don't think we knocked it when we came in. The only living thing in here this whole time was the goo—oh, no.

Jerome pulls me up from the floor as Alfie and Sweet finally get the culprit itself into the cage. "Well, that wasn't too hard in the end, was it?" Sweet says, following it up with something in Latin. "Excellent teamwork, Alfie. Well, let's get this place tidied up."

"And we will leave you to that, sir," Jerome says.

"Oh, you will, will you? I think you'll find that you three will be on clearing up duty after you've returned our little visitor."

The second all three of us are out of the office, I tell them loudly, "I hate you both so much."

—

"It can't be."

"It must be."

"Again, I hate you both so much."

The goose sits content on some newspaper on Jerome's bed while the three of us stare at it, debating whether or not the goose actually swallowed the gem. I can't believe I'm involved in this right now. I can't believe I'm sitting here staring at a goose that looks as calm as a goose can be in Anubis House.