Addison Addley and the Trick of the Eye

by Melody McMillian

  Maybe this refraction stuff would explain why we’d never caught any fish. There had to be some sort of explanation, because I knew we were the best fishermen around. At least we were the best at trying to be. And we didn’t have a lot of competition.

  Sam swept his arm out in front of him as he got ready for his grand finale speech. “Things can appear totally different, depending on what angle you’re looking at them from. I guess you really could call that an optical illusion.”

  I nodded, pretending I understood. By that time, though, I didn’t care if I understood the facts. The only things I needed to know were jumping around in my brain like fish in a net.

  Different angle + optical illusion = different look…

  I suddenly saw my moving problem in a whole new light. I would create some optical illusions of my own. I’d fool Mom into thinking that our dumpy old house was actually a mansion, heck, a castle. A small castle, mind you, since she didn’t want anything too big.

  That new development was going to look like a rundown little doghouse when I got finished painting it in a new light.

  The only thing I hadn’t figured out yet was what to do about the break-ins. I didn’t think that I could make an optical illusion out of them. No matter what angle you looked at them from, break-ins were still scary.

  Chapter Three

  Paint, nails, Sam’s old gaming system. We wrote a list on the way home after school the next day. Well, actually, Sam wrote while I listed. I didn’t want to waste energy doing both things at once.

  “Wait a second,” Sam cried. “My old gaming system? How is that going to make your house look better?”

  “Come on, Sam, think!” I urged. Sometimes Sam doesn’t get my ideas too quickly. I thought great minds were supposed to think alike. Maybe Sam’s wasn’t so great after all.

  “It’s the illusion thing. The more stuff we cram into the house, the smaller it’s going to seem, and the more Mom will realize that we really do need all that space,” I explained. That and the fact that I’d been dying to try out Sam’s system on my own, without him watching me. I needed to practice without pressure. Besides, he had a new system now anyway. He usually likes to keep his games and systems all lined up and locked away in the closet, in alphabetical order. I was sure he could let one go just this once. After all, it was an emergency.

  “It’ll just be for a couple of weeks,” I promised. “I’ll take really good care of it.” I would. Taking really good care of video games was one thing I was great at.

  “Keep writing,” I said. “Garbage bags, shovel, hole digger.”

  “Hole digger? Isn’t that the same as a shovel?” Sam asked.

  “No, not at all. I’ve got big plans for the backyard. I’m going to turn it into a worm store. I don’t want to dig up the whole yard with a big shovel. Little holes will do. The worms aren’t that big. I think I can make a hole digger with a spike and some duct tape. I’ll need something to tie it on to though. I’m sure Mom doesn’t need her old canoe paddle anymore.”

  Sam nodded. “That’s not a bad idea. You could make some extra money that way! You can also get rid of some weeds at the same time.”

  Now Sam was catching on. I liked the words at the same time. There was no use wasting energy when I could get two things done at once. The way I looked at it, I had three problems to solve. One, I had to get Mom to look at the house from a different angle; two, I had to make the street safer by solving the break-in mystery; and three, I had to come up with some money to give to Mom for the monthly budget. Mom and I had already talked about ways of making more money. I had one paper route. I didn’t want to take on another one. Sometimes I was chased by a little dog with three legs and sometimes I was chased by a little kid throwing stones at my bike. Selling worms would be a dream job compared to that.

  “Now, you start thinking of some ideas to spruce up the old house,” I encouraged Sam. He was probably better at home improvement than me. He liked everything to be neat and clean. He wouldn’t even get his fingernails dirty when we tried to see if mud stuck to rocks better than it did to our feet. I was better at the money-making ideas.

  “Maybe we could phone one of those home-makeover shows on tv, and they could renovate the house for free,” Sam suggested.

  I shook my head. “No, Sam,” I explained patiently. “Think about it. The whole house would look brand new when it was done. Then people would think we were rich. Then our house would be the next one broken into.”

  When we got to my house, we looked at it from across the street. Did you ever notice how things look better when you know you might not see them anymore? The house did look sort of old and lopsided, but I liked it that way. It was comfortable. The only thing that looked fresh were all the trees in the backyard. Trees always look good because they grow new leaves every spring. They’ve got it easy.

  “We have to fool Mom into looking at the house from a different angle,” I said. “We need something out front to catch her eye.” I’d seen the pamphlet for the new development. It had a white picket fence, a statue of a fat lady in a toga and a big rose garden in front of it. I’d think of something better. I only had three weeks until the open house. I’d have to move fast.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Sam said. “If you had something out front to focus on, your house might just fade into the background. It’s got something to do with perspective. I learned that at summer camp last year when we tried to draw a picture of the lake. We had to make the trees in the front of the picture bigger than the ones in the back so the ones in the back looked farther away. It’s easy to trick your eye into believing things. Remember how we made those flip books when we were in grade three? We drew stick people on the corners of a pad of paper and then flipped through the sheets as fast as we could. It looked like the stick people were moving. We tricked our eyes into thinking they were.”

  Sam was squinting at the house. I guess that makes him think better. He was just about to say something when Tiffany popped into view. She’d just rounded the corner of our street. What a way to wreck the scenery. Her cousin, Trent, was with her. The only good thing I could say about Trent was that his hair wasn’t as puffy as Tiffany’s. Her head looks like a lampshade, and sometimes her face gets as red and shiny as a Christmas-tree bulb. That’s why I called her The Lamp. Tiffany always tries to annoy me. She really doesn’t have to try too hard though, because annoying me is the one thing that she’s good at. She’s mean to every single person she knows. Heck, she probably even taught that little kid how to throw stones at my bike.

  “I don’t blame them for staring,” Tiffany said loudly to Trent. “If I lived in a house like that, I wouldn’t be able to believe my own eyes either. What a dump!”

  “Get lost, Tiffany,” I said. “My house is better than yours, and you know it.”

  “Better in what way?” she asked. “Better because there’s more room for the rats to run around in your backyard?”

  “At least I have a backyard,” I answered. “Yours is the size of a stamp. Which is about the size of your brain, so at least you match.”

  The Lamp snarled. “Yeah, well I’m glad I don’t live on this creepy street. Becky’s house has been broken into twice already.”

  So it was Becky’s house. Both times. I guess they hadn’t got what they wanted the first time. Poor Becky. She was so shy already. Now she was probably afraid of her own shadow. Becky is smart. She doesn’t talk a lot about herself though. She doesn’t need to. She’s nice. Do you ever notice how nice people don’t talk a lot about themselves? I talk a lot about myself, but usually it’s just to Sam. I don’t know if that makes me nice or not. There’s no question when it comes to Tiffany though. She’s definitely not.

  It bugged me that The Lamp always seemed to know things before I did. Then again, her mother knew every bit of gossip in town, mostly because she started every rumor in town too.

  “It wasn’t really her house,” Tiffany continued. “The first time it was her shed. S
tuff had been moved around like somebody was looking for something. The next time, someone messed with the lock on the garage. They didn’t get inside though. Becky’s mother found a note near the trash can by the garage that said eight cents.”

  The garage. I’d never liked that creepy garage of Becky’s. It was full of junk her family got at yard sales. Once I walked by when it was just getting dark and I thought I saw a moose hanging upside down in the garage. Turns out it was just an overstuffed chair with four pointed legs that had fallen sideways on the twisted wire frame of a lampshade. It must have been a Tiffany lampshade because it was really big. Those wires looked just like antlers, at least the antlers I’ve seen on cartoons. I’ve never seen a real moose. I’d probably have to go to the zoo. Do they have moose at zoos?

  Tiffany flipped her hair away from her face. I guess it was so we could see her rolling her eyes better. “Some people just don’t have any common sense,” she sneered. “Becky’s family should have locked their shed. At least they locked their garage. I guess they’ve learned their lesson.”

  It was too bad Tiffany hadn’t learned to put a lock on her mouth.

  Trent spoke up. “Eight cents. It was probably just some little kid counting up his pennies to buy a pack of gum. You guys get scared over nothing.”

  I wondered if I could pay Tiffany and Trent eight cents to get lost. I doubted it. They probably couldn’t count that high.

  “Well, my street beats your street by a mile,” I said. Sam nodded. Tiffany lived in a new house a few streets over, not far from the school. Every house on her street looked exactly the same, like a row of Monopoly houses all lined up neatly on one side of the board. The streets were all named after trees. Tiffany lived on Willow Street. Her hair looked like a bunch of willow branches after a tornado.

  “Don’t listen to them,” Trent said to Tiffany. “They’re just worried about the game next week.”

  Our team was playing the Whinycats on Saturday. Trent was the pitcher. Why he would think we’d be nervous was a mystery to me. We would beat them hands down. We always did. The Whinycats had only won two games in the last two years. I guess Trent thought he was going to be the new hero and turn the team around.

  Just then Trent waved his hands around like some crazy magician and then tapped his thumb three times with his other thumb.

  Tiffany laughed, and they walked away from us.

  “Secret signals,” Sam said. “He’s probably going to use them at the game.”

  “Well, they can keep their dumb secret signals,” I said. “We need to come up with some optical illusions. Some good ones.” I watched Tiffany and Trent cross the street. They were still laughing. It was too bad that I couldn’t think of an optical illusion to just make them disappear.

  Chapter Four

  “We need to come up with some money,” our teacher said on Thursday morning.

  No kidding, I thought. It’s funny how Miss Steane can read my mind. I was just thinking the same thing. I needed to come up with some money so I could buy some paint for the front door and some wood for the steps. Personally I don’t mind that you have to jump over two holes in the second step to get to the third step, but I guess Mom does.

  The money wasn’t pouring in yet from the worm farm. I’d dug fifty-seven holes in the backyard with my special canoe-paddle hole digger but so far I’d only found three worms. I’m not good at math, but even I knew that three worms wasn’t a whole lot for fifty-seven holes. I’d have to find out what worms ate. Maybe I could lure them out with some good worm food. I could trick them into thinking there was a feast waiting for them. Sam said it was easy to trick the eye. The problem was, I didn’t know if worms even had eyes. And it would have to be a pretty cheap feast because I needed to save my money for paint. Good thing I didn’t have to dish out any money for the statue I had in mind for the front yard. I knew where a few good rocks were hiding at the creek.

  Besides reading minds, Miss Steane was a really great teacher. She was nice to everyone: the smart kids and the not-so-smart kids and the not-so-smart kids who thought they were smart.

  Like right now, we were supposed to be having a math lesson, but she decided to use the time to talk about fundraising for new playground equipment. She could have talked about it during gym class or art class, but she didn’t. She decided to take up time in our math class instead. She knows I hate math. Like I said before, she’s the greatest. I didn’t really want to talk about raising funds, but it sure beat talking about raising rates and moving decimal points. I bet the teachers at the Whinycat school weren’t anywhere near as nice. There was just no way I could go there. There was just no way that I could move. I would rather eat all the worms in my backyard than move from my house.

  “The kids in the younger grades really need some new playground equipment,” Miss Steane explained. “They need our help. Does anyone have any ideas?”

  I had lots of ideas, but I wanted to keep them to myself. My worm-selling idea was a good one, but somehow I doubted the principal would want to fill the whole schoolyard with holes. They could probably make lots of money though, enough for a gigantic new piece of playground equipment. Too bad there wouldn’t be any room left for it in the yard because of all the worm holes.

  Everyone suggested ideas. Some were pretty dumb, like Tiffany’s idea for pet-sitting. Who would want to pay Tiffany to sit with their pet while they were away? She’d probably sit on the pet instead of with it because she’s so clumsy. Come to think of it, I can’t understand why they call it “pet-sitting” in the first place. You don’t just sit there with a pet. You play with it and take it for a walk to the creek. Same thing with babysitting, although I guess you wouldn’t take a baby to the creek. Unless he liked fishing, of course. Those sitting words just didn’t make sense. Sometimes words just have a weird language of their own.

  I thought my idea was great. We’d sell lottery tickets for people to guess how many times I could bounce a tennis ball off the ceiling and into a garbage can in one week. Of course it would involve me missing some school because the only ceiling that I could use that had the right slant was the one in my bedroom.

  “Good idea, but maybe you could practice that trick during the summer,” Miss Steane said with a smile. Miss Steane has a nice way of making “No way” sound like “Maybe,” even if she doesn’t really mean it.

  “What about a magic fair?” Sam suggested. He glanced over at me. “We could do card tricks and fortune-telling and optical illusions.”

  That Sam. What a guy. What a way to sneak in the illusion bit. Now I wouldn’t have to think as hard. I was almost jealous of his sneaking-in skill. He usually wasn’t that good. He must have been hanging around me too much.

  “Why, that’s a wonderful idea, Sam,” Miss Steane said. “And it fits in perfectly with the unit we’re starting in science today. It’s on optics.” Miss Steane explained what optics was. “Optics is the study of the properties of light, especially the way it changes directions when it’s reflected by a mirror or refracted by a lens,” she said.

  I thought now would be a good time to look smart. There aren’t too many of those opportunities floating around. I volunteered my information on refraction. “Sometimes light gets bent out of shape,” I said.

  Miss Steane was impressed. “Very good, Addison. It’s something like that. Do you ever notice on a hot day how the pavement or car roof seems to shimmer? The light looks like it’s dancing. That’s because it’s traveling through hot rising air that has a different density from the air around it. The light is being refracted, or bent, and it looks like it’s shimmering. It’s the same as a mirage in a desert. The shimmering light from the hot air makes it look like there’s a lake on the horizon.”

  She went on to explain how our eyes can get tricked by all sorts of things. She said that optical illusions are eye tricks caused by weird use of lines or color that make the brain confused. The brain sort of guesses, or fills in the blanks, and comes up with what it thinks i
s real. I guess my whole life is pretty much an optical illusion, because my brain always has to fill in the blanks. The problem is, it usually comes up with the wrong answer.

  “In art class we’ll also be learning about illusions,” she continued. “Vertical lines guide our eyes upward and horizontal ones guide us outward. There are also ways we can draw pictures to make objects appear farther away. If we draw two lines and make them converge, or come to a point, then it looks like they are receding into the distance, like a set of railway tracks. It’s another type of illusion.”

  Those were good ideas. I didn’t need to write them on paper though, because I’ve got a great memory for things that I can actually use. The problem is, the things that I think are important usually aren’t the things my teacher thinks are important. Like right now, when she explained about converging lines and points and guiding our eyes upward, all I could think about was straight-up-and-down lines and sharp points and how I now had a fantastic idea for the front yard. I couldn’t wait to get started.

  The magic fair was going to be in two weeks, one day before the open house at the new development. We were going to have a card-trick table, a fortune-telling table, a magic-tricks area, an art-illusion area and a science-optics area. There would be a small admission charge, and we’d sell magic-wand cookies and disappearing juice. Becky was going to do an act with her ventriloquist dummy if she got it clean in time. Some goof had spilled punch all over it a while back. She wanted to clean it up before she gave it back to her uncle, who had let her borrow it. I personally didn’t know why it mattered if it was clean or not. It was still worn out and old and creepy. Sort of like some of my great-aunt’s old friends.

  I was going to be in charge of the invisible-ink trick. That would be easy. I needed to keep my brain free so that I could think of more ways to convince Mom to stay in our old house. Besides, it would be fun to write messages about Tiffany; she wouldn’t even know what I was saying.