Sorry!!!!--- Merry Late Christmas and Early Happy New Year

Due to inconvinice of retarted computers, vacations, and passwords (these all I absulutly hate. along with spelling....) Soooo I have not been able to post more of the story but if you go to Ms. Van Draanen's looooovley site you can crack the code and figure out the rest of the book.
So to Crack the code- Click here!!
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Hahah  oh and COMMENT  pleaseeeeeeee

 Hope you had a merry christmas and hope that you will have a happpy new year (its my dads b-day, but mines on easter so its WAYYY better)
Byeeee

Chapter 3 of Sammy Keyes and the Boyz in the Band

CHAPTER 3 (The font changes once and a while, I dont know why, sorry.)

The first thing I noticed when the Guard Boss led us into the conference room was the

tension in the air. I wasn’t being acutely perceptive, or anything—it was like a blowtorch

coming off the adults in the room. They were talking to each other in loud voices, looking

stressed out and totally spun up.

I was about to tell Marissa, Look! There’s that guy we saw in the hallway! because

I recognized his gray suit and fluffy ponytail, but just then Marissa squeals, “There they are!”

and points out The Boyz sitting together near a table with deli trays. The three of them are

looking pretty sullen, and not much like rock stars, but it doesn’t seem to matter to Marissa.

She starts bouncing up and down, going, “I can’t believe it! I can’t be-lieve it!"

Then the Guard Boss announces, “Good news!” and the room falls quiet as people turn

to stare at him. “Everything’s under control,” he says. “We should be ready to start the event

in about fifteen minutes.”

Now, the funny thing is, once he leaves, no one comes up to us and says, “Hey, who are

you, and why are you here?” The adults just go back to blowtorching, and The Boyz kick back

in their chairs like, Yeah, yeah, whatever.

So after a few seconds of just standing there, Marissa whispers, “Come on!" and leads me

to where The Boyz are sitting. “Hi!” she says, and let me tell you, she is sounding way too

perky for my comfort.

“Hey,” the three of them say, giving each other knowing grins. Like, Are we babemagnets,

or what?

So they’ve said one collective word, and already I hate them. But Marissa gushes, “I’m

Marissa, and this is my friend Sammy, and we’re really, really honored to meet you!”

Honored? Honored?

Anyway, all of Santa Martina already knows that the one with the hoop earring is Toby,

the guy with the black close-cropped curls is Jackson, and the one with the spiky bleached hair

and million-dollar smile is Ace. But they go ahead and tell us anyway.

“I’m Toby.”

“I’m Jackson.”

“I’m Aaaaccce.”

Ace is trying to be all, you know, suave, but what strikes me is how small he is. And I’m totally amazed that this little guy could have so much power over the girls at my school. They thought Toby and Jackson were cute, but Ace? They got ridiculously swoony over Ace.

Then we hear a high-pitched voice singing, “And I . . . will love . . . you . . . forever!” Ace backhands Toby and growls, “Shut him up, would you?” So Toby reaches over a chair and swats, saying, “Knock it off, Evan!”

A kid about ten or eleven with bright brown eyes and blonde hair pops up from behind the chair and pulls off some headphones. “What?” he asks.

“You were doing it again,” Toby says through his teeth, then he turns to us and says,

“Evan wants to be in the group—real bad.”

Evan smiles at us and says, “I know all the moves . . . all the words . . .” he spins around

“. . . I’m good!”

Now it’s funny—if Ace had said the same thing I would’ve thought, What a jerk. But

Evan was so cute that Marissa and I couldn’t help laughing, “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah!” he says and starts singing, “Girl, you know I always think about you, Wanna build

my world around you . . .”

“Enough!” Ace snaps, making Evan dive for cover. Then Ace turns to Marissa and asks,

“So how’d you chicks rate a security escort backstage?” He gives her a lopsided grin. “You the

mayor’s daughter or something?”

“The mayor’s daughter?” Marissa asks, and you can tell—she doesn’t know what she’s

saying. She’s lost in his million-dollar smile.

So I butt in with, “No, we’re reporters from our school’s paper.”

“Awwwwgh!” Ace and the other two groan, flopping back in their chairs. Then Jackson

says, “Sorry, but they just kicked all the reporters out of here.”

Then a deep voice behind me says, “What’s going on here?” So I whip around and find

myself face-to-face with a woman wearing tight black pants, a bell-sleeved blouse, and hoop earrings so big trained seals could dive through. “Well?” she asks, and I don’t know if it’s too many cigarettes or what, but this woman’s got the voice of a cement mixer.

“It’s okay, Vanessa,” Toby hurries to say. “They won a contest at their school. They’re here

for a quick meet ’n’ greet.”

Marissa smiles at him like, Thanks, and then Ace picks up the thread, saying, “It’s cool,

Vanessa. Just let ’em hang.”

Vanessa looks skeptical, but she switches gears, rasping, “Okay—we’ve finally got things

squared away. Ace, we’re going to shoot you doing lead first—”

“But why?” Jackson asks, getting up, and let me tell you—he’s not looking too happy.

“Easy, Jackson,” Vanessa says. And then, like she’s explaining something to a kindergartner

she adds, “Everyone’s agreed, okay?”

“But I’m the one singing lead on the demo!”

“And we’ll shoot with you singing lead, too,” Vanessa says. “We’ll get tape of everything.”

“Yeah, chill, would you?” Ace says to him. “So I’m first, so what?”

Toby puts his hand on Jackson’s arm and says, “Just go with it, man—you know it’s going

to be you in the end anyway.”

“Then why are we doing this?”

“Because it ain’t all about you, dawg,” Ace says.

Jackson squints at him. “Me? Whose dad’s here, throwing his weight around? Who’s like,

in the face of every reporter, cutting in on every answer? Who’s—”

A man I hadn’t seen before appears behind Ace. He’s got brown, slicked-back hair and

is wearing a dark blue banded-collar shirt and black jeans. His belt is out a couple notches from its worn position—like he’s recently put on a few pounds—and seeing him makes Jackson

clam up.

“Here you go,” the man says, handing Ace a can of soda. “Ice-cold cherry cola.” He gives

a friendly snort. “I finally found a machine, but it wasn’t easy.”

Now, this guy’s voice is like the opposite of Vanessa’s. Instead of deep and growly, it’s high and squeaky. Like his collar is splitting his vocal cords into bass and treble, and only the high notes are getting out.

“Thanks, Dad.” Ace says, swabbing a rim full of water off the can with a napkin before

cracking it open. He grins at Marissa. “Gotta have my cherry cola.”

Meanwhile, a sweet-looking lady with a total doll face and a blonde bob that’s banded back

with a red scarf has grabbed Evan and moved in close to Toby, while a woman with very short

graying black hair and dangly wooden earrings has stepped beside Jackson.

“We’re all right—everything’s all right,” Vanessa says to the hovering adults. “Tell your

kids that we’re all on the same page, would you?”

Toby’s mom nods, but Jackson’s mom says, “I know I agreed, but I’m with my son—I

don’t understand why we’re switching everything around.”

“I thought we’d settled this an hour ago,” Ace’s dad says.

Vanessa glances over her shoulder at the guy with the fluffy ponytail that we’d seen in the

corridor. “We’re doing it this way,” she says dropping her voice to a guttural whisper,

“because Barry Rich from Warner is interested in his options.”

“So what are you saying?” Jackson asks. “He thinks Ace should sing lead?” He points

at Ace’s dad. “That’s probably because he’s been bending his ear nonstop since he got here!”

“Look,” Vanessa says. “You hired me to take this act to the next level and that’s what I’m

doing. I’ve got you a mall full of screaming girls and a record exec to watch you perform.

Don’t blow it!” Her voice softens but it still sounds like a cement mixer when she says, “You’ll

each get a shot, so when it’s your turn just give it your all. Eyes on the prize, boys. Ma-jor

re-cord deal. Fame. Fortune.” She shoots a look our way. “Girls.”

I pull Marissa to the side, muttering, “I’ve seen enough. All this hype and they don’t even

have a record deal?”

 “But . . . but they must have . . . something!”

“Have you seen a CD?”

We look over at The Boyz. They’ve each gone to their separate corners to huddle with

their parents, while Vanessa’s gone back to talk to the Ponytail and some bald guy who’s

with him.

Marissa blinks at me. “But they played one of their songs on the news. . . .”

“It was the same song, over and over. They have one song. No CD. No deal. This whole thing is all just a bunch of hype!”

“But . . . I didn’t even get a picture yet!”

“A picture?” But rather than argue, I stick out my hand and say, “Fine. Give me the

camera, I’ll take a picture.”

So she digs her camera out of her bag, and right then Ace appears, giving Marissa a coy

little smile. “Sorry about that buzz-kill. But the show’ll be sizzlin’ You wanna watch from

backstage?”

“Really?” Marissa gasps. “That’d be great!”

Now, for Marissa I choke back my extreme nausea and say, “Mind if I take a picture?”

“Cool!” he says, then puts his arm around Marissa and gets cheesy for the camera.

Ace is several years older than Marissa, but he’s only about a quarter inch taller. So when

I’m done snapping the photo and he says, “Did either of you happen to see some really big

girls out in the corridor?” I almost blurt out, Dude, anyone older’n ten is gonna seem large

to you! But Marissa gushes, “You mean the Amazons?”

I shoot Marissa a look to remind her that we were sworn to secrecy about large ladies tying up guard bosses, but it’s too late. The room falls quiet, and suddenly everyone is moving our way.

Chapter 2 of Sammy Keyes and the Boyz in the Band

CHAPTER 2

“Marissa!” I hiss. “Wait!”

Marissa dives back into the storage room, and points outside at a man in a sharp gray suit and a fluffy black ponytail hurrying along the corridor away from us. When he disappears

around the corner I whisper, “Did he see you?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t think so.” She turns to face me. “What made that noise?”

I switch on the light. “Trouble.”

Marissa gasps when she sees him. “Holy—”

“—shackled security guard?”

“It’s a security guard?” Marissa asks, looking closer.

The guy’s hands and wrists are bound, and he’s blindfolded and gagged and handcuffed

to himself like a giant pretzel. He’s squirming like crazy and gurgling through his gag,

so I try to calm him down by saying, “Hey, it’s okay. We’ll untie you. Hold still!”

He quits moving, and while Marissa pulls off the blindfold, I get to work on the knot

of his gag. It’s a silk scarf, though, so the knot is tiny and tight. But finally I get it loose, and

my reward for this? The guy lashes the air with cuss words like he’s reciting from The Mall

Guard’s Guide to Creative Cursing or something.

“Hey, take it easy!” I tell him. Then I do a kind of mental double-take. “Wait a minute—

did you say girls tied you up?”

The guard stops moving and stares at me. Then at Marissa. “I’m an idiot!” he says. “A

complete idiot!” He starts squirming like crazy, cussing away again, but finally he gives up and

lies there, panting, “Okay. What’s it going to take for you not to spill this to anyone.”

Now, I’m thinking, Spill what to who? but apparently Marissa’s caught on quick. She tilts

her head at him. “How about you get us backstage?”

“Backstage?” the guard says. “What excuse am I gonna give for that? It’s press only,

no fans.”

Marissa shrugs. “So tell them we’re reporters for the school paper.” She grins. “A small

price to pay for us not telling a soul that you got hogtied by some pansy girls.”

“They weren’t pansies, they were Amazons!”

“Amazons?” I ask him, and you better believe I’m having trouble not busting up.

“Yeah, smartlips,” he grumbles, “Amazons.”

But Marissa says, “Yeah, yeah, whatever. You’re supposed to be protecting the biggest act

to ever hit town, and you let yourself get tied up and then rescued by girls?”

Now, usually it’s just me sassing authority, but I guess the thought of getting up close to

The Boyz was bringing out Marissa’s brash side. And she did have a point. Even hogtied like

he was, you could tell—the guy was probably over six feet tall and at least two hundred pounds.

And who’s ever heard of Amazons roaming the Santa Martina mall?

“All right, all right!” he says then shakes his wrists. “Just get me out of this!”

So I retrieve the key from his pocket, and while I’m unlocking the handcuffs, the guard

mutters, “They took my radio, they took my I.D., took my keycard . . . took me for a chump.”

Once he’s completely untied, he leads us through the back corridors fast. Left turn, right

turn, up stairs, down stairs, right turn, left turn . . . and my mental compass was just starting

to feel hopelessly disoriented, when he stops at an unmarked door and faces us with a scowl.

“Is this where The Boyz are?” Marissa whispers.

He just keeps on scowling as he jabs at the combination keypad and unlocks the door.

We follow him inside and find ourselves in a mini cop locker room / office / kitchenette.

“Do not make yourselves at home,” he says, sliding into a chair behind a computer. He types

like crazy on the keyboard, studies the screen, then murmurs, “One-twenty-seven and one twenty-eight?

They think they’re the green room?” He actually grins at us and says, “This

might not be so bad after all.”

So as he types some more on the keyboard, I ask, “What are one-twenty-seven and onetwenty-eight?”

“Doors on the first level.” He laughs, and all of a sudden he seems like a completely different

guy. A friendly guy. “Instead of the band, they found a boiler room!” He gives the

keyboard one last jab and says, “And that should take care of that.”

“You deactivated their keycard?”

“Smart girl,” he says as he rolls open a desk drawer and pulls out a new keycard. And after

a few minutes of typing information into the computer, he slides the card through a card

reader and says, “They are out of business, and I am once again in business.”

Now it hits me that this guy might not even know that there’s a huge mob of kids out in

the mall. I mean, what if he’d been tied up for an hour? He’d have no idea. So I say, “Uh . . .

are you aware that the mall is packed with kids? And that other guards are out there trying

to make a bunch of them leave?”

“Am I aware?” He snorts and hurries to retrieve a walkie-talkie radio out of a locker. “Oh, yeah.” He keys his radio and says, “Sam-One to Unit Seven.”

A second later the radio crackles, “Seven.”

“Do you have a status report—lower level east side?”

“Everything’s Code Four, boss,” the radio says. “It was touch and go there for a few minutes

but we did what you said and we’ve pretty much got it under control.”

Marissa and I bug our eyes out at each other. We’d found the security boss in the supply room? No wonder he didn’t want anyone to know!

“What’s the ETA?” the Guard Boss says into his radio.

“We should be ready by fourteen hundred,” comes crackling back.

“Ten-four.”

“Copy that.”

“Well!” he says to us, all jovial now. “This situation’s taken a complete one-eighty. First

I’m grilled by the mall manager for tellin’ him we didn’t need to hire extra security—like

I was supposed to know every kid in the county was going to show up here? Then I get

chewed out by the fire marshal and the record label guy and the band’s manager. And then

on my way out to sneak a quick smoke I get ambushed by Amazons in the stairwell!”

He grins as he leads us to the door. “This day had CANNED written all over it, but fifteen

minutes in a closet and hey, the world’s a peachy place again.”

“Fifteen minutes?” I ask him. “That’s all you were in there?”

He pulls the door closed behind us and says, “Alone? Yeah. I actually thought you kids

were the Amazons, coming back for something.” He leads us down the hall saying, “Hey, I’m

really sorry about my behavior before—I owe you two big-time.”

So we followed him through the back corridors until we came to a door with a brass

CONFERENCE plaque on it. The Guard Boss hesitated at the door, then said, “I have your

word, right? Not a hint of what happened to anyone.”

Marissa and I nodded.

“All right, then. Try to act like student reporters, okay?”

We nodded again and he opened the door.

It was time to meet The Boyz.

Chapter 1 of Sammy Keyes and the Boyz in the Band

Okay, I found this on a site. Van Draanen wrote it and I’ll give it to you chapter by chapter. Here we go with chapter one of…

       Sammy Keyes and the Boyz in the Band

  I’m not big on the mall. It’s full of pricey clothes and poseur kids flexing their coolness as they cruise the halls.
Please. Like I don’t get enough of that in junior high?

But my best friend Marissa likes the mall. She likes the stores, she likes the food, she likes annihilating electro-badguys at the video arcade…all of which add up to me being way more familiar with the Town Center Mall than I’d ever intended. But that Saturday when we walked through the lower level doors, I knew I should have stayed home. “Marissa,” I said, gawking at the sea of kids in front of us, “this is insane!” As we moved toward the crowd, I shook my head and said, “I can’t believe there are even this many kids in Santa Martina!”

“They’re almost all girls, too!” Marissa whimpered.

See, like the rest of the mob at the mall, Marissa was dying to get a glimpse of The Boyz— a boy band I had never even heard of until they became, as Miss Pilson said in English class, “suddenly ubiquitous.” They were in the paper, on the news, on flyers that got passed out at school. . . . And why? Because they had chosen our mall as the place to shoot their video and had put out a call for “enthusiastic fans between twelve and sixteen” who wanted to be “extras” in the video.
Quicker than mosquitoes at sunset, all the girls at school were totally slurping it up, going,
“They’re so hot! I can’t believe they’re coming here.” They even knew their names—Toby, Ace, and Jackson—and seemed to know everything about them. “Ace is into racecars, did you know that?”

“Toby’s way into pirates—I think that’s so . . . romantic!”
“Jackson thinks golden retrievers are the best dogs—I have a retriever!”

“Toby’s birthday is May twelfth—my birthday is May twelfth!”

Like, who cares?

But even though the whole thing seemed colossally stupid to me, I let Marissa drag me  along. After all, we are best friends, and it was nothing compared to some of the places I’ve dragged her.

Anyway, Marissa was on her tiptoes whimpering, “We’ll never even get near the stage!” when a voice behind us snarled, “You losers actually think you’re going to get to see the band?”

Out of reflex I whipped around, but I already knew who it was. Worse than a regular mall rat, it was Santa Martina’s very own Rodent with Rattitude—Heather Acosta. I glanced around, looking for her brother Casey but didn’t see him. Which made sense. Like he’d want to see a teeny-bopper boy band?

But right beside her like little mimicking mice were Heather’s wannabe friends Tenille and Monet.

“Yeah,” Tenille said. “You losers think The Boyz are even gonna notice you?” She eyed my high-tops and jeans and snorted.
So I smirked at the gold stud sticking through her bellybutton and said, “Hey, look—you got your brain pierced!” Then I turned to Marissa and muttered, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Might as well,” Heather said with a shrug. “You’ll never get close enough to even see them.” She sneered. “Me? I’m gonna meet them.” Then she pushed through the crowd going, “Excuse me . . . excuse me . . . emergency, excuse me . . .”

“Oh!” Marissa growled as Heather weaved through the crowd. “She is the pushiest

person on the planet!”

I noticed a group of mall security guards muscling their way through the crowd in front of us, stretching out yellow CAUTION tape. I pointed and said, “What do you think those guys are doing?”

Marissa looked, too. “Maybe someone fainted?” It didn’t seem like a medical emergency to me. It seemed like . . . crowd control. I turned and checked the big glass doors we’d come through. There were security guards shaking their heads at people yanking on the entrance doors. “Marissa,” I whispered. “They’ve locked the mall!”
She turned around, saying, “You’re kidding.”

“See? I think they let too many people in here.” I looked back at the guards with the

CAUTION tape. “And I’ll bet they’re going to make everyone on this side of the tape leave.”

“But . . . they can’t do that! People are going to riot!”

“They’ve got to do something—there are way too many people in here.” I pointed into

the crowd. “Look! Heather’s already on the other side of the tape.”

“Oh!” Marissa growled again, and this time she actually stomped her foot. “She worms her way in and we get kicked out. This is so unfair!”

Well, there was no way I was going to let Heather win that easily. I grabbed Marissa

by the arm and said, “Come on!”

I was dragging her away from the crowd, but not toward the entrance doors, so she

didn’t put up too much of a fight. “You’ve got a plan?” she asked.

I grinned and tilted my head toward an EMPLOYEES ONLY door. “You game?”

Her eyes got wide. “You know how to get over to the rotunda?”

Now, I didn’t exactly. But let’s just say I’ve had some uh, experience in places where I don’t belong, and the back corridors of the Town Center Mall are definitely on my resume.

So I just grinned some more and said, “How hard can it be?” as I sidled up to the door.

“Well?” she whispered as I tried the knob.

“Be smooth,” I said and pulled the door open.

In the blink of an eye, we were both inside.

“Cool!” Marissa whispered, slapping me five.

 “Okay,” I said. “Let’s head up this way and turn right.”

The trouble with the back corridors of the mall is that they’re a crazy maze. They’ve got steps in weird places, zigzagging turns, and sudden dead-ends. Plus, there are doors everywhere, some locked with a card-reader/combination-keypad-contraption, some not. Some labeled— like the back doors of the stores, and some not—like closets and storage rooms and stairwells to the roof.

The trick to the back corridors is knowing what direction you want to go and keeping your mind like a compass on that direction. If you don’t, you’re gonna get totally lost. So there I was in compass mode, starting to lead Marissa up the corridor, when suddenly the EMPLOYEES ONLY door we’d just come through starts to open. Marissa and I give each other wide-eyed looks, then dash around the corner and dive

through the first door we find that isn’t locked. And when we’re safely hidden inside, Marissa catches her breath and whispers, “Do you think someone saw us?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper back.

The room we’re hiding in is completely dark, but my nose is picking up the smell of dirty dust mops, ammonia, and…a faint sort of stinky sulfur odor. So I figure we’re probably in some kind of janitor supply closet, but then through the darkness Marissa and I hear a sound.

A gurgly, angry, scary sound.

And just as my heart tries to shoot through my chest, Marissa swallows a scream and shoots

through the door.

Light from the corridor comes flooding in, and when I turn and see what’s making the

sound, I know we’ve just found trouble.

Big, big trouble.