Read Online Disappearance at Devil's Rock by Paul Tremblay - Free Book Online

characters (like SpongeBob and Finn, Jake, and Lumpy Space Princess from Adventure Time ) have mustaches and other black Sharpie alterations. There is one little square of duct tape in the middle, covering up the laptop’s brand symbol, with a Tommy sketch: a puffy monster-cloud with angry eyebrows and a big, open mouth with two sharp fangs ready to devour a small flock of panicked birds. The sketch isn’t very detailed and the birds aren’t really more than rounded off Vs, yet the scene is clear and vivid, and funny as hell. Kate smirks at it, like it’s too clever for its own good. She can hear Mom saying to Tommy, No one likes a wise ass , in a way that clearly means the opposite.
    Kate opens the laptop and turns it on, but the log-in screen is password protected. She gives up guessing at the password after four tries,even though she thinks she’s close. She doesn’t want to guess wrong again and have the computer locked up. She closes the laptop and again looks at the monster-cloud sketch, which looks a bit more sinister with repeated viewings.
    On the floor and adjacent to the desk is a milk crate neatly filled with his many sketchbooks and notebooks. Tommy has been doodling and drawing ever since he could hold a crayon, and he’s always been amazing at it. Tommy’s attitude toward his talent oscillates between bouts of painful modesty and cocky showmanship. Kate pulls out a sketchbook from the middle. It’s green and is filled with drawings of Minecraft characters, maps of houses and areas he’s created, and brief scripts for his YouTube videos where he’s describing the game play and his designs.
    She takes out another notebook, one with a yellow cover. This one has outlines of giant waves braking over and around a jagged rock formation. A drenched boy about to be swept away clings to the rocks. His long bangs cover one eye, and the other looks up at Kate, pleading with her for help. Inside the cover, on the first page, in heartbreakingly small, careful script is the sentence “School is like drowning.”
    Kate, unlike her brother, has always got along with her elementary school teachers, and getting top grades has been easy. But the prospect of going to the middle school has left Kate utterly terrified. She thinks she can handle the workload; it’s more the stories she’s heard about what goes on in the lunchroom and hallways and bathrooms that has her anxiety level red-lining. Stories about girls getting their bra straps snapped or girls goosed in the hallways, and this year she heard there were some seventh-grade boys caught taking up-skirt pictures and sharing them online, and then there’s all the stuff about the older girls beating up the sixth-grade girls in the bathrooms and making them do gross stuff. Nothing like that happens at the elementary school, and she doesn’t understand what happened to everyone to make them somean and awful. Her and Sam have been talking about nothing else this summer and doing their best to dismiss the stories as not true, as the older kids trying to scare them. But she doesn’t know for sure, and there’s no way she can go to middle school without Tommy being there. She’s counting on him to look out for her.
    Kate flips quickly past “School is like drowning.” The subjects of the notebook’s early pages are scattershot and seemingly unrelated: a giant, intricately detailed foot in the middle of a busy intersection; a cartoonish bear that’s simultaneously cuddly and menacing wearing a wristwatch; a jagged cliff that has a sad-faced boulder sitting on top; open fields and rivers as viewed from up in the clouds, the view framed between two hands, a broken string looped between the right hand’s finger and thumb.
    She skips ahead and toward the middle of the book is a page full of cartoonish naked people, their eyes bulging and tongues wagging as they point and leer at each other. From