How to Curse in Hieroglyphics Read Free Page A

lightly in the air and caught it again, her stare back at Artie never wavering.
    â€œTell me, Tweed,” she said. “When, exactly, are we scheduled for mummy week?”

2
    STRANGE INVADERS
    T he old blue pickup rumbled away from the gas pumps, kicking up a cloud of dust as Pops turned onto Rural Route #1, which would take them back home to the drive-in.
    Crouched in the truck bed as they rumbled down the road, the girls kept an eye on the store-bought provisions, making sure nothing blew away on the hot, dry wind, and pored over their appointment book, making plans for the coming week. Besides monster hunting, the girls could mostly be found engaged in marketing schemes for their primary business endeavour: babysitting.
    It was a competitive field; there were only so many tots available to sit in Wiggins and many a sitter to choose from. Cindy Tyson, for one. Hazel Polizzi, foranother. Rivals in the babysitting trade, Cindy and Hazel had already turned thirteen.
    And, apparently, “thirteen” was some kind of magic number. As soon as the twins’ sitter competition hit that mystical age, their number of gigs skyrocketed. Even though everyone in Wiggins (silently) acknowledged the (vast) superiority of the twins’ sitting abilities over those of their (slightly) older competitors, all of a sudden, Cheryl and Tweed’s regular sitting gigs had started to dry up. It had to be the age-bias thing. The girls could think of no other reason.
    Nevertheless, they remained undaunted. Just that week past, Cheryl and Tweed had made a trip into town on their bikes and gone to Wiggins’s only copy shop, where they had printed up glossy, four-colour mailbox flyers detailing their supersitter services. They had also had business cards done up that read:
    Cheryl & Tweed’s
    Expertitious Child-minding Services
    (and Auto-vehicular Detailing)
    While - O - Wait
    It was supposed to read “While- U -Wait.” Neither of the girls knew how the typo had crept in there, but it hadkind of grown on them and become a slogan of sorts. They thought about making up another series of cards for their sideline business: imaginary monster mashing. Maybe with a variety of appropriate catch-phrases:
    Vampires Staked! While-O-Wait!
    Sea Hags De-hagged! While-O-Wait!
    Bye-bye Bigfoots! While-O-Wait! (The girls had debated at length whether it should read Bigfoot s or Big feet . They’d decided to go with the former.)
    And so on.
    Babysitting, car repair, monster busting—Cheryl and Tweed could multi-task with the best of them. The babysitting was self-taught. Car repair they’d learned from their grandfather, Pops, and the movies had taught them monster busting. Some of the townsfolk might have thought the girls were weird but, well, in a place like Wiggins Cross, where everything was so excruciatingly, unrelentingly, overwhelmingly ordinary , “weird” seemed to be the only thing that felt normal.

    â€œWeird …” Tweed muttered suddenly as the pickup rolled to a stop at one of Wiggins’s only stop signs.
    â€œWhat’s weird?” Cheryl asked, poring over the appointment pages in the calendar diary, which were chock full of monster-hunting engagements but, sadly, mostly empty of sitter bookings.

    â€œThere seems to be a dust cloud following us.” Tweed pointed down the road behind them.
    Cheryl glanced up and, sure enough, a yellowish haze billowed up over the horizon, where the road crested a low hill. The girls had ample time to wonder what was coming as Pops looked left and right to make sure there was no oncoming traffic, even though the flat country road stretching out on both sides to the horizon was clearly deserted. Pops was a cautious driver.
    The traffic stop was long enough to allow the dust cloud—and the cause of the dust cloud—to catch up with the old blue pickup. Suddenly, a row of mailboxes bolted to a wooden rail at the side of the road started to