The whole class waited for Trevor's reaction.

"Sure, you and Igor can come…but remember, we drink beer, not blood!" The whole class laughed again, and Trevor high-fived Matt.

Just then Mr. Harris blew his whistle, signaling us to hightail it off the bleachers and run like greyhounds around the track.

But Becky and I walked, indifferent to our sweating classmates.

"We can't go to Matt's party," Becky said. "Who knows what they'll do to us?"

"We'll see what they do. Or what we'll do. It's my Sweet Sixteenth, remember? A birthday to never forget!"

4 Truth or Scare

The most exciting things to happen in Dullsville in my lifetime, in chronological order:

1. The 3:10 train jumped its tracks, spilling boxes of Tootsie Rolls, which we devoured.

2. A senior flushed a cherry bomb down the toilet, exploding the sewage line, closing school for a week.

3. On my sixteenth birthday a family rumored to be vampires moved into the haunted Mansion on top of Benson Hill!

The legend of the Mansion went like this: It was built by a Romanian baroness who fled her country after a peasant revolt in which her husband and most of his family were killed. The baroness built her new home on Benson Hill to resemble her European estate in every detail, except for the corpses.

She lived with her servants in complete isolation, terrified of strangers and crowds. I was a small child at the time of her death and never met her, although I used to play by her solitary monument in the cemetery. Folks said she would sit by the upstairs window in the evenings staring at the moon, and that even now, when the moon is full, if you look from just the right angle, you can see her ghost sitting in that same window gazing at the sky.

But I never saw her.

The Mansion has been boarded up ever since. Rumor had it there was a witchlike Romanian daughter interested in black magic. In any case, she wasn't interested in Dullsville (smart lady!) and never claimed the place.