Zero to Hero Read Free

around with lightning speed,half expecting to catch his jersey moving by itself. But it just hung there, smelling like orange juice, presenting no danger to anyone.
    Billy was relieved, because he was not a guy who loved danger. At the top of his list of least favorite things were scary movies, bumpy airplane rides, bungee jumping, roller coasters, creepy or sad clowns, and anything that popped up at him. As a matter of fact, when he was five and a half, he’d smashed his jack-in-the-box to bits with his slipper.
    He spent the rest of the afternoon putting his clothes away and organizing his room. By the time he finished, ate some pizza, and crawled into bed that night, he was exhausted. But even though he was bone tired, he just couldn’t drift off. He missed his old room in his old house. And he worried about starting a new school on Monday and having to make all new friends.
    Billy rolled to his side and stared at the closet door, focusing on the brass doorknob. He had read once that if you stared at something for a really long time and didn’t even let yourself blink, it calmed you down enough so that youeventually fell asleep without knowing it. He must have stared at that doorknob for seven minutes, but nothing happened. It just hung there on the edge of the door, being all knobby. He was about to give up when suddenly he saw something that made his stomach flip and his blood run cold.
    The knob was turning all by itself! Billy closed his eyes, counted to three, then opened them and focused back on the knob. The knob turned again, as if someone inside the closet was trying to get out.
    He tried to call out, “Who’s there?” but his vocal cords snapped shut. Nothing came out but a sorry-sounding rasp.
    The knob continued to turn. Billy thought he heard the click of the closet door opening.
    The next thing Billy heard was the scraping of wood against wood, followed by a long, low creak. Then, with a sudden jerk, the door flew open. Billy pulled the covers over his head, hoping that whoever was in the closet wouldn’t see him. Even hidden under the covers, his whole body shook uncontrollably. There wasnothing he could do to stop every muscle from twitching.
    After a minute, Billy’s curiosity got the better of his fear and he peeked out from underneath the covers, exposing only a tiny bit of his left eye. That little piece of eye was enough for him to see the scariest sight he’d ever beheld. The arm of his red and white baseball jersey was reaching out of the closet door,
but there was no hand at the end of the sleeve.
    Billy finally found his voice and shrieked like a five-year-old.
    From inside the closet, he heard an urgent teenage voice say, “Shhhh … Do you want to wake the whole house?”
    “Yes, I do,” Billy rasped. “I absolutely do.”
    “Trust me, that is something you don’t want to do,” said the voice.
    “I’m going to scream. I can feel it coming up from my toes.”
    “Calm down, Georgie Boy. You sound like my cousin Annabel when she got bit by the horse that was pulling the ice wagon.”
    Billy’s head was swimming. Was this adream or was he actually having a conversation with a sleeve?
    “First of all,” he ventured, “I don’t understand anything you’re saying about your cousin what’s-her-name and that horse. And second of all, my name is Billy. And third of all,
where
is your hand?”
    Suddenly, without warning, Billy’s entire baseball jersey flew out of the closet and floated across the room, the red and white sleeves fluttering in the darkness. The jersey came to a stop in front of the mirror on the back of his door. Billy became aware of a strange whirring next to his bed. He whipped around and saw that the numbers on his digital alarm clock were going haywire, spinning like crazy, racing forward and backward like some unknown force was controlling them.
    Impulsively, Billy grabbed the clock and threw it at the jersey, which was still twisting itself this way and that,