Rebecca's Ticklish Adventures

         Seeing the ancient-looking old lady who owns the house frightens Rebecca, and she only hopes the woman won’t be able to identify her as she slips out of the window when suddenly: SLAM! – And she loses her right sneaker as the window suddenly shuts on it!

         Rebecca high-tails it out of there, sans sneaker, praying the noise doesn’t alert any insomniacs in the neighborhood. She hops on her bike and peddles home with her prize statuette to bring to the book club after school tomorrow.

         She makes it home safely, with seemingly no witnesses, and hides the statue out in the garage, behind some covered up project of her Dad’s that’s sat like that for years, then sneaks upstairs and back into her bed for the rest of the night.

         Only she doesn’t have a very restful night at all, thanks to some weird dreams of the statuette and Mrs. Mallory, and feeling trapped and tormented ever-so-delicately by a dozen feathers all at once all over her body! She wakes from that dream in a cold sweat and is suddenly overcome with the need to make sure the statue is still where she put it, although she knows no one in her family would have woken up in the middle of the night and been in that part of the garage for any reason whatsoever.

         So, she makes her way silently-as-possible in the quiet house, back downstairs, in only her panties and a long sleep shirt over them, and tiptoes down to the garage to find the statue exactly where she’d left it (though seemingly warm for being made of iron). Rebecca again sneaks back up to her bedroom, and finally gets a couple of hours of sleep before the alarm goes off for the next schoolday.

         But when she wakes up…the statue is sitting right next to her on the nightstand. Her immediate reaction is: Mom or Dad found it, and now I have some explaining to do. When neither parent or her little brother comes forth as the culprit, Rebecca gets a case of the jitters, but still holds out the possibility that they plan to question her about it later. She hides the relic in her book-bags and makes her way to school, then hides the figure in her locker and hurries on to her classes, hopeful the day will go quickly so she can become a member of the after-school book club.