Crazy Dangerous by Andrew Klavan Page A

I’d seen a figure—a person—darting behind a tree. That sound I’d heard—it was the sound a branch makes when it’s lying on the ground and someone—or something—steps on it.
    My heart started beating hard. My eyes moved slowly over the trees.
    Someone was out there. Someone was in the woods.
    It was an eerie feeling, sitting there on my bike, alone on the road in the afternoon with nothing but trees on either side of me, knowing someone was there, hiding, watching me. I didn’t like it.
    My first thought was to start pedaling again and get out of there, get up to the barn. But I hesitated. I didn’t like the idea of running away either—especially when something I couldn’t see might be chasing after me. No, I thought it would be better to find out what was there.
    So I shouted, “Hello?”
    There was no answer. Silence from the woods. A big silence that seemed to fill up everything.
    I was about to call out again when a movement caught my eye. A head peeked out from behind a tree.
    I let out a sigh of relief. It was a girl. I recognized her right away. Her name was Jennifer Sales.
    You remember Mark Sales, the track star, right? The handsome one Zoe Miller was always talking to. Well, Jennifer Sales was Mark’s younger sister. His weird younger sister, to be more precise. Weird was definitely the best word to describe her.
    She was a hunched, shy, quiet girl, a small girl, small and thin. My age, sixteen. She had long, straight brown hair that framed a pale, serious face. She was actually kind of pretty in a shy, bookish way. But she always seemed to be off in her own world, living inside her own head. She kept to herself at school and moved along the hallway close to the walls as if she were someone’s shadow. When you did try to talk to her, a lot of times she’d say stuff that was . . . well, weird , like I say. Like she would rhyme words or string words together that didn’t make much sense. She did it as if it were a joke—she’d say it was a joke if anyone noticed it—and she’d laugh as if she thought it was really funny. But sometimes I got the feeling she couldn’t help doing it, that the words just came out of her before she could stop them.
    A few kids had made fun of her once or twice, calling her names or laughing at her. But Mark set them straight and it didn’t happen again. Mark was a good guy, but he was a big guy too, and you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. He loved his sister. He said she was just different, that’s all, like maybe she was a poet or something. Anyway, most of the kids in school were decent types and tried to be nice to her when they could. In the end, though, she just seemed to want to be left alone, and a lot of times she was.
    Jennifer stared out at me from around the tree with big eyes—as if she were afraid of me, as if I might be a monster or something. Now that I knew who it was, I didn’t want to annoy her or anything, but I was a little worried about her. I mean, what was she doing out in the middle of nowhere like this, out in the middle of the woods with no one else around? If it had been anyone else, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me, but this being Jennifer—I don’t know, I thought she might be lost or something.
    So I called out to her. “Hey, Jennifer. How’s it going?”
    The minute I said her name, she seemed to relax a little. She kind of edged out from behind the tree—although she still stood close to it as if she might need to duck back behind it at any second.
    She lifted her hand in a shy greeting. “Hey,” she said.
    “You all right?” I asked her.
    She nodded. “Sure.”
    I looked around me. There was no one else in sight. “Are you all alone up here?”
    She nodded. “I’m just walking. And talking,” she added—mostly, I think, because it rhymed.
    I didn’t have much else to say to her, and I thought of just saying good-bye and taking off again. But still, something about this just didn’t seem