Ninth Key by Meg Cabot Page B

He was so hot to drive, he’d have picked me up from Albuquerque if I’d called him from there. I didn’t think he’d mind too much if I called him from Thaddeus Beaumont’s mansion on Seventeen Mile Drive.
    Sleepy still looked uncertain. “I don’t know….” he said, slowly.
    I could tell he thought I was headed for a gang meeting, or something. Sleepy has never seemed all that thrilled about me, especially after our parents’ wedding when he caught me smoking outside the reception hall. Which is so totally unfair since I’ve never touched a cigarette since.
    But I guess the fact that he’d recently been forced to rescue me in the middle of the night when this ghost made a building collapse on me didn’t exactly help form any warm bond of trust between us. Especially since I couldn’t tell him the ghost part. I think he believes I’m just the type of girl buildings fall on top of all the time.
    No wonder he doesn’t want me in his car.
    “Come on,” I said, opening up my camel-colored calf-length coat. “How much trouble could I get up to in this outfit?”
    Sleepy looked me over. Even he had to admit I was the epitome of innocence in my white cable-knit sweater, red plaid skirt, and penny loafers. I had even put on this gold cross necklace I had been awarded as a prize for winning an essay contest on the War of 1812 in Mr. Walden’s class. I figured this was the kind of outfit an old guy like Mr. Beaumont would appreciate: you know, the sassy schoolgirl thing.
    “Besides,” I said. “It’s for school.”
    “All right,” Sleepy said at last, looking like he really wished he were someplace else. “Get in the car.”
    I hightailed it out to the Rambler before he had a chance to change his mind.
    Sleepy got in a minute later, looking drowsy, as usual. His job, for a pizza stint, seemed awfully demanding. Either that or he just put in a lot of extra shifts. You would think by now he’d have saved enough for that Camaro. I mentioned that as we pulled out of the driveway.
    “Yeah,” Sleepy said. “But I want to really cherry her out, you know? Alpine stereo, Bose speakers. The works.”
    I have this thing about boys who refer to their cars as “she,” but I didn’t figure it would pay to alienate my ride. Instead, I said, “Wow. Neat.”
    We live in the hills of Carmel, overlooking the valley and the bay. It’s a beautiful place, but since it was dark out all I could see were the insides of the houses we were driving by. People in California have these really big windows to let in all the sun, and at nighttime, when their lights are on, you can see practically everything they’re doing, just like in Brooklyn, where nobody ever pulled down their blinds. It’s kind of homey, actually.
    “What class is this for, anyway?” Sleepy asked, making me jump. He so rarely spoke, especially when he was doing something he liked, like eating or driving, that I had sort of forgotten he was there.
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “This paper you’re doing.” He took his eyes off the road a second and looked at me. “You did say this was for school, didn’t you?”
    “Oh,” I said. “Sure. Uh-huh. It’s, um, a story I’m doing for the school paper. My friend CeeCee, she’s the editor. She assigned it to me.”
    Oh my God, I am such a liar. And I can’t leave at just one lie, either. Oh, no. I have to pile it on. I am sick, I tell you. Sick.
    “CeeCee,” Sleepy said. “That’s that albino chick you hang out with at lunch, right?”
    CeeCee would have had an embolism if she’d heard anyone refer to her as a chick, but since, technically, the rest of his sentence was correct, I said, “Uh-huh.”
    Sleepy grunted and didn’t say anything else for a while. We drove in silence, the big houses with their light-filled windows flashing by. Seventeen Mile Drive is this stretch of highway that’s supposed to be like the most beautiful road in the world, or something. The famous Pebble Beach Golf