Ghoulfriends Just Want to Have Fun

  “Headmistress Bloodgood, you’re wetter than Miss Sue Nami,” Robecca commented.

  “This weather is simply ghastly. I went outside to check on one of the trolls who has taken to sleeping in a tree. He’s in the midst of an identity crisis—I’m quite certain he thinks he’s a squirrel. Normally I would just let him be, but with everything that’s happening, we need all trolls on deck,” Headmistress Bloodgood prattled on as she rung out her waterlogged outfit. “And this rain is just plain dreadful. Not to mention that I was nearly hit by lightning again.”

  “That would have been terrible. Your Muddled-Mind Syndrome would have returned with a vengeance,” Rochelle speculated aloud.

  “Oh, forget that. It’s more that I wouldn’t be able to say that lightning doesn’t strike twice anymore,” Headmistress Bloodgood explained, and then shook her head at Rochelle as though it were the most obvious of answers.

  “Headmistress, do you not recall that I explained this to you. Lightning—” Rochelle started, before being interrupted by Venus.

  “Ro, I got this. Headmistress, on behalf of the entire student body, please do not go outside again until this storm passes once and for all.”

  “Very well, ghouls,” Headmistress Bloodgood said as she touched her neck. “Oh dear, I think I have a leak; detachable heads are never really waterproof.”

  “Headmistress, I’m sure you’ve read the rumors about us,” Venus interjected solemnly. “And, well—”

  “Stop right there. Neither Miss Sue Nami nor I believe the gossip. You must understand, the students are scared. Actually, I am scared as well. We still haven’t a clue who is behind all this.”

  “Didn’t Miss Sue Nami speak to you about Miss Flapper?” Rochelle inquired.

  “Oh, enough about Miss Flapper! I am an excellent judge of character, so you can trust me when I say that none of this has anything to do with that dragon. Honestly, I think Miss Sue Nami simply doesn’t like Miss Flapper because she was popular in high school and Sue was not….”

  Then without so much as a good-bye, Headmistress Bloodgood wandered off, having completely forgotten that she was in the middle of a conversation.

  “We need to get to the bottom of this, especially since it doesn’t appear that Headmistress Bloodgood is looking in the right places,” Venus said as her vines bristled.

  “Should we ask Cy to help? Although, I haven’t seen much of him lately. It’s almost like he’s avoiding me. You don’t think he’s avoiding me, do you?” Robecca asked Rochelle and Venus earnestly.

  “No, of course not!” Venus replied vehemently—maybe a little too vehemently. “Cy would never do that to you.”

  “Unless, of course, he’s like the rest of the school and thinks we’re them,” Rochelle interjected.

  “Oh, this is sillier than a bee’s sneeze in a strong breeze! Cy knows me; he knows all of us. He helped us defeat the whisper. I’m sure he’s just busy, that’s all….”

  what’s that lump on my bed?” Robecca asked seconds after the trio walked into the Chamber of Gore and Lore and switched on the light.

  “Maybe it’s Penny?” Venus offered as she began to unlace her pink boots, utterly exhausted from the long and emotionally taxing day.

  “I’m afraid not. At the present time, Penny is seated on the windowsill staring angrily at Chewy, no doubt the result of an unwanted nibbling session. Perhaps it’s time you look into getting Chewy a bone to gnaw on,” Rochelle suggested, before greeting her always-perky pet. “Bonsoir, Roux!”

  “I hope I didn’t leave my oiling can under here again. It took two straight hours of steaming to get that stain out last time,” Robecca babbled to herself as she pulled back her mummy-gauze and werewolf-fur sheets. “Jeepers creepers! Someone left a giant egg in my bed!”

  “An egg?” Venus repeated incredulously. “Let me guess: There’s a giant chicken on the loose,” she added.

  Curiosity quickly got the better of Venus, prompting her to get up and look. The sight of the melon-size item on Robecca’s bed gave Venus pause. It did, in fact, resemble an oversize egg. However, as Venus peered closer, she saw that it was not crafted out of shell but intricate spider threads in a delicate pattern.

  “It’s a spider’s web, isn’t it?” Rochelle inquired as she climbed onto the bed to inspect it more closely. “There’s something to all these webs. It doesn’t make sense; it would take thousands of those little black spiders to produce the amount of threads found on campus, and yet we haven’t seen one spider.”

  “It’s true; outside of the ones in the dormitory hall, I haven’t seen any,” Venus replied as she picked up the webbed ball and studied it closely. “There’s something inside.”

  “Good luck. This is like opening a seriously scary birthday gift,” Robecca surmised.

  “Why do I have to do it? It was found on your bed,” Venus retorted and then put it down. “And let’s not forget who pulled Rochelle from her webbed sleeping bag….”

  “Vous êtes impossibles! I’ll do it,” Rochelle said, reacting with palpable frustration.

  “Well, you do have the perfect claws for opening things,” Robecca added quietly as Rochelle tore open the webbing, revealing yet another doll of doom.

  The jagged-edged figure’s large black eyes seemed to stare ominously at Rochelle, momentarily shortening her breath. For one brief second, she was transported out of herself and to a place where she understood the others’ irrational fears of the dolls and cats and such.

  Wishing to literally destroy her fear, she crouched down and slammed the doll against the floor. After pausing for one brief second, she resumed crushing the doll against the ground, banging it harder and harder until small bits of wood splintered off.

  “Um, I’m pretty sure it’s open,” Venus stated wryly.

  Rochelle then slammed the doll against the floor one more time.

  “Oh, so it is,” the granite-bodied ghoul replied softly.

  “Is there anything you want to talk about?” Robecca asked Rochelle while shooting Venus a concerned look.

  “What do you mean?” Rochelle responded in her normal matter-of-fact manner.

  “You really let that doll have it,” Venus said, pointing to the damaged figurine.

  “Did I?” Rochelle questioned her friend.

  “Um, yeah, you did. It was a little like gargoyleversus-doll smack-down for a second,” Venus countered with raised eyebrows.

  Not wishing to admit her momentary lapse into the land of superstitious nonsense, Rochelle shrugged and set about opening up the doll.

  Tucked inside was a small creased note wrapped in spiderwebs. After carefully removing the strands of webbing, Rochelle slowly unfolded the paper.

  “ ‘They come tomorrow,’ ” Rochelle read aloud, before sighing, clearly overwhelmed by the information.

  “Tomorrow? I would have much preferred it said a month or even a year! I mean, we are definitely not ready for them!” Robecca whined with burgeoning hysteria and steaming ears.

  “Robecca, grinding your gears is not going to help anything,” Venus stated firmly.

  “But they come tomorrow! And technically tomorrow is only a few hours away! Are they coming right at midnight? Or later in the day? The least they could have done was give us a specific time,” Robecca prattled nonsensically.

  “Give me that,” Venus said as she grabbed the note, crumpled it into a ball, and walked over to Chewy. “Open wide, little friend.”

  And just like that the plant swallowed the balled-up wad of paper—whole.

  “I never realized Chewy’s talent for eating could be quite so helpful,” Rochelle commented, genuinely impressed.

  “Tomorrow, they’re coming tomorrow,” Robecca mumbled as she hugged Penny tightly, too tightly for the penguin’s liking.

  “What’s so special about tomorrow?” Venus asked while staring at the half-demolished doll of doom.

  “The Hex Factor…” Rochelle answered, looking at the calendar on her iCoffin. r />
  As the outside world descended into meteorological chaos complete with hurricane-level winds, bouts of hailstones, and the continuing deluge of rain, Robecca, Rochelle, and Venus prepared themselves for what was sure to be an eventful day.

  “Shouldn’t we be warning people? Telling them what the note said?” Robecca asked as she walked out of the Chamber of Gore and Lore with Penny tucked tightly under her arm.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re social pariahs; no one is going to listen to us. Thanks to our ‘anonymous’ friend, aka Toralei, the whole school thinks we’re the infamous them,” Venus explained as she passed under the dormitory’s webbed curtain. “And then there are the spiders; how do they fit in to all of this?”

  “Maybe there’s a spider whisperer among us?” Rochelle pondered aloud.

  “It would take a small army of spiders just to carry the dolls and notes… never mind about the cats,” Venus responded. “And thus far we haven’t even seen a spider.”

  An unnerving clang and clatter greeted the three ghouls as they entered the main hall. With the wind continuing to rage outside, trees snapped, lawn furniture tumbled, and pretty much anything that wasn’t bolted to the ground blew away.

  While trying to ignore the jarring rattle of the storm, Rochelle spotted Trick and Treat and instinctually called out to them.

  “Trick? Treat? Hello?”

  But the trolls refused to answer; they wouldn’t even look in her direction.

  “Trick? Treat?” Rochelle called out louder.

  “They’re ignoring you, Rochelle. Don’t take it personally. They’re just scared,” Venus explained.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised. Deuce e-mailed me this morning to say that Cleo no longer felt comfortable allowing him to tutor the trolls with me,” Rochelle lamented with a hint of sorrow.

  “It’s surprisingly exhausting being unpopular,” Venus said while stifling a yawn.

  “Ghouls, excuse me?” Miss Flapper said. “Might I have a moment of your time?”

  “Um, yeah, sure,” Venus replied reticently.

  “It seems you three are the target of a great deal of unfair gossip. And I think I know how you feel. After the events of last semester, a few monsters still look at me suspiciously, sure that I am up to no good. Why, a few have even followed me,” Miss Flapper said pointedly, her eyes filling with tears. “It’s hard to handle the looks, not to take them personally. But remember, it’s only fear clouding the monsters’ judgment about you. And in those moments, those horrible soul-shaking moments, do you know what I remind myself? Everything eventually passes. Just focus on weathering the storm with as much grace and compassion as you can muster.”

  “Thank you, Miss Flapper,” Robecca confessed honestly, clearly moved by the dragon’s words.

  “And on that note, my offer for tea and crones always stands,” she said, before dabbing her eyes with a tissue and walking away elegantly.

  “Definitely better than Feral Streak. I mean, that was quite a performance,” Venus muttered.

  “Are you sure it was a performance?” Robecca inquired. “Is it possible that we misinterpreted what we heard about her plan? Maybe it was about her career plan here at Monster High?”

  “Boo-la-la, Robecca. You don’t really think that, do you?” Rochelle asked. “You can’t possibly think that someone would climb through a crawl space to talk to her about getting tenure as a teacher?”

  “No, I guess not. She just seemed so genuine, but like you said, she’s a great actress,” Robecca acquiesced.

  “Interesting that today of all days, she pulls out all the stops, even tears, to try to win us over,” Venus pondered. “She clearly wants to keep us off her trail.”

  “Who can tell me how to create the molecular compound needed to make anti-fungus serum for pumpkin heads?” Mr. Hack asked the class as he rubbed his small elflike ears and waited for a volunteer.

  In the back of the room, a small gray hand shot straight up in the air, eagerly waving side to side, desperate to garner Mr. Hack’s attention.

  “Dear me, you certainly are a glutton for punishment,” Robecca said to Rochelle while shaking her head.

  “Rochelle, it’s with a heavy heart that I say this: Put down your hand. He’s never going to call on you,” Venus whispered to Rochelle.

  “But I know the correct answer.”

  “And we know how much you love answers, but every student in here thinks we’re a threat to the school. If he called on you, chaos would erupt in the classroom,” Venus explained, just as a crackling sound came over the intercom.

  “Miss Sue Nami, how do I turn this on?” Headmistress Bloodgood’s voice barreled over the school’s radio system. “Did I eat lunch today? I’m feeling awfully light-headed.”

  “That’s because you have a leak in your neck, ma’am,” Miss Sue Nami barked. “Oh, and the whole school is listening to this.”

  “Well, in that case… Hello, boys and ghouls, this is your headmistress speaking. I have just spoken with the sheriff, who informed me that the storm has knocked down at least twenty trees and utility poles on the road between here and town, so for the interest of all involved, Monster High shall be having its first-ever school-wide sleepover.”

  “Don’t forget about the Hex Factor,” Miss Sue Nami reminded Headmistress Bloodgood.

  “But we shall still have the Hex Factor Talon Show, which, per the Toralei-Cleo Peace Summit, officially has no theme. Or perhaps it’s nicer to think that each performer can create his or her own theme….”

  small white candles lined the walkways in the Vampitheater, casting long and distorted shadows across the plush purple walls. Having lost electricity hours earlier, the school was now running solely on candlelight and ingenuity.

  “Listen up, non-adult entities,” Miss Sue Nami bellowed at the students as they filed into the candlelit Vampitheater for the Hex Factor. “Thank you for arriving already in your pajamas. Immediately following the show, you are to line up in the main corridor, at which time Ms. Kindergrubber and I will pass out sleeping bags. As luck would have it, Ms. Kindergrubber has a rather well-stocked linen closet after teaching Home Ick for so many years.”

  “Hi, Robecca,” Cy said meekly, trailing behind the ghouls as they made their way into the auditorium.

  “Wow, I’m surprised you remember my name,” Robecca huffed sarcastically.

  “I don’t understand…”

  “Cy, you’re even worse than an empty boiler!”

  “I am?”

  “I actually thought you were a true friend, but it turns out I was wrong. You disappeared the second everyone else did,” Robecca said with steam pouring out of her ears, nose, and eyes.

  “You’re right, I did….”

  “And I deserve better than that from my friends,” Robecca replied.

  “But you see, that’s just it. I don’t want to be your friend.”

  “Cy Clops, you are the nastiest—”

  “No, wait!”

  The one-eyed boy then drew one deep breath as he prepared to say everything he so desperately needed to say as fast as possible.

  “The only reason I stayed away from you was to get the courage to ask you to sit next to me during the show,” Cy blurted out rapidly.

  “Well, if that isn’t the cat’s pajamas, then I don’t know what is,” Robecca said, before leaning in and kissing Cy on the cheek. “I would be honored to sit with you.”

  Cy grinned like a pumpkin head and then followed the ghouls to their seats.

  “All non-adult entities are to sit down!” Miss Sue Nami hollered from the stage.

  “Is it just me, or are we the only ones in here surrounded by empty seats?” Rochelle commented as she looked around the candlelit Vampitheater.

  “Gee whiz, if I wasn’t so thrilled about Cy still being our friend, that just might hurt my feelings,” Robecca bubbled happily.

  First onstage at the long-awaited Hex Factor Talon Show was none other than Three-Headed Fre
ddie, who used his three mouths to juggle balls. While not the most interesting of acts, all the students appreciated the distraction. Well, except for Robecca, Rochelle, and Venus. With the knowledge that “they” would soon be arriving, the ghouls had no choice but to keep their eyes and ears peeled.

  “Nice job, Freddie,” Toralei droned sarcastically as she walked onstage at the end of his performance. “I’ve never tried juggling, but I’m sure if I did, I would be amazing, like a total superstar.”

  “Whatever, Toralei, everyone knows that mummies are the best jugglers,” Cleo snapped as she pushed past the werecat. “Next up is Frankie Stein.”

  Frankie, dressed in all white and a large puffy chef’s hat, wheeled a cart onto the stage. After adjusting her hat and apron, the green ghoul then cleared her throat and began singing.

  “I was working in the Creepchen late one night. When my eyes beheld a yummy sight. Two grated potatoes, one egg. A frying pan and a tummy to be fed. We did the hash. We did the monster hash. The monster hash. It was a graveyard smash,” Frankie sang as she prepared hash browns onstage.

  “Boys and ghouls!” Toralei called out as she ran onto the stage, interrupting Frankie’s singing-chef performance. “We really need to talk to you.” Just behind her, in high-heeled slippers, was an equally distressed-looking Cleo.

  “It’s serious,” Cleo added solemnly.

  “If this is about the theme, I’m going to lose it,” Venus muttered under her breath.

  “While we were getting our makeup touched up, a DeadEx zombie came in with a package. And seeing as Cleo needs makeup way more than I do, I signed for it,” Toralei stated dramatically.

  “And, of course, upon seeing that Toralei had signed for a package, I immediately demanded to see it,” Cleo explained, wiping away tears. “Understandably, I was a little concerned she was trying to pull a fast one on me regarding the Hex Factor theme.”

  “But of course I wasn’t,” Toralei interjected.