Here Lies Linc Read Free Page B

chatting during the bus ride. I was too nervous thinking about what was in store for me during the next hour. But a kid named Cliff from the robot fighting club had slid into the seat next to me when we got on the bus, and he kept trying to start up conversations. Cliff had the palest skin and the brightest orange hair I had ever seen—exactly the same color as sweet potatoes. I had met him on the first day of school when I couldn’t figure out where to sit at lunch and ended up at his table with the rest of the BattleBots. “So how’s cross-country going?” Cliff asked me.
    “Oh. I didn’t make it,” I told him.
    “I thought everybody made cross-country.”
    I shrugged. “Not me.” Actually, I hadn’t stayed past the first ten minutes of tryouts. Once I saw all the guys in their cool running gear and heard how far we were supposed to go that day, I chickened out and slipped around the corner of the gym when no one was looking. How was I supposed torun two miles in my blown-out sneakers and baggy shorts when I’d hardly ever jogged around my block before?
    Cliff’s pale face brightened. “So now you can come to BattleBots. Since you’re not doing cross-country, I mean.”
    “Yeah, maybe.” I hesitated. “I’ll have to see. I have a job walking my neighbor’s dog in the afternoons.…”
    “We meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” Cliff added quietly. I felt bad. Cliff was nice and all, but the BattleBots reminded me an awful lot of the Ho-Hos. They spent their whole lunchtime arguing about stuff like whether they should build their robot with a overhead pickax or kinetic spike weapon, or whether their bot should be called the Vladiator or Dr. DeathBlow. The thought of spending four more hours a week in the midst of all that geeky bickering just made me feel tired.
    My ears pricked up. I could hear Sylvie Rothaker in the seat ahead of me babbling on about Professor Landers. “I hope Professor Landers tells us more about the Curse of the Black Angel,” she was saying to her friend Rosa. “People say the statue used to be white, but the marble turned black because the man who’s buried there was so evil.”
    I saw Rosa’s dark eyes widen as she swiveled sideways to listen to Sylvie. “What did he do, this man?”
    “My uncle told me that he was a preacher who murdered his son,” Sylvie said. “He got away with it in court, but a lot of bad things happened to him after that. We’ll have to ask the professor.”
    I slumped down further in my seat. Everybody was fascinated with the Black Angel—a creepy monument that toweredover one of the graves in the middle of Oakland Cemetery. Everybody except my mother, that is. Whenever anyone even mentioned the subject, Lottie would shake her head in disgust. She thought the kind of superstitious legends that swirled around the Angel were ridiculous, and anyone silly enough to believe them, she’d say, must not be very smart.
    “We’re here,” Cliff murmured. I sat up and took a shaky breath as we rattled between the brick pillars at the entrance gates to Oakland, past the tall trees and waves of headstones spread out on either side. My palms felt slick.
    “Vel-come, children,” someone crooned from the back of the bus. “Mua-ha-ha-HA-HA!” It was a terrible Dracula impersonation, but a bunch of kids thought it was hilarious and started chipping in with their own scary sound effects. A werewolf howl. Ghost noises. More shrieks and moans.
    “Quiet down, people!” Mr. Oliver bellowed from up front as the bus rumbled to a stop. “Has everybody got what they need for taking notes?”
    “Yep!” Sylvie called back. She waved her hot-pink binder in the air.
    I pressed my face to the window, searching the small parking area for Lottie. There was no sign of her. A last flicker of hope sprang up inside me. Maybe her flight had been delayed. Even if her plane was only an hour late, she wouldn’t make it back to town in time to give us a tour. I rubbed my damp