Goosebumps #50: Calling All Creeps! (R.L. Stine)

Ricky gets picked on by everybody in his school. He joins the school newspaper, but that doesn’t stop the teasing. One day, a guy chases him into the library and he spills soda all over editor Tasha’s keyboard. She screams at him and kicks him off the newspaper. She calls him the next day and asks him to cover the charity car wash.

When Ricky gets to the school, Tasha gives him her dad’s very expensive new computer. Can you see where this is going? She warns him that if he messes up again, he won’t get a second chance. Naturally, the four same bullies chase him all over the car wash, drench the camera, and trip him so he falls on it and breaks it.

To get back at Tasha for kicking him off the newspaper, he sneaks into the office late one night. He puts a note on the front page, saying that if you’re a creep, then you should call Tasha after midnight with her number listed. He wants to see what happened, but he keeps getting distracted all day and never sees a copy of the paper.

His friend Iris calls at midnight that same night, trying to tell him something. Her dad starts yelling at her, so she hangs up the phone. Immediately, Ricky gets three new phone calls from people saying that they are creeps, before his dad yells at him over the late night calls. He finds out that Tasha found his note and changed it to his number before the paper went out.

Ricky tries meeting Iris that day, but the bullies grab him and drag him into the woods. They announce that they are creeps and ask him why he never identified himself as their commander. They change into huge monsters and show him a bag of seeds that will change everyone else into monsters. He tries telling other people what happened, but no one believes him.

The bullies meet the next day, intent on hiding the seeds in the school cafeteria. They force Ricky to sneak inside and he spills the seeds on the floor. They give him another bag and he dumps them in the macaroni and cheese. Fortunately, no one eats the mac and cheese because it is so disgusting. The bullies corner him outside and Iris jumps out, pretending to also be a creep.

Iris is human, but they follow the monsters’ plan because they don’t know what else to do. They bake chocolate chip cookies and hide the seeds inside. They take the cookies to the school bake sale and Ricky warns everyone about eating them. One of the monsters drags him off and remind him that anyone who eats the seeds will become his slave. Ricky decides that having slaves is much better than getting picked on all the time, so he runs off, passing out free cookies…