Freeze Tag by Caroline B. Cooney

favorite TV programs and the children would be sent to their desks to do homework.
    Well, they would do homework. But it wouldn’t be a school assignment.
    Meghan stayed beneath the level of the windowsill, just in case Lannie was lurking outside, peeking, staring, thought-policing.
    It was eight-fifteen before Tuesday led West into her silent unlit bedroom.
    “Sit on the floor,” Tuesday said to him, and burst into a spatter of giggles.
    “Tues, I’m tired,” he said. “I can’t play games anymore. Isn’t it enough I have to play this endless game with Lannie?”
    Meghan crept out from behind the bed.
    West stared at her. She held a finger to her lips.
    He sagged in a funny way, as if he were being rescued. “Oh, Meghan!” he said, and he said nothing more, but it was enough. He sat down next to her, and Tuesday sat with them, which Meghan regretted, but then, tonight’s plan did not call for a kiss. It called for strategy.
    “What’s going on in here?” hissed Brown.
    “Crawl in,” whispered Tuesday.
    Brown checked out the participants. “War council!” he said delightedly, and dropped down, and crawled. He would make an excellent desert warfare soldier, he had that belly technique down perfectly.
    The four of them lay on their stomachs, propping their heads up with their cupped hands.
    “What,” said Tuesday, “are we going to do?”
    “You’re asking me?” said West. “You think I’ve come up with something?”
    “Where does Lannie get this power?” said Tuesday. “Maybe we can cut off her source.”
    West shook his head. “I asked her how she calls it up. I was half thinking I could freeze her . If I knew how. She said she’d stage a demonstration for me. She said she’d freeze that gym coach I don’t like.”
    “Wonderful,” said Brown.
    “Exactly. I start yelling ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ and Lannie says to me, ‘Don’t worry, West, it’s easy, all I have to do is touch him, you won’t be involved. I’d do that for you,’ she says. Like I’d be happy afterward.”
    “But Lannie must touch you all the time,” said Tuesday. “And you don’t freeze.”
    “She does touch me all the time. But I don’t touch her. It’s not so bad if I just sit there and let her do what she wants.”
    It sounded pretty bad to Meghan. But still, Meghan began to enjoy herself. This was nice, this meeting of the best friends, plotting in the dark, hidden by the furniture, safe from the bleached eyes.
    “I give Lannie hundreds of excuses for why I can’t see her every waking minute,” West said. “I use sports, chorus, homework, term papers, weather, baby-sitting, Tuesday, Brown, Mom, Dad, Grandma.”
    “Grandma?” said Tuesday.
    “I said when you’re eighty years old and you’re stuck in a nursing home five hundred miles away, you want to hear from your oldest grandson. I’ve written a lot of letters.”
    Meghan giggled. West’s face split into the old familiar grin. Oh, she loved him so much! Okay, they were going to whip this thing. Together they were going to knock Lannie out of commission.
    “You should have been here at breakfast this morning,” Tuesday told Meghan. “It was so funny. Mom says to West, ‘You can have the car, dear.’ And West says, ‘No thanks Mom,’ because the last thing he wants is to be alone with Lannie yet again. And Mom goes — ‘There’s no such thing as a seventeen-year-old boy who doesn’t want the car. Are you sick? Are you taking drugs?’ So after we make our way through the no-I’m-not-on-drugs conversation, Mom wants to know the truth about why West doesn’t want the car. And the best my stupid old brother can come up with is — it’s tough finding a parking space.”
    “Oh, yeah, Mom believed that,” said Brown. Tuesday and Brown burst into gales of laughter. West flushed. Meghan rested her hand on his. It was their only touch. The only touch in so long! He lowered his gaze and seemed to draw comfort from her hand. No doubt it was