“Bird-watching,” the man explained. He had a brisk, cheerful accent. German, maybe.
“I saw you scowling. You are having a—how do you say—lousy day?” With his camera he gestured to the sky. “Watch the birds! How they fly about. So graceful. It will make you happy again.”
“Uh…okay.”
“Look up, up!”
Smiling, the man trotted off.
I stood up. I even looked up, like he told me to do. He sure made bird-watching sound appealing. Watch the birds, forget your troubles.
The only thing was, it hadn’t been a goldfinch that I’d scared. That flash of red was a robin.
If you were into bird-watching, wouldn’t you know that?
Chapter Four
I rang the Bilks’ doorbell a third time. With any luck, they weren’t home.
I was here to apologize to Brody. I’d walked from the Eye.
The apology was Dad’s idea. I thought Dad was wrong. Brody had acted like a bully.
But, with the troubles Dad was having, I didn’t argue. I’d heard him on the phone with his bank manager. Two tour groups had canceled. Nobody wanted to be near a shouting mob.
Unless people started showing up, Dad would have to close the Eye.
No one was answering the Bilks’ door. I used the time to get some moves in.
Hop, slide, spin. Jump!
In midair, I folded my knees. I wrapped my arms around them. I’d seen the late, great dancer Gene Kelly do this in an old movie. I was thinking of including it in my talent-show routine.
I let go of my knees—too late. Unlike Gene, I didn’t land neatly on two feet. I landed on my right foot and fell sideways. My right hand plunged deep into the soil of a planter.
“Are you looking for something in there?”
The door was open. A girl was staring down at me.
“Uh…” I pulled my hand free. It was caked with dirt. I stood up. “I’m looking for Brody Bilk.”
She glanced at the planter. “You won’t find him in there.”
“No,” I agreed. I was trying not to stare at the girl. She was about my age. She had the Bilk blond hair and blue eyes.
Brody’s sister? I didn’t know he had one.
She sure was pretty. It was truly amazing how the same family features rearranged could be so much nicer to look at. Like, for hours.
I cleared my throat. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around. I mean, I would have noticed.”
Smooth, Higgins.
She didn’t reply. There was a glimmer in her blue eyes though. It may have been amusement.
I tried a different tack. “My name is Chaz Higgins. I’m—”
“I know who you are. You’re the boy who humiliated my cousin on TV.”
She shut the door.
But didn’t slam it, I thought.
I jumped down from the step and executed a soft-shoe hop, slide and circle. She didn’t slam it.
But I still had to apologize. I couldn’t leave without doing that. Otherwise I would be letting Dad down yet again.
It was a warm night. Maybe Brody was in the backyard.
I walked around the side of the house. A gardener was clipping a hedge. I thought he might notice me and say something. But he didn’t. He had his earbuds in. I could hear the tinny buzz of his music.
A terrace stretched behind the house. Jonas Bilk was sitting on a patio chair. He was slurping back lemonade from a tall glass.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said.
Jonas didn’t answer. I saw that he was wearing earbuds too.
I stepped up to the terrace. The glass doors stood open. I looked through to a round foyer with a white marble floor. A white marble staircase curved against a white wall.
Okay, so now I had a pretty good idea of the Bilks’ color scheme.
But not about where Brody was.
Brody’s cousin walked across the foyer. She was holding a magazine.
She, too, was wearing earbuds.
Now I got why it had taken three doorbell rings for someone to answer the door. Everybody was listening to tunes.
I waved my arms to get her attention.
She glanced over at me, startled.
On the wall beside her was a portrait of a woman in a white dress. The woman, holding a glowing white flower, was blond and pretty.
She looked a lot like Brody’s cousin. An ancestor?
From upstairs, a bloodcurdling scream burst out. Followed by a woman’s voice saying “Enough! Please stop!”
I ran up to Brody’s cousin. “We have to get upstairs.”
She removed her earbuds. “What are you talking about?”
“I just heard a weird scream. Like someone being tortured. Then a woman calling for help.”
I started up the twisting staircase.
She caught my arm. “What call for help?”
“Lauren, what’s going on?”
Brody appeared at the top of the stairs. Seeing me, he jumped down them two at a time. “You! Get out!”
“Somebody screamed.”
“It was the TV. Mom’s watching a horror movie.”
It was a sensible explanation. I hesitated.
Brody demanded, “What are you doing here anyway?”
I decided to get the apology over with. “Sorry about the sand thing.” I held out my hand.
He stared at it. His face turned an angry, boiling red.
Oh, right. My hand was still covered with soil. With my left hand, I brushed the soil off. I brought my right hand forward for apology, take two.
“Get out of here, Higgins,” Brody barked.
“But…” I didn’t want to get out. I wanted to get to know Lauren Bilk.
I couldn’t say this. So I did what I always do when stuck for words. I executed a dance step. I did a long sideways slide.
Brody looked ready to pop. What was it about dancing—my dancing—that burned the guy up?
For a finale, I raised my arms.
“Out!” Brody bellowed.
Okay, so I hadn’t won Brody over with my soft-shoe routine.
But as I turned to leave, I caught Lauren smiling.
The next morning, Dad, Moe and I headed up to open the Eye. Dad slapped the steering wheel. He was cheerful again. “We have another chance!”
A TV crew was coming. They weren’t going to film protesters this time. They were going to ride the Eye. Dad had convinced them it would be fun for their viewers.
It would also bring us great publicity. It would make up for yesterday.
Dad opened the gate with his remote. He swung the car up behind the office.
“Okay, guys. The TV people will be here at ten. We have two hours to polish the Eye till it shines.”
We got out of the car. On the other side of the office, the Eye rose like a gigantic silver coin. Shine it? It was already gleaming so brightly we had to shield our eyes with our hands.
“Not much for us to do,” I said.
There was a clanking sound at Moe’s feet. We looked down.
He’d accidentally kicked an empty paint can. The inside of the can was coated with black. It gaped up at us like a bruise.
Ahead, we spotted more empty cans. We glanced at each other.
We hurried around the office to the Eye.
More paint cans littered the ground.
We looked up.
The bottom third of the Eye was drenched in black.
Chapter Five
Overnight, someone had vandalized the big wheel.
Moe, Dad and I stared. The gondolas and spokes at the middle still sparkled. At its base, though, the Eye was—well, a black Eye.
“Brody Bilk,” I said. I pictured him tossing paint cans over the fence. Then climbing the fence and hurling their contents at the Eye.
Dad looked at me sharply. “You don’t know it was Brody. You can’t accuse someone because you don’t like him.”
He took his car keys out. “I’ll go get paint remover. Moe, you come with m
e. Chaz, you stay here and clean up what you can.”
I picked up the paint cans. I carried them to the Dumpster at the back. I threw them in as hard as I could. I took grim pleasure in hearing them smash against the metal sides.
I remembered the hatred in Brody’s face. I could hear him sneering, Hey, dancing boy…
Dad was wrong. I did know, without a doubt. Brody was the vandal.
I looked up at the Eye. To Dad, it was a dream come true. To the Bilks, it was an evil Eye.
To me, it was a source of my archenemy, vertigo.
The three of us tackled the black paint. We started with the gondola beside the platform. We scrubbed its sides. We climbed on top to scrub the gondola’s roof.
Moe glanced at me. I guessed what he was thinking. Didn’t I feel dizzy?
I gave him a thumbs-up. The gondola was only ten feet high. Places I could jump down from didn’t bother me. It was the higher ones that got to me, big spaces with too much air—too much space—between me and the ground.
We didn’t speak as we worked. The only sounds were from the forest around us until—
Can you believe, baby, how good it feels
Falling in love on a Ferris wheel?
It was Dad’s phone, with its Michael Sarver ringtone. He patted down his pockets to find it. He was always forgetting where he’d put it. Then he spotted the phone on top of a picnic table.
I looked way up to the top of the Eye, to the blue sky beyond.
All at once I was tired of being scared of heights. I was tired of having to hide it from Dad. If vertigo was a person, not a feeling, I would punch its daylights out.
We finished cleaning that first gondola. In the control booth, Dad rotated the Eye. The next gondola shifted down to the base. We started on that.
We were still working when the TV crew arrived.
“You’re the dancing guy.”
The reporter beamed at me. She held the microphone up to my face.
Her cameraman aimed his lens at us.
“Chaz isn’t here to dance,” Dad said.
By now Dad had rotated the Eye so that the black parts were at the top. He gestured to them. He smiled at the reporter. “As you can see, we’re still working on the look of the Eye.”
The reporter barely glanced at the Eye. Her gaze was fixed on me. “I was hoping your son would dance for us, like he did yesterday. Maybe he could do a two-step.”
A two-step? That would be boring. A two-step just means moving one foot sideways, forward or back, then sliding your other foot to meet it.
“I could do much better than that,” I assured her. As well as the Gene Kelly midair move, I was working on a spin. A fast one, like skaters do. Followed by a leap in the air, then a rapid hop-slide-jump.
Dad’s hand tightened around my shoulders. He said brightly, “Chaz is going to do way better than that. He’s going to take you and your cameraman up in the Eye.”
Dad turned his smile on me. He was showing he believed in me. “Chaz will give you a guided tour. Then you can share it on tonight’s news for your thousands of viewers. Right, son?”
“I…uh…Let me check this out with Moe,” I said.
“What?” Dad exclaimed.
But I was striding away from him and the TV people. I joined Moe at the ticket booth. Moe was reading Scalpel Monthly. He read medical stuff all the time. He wanted to become a surgeon, like his dad.
“You gotta help me,” I said in a low voice.
Moe looked up from his magazine.
“I’m stuck going up in the Eye with those TV people,” I said. “Tell me what to do about my vertigo.”
“Duh. Tell your Dad about it,” he answered.
I glanced back. Dad and the TV crew were staring at me. Dad was frowning. The reporter wore a puzzled smile. The cameraman was filming me.
I waved cheerily at them. “That’s not an option.”
“Oh, man.” Moe exhaled heavily. He thought for a moment. “Okay. Stand still. Shut your eyes. If you look at something—a tree, the water, the city—it won’t be moving. But your body is moving. That’s what confuses your brain. That’s what makes you dizzy.”
I stared at him. “That’s amazing.”
I didn’t mean what Moe had said. I meant how much he’d said. Normally Moe didn’t say that many words in an entire year.
Chapter Six
The reporter was going to be on camera, so she took off her sunglasses. She started to place them in her purse.
“Wait,” I said. Shades! That’s what I needed. With shades on, I could close my eyes and no one would know.
“Do you mind if I borrow those?” I asked.
She looked at me doubtfully. The sunglasses were neon pink with rhinestones.
“It’s fine,” I assured her. “I forgot my own. The sun gives me a headache.”
We stepped into the Eye. I put the sunglasses on. So what if I appeared on TV wearing them? It had to be better than barfing in front of thousands of viewers.
The cameraman started filming. I closed my eyes.
The reporter said brightly, “We’re on the new North Vancouver Eye, built by Don Higgins. With us for the ride is Don’s son, Chaz. Up, up, we go. Wheee! I can feel my stomach churning. How about you, Chaz?”
I smiled and shrugged. I didn’t want to speak. My breakfast was stirring in my stomach, as if searching for an exit. I thought it was better to keep the floodgates closed, just in case.
As the Eye climbed higher, I realized Moe was right. The movement was bearable if I didn’t look at anything. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad.
The reporter hastily filled the silence. “Here we go, out of the trees, into the wild blue yonder! So, Chaz. Why do Ferris wheels go counterclockwise? I’ve always wondered. I bet our viewers at home are curious too.”
I realized I couldn’t stay silent. Not while trapped in a gondola with Ms. Buzzing-With-Questions.
Keeping my eyes shut, I replied, “In the old days, people were afraid of a forward-spinning wheel. They thought it would push the motor off the wheel’s base. The wheel would then spin off and roll away.”
The reporter let out a whistle. “Imagine this Eye rolling down the highway and splash! Into Burrard Inlet!”
I didn’t like the Eye. It took me away from dancing. But some outsider finding fault with the Eye—that was different. The Eye was my dad’s dream.
I tried to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “Our Eye isn’t going to roll anywhere, ma’am. As far as we know, no Ferris wheel has ever rolled off its base. Even when a hurricane hit Chicago in 1893, George Ferris’s wheel stayed put. A runaway wheel is just one of those myths.”
She started to speak, but I cut her off. I was on my own roll.
“Eyes go backward to make the ride more exciting. Think about it. You lift slowly back and up. You reach the sky. The sun blitzes down on you. Then the wheel plunges forward. It hurls you down at the city, the water, the trees below. The whole ride builds up to that big finale.”
I stopped. To my surprise, I was actually enthusiastic.
The reporter nodded. She looked pleased.
Wait.
I could see how she looked.
While I’d been talking, I’d opened my eyes.
I was doing exactly what Moe said not to.
I clamped my eyelids shut again. But it was too late. My breakfast churned. I was going to be sick. On TV.
I pointed ahead. “Aim the camera there!” I croaked.
Startled, the cameraman swung his camera. It was a good view of the gleaming beaches of West Vancouver, the blue ocean, the bright horizon.
I sank to the gondola’s floor. I pressed my face against my knees. I clenched my teeth. I sweated in the sun. I willed the sick feeling to stay that—just a feeling.
The reporter joked, “We can just about see Hawaii, huh, Chaz?…Er, Chaz?”
The sun slipped off me. The Eye had dropped into the trees again. The gondola cooled down.
I c
ould handle this. I could.
Forcing a smile, I pointed through the gondola’s glass floor. “This is how I like to ride the Eye.”
The reporter plunked down beside me. “Oooh! I see what you mean.” She beckoned to the cameraman. “Look at the earth rushing up to us! Look at those trees surging into view! Wow!”
I shut my eyes. Surging wasn’t a great word to use around me right now.
I was locking up the visitors’ gate at the end of the day. We’d had a few riders, but not many.
Moe had already left. I was staying behind, waiting for our new overnight security guard. If our vandal showed up again, the guard would be ready for him.
Dad was on his way to a meeting with the protesters over at the community center. He was hoping to straighten things out.
He brushed grimly past me. I wasn’t surprised. Earlier, when I’d stepped off the gondola, I’d forgotten to take off the neon-pink sunglasses. I’d been too busy feeling relieved about not barfing.
I’d seen the look Dad shot me. It was bewildered, exasperated. He thought I had been joking around with the glasses. Not taking business seriously.
No matter how hard I tried, I kept disappointing Dad.
I watched him drive out the back way. Dust from the dirt road rose behind him like a clenched fist. Which pretty much summed up our relationship.
I leaned my forehead against the gate. I thought of the fist-like cloud of dust. I thought of the vertigo.
I punched one of my own fists in the air. Take that, vertigo! Then the other fist. I kept doing it. I kept shadowboxing in the shade of the giant Eye.
Pow! Pow-ditty-pow-pow! I was hearing music in my head. I was punching to a beat.
I slid-hopped-jumped in a circle. I imagined fists popping out of the ground. I punched back as I danced. Pow! Pow!
Maybe this could be my routine for the talent show. An angry dance. Yeah. Why not?
I also imagined audience applause. I pictured Lauren Bilk, clapping louder than anyone.
Wait. I slid to a stop. That was real clapping I heard.
Not by Lauren Bilk though.
Eye Sore Page 2