chapter 27

on to something

I had learned my lesson. If Bones said he had a feeling about not walking through the front of the junkyard, then I was going to listen to him. Instead, we cut through the woods behind a couple houses to avoid walking on the street and crouched behind some bushes across from Yogi’s lot. 

Sure enough, Bones had been right. There they were—the Goon Squad, sitting on their bikes outside the front entrance, waiting for us. 

“But how did they know where we were headed, Bones?” I asked. 

“I don’t know, Lump. Maybe they saw Yogi drop us off at school.” 

He was giving the Goons way too much credit. How could they have known that the junkyard had become our home base? 

Yogi’s truck was gone and the front gates were shut. From this distance, it was more obvious than ever how much better the junkyard looked now than it did in our time. Now it had a big, new-looking fence, and a smaller, gated entrance for pedestrians to the right of the big gate.

The gate was shiny and black and surrounded by lots of colorful flowers. In our time, the gates were boarded up and had weeds and thistles choking the ground. Now the shack was freshly painted, and the old sign above the shack that had snapped in half was this cool neon sign that lit up the yard, and there weren’t any “No Trespassing” signs anywhere along the fence. 

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