Boys Against Girls

  For more than forty years,

  Yearling has been the leading name

  in classic and award-winning literature

  for young readers.

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  OTHER YEARLING BOOKS

  BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR

  YOU WILL ENJOY

  THE BOYS START THE WAR

  THE GIRLS GET EVEN

  THE GIRLS’ REVENGE

  A TRAITOR AMONG THE BOYS

  A SPY AMONG THE GIRLS

  THE BOYS RETURN

  THE GIRLS TAKE OVER

  BOYS IN CONTROL

  To the people at Loaders’ Bookstore

  in Buckhannon, West Virginia,

  which is almost, but not quite,

  where this story takes place

  Contents

  One: Abaguchie

  Two: call of the Wild

  Three: Bunny Slippers

  four: Kidnapped

  five: Search Party

  Six: Chiffon

  Seven: Confession

  Eight: Eddie's Thumb

  Nine: Toll Tile

  Ten: The Secret Staircase

  Eleven: Waiting for caroline

  Twelve: Trapped

  Thirteen: Alarm

  Fourteen: Escape

  Fifteen: Abaguchie?

  Sixteen: Playing Ball

  Seventeen: Letters

  Eighteen: Paw Prints

  Nineteen: Two Yellow Eyes

  Twenty: A little Talk with Willy

  Twenty-one: Bait

  Twenty-two: The Capture

  Twenty-three: The Gone

  Twenty-four: Cruising Down The River

  Twenty-five: Guest

  One

  Abaguchie

  Wally Hatford usually spent the day after Halloween counting his trick-or-treat candy, trading off Mars bars for Milky Ways, and opening all the little packets of candy corn. He'd pop a whole handful into his mouth at once, and follow that with a couple of chocolate kisses.

  But not this Halloween.

  Wally and his two older brothers, Jake and Josh, sat numbly in the living room, looking at the candy wrappers scattered about the floor after their party for the girls—the party the Malloy girls had tricked them into giving. Never mind that. the Hatford brothers had tried to trap them in the cemetery and would have dropped worms on their heads if they'd succeeded. The fact that the girls had found them out and beaten them at their own game was too humiliating for words.

  “You know what I wish?” said Jake after a while. “I just wish a big tornado would sweep through Buckman and blow them away. Not kill them, exactly—just deposit them back in Ohio where they belong.”

  “I wish there would be a big flood and they'd just wash away,” said Josh, his eleven-year-old twin.

  Seven-year-old Peter was eating a malted milk ball he'd found under the couch. He'd had no part in the trickery, so his conscience was clear. “What do you wish, Wally?” he asked.

  Wally wished, quite frankly, that his brothers would quit asking him questions, that's what. He always got dragged into things whether he wanted to be or not. And right now he did not want to be.

  He was tired of girls. Sick of girls. Bored to death with talking about them. Since the Hatfords’ best friends had moved to Georgia and rented out their house to the Malloys, it had been “the Malloy girls this” and “the Malloy girls that,” and if Jake and Josh hated them so much, why were they always talking about them, looking at them, laughing at them, and thinking about what they were going to do next? It was disgusting.

  “Well?” said Jake and Josh together, still waiting for his answer.

  Wally had to say something. He sighed. “I wish the abaguchie would carry them off,” he said finally.

  “That's it” cried Jake. “Wally, you're a genius¡ It's perfect!”

  Wally stretched his nine-year-old self out on the couch and stared up at the ceiling where the cracks in the plaster spread outward from around the light fixture. He wondered why it was you never saw a crack happening. Not once in his life had he been looking at a wall or ceiling and seen it crack. One morning he would be eating his Corn Chex and the wall would be fine. The next morning he would be eating his Corn Chex and there would be a thin hairline crack in the plaster.

  “How are you going to get the abaguchie to come and carry off Caroline and her sisters?” asked Peter, wide eyed.

  “All we're going to do is scare them a little’ said Josh.

  “Scare them a lot” said Jake, and he and Josh laughed.

  Actually, nobody knew if there was an abaguchie in Buckman at all, and if there was, just what kind of creature it was. For several years various people in Upshur County claimed to have seen a large animal, something like a cat, lurking around in the shadows, running along the edge of the woods, or even crawling about under somebody's window.

  Tracks were supposedly found in the dirt, howls were heard in the night—more like “squawls,” someone said—and sometimes a chicken or cat or a dog was found half eaten. Two different farmers even complained that one of their calves was missing. The newspaper would report these incidents, and everyone would talk about the abaguchie awhile. Then the people of Buckman would lose interest until it happened all over again.

  “So we tell the girls about the abaguchie. So what?” Wally said.

  “So they'll get scared. Real scared. And we'll just sort of help things along’ Jake told him. “Monday, in school, you tell Caroline.”

  Wally bolted straight up. “Oh, no¡ Don't get me messed up in this. If you want to scare the girls, you tell them.”

  “Wally, you've got to!” said Jake. “If we tell Eddie or Beth, they'll never believe us. Old Caroline will believe anything. You know that. And if we can make Caroline believe it, she'll tell her sisters.”

  It was going to be like this forever and ever, Wally knew. Unless the Bensons came back at the end of the year, the Malloys would probably stay in Buck-man, and Wally would have to listen to his brothers talk about them for the rest of his life. The Benson boys were the best friends the Hatfords had ever had. Why their father had decided to take a job in Georgia for a year, Wally could not understand. But they had rented their house to the Malloys and, what's worse, they seemed to be enjoying it down in Georgia.

  When he went to bed that night, Wally thought about how he did not want to have to get involved with the girls again.

  When he got up the next morning, he thought about how the last thing in the world he wanted to hear was anything at all about the Malloys.

  But when he saw the three girls coming across the swinging bridge toward College Avenue and Buck-man Elementary, he imagined how Caroline's eyes would grow big as cantaloupes when he told her about the abaguchie, and he found himself smiling.

  It was a cold November day, and only a few stubborn leaves clung to the tree limbs. It took a long while for the West Virginia sun to get up over the rim of the hills and warm the sidewalks, and then it was down again before you knew it, slipping and sliding behind the courthouse.

  The Buckman River shone silver in the early morning light where it looped around at the end of Island Avenue and came flowing back again. When you rode into Buckman for the first time, right out to the end of Island Avenue and over the bridge into the business district, you might not realize that the river on your right was the same as the river on your left, and before you knew it, you'd be passing City Hall
and the police department and the college campus.

  Wally hung up his jacket, clunked his lunch box on the shelf overhead, and slouched on into the classroom.

  Caroline Malloy was there, of course, in the desk right behind his, and she looked fatter. Yes, he was sure of it. Her cheeks were just a little bit puffier than they were before, and Wally was sure it was because his very own Milky Way bars and M&M's were in her stomach instead of his. All because the girls told Mom that the boys had invited them to a Halloween party, and Mom made him and Josh and Jake share all the candy they had collected. His stomach growled more out of anger than hunger.

  Maybe he would like Caroline to think that there was a creature called an abaguchie around. Maybe he would like to see her looking over her shoulder as she went back and forth to school. She wasn't even supposed to be in fourth grade at all, she was supposed to be in third. Just because she was supposed to be super smart—” precocious’ the grown-ups called it—didn't mean he had to like her. Wally began to think that precocious was just about the most awful thing you could possibly be, next to dead.

  Everyone was talking about Halloween—what they had done and where they had gone—and when Caroline finally settled down, Wally turned around and said, “You don't have any pets, do you?”

  “What?” said Caroline. Even her neck was fatter, Wally decided. She had probably spent the whole weekend eating Wally's candy.

  “Pets. Cats or dogs or rabbits or anything.-”

  “No. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Wally, and turned back around again.

  Caroline grabbed at his sweater and tugged. “Why?” she insisted.

  Wally half turned. “Because the abaguchie's been seen again.”

  “What?”

  Wally turned completely around this time. “Hasn't anyone told you about the abaguchie?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It's some kind of animal. Except no one knows what, so we just call it the abaguchie here in Buck-man. Every so often someone sees it around dark, and the newspaper has another story. They say it carries off pets and stuff.”

  Caroline's eyes got as dark as her hair, which she wore in a long ponytail. “You're just making that up.”

  Wally shrugged. “Don't believe me, then. I don't care. Ask anyone. You can even look it up in old newspapers.”

  He turned toward the front of the room again as Miss Applebaum rapped for attention. But as the homework papers were being collected later, Wally felt another tug on his sweater, and heard Caroline whisper, “Does it ever attack people?”

  “Hasn't yet,” he whispered over his shoulder. “But it's carried off some hundred-pound calves. You won't find many people sitting out on their steps alone after dark.” And when he faced forward again, Wally had to be very, very careful that a smile didn't take over his whole face.

  Two

  Call of the Wild

  The very first thing that entered Caroline Malloy's head when she heard about the abaguchie was what a marvelous movie it would make. That would be the title, of course: just Abaguchie.

  While the credits were rolling across the screen, the camera would be scanning a typical small-town neighborhood about dusk, zooming in on a young girl sitting on the steps of her house with a kitten in her lap, watching the sky grow dark, the fireflies come out, and the moon rise up in the sky.

  After a while she would feel chilly, so she'd put down her kitten and go inside to get a sweater, and when she came back, the kitten would be gone. Worse yet, on the steps where the kitten had been, there would be … Yes¡ A pool of blood. And a little tuft of white fur, along with the kitten's collar. And the girl's eyes would open wider and wider. She would grab her throat and stifle a scream, and then … in big letters filling up the whole screen, ABAGUCHIE, starring Caroline Lenore Malloy.

  “Caroline, what the heck?” asked her oldest sister, Eddie, as the girls walked home from school, and it was only then that Caroline realized she was walking down the sidewalk clutching her throat. Caroline's one ambition in life was to be an actress, and an actress, as everyone knows, always has an eye out for a good role.

  “How did I look just then?” Caroline asked eagerly. “Horrified? Frightened? Stunned? What?”

  “You looked like you were about to throw up,” said Beth, the middle daughter in the Malloy family.

  Caroline looked at her ten- and eleven-year-old sisters. “I was just thinking about what it would be like if I found a pool of blood and a little tuft of white fur where I'd left my kitten. If I had a kitten.”

  Eddie gave her a peculiar look, lifted the baseball cap she wore all the time on her head, and put it on again backward. “Sometimes I wonder about you, Caroline, I really do.”

  But Beth was more sympathetic. Beth always had her nose stuck in a book, Zombies on the Loose or The Smell of Midnight or something, so she understood things like pools of blood and tufts of fur.

  “What got you thinking about that?” Beth asked.

  “Wally Hatford asked me if we had pets. He said if we did, we'd better not leave them outside after dark, because the abaguchie had been seen again”

  “The what?” asked Eddie. Eddie's name was really Edith Ann, but she hated it, and preferred Eddie.

  “That's what he called it. He said nobody knows what kind of animal it is, so people around here call it the abaguchie. It comes out around dusk and several people have seen it. He said there had just been another sighting.”

  “Spookie!” breathed Beth.

  But Eddie scoffed. “That sounds exactly like something those Hatford goons would dream up¡ Caroline, can't you tell when somebody's pulling your leg?”

  “He said we could look it up in old newspapers, that there had been stories written about it.”

  “Oh,” said Eddie, and grew thoughtful.

  •

  At dinner that evening Caroline was thinking some more about the movie she was creating in her mind when she suddenly wondered what would play the part of the kitten. No one would want a real kitten to be snatched up by some creature and squeezed and clawed to death. Then she realized that a little kitten didn't have to die at all to leave a little blood and fur behind. All you needed was a close-up of a kitten sitting peacefully on the steps in the dark, and in the next shot you could have a pool of fake blood and a piece of fuzz off a wool blanket or something.

  She put a spoonful of strawberry jelly on her plate and stirred it around with a fork. Too light. She poured a little catsup in it and mixed some more. That looked somewhat more like blood, but perhaps if she—

  “Caroline, what on earth are you doing?” asked her father.

  “Making blood,” Caroline told him. “For my death-of-a-kitten scene.”

  “Your what?” came Mother's voice.

  So Caroline had to explain once again what Wally Hatford had told her about the abaguchie.

  “That sounds like absolute nonsense,” Mother said.

  “Well, I've heard the faculty mention it once or twice,” Father said. He was coaching the college football team this year, and wasn't quite sure whether he would stay on after the year was over or move the family back to Ohio. “I've heard different players on the team joke about it now and then too.”

  “Then that's the last time I'm going to go for firewood after dark,” Mother said.

  “Could be some bobcat or something, but from what the faculty members say, it's supposed to be bigger. Probably like the Loch Ness monster—the more you talk about it, the bigger it gets’ Father said.

  •

  There was a PTA meeting the following night, and both Mr. and Mrs. Malloy got ready to go.

  “Anything special you want us to ask your teachers?” Mother said, throwing on her jacket.

  “Could you ask when the next school play will be?” Caroline begged. “I'll just die if I have to wait until fifth grade to be in another play.”

  “Ask when I can try out for the Softball team,” Eddie told her father
. “They said March, but I see guys out there practicing all the time, and I want to be sure they don't hold tryouts without me.”

  “Ask why we can't have silent reading at our desks like we did back in Ohio,” Beth suggested. “I could finish a book in two days if we just had silent reading in school.”

  “We'll ask,” said Mother, and she and Father headed outside and down the bank toward the swinging bridge, to walk the few blocks to Buckman Elementary.

  Eddie and Beth spread their homework out on the dining-room table and began their assignments, while Caroline stretched out on the sofa with her geography book and tried to memorize the capitals of the states west of the Mississippi.

  The fire in the fireplace snapped and popped occasionally, and now and then there would be a clunk as another log fell, smoking and sizzling. She recited under her breath:

  “North Dakota, Bismarck,

  South Dakota, Pierre;

  Nebraska-ka, Lin-colon,

  Kansas, To-peak.”

  Suddenly she put down her geography book and listened.

  There was a soft distant sound of … well, she wasn't sure. A moan? Like something in pain, perhaps?

  She lifted her head from the cushion and looked at Beth and Eddie.

  Another moan, more like a howl this time. A moaning howl. A howling moan. Closer now. Was it anything they had ever heard before? She didn't think so.

  Beth and Eddie had heard it too.

  Caroline swung her legs over the side of the couch and sat up. They listened some more.

  Again the noise came. More like an animal, Caroline thought, but no animal she could name. It was growing louder all the time.

  All three girls ran to the dining-room window overlooking the Buckman River below, hands cupped over their eyes to search out the darkness, ears listening for the least little sound.

  “Owl-oooo¡ Owl-oooo!” came the noise again. Then a sort of yipping, yelping sound, followed by another “Owl-oooo!”

  Beth's voice was shaky. “Eddie, what is it?”

  “I don't know. It's not far away, whatever it is,” Eddie said.