Miraculous: Tales of the Unknown Read Free

balancing on one of the deck rails.
“Jerk.”
    He pulled me toward him
and tried to kiss me but I turned my face away. “Aw come on Shaina,
you know you love me.”
    I started laughing despite
myself, “I love that you brought pizza, that’s about
it.”
    He moved forward for a
quick kiss and then we hurried inside when I started shivering. “So
where are the kids?”
    He hopped up onto the
counter while I pulled plates out of the cabinets and started
filling them with pizza. “Malcolm and Priscilla were watching TV
and Tessa was in her room.” Without even asking me first, he opened
the kitchen door and screamed for them to come and eat. “Why did
you do that?” I hissed. “You aren’t supposed to be
here.”
    He smiled, “kids love me.
They won’t say anything.”
    I rolled my eyes. Yeah
right, I thought.
    A few seconds later, three
kids slammed through the kitchen door. “Who is that?” Priscilla
asked. “He’s cute,” Tessa whispered. “You aren’t supposed to have
boys over,” Malcolm told me.
    “Told you,” I said to
Ben.
    He held out a plate of
pizza to Malcolm, “come on bro, I brought you some
pizza.”
    Malcolm took the pizza
from him, but gave him a dirty look, “you aren’t supposed to be
here though.”
    A few minutes later and
the kitchen was destroyed. Priscilla thought it would be funny to
throw her pizza at her brother who then threw his back at her. The
end result was one crying child, one laughing child, and walls
covered with red pasta sauce and strings of mozzarella cheese. I
looked at the clock. It was almost nine. I
can do this… I can do this… I can do this… I can do anything for
four hours.
    After screaming at the
kids to get out of the kitchen, I sunk into a chair and rested my
head on my hands while my eyes surveyed the damage. I had only been
there for two hours and I had cleaned more here than I usually had
to all month at my own house.
    “Wow, you weren’t kidding,
those kids are awful.”
    I sighed, “I know. I feel
so bad for their parents. My mom gave me some information about a
company that works with bad children, but I almost feel guilty
telling their parents about it. I don’t want to offend
them.”
    “That’s weird. What’s the
name of the company?”
    I pulled out my cell phone
and looked at the text again, “Changed.”
    There was a computer
sitting on the counter and he walked over to it. “Let’s Google
it.”
    He typed, Changed located
in Denver Colorado into the search bar and we waited while it
loaded the results. There were about twenty different
possibilities, but after reading the summary description of each
one on the search page, we decided to try one about halfway down
the second page.
    “Wow, this is awesome!” He
exclaimed when the pictures came up, “they all look like wax copies
of themselves.”
    There were a series of
before and after photos on the main page. In each one of the before
photos, there was a messy and emotional child, and all of the after
ones showed a well behaved, well dressed, smiling version of
themselves. It was actually almost creepy.
    “Look there’s a place to
put your information so that someone will contact you. Why don’t we
fill this out for the Anderson’s? That way they won’t know that it
was you who referred them to the company.”
    An uncomfortable tingling
sensation had begun to buzz in my head, but I pushed the feeling
aside and took control of the keyboard. Almost as if my hands were
more excited than the rest of me, they began flying over the keys
and filling in the information. When I was done, I almost felt
guilty, but then I looked around the kitchen and that guilt just
dissolved right out of me. Then the doorbell rang.
    Ben and I both looked at
each other and then the computer screen. He started laughing first.
“That’s weird.”
    I rolled my eyes. “I’ll be
right back.”
    Despite the fact that
there was no possible way that it could be the Changed people at
the door, I