Addison Addley and the Trick of the Eye

by Melody McMillian

  My head was spinning with ideas on the way home. I was planning to stop at the hardware store to see about buying some cheap paint for the front door, but I decided to stop at the candy store instead. It was time to start solving the break-ins so Mom would feel safer about staying on our street. Solving break-ins meant eating candy. Lots of it. It helped me think. Sam was staying overnight at my house on Friday night so that we could watch out for anything suspicious. I decided that the paint would have to wait. We needed to buy other supplies instead, important stuff like root beer and chips to keep up our strength. I had a feeling we were going to need it. Sometimes you’ve just got to get your priorities straight.

  Chapter Five

  Sam came over right after supper the next night. He brought his sleeping bag, his video system and a dozen eggs. I was happy because I thought the eggs were to throw at people, but he told me they were for his science tricks instead. He needed to practice squeezing a peeled hard-boiled egg into a milk bottle. It looked impossible to me. He put some hot water into the bottle, shook it up and then dumped it out. He put the egg on top, and after a little while it dropped inside the bottle. Sam was pretty excited with his magic trick. He went on and on about hot water and air pressure and how it forces air out of the bottle so that the egg could squeeze in. Personally I couldn’t see the big deal about sitting there and watching an egg drop into a bottle, but I guess everyone’s different. I could think of a whole lot of other things that I’d rather watch than an egg, like maybe the latest dragon-warrior movie or the baseball playoffs on tv or a frog-jumping contest.

  To get the egg out, Sam mixed up some vinegar and baking soda and put it in the bottle. He turned it upside down and the egg slipped out. He said the pressure inside the bottle forced the egg back out. Sam kept practicing squeezing that egg into the bottle. I was glad I was doing the invisible-ink stuff. All I had to practice was how to squeeze lemon juice into a bowl without squirting it into my eye.

  After I wrote some messages on paper with the lemon juice, Mom helped me iron the paper to make the words appear like magic. Sam told me that the heat makes the lemon juice appear. The acid in the lemon juice weakens the paper. When you heat the paper up, the weakened parts of the paper where the writing was turns brown.

  SHOE BOX. The words appeared out of thin air. “Shoe box?” Mom asked as she put away the iron. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I didn’t want to tell you, Mom,” I said. “That’s the nickname for the new development that you like. People are calling it ‘the Shoe Box’ because it’s so small.” It was partly true. Sam and I were calling it that. As far as I knew, we qualified as people.

  Mom smiled. “We’ll see about that at the open house,” she said as she put on her coat. “I’ve got to go to the astronomy club meeting now, but I should be back about eleven. Make sure you lock the door after me, and don’t let anyone in.”

  “Sure,” I said. We weren’t going to let anyone in. Well, besides ourselves, that is. We’d need to let ourselves back in after we spied on Becky’s house.

  “By the way,” Mom said as she headed out the door, “what happened to the mirror that was here in the entryway?”

  “Oh, I’m borrowing it for the magic show,” I confessed. That was partly true. Alex, the skinny kid who sat next to me in class, was going to use it to create some sort of illusion. He was going to lean the mirror up against a table. Then he was going to stand with one leg behind the mirror and the other leg in front of the mirror. He said if he lifted up his front leg it would look like he was floating in the air because you would just see his lifted leg and the image of his lifted leg.

  The main reason I took the mirror though was because Sam had said that mirrors make rooms look bigger. They sort of tricked the eye into thinking that there was more space than there really was. I couldn’t have Mom thinking our entryway was any bigger than it actually was. I needed all the help I could get. Besides, that mirror was always in the way when I tried to bounce a tennis ball off the wall and out the front door. It would be easier to do now.

  After Mom left, Sam showed me some cool optical illusions on the Internet. There were tons of sites. There were some pictures that changed shape right before your eyes if you stared at them long enough. There were others where you’d swear that one line was shorter than the other, but really they were both exactly the same length. It had something to do with arrows at the end of the lines. Some pages had things that looked like they were spinning around when they weren’t. One picture of an old man was really creepy. Even though I knew better, I could swear the guy’s eyes were following me. There were pictures of staircases that looked crooked but really weren’t. I wondered if I could somehow paint the whole house in a way that would make our crooked steps look straight. I found one site that said vertical lines make things look taller. Maybe I could paint stripes on the broken shutters to make them look tall enough to match the windows. Maybe that’s why zebras have stripes. They probably like looking taller than they really are so that lions don’t chase them as much.

  As soon as it got dark, we went outside. I locked the door behind me and we started out. The street was really quiet. A dog barked a few doors down. I jumped a mile. Did you ever notice that when it’s dark, noises seem to be a million times louder? I’d swear I could even hear Sam’s glasses sliding down his nose as we walked. That’s not an optical illusion, it’s some other kind. I don’t know its name.

  We went really slowly so we could watch for anything strange. I was glad there were some cars on the street. That way we didn’t feel quite so alone. I let Sam go in front of me. I mean, he wears glasses, so if something jumped out in front of us, he’d be able to see it better than I would. You have to be logical about things like that.

  The moon was right above our heads. In a way that was good, because the sidewalks were all lit up. In a way it was bad, because where there’s light there are also shadows. Lots of them. I didn’t remember the trees being that big before or the bushes that wide or the shadows that gigantic. Who knew what could be hiding in those gigantic shadows?

  When we got to Becky’s house, we stopped. I closed my eyes and listened. I can hear better when I can’t see. Also it made it easier to ignore the creepy garage when my eyes were shut. Sam could do the looking for us both. It wasn’t that I was afraid or anything, it’s just like I said before—Sam can probably see better because of his glasses.

  Everything sounded normal. Well, as normal as everything can sound in the middle of the night on a dead-end street. I opened my eyes just once to look at the house. I could see the light on in the living room. I could see Becky’s family watching tv. I could see Sam inspecting the garage. By inspecting, I mean taking three steps up the driveway and then jumping back to the sidewalk.

  I decided that was enough. We’d done our bit for crime solving. The crimes would have to solve themselves. We were just about to head home when I noticed something white fluttering in the shrub next to the garage. It looked like a piece of garbage, but I decided to send Sam over to get it anyway. I was sure he wouldn’t mind. It might have been a clue to the break-ins.

  “Here,” he said, shoving the crumpled up paper into my hands. “Next time let’s do this when it’s light,” he whispered. “When it’s daytime. When we can see.”

  I flattened out the paper as much as I could. I shone my flashlight on it. It was just a shred. We could only make out two words.

  Sam 11

  Those two words jumped off the paper and into our throats. We gasped because we couldn’t scream. And then we ran.

  Chapter Six

  If I’d known that I could run that fast, I would have tried out for the track team. I would have been the hands-down winner. I left Sam in the dust.

  I made it back to my house in record time. I waited on the porch for Sam because I’m a nice guy. That and the fact that I’d given him my keys to hold while I read the note.

  I took the keys from him and fumbled wi
th them to open the door. We’d really have to get a better light on the porch, because it was hard to see the lock. It didn’t help that my hands were shaking, probably from the cold night air.

  Once inside, we turned on every light in the house. I could feel the creepiness of the street seeping in through every cracked window and crooked door.

  We sat down at the table and looked at the note again. It wasn’t Becky’s neat writing. These were scrawled letters, even messier than mine. We looked at that note so hard that we didn’t even feel like having any root beer or chips.

  The note was about Sam. The intruder must have been watching him. He even knew that Sam had just turned eleven. What else did he know about him? He must have gotten Sam’s street mixed up with Becky’s. Now Sam’s street was going to be the unsafe one. Hopefully Sam’s mom wouldn’t want to move now too.

  When Mom got home, we showed her the note. We weren’t going to at first, because I didn’t want her to be any more scared than she already was. I knew I should show her for Sam’s sake though. My mom would tell his mom about it and then he’d feel better. Sam’s mom would take care of it. She’s very logical, almost as logical as me. Sometimes you’ve just gotta do what you’ve gotta do.

  Mom didn’t seem too concerned. She said that the note could have been anything. Maybe one of Sam’s friends wrote it a while ago as a reminder about Sam’s birthday. Maybe the man from the corner store was keeping track of all of the kids’ ages in the neighborhood. He always gave out free packs of gum on our birthdays. It could have blown there from anywhere, especially in the storm we’d had the week before. She smiled and said not to worry about it. I couldn’t tell if it was her “It’s really nothing to worry about” smile or her “It’s nothing to worry about too much, but I’m a bit worried anyway” smile. I hoped it was the first one. Finding a note about Sam in the schoolyard is one thing. Finding a note about Sam at the site of the break-ins is another story.

  Sam decided to go home. Mom made us some chamomile tea, but he didn’t feel like drinking it. I downed mine in one fell swoop. It always made me feel sleepy, and that’s all I wanted to do. Sleep. Nice and safe in my own room. I’d think about the note tomorrow.

  When we got back from driving Sam home, I went to bed. It was nearly midnight. That chamomile tea didn’t seem to be working. I had too many ideas swirling through my head. The note was bad enough, but I was running out of time to think of ways to change our house.

  For once I wished my room wasn’t quite so big. Maybe Mom was right about not needing all this space. If my room were smaller, then I wouldn’t have to wonder what might be hiding in the empty space behind the chair where I threw all of my clothes.

  I decided to take the clothes off the chair and throw them on the floor instead. That way I could see through the back rails. Better safe than sorry. Then I decided to take the batteries out of the remote-control car in the corner, just in case. I mean, what if the car just started up by itself in the middle of the night? It would wake up Mom for sure. Either the car would wake her up or I would wake her up with my scream when I saw the car moving on its own. Besides, I could use those batteries for the flashlight that I was planning on taking to bed with me.

  I was almost asleep when I noticed the mirror that I was going to lend to Alex propped up in the corner. I got up again and flipped it around so it faced the wall. Sometimes mirrors look a whole lot better when there’s nothing looking back at you.

  I tried one more time to get to sleep, but now my eyelids didn’t want to behave. Did you ever notice how your eyelids flutter back and forth really fast when you’re trying to be still so you can sleep? The more you want them to stop moving, the faster they jump around. Same with your brain. The more you want it to slow down, the faster ideas and pictures come storming through. Like right now, ripped notes and slimy worms and broken steps were playing hide-and-seek in my head.

  I tried counting sheep, but every time the sheep got to the fence, they tripped and fell on the ground instead.

  I knew I needed to get at least a few hours of sleep because of the baseball game the next day. I’d need to concentrate to win. Then again, we were playing the Whinycats. The boring, annoying Whinycats and the equally boring, annoying Trent. The only good thing about thinking about Trent was that it finally put me right to sleep.

  Chapter Seven

  I dragged myself out of bed after the third time Mom called me the next morning. I wished I had felt that tired the night before. I would have slept better. I was too tired to pick the almonds out of the organic muesli to save them for the squirrels. I ate them instead. The squirrels would have to wait. I didn’t even have the energy to complain about the pomegranate juice Mom gave me. She knows I only like juices I can spell.

  At the game Sam looked tired too. Even his hair looked tired, like he’d been scratching his head and thinking all night.

  “Everybody knew I was turning eleven,” he said when we got to the field. “My birthday was in February, so I was the first one in the class to turn eleven. That was a big deal. Mom said somebody just wrote the note to remind them to buy an ‘eleven’ birthday card, because they were used to everyone turning ten. She said it had nothing to do with Becky’s house.”

  I didn’t really buy that explanation. You wouldn’t need to write a note to remind yourself that your friend was turning eleven. Maybe Sam’s mom wasn’t so logical after all. It had to have something to do with the break-ins. Both notes were found there. Becky had turned eleven last month. The intruders couldn’t find whatever they were looking for at Becky’s, so they were probably going to go to Sam’s next. I was glad my birthday wasn’t until June. I sure wouldn’t want to find my name and age scrawled on a dirty note near a creepy garage that had been broken into. Still, it was nice of Sam’s mom to come up with some sort of explanation

  “Yeah, that sounds right,” I said. Sam was trying to sound sure of himself, but I could tell that he really wasn’t. He flares his nostrils three times when he’s pretending. I used to think he was just trying to stop his glasses from sliding down his nose, but I know better now. I call it pretending because I doubt that Sam would ever lie. He can pretend with the best of us once in a while though.

  The Whinycats looked meaner and whinier than usual. Trent was the catcher, which was good because I didn’t have to look at him when I was up to bat. We got through most of the game without giving up a run, but in the eighth inning they complained that our bat was too broken. Too broken? Why they would care if our bat had a couple of pieces missing from the end was beyond me. You’d think they would have realized that it’s harder to hit a ball with a broken bat. I guess it gave their mouths something to do. I liked the broken bats. They were lucky. They’d been around forever. Sometimes old things are best. Just like my house.

  Their whining must have thrown our team, because the Whinycats tied it up with two runs.

  In the bottom of the ninth, I was up to bat with two out. Sam was on third. The pitcher glared at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Trent do one of his fancy little hand signals to the pitcher.

  I was just about to swing when I saw Trent jump way over to my right side. I don’t know what he was doing there, because that sure wasn’t where the ball was. The ball came right at me. It was so low it almost touched the ground. Too low for me to swing at, which was good because it was so fast I would have missed it. It zoomed right past me and right through the hole in the fence behind me. Good old Trent tried to run around the fence after it, but he shouldn’t have wasted his energy. It was too late. I walked to first, and Sam came home from third. We won the game.

  Let me tell you, that pitcher was mad. Not at us—we won the game fair and square. He was mad at Trent.

  “Good thing that guy’s not on our team,” I said to Sam on the way home. I almost felt sorry for Trent. Almost.

  “Trent got his signals mixed up,” Sam explained. “That’s why the pitcher was mad. I heard Trent saying that two taps on the glove w
as a throw-out on his old team. Trent probably thought they would let you walk so that Chris, the next batter, would be up. Everyone knows that poor Chris hasn’t had one hit all year. He didn’t realize that two taps on the glove on this team means a fastball. It’s that illusion thing again. The same thing can have different meanings. It all depends on how you look at it.”

  I nodded because I was too tired to think. Besides, I didn’t have much time to think; I had a busy weekend ahead of me. I was going to spend the rest of the day fixing up the house. I had a great idea for the front yard. It involved some begging for free materials from a few places around town, but I knew it would be worth it. I put on my best begging face and headed downtown.

  First up was the hardware store. I managed to get half a can of free paint that some guy had returned because he said it was the ugliest color in the world. I remember Sam saying that everybody sees things differently. I bet that paint would look good on our front door. It would make our house look new and fantastic. Well, new anyway.

  After that I went to the sporting-goods store. I managed to get eight broken hockey sticks because the season was over. That, coupled with the two broken bats I already had, would be just perfect.

  My last stop was the corner store. I used real money there. I bought five packs of gum. It was for fixing the gate, after I was done chewing it. No sense wasting perfectly good sticky stuff just because it had lost its flavor. You’ve always gotta be thinking about the environment, you know, recycling and all.

  I started with the porch steps. I covered one of the holes with a broken shutter from the shed. I couldn’t cover both of the holes, because the squirrels liked to jump through them to get under the porch. I guess I could have built a separate squirrel-jumping hole on the side of the stairs, but that would have been too much work.