The Dryer That Ate Tuesday

Some machines eat socks. This one eats hours.

Zuri Adebayo hasn't slept a full night since fourth grade. She doesn't mind. While the rest of Delacroix Street snores, Zuri sits on her windowsill and listens, and over four years she has built a map of her whole neighborhood out of sound. The screen door that smacks twice at 11:40. The city bus that stops at 12:15 for passengers who never come. The raccoons at 1:00. The freight train at 1:52.

And at 3:00 a.m. exactly: nothing. Twenty perfect minutes of quiet.

So the night a dryer starts tumbling in the middle of her nothing, Zuri follows the sound. It leads her to the Suds-O-Rama, the 24-hour laundromat at the dead end of the street, where the lights buzz, the door is always unlocked, and the place is always, always empty.

Twelve machines hum. Dryer number nine doesn't.

And when Zuri opens dryer number nine, she can't remember Tuesday. Not one single minute of it.

Her best friend Milo says she's imagining things, because Milo sleeps through fire drills and dentist appointments and probably the end of the world. But that night Zuri finds Tuesday at the bottom of her laundry basket, folded warm and neat, with something chewed out of the middle. Dryer nine isn't losing socks. It's eating time. And it isn't finished eating hers.

Unplugging it gets Tuesday back. It's the receipt in her hoodie pocket that ruins everything.

Forty-one hours remaining.

Inside this Creep Street book:

• A laundromat that's open all night and empty for a reason
• A monster made out of stolen hours, warm laundry, and teeth marks
• A brave, funny insomniac heroine who notices what nobody else does
• A best friend who refuses to believe a single word of it
• Short chapters and a cliffhanger every few pages
• A final twist that will make readers check their own pockets

Creep Street is a series of standalone spooky-fun horror novellas for readers 8 to 12, written for kids who say they don't like reading yet. Every book is a brand-new monster, a brand-new kid, and a brand-new terrible idea. Read them in any order. Just don't read them at 3 a.m.

Perfect for grades 3 through 6, classroom shelves, school libraries, sleepover dares, and any young reader who loves scary stories that are creepy without being nightmare fuel.

On Creep Street, the wash cycle never ends.