The Fear Zone 2 Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  April

  Kyle

  Deshaun

  Andres

  Caroline

  Kyle

  Deshaun

  April

  Andres

  Deshaun

  Kyle

  Caroline

  Andres

  Deshaun

  Caroline

  April

  Kyle

  Andres

  Caroline

  Deshaun

  Kyle

  Andres

  April

  Kyle

  Deshaun

  April

  Andres

  Caroline

  Kyle

  April

  Andres

  Kyle

  Deshaun

  Caroline

  Andres

  April

  Kyle

  Andres

  Caroline

  April

  Andres

  Kyle

  April

  Caroline

  Deshaun

  Kyle

  Deshaun

  April

  Andres

  Caroline

  Kyle

  April

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Teaser

  Copyright

  We thought the nightmare was over.

  Andres and Deshaun and Kyle and Caroline and me—two years ago, we faced our fears. We vanquished them. No more nightmares of snakes or sharks or being buried alive. No more ghosts haunting the hallways.

  No more vengeful clowns.

  For two years, we started to believe we could move on and leave all the scary stuff behind us. We let ourselves believe we were victorious.

  We were wrong.

  Now we’re starting to learn the truth:

  You can face your fears. You can overcome them. But then you grow older. You change.

  And your fears grow and change too.

  We should never have let ourselves believe we were safe.

  “Were we ever that tiny?” Andres asks as we pass by the elementary school.

  I look over to the kids playing on the playground. Swinging and playing tag and laughing in the cool autumn afternoon. I watch as one of the girls jumps into an enormous pile of leaves, giggling as they cascade around her.

  I suppress a shudder—the sound of rustling leaves sounds way too much like hissing for my liking.

  “No,” I say. “I’m pretty certain we skipped that age and became, like, old people overnight.”

  Andres’s grin slips.

  Neither of us mentions what happened two years ago. Neither of us says why we had to grow up so fast. We don’t have to. The memory is burned into both of us like scars.

  “Why are we meeting them here, anyway?” I ask. “Isn’t it a little strange that we’re hanging out at the middle school?”

  Andres shrugs and sits down on a bench, watching the kids play. “April said she wanted us to meet here,” he says.

  I sit down next to him, our shoulders almost brushing. I feel like I should say something.

  I’d been joking about growing up overnight, but as we sit there, staring at the kids who don’t seem to have a care in the world, it’s clear the words couldn’t have been more accurate, or more cutting. It’s like we’re a different species. Not just older, but more … I don’t know, aware. We know that there are true evils out there. We know there are monsters that go bump in the night. To these kids, it’s all just make-believe. To us, it’s deadly real.

  A wind rustles through the trees, scattering leaves across our feet. Hissing.

  Lately, all I hear is hissing.

  “Don’t you two look cheerful,” someone calls out.

  I jolt and look behind me to see Deshaun, April, and Caroline walking our way. Deshaun and April are holding hands, and Caroline is leaping through the small piles of leaves lining the sidewalk.

  April waves when we make eye contact, and Andres jumps off the bench to go give her a hug. I slide off and walk over, bumping fists with Deshaun and embracing the girls.

  “Good to see you guys,” April says. Even though we’re all in the same high school now, we don’t get to see each other very much during the school day. April and Caroline and Andres are sophomores, while Deshaun and I are juniors. With everyone in different school activities, well, it’s hard to actually find time to meet as a group. I always see Andres because we’re dating and Deshaun because we’re still best friends and I live with his family now. But I don’t see the girls as much.

  “Yeah,” I say. Another breeze blows past.

  Hisses past.

  I burrow deeper into my coat and try not to look bothered. It’s just the wind, Kyle. Just the stupid wind.

  “What did you want to meet us here for?” I ask. “Couldn’t we have met somewhere a little warmer? I don’t know about you, but I could use some hot chocolate.”

  April rolls her eyes, but her expression goes serious immediately. She steps a little closer and lowers her voice.

  “I just thought …” She takes a deep breath and looks around, as if trying to catch someone listening in. But the kids are all playing and completely ignoring the group of high schoolers huddled at the edge of the playground. “I thought it made sense for us to meet here. Because tomorrow is Halloween, and … tomorrow marks the day we all got the notes.”

  Chills slither down my spine at the thought. She’s talking about the notes that dragged us to the graveyard. The notes that led us to unleash the clown and all its terrible nightmares.

  I swear the air between us drops twenty degrees.

  “C’mon, April,” Andres says. “Why’d you have to bring that up?”

  “Because it’s important for us to remember.” She glances around the group, but it’s clear from everyone’s expressions that we do remember. And we wish we could forget.

  April goes on. “We’ve all been so busy—I haven’t seen all of you guys for weeks. And, I don’t know, I thought we should get together. To sort of prove to ourselves what we did.”

  “We don’t need to prove anything,” Andres says. “It’s over. Behind us. We need to move on. You need to move on.”

  I don’t say anything. Because even though I agree, I also know that as April’s best friend, Andres is able to say what the rest of us probably shouldn’t. I can tell from her expression that she isn’t letting this go. Deshaun squeezes her hand.

  “I don’t want to remember the bad stuff either,” she continues. “That’s not the point. I wanted us to celebrate coming together. I wanted to celebrate our friendship, because that’s what defeated the evil in the first place.”

  Another breeze rustles around us, tumbling leaves over my sneakers. The noise almost drowns out April’s words.

  “I was thinking we could go to the carnival tomorrow,” April says. “It’s their opening night, and they’re doing free entry for kids in costume. It would be a lot of fun.”

  I look over to a group of kids huddled on the other side of the playground, just like us. It looks like they’re passing homework or something around between them. One of the kids looks over—he has bright red hair and freckles, and when he sees me looking at him, he quickly looks away.

  “That sounds great,” Deshaun says. “Saves Kyle and me from candy duty.”

  “Then it’s settled,” April says. “Cancel your Thursday plans: Tomorrow night we go to the carnival.”

  “And I was talking to my dad,” Caroline chips in. “I was thinking we could do a sleepover Friday night. Maybe watch some scary movies and eat leftover candy?”

  We all voice our agreement. I don’t think we’ve ever
been to Caroline’s house. Normally when we do sleepovers or game nights, it’s at my place or April’s. Not that those have happened much lately; we’ve all gotten so busy.

  “I guess I should ask,” Deshaun says timidly. “No one got any notes today, right?”

  To our collective relief, everyone shakes their head.

  “Good,” he says. “It’s still over.”

  Another gust. Another hiss. Another leaf sliding across my ankles.

  I look down as my friends discuss the details

  and see a snake slithering over my shoes.

  I yelp and jump back.

  But the snake isn’t there. It was never there.

  “Are you okay?” Andres asks. He takes my hand and gives it a squeeze. I can’t return the gesture. My heart hammers too loudly in my ears. My hands feel numb.

  “Yeah,” I lie. “I’m fine.”

  “Dude, you’re not fine,” I say.

  We’re sprawled out in my bedroom, Kyle on the floor and me on the bed. Even though he has his own room, he pretty much only uses it for sleeping. Otherwise, he hangs out in here with me. Just like old times.

  Kyle pauses the game he was playing and looks up at me. I set down my homework and return the stare.

  “What?” he asks.

  “Earlier, on the playground. You looked like you saw a ghost.”

  “Snake,” he corrects me before swallowing and looking away. “I thought I saw a snake.”

  That makes me pause. I shuffle closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t brush it off. I don’t really know what to say.

  Of all of us, Kyle still seems the most haunted. Maybe because his fears were rooted in reality; they had manifested long before we were given the creepy notes that dragged us into the graveyard. Even though we’ve been best friends since elementary school, he still won’t really tell me what happened in the years before he moved in with us. I know enough. I know his dad was horrible to him, keeping snakes in the basement and threatening Kyle with them daily. I know that for Kyle the appearance of the clown hadn’t been as scary as the real nightmare waiting for him at home.

  I know because even though the clown is gone and our fears are no longer following us around, even though Kyle now lives with me, he still has nightmares. He still wakes up yelling out in fear. We share a wall. I’ve heard it more nights than I can count.

  We defeated the clown. We faced our fears. We got Kyle out of his house. But for Kyle, the nightmare never really ended. It got buried deeper … but it’s still there.

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  He doesn’t look at me when he nods.

  Even though I want to convince myself that everything is behind us, I’m not like Caroline or Andres or April. I’m not willing to believe it’s all over. It doesn’t feel safe.

  I haven’t told anyone—not even Kyle—but every day, I expect the nightmare to start again. Every day, I wake up believing that the last two years were just a dream, and that reality is just waiting to smack us in the face. Every day I flinch at shadows or gusts of wind. I double-check to make sure that nothing in my room is out of place. I ensure the precautions I set up around my room are still intact: bowls of sea salt by the windows and doors. Quartz crystals under the mattress. Lit candles and incense to keep away bad energy. I’ve even hidden some charms in Kyle’s room, just in case. Not that I expect them to work—they didn’t before—but I have to at least try to do what I can.

  It feels like all those preparations are about to be put to the test.

  My chest constricts as we sit there, silent.

  Maybe it was your imagination, I want to tell him. Maybe it was a twig. Maybe it was just a normal snake.

  But I don’t say anything. Because I believe Kyle saw what he saw.

  “Do you think it’s coming back?” I ask. The words come out before I can stop them, the one question I don’t want an answer for.

  “I don’t know,” he says after a long pause. He sighs. “Maybe it was just my imagination. I didn’t sleep much last night. Was cramming for the history exam.”

  I know it’s a lie—his voice is too light, and he wouldn’t have brought it up if he thought there was a chance he’d been imagining it. But I don’t push it.

  “You’re not going back there,” I say. I squeeze his shoulder, and he finally reaches up and puts his hand on top of mine. His fingers shake. “I promise you, okay? You’re my brother now. You’re safe.”

  He looks back at me and smiles.

  “Thanks,” he says. “For everything.”

  I smile back, and then, because I don’t know what else I could say, I go back to my homework. He goes back to his game. I can’t focus, and not because of the explosions and music on the screen.

  If Kyle truly saw a snake—one that definitely wasn’t just a normal snake—then it means that none of us are safe.

  I consider texting April, partly because she’s my girlfriend and I tell her everything, and partly because I want to warn her. I stop myself, though.

  There’s no use worrying her; she already has enough on her mind. This time last year, I spent the entire week before and after Halloween at her place, trying to distract her from the panic attack she was always at risk of falling into. I don’t think she’d been truly convinced that the clown wasn’t returning until we finally made it to Thanksgiving. Even then, she made me accompany her to the graveyard where it all began, just to ensure that the tombstone we’d been led to—the tombstone that had eventually opened into a tunnel leading to the clown’s lair—was still missing. A memory. Just like the nightmares from the year before.

  Besides, of all our fears, Kyle’s was the easiest to mistake for reality. It could have been a real snake. It could have also been Kyle’s tired imagination.

  The clown isn’t coming back.

  It can’t be.

  I wake up covered in sweat, panting, and it takes a long time for the dreams—the nightmares—to settle. Dreams of being stranded in the middle of the ocean. Nightmares of shark fins circling me, closing in …

  “Eww!” says Marco from the doorway. He’s dressed up as a giant pickle. “Why are your sheets all wet? Did you pee the bed?”

  “Get out!” I yell, throwing a pillow at him. My younger brother runs away, giggling, clearly already hopped up on stolen candy.

  I roll over, but he’s right—my sheets are drenched from sweat. Gross. I haven’t had a nightmare that bad since … well, since the clown made all of our nightmares reality. Two years ago, when we went to the graveyard at midnight on Halloween, we found a tombstone that told us to dig. Not our wisest decision, but we did it. We didn’t find anything apart from an empty box, but what we released was beyond our worst nightmares.

  A monster that showed us what we feared the most.

  For me, it was sharks. For Deshaun, it was ghosts. Kyle was haunted by snakes and Caroline by being buried alive. And April … she got the worst of it. She was terrorized by the blue-eyed, sharp-toothed clown. It followed her everywhere, tormenting her, a monster even the rest of us could see on occasion. It had nearly dragged us all to the graveyard to feed on our fears for eternity.

  Except we managed to band together. We followed it to its lair and faced our fears and locked it away in a casket for good. Since then, life had returned to normal.

  So why, as I lie here, can’t I get my heart to stop racing? Why does it feel like those horrible days when everything was a waking nightmare? It’s stupid, but I honestly expect to see a shark fin gliding by my bed.

  My mom knocks on the door.

  “Andres?” she asks. “You’re going to be late for school. Breakfast is getting cold.”

  My two other brothers, Lucas and Hector, run past, throwing candy bars at each other. Mom watches them and sighs in exasperation. “Are you doing anything tonight?” she asks.

  “Going to the carnival,” I say. “April and the rest are getting together.”

  My brothers run past once more, all three of
them this time, and Hector throws a candy bar at my face. Now that my oldest brother is in college, I get to deal with my younger brothers’ antics. Meaning, I’m their new target.

  “Boys!” Mom yells as they thunder down the steps. “Sure I can’t convince you to take them?” she asks. “You wouldn’t even have to return them. Honest.”

  “Not for all the candy in the world,” I reply. The last thing I need is to babysit my brothers on the one night all my friends are able to hang out. Especially in a crowded amusement park filled with flashy lights and candy—my brothers would be gone in a minute. “Besides, I can’t let you miss out on another amazing trick-or-treat adventure.”

  Mom groans. Last year, Hector hid a dozen eggs under his vampire cape—the cape he borrowed from me, I might add—and egged his friend’s house while Marco and Lucas distracted my parents. They were grounded for a week. Miraculously, they managed to keep all their candy.

  “Can’t say I didn’t try,” Mom says, exasperated. Then she turns, spots my brothers doing something else they aren’t supposed to be doing, and yells at them to stop or else she’ll ban sugar in the house.

  I peel myself out of bed and head to the shower. Even though I’m running late, there’s no way I’m going to school like this. I smell horrible.

  I turn on the shower and watch the water swirl and collect in the bottom of the tub, once more feeling myself transported back to the nightmares, back to the horrible events of two years ago. Being lost at sea. Swimming as hard as I could from a shark. A shark that appeared in this very tub …

  I shake my head.

  “That was years ago,” I tell myself as I step under the spray. “It’s over. It’s all over.”

  The school day passes in a blur. It’s clear even our teachers aren’t focusing or trying to get us to learn. We end up watching the original Frankenstein in English class, and in history we’re tasked with researching our favorite scary myths and where they’re from, which is actually a lot of fun.

  I sit with April and Caroline at lunch. The cafeteria is also attempting to be festive—there are plastic cauldrons of pumpkin-shaped cakes and candy on each of the tables, though the main food is as gross as ever. Lasagna. At least they didn’t try stuffing it with candy corn.