Addison Addley and the Things That Aren't There

by Melody DeFields McMillan

  Right now my speech was done. Well, the six lines that I needed were written, anyway. I could just fill in the blanks tomorrow. I could make those six sentences turn into sixty or six hundred or even six thousand if I wanted to. As long as I had the bare bones of what I needed I would be fine. Why would anybody waste their energy writing down every word they were going to say? They should learn to trust themselves to come up with the right words at the right time, like I did.

  I knew I needed to speak for three minutes. I’d throw in a thing or two about gravity and ESP too. I would just add things as I went. After all, my nickname wasn’t Add for nothing. My brain was good at stuff like that. I was sure of it. The only thing I wasn’t one hundred percent sure about was my mouth. Like I said, sometimes my mouth is its own boss.

  Chapter Twelve

  Wednesday morning at school just flew past. Do you ever notice that when you want time to go slowly it speeds up? Like it’s getting back at you for wasting it. I really needed that time to practice my speech. Or at least my six lines of it anyway.

  At lunch we set up the food for the party in the party room. It was really the study room for the grade fives and sixes, but we called it the party room. I guess we were supposed to feel honored to have our own study room. “Party room” sounded a heck of a lot better to me. I mean, why would you waste a perfectly good room on studying?

  Everybody laid out their snacks for the party afterwards. I put my punch out smack in the middle of the table. It still looked a lot darker than Mom’s version, but maybe it was just the lighting in there. It sort of reminded me of the color of mud at the creek on a rainy day.

  Mrs. Wilson showed up for the afternoon. She promptly moved my punch out of the way and put Tiffany’s peanut butter cookies in the center of the table. Like daughter, like mother. She even shoved aside the ventriloquist’s dummy that Becky had used for her speech the day before. It must be pretty bad when you think a dummy is going to compete with your daughter for attention. Then again, it’s Tiffany we’re talking about. The dummy would win hands down.

  Miss Steane put the money we’d collected for the pizza in a bowl by the punch. She turned out the lights and closed the door. She told us that we weren’t allowed to go back in there until after the speeches were done and the pizza delivered. Then we could have our party.

  I was the last person to give my speech. I pretended to listen to the other speeches that afternoon, but really my mind was just racing. It was racing so fast that I couldn’t catch it. I kept reminding myself that I already had the six lines memorized, and that it would be easy to make up the rest. I’d just pretend I was talking to Sam, telling him some made-up story about fishing or baseball...

  All I needed to do was fill in the blanks for three minutes. The problem was I couldn’t really fill in the blanks when my whole mind was a blank. There was nothing to fill in. For some reason I couldn’t seem to concentrate on my speech. It must have been the chocolate bars I had at lunch. Mom had told me that too much sugar would give me a sugar rush. I wished the sugar would rush to my brain and give it a kick start.

  After recess, Mrs. Wilson came storming into the classroom, raving about how somebody had snuck into the party room and helped themselves to some snacks and some of my punch, which was now spilled all over the cookies and Becky’s dummy’s head. There was also some money gone from the pizza bowl. I was sure Mrs. Lamp was more worried about Tiffany’s precious cookies than the missing money.

  “Someone in here has been in the party room,” Mrs. Wilson growled, staring straight at me. Why does everyone automatically think that if something’s messed up, it’s me who did it? I guess I should be proud of myself for having people think I’m so powerful, but sometimes I get tired of being the first one to be accused.

  Miss Steane put on her sternest teacher voice. “All right, class. Whoever is responsible for taking the food and money, please own up to it right now. Don’t let this ruin our party.”

  There was silence as everyone squirmed. Nobody volunteered any information.

  Mrs. Wilson snarled, “We’ll find out who the thief is. There’s a way to find out. There’s always a way. We’ll just look for the evidence. It will show up. That student is going to pay.” She glared at every one of us, stopping extra long on me.

  I felt sorry for whoever did it. With Detective Lamp on the case, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

  “We’ll discuss this matter after the speeches are done,” Miss Steane said firmly. “Right now, let’s have the last two speakers.”

  Chris, the guy in front of me, gave his speech on whales. I pretended to listen. I should have been using that time to go over my own speech, but I couldn’t help thinking about Becky’s dummy instead. I could just imagine what it looked like with my punch all over it. Poor Becky would be really upset now. I’d have to give her some of Mom’s extra paper clips to take home to her mother, who was probably going to be mad. I heard the class clap. Chris took a bow. My hands started to sweat.

  “And finally, we have Addison Addley and The Things That Aren’t There.” I heard Miss Steane speak, as if from another planet. Everything seemed very far away.

  I’m really glad that my legs have a mind of their own because they somehow found their way to the front of the classroom.

  Everyone was quiet. They just stared at me, waiting for something. Then I remembered they were waiting for me to speak.

  I coughed. I blinked. I started my speech.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Miss Steane, honorable judges, and fellow classmates, do you ever wonder if something is really there?”

  I coughed again. I blinked again. The class waited. They waited some more. I heard someone blow his nose.

  I couldn’t remember a thing. My mind was suddenly as empty as a black hole. The Lamp’s mother must have thrown off my brilliant memorization skills. I wiped the sweat off my forehead.

  I thought hard. The harder I thought, the farther those six lines ran away from me.

  After a couple more seconds of dead silence, some wise guy at the back of the class started clapping. A couple more kids started giggling.

  I saw Sam trying to urge me on. He put his fingers in his mouth like he was going to whistle.

  “Oh yeah,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Like how a dog whistles really high.”

  Everyone laughed and then looked at me as if I was a complete moron. Which I was beginning to think I was. Everyone knows dogs can’t whistle.

  “Some people believe in microwaves,” I stumbled on. Now that was even more stupid.

  Why couldn’t I remember anything? It felt as if those six lines had suddenly decided to take a vacation. Even if I had remembered them, I realized that I didn’t actually know much about any of the things on my list. I guess I should have paid just a bit more attention to Sam and my mom and the dentist. Just this once.

  “Sometimes ghosts fall out of the sky because of gravity,” I said. That’s all I could think of to say on that topic. It’s hard to talk about something you don’t even like to think about.

  Everyone continued to stare at me like I was a lunatic.

  There were words in the back of my brain. They just didn’t seem to come together properly. Sort of like how numbers never seem to come together properly for me. I knew there was something about black holes, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what a black hole was. I wished I could crawl into a black hole right then and there.

  I scrunched up my eyes to try to jog my brain into action. I ground my teeth together. My teeth, X-rays ....

  “Oh yeah, dentists use X-rays to find black holes in your teeth,” I said. “Sometimes they use ESP too.”

  Everybody looked as confused as I felt. Now I felt confused and stupid. That’s not a great combination. This was getting ridiculous. I had to make some sort of sense about at least one thing on my list.

  I could talk about wormholes. I knew wormholes had something to do with time travelling and secret p
assageways, but I couldn’t remember what. I wished that I could time-travel out of the classroom to another planet right then and there. I wouldn’t even care if a whole team of aliens in ufos came to get me.

  I saw Tiffany sneering at me from her front-row desk. She yawned and went cross-eyed. She put her fingers in her mouth like she was trying to gag. I knew I had to think fast. At the very least, I knew I had to talk fast.

  That was it. Finally I knew what I had to do. I’d have to rely on my trusty old mouth instead of my not-so-trusty brain. I’d start with wormholes.

  I took a deep breath and let my mouth run wild.

  “How many people here like fishing?” I started.

  A few people put up their hands.

  “Well, do you ever go fishing and forget the bait?” I asked the class. “Then you don’t know what to do. You decide to look around for some worms, but you don’t see any. But you do see these little hills and lines of dirt. You’re happy because you know that there must be worms around, because something had to have made those little wormholes. You see, you can’t see the worms, but you know they’re there because of the holes. They’re things that aren’t there, but they really are.”

  I looked at Sam for support. He looked like he was going to strangle me after class. He’d spent all that time researching the topic, and I had just thrown it out the window. He shook his head and then scratched his nose and shook his head again. He must have been even more nervous than me.

  I was on a roll now. I remembered there was something about atoms.

  “Remember last year when we almost lost the baseball tournament?” I continued. “Well, what saved us was our lucky charm. It was Adam’s little green plastic frog. We’d won every game before that when he wore it under his hat, but he lost it just before the tournament. We thought we were done for sure.”

  I didn’t bother telling the class that the frog wasn’t really lost. I had borrowed it to try to scare Tiffany, but I’d decided to flush it down the toilet instead for an experiment.

  “Anyway, we imagined that we still had Adam’s frog for good luck. We concentrated and pretended it was there, just under his hat. We pretended it was there for the whole game. It worked. We won the tournament. It was all because of something that wasn’t there, but we imagined it was.”

  Atoms, Adam’s, what’s the difference? They were close enough. Wow, I was good, if I did say so myself.

  Miss Steane had her eyes shut as if she didn’t know what to think. Either that or she had a really bad headache.

  Some of the kids were nodding. That was a good sign. I think. By now Sam looked like steam was coming out of his nose. I thought he was going to blow up.

  I looked at my watch. About one minute had gone by. I had two more to go.

  I shouldn’t have looked down at my watch because that seemed to stop my mouth.

  Now both my brain and my mouth were quiet. Too quiet. I started to feel panicky again, but suddenly I remembered auras.

  “Listen,” I whispered. “Look around you really carefully and sort of squint like this.” I showed them how to do it. “If you kind of go a bit cross-eyed, you can see weird colors around people.” I tried to sound as mysterious as I could. “There’s some sort of stuff that comes out of them, some sort of energy or something.”

  I blabbed on for a whole minute about colors and what they meant. I told them how there were many different shades of the same color, so one color could mean different things. Blue was calm and peaceful. Red was sometimes energetic but sometimes nervous. I wondered if anybody could see red around me right then. Of course, maybe they saw lavender, which was the color of imagination and daydreamers. I then stood very still and pretended I could see auras around people’s heads. Everybody believed me. I saw everyone turn around and squint at each other.

  Things were looking up. I’d bought some valuable time while they looked for auras. I scrambled, trying to think of something else to say.

  It was then that the weirdest thing happened. I really did see my first aura. At least I thought I did.

  “For example, look at Tiffany,” I began excitedly. “She’s got this greenish color around her.” I swear I could actually see it. Maybe Sam had been right about this aura stuff. The problem was, it wasn’t just around her body like it was supposed to be. It was actually on her. On her face, to be exact.

  “Look at her,” I urged the rest of the class. “An aura is something that isn’t there, but it really could be. Concentrate hard and you’ll see the stuff coming out of Tiffany.”

  Everybody turned to stare at Tiffany. I couldn’t believe the Lamp’s face might actually save my speech. It was usually red and shiny, but now it was definitely grayish green and damp. It was getting greener and damper by the second.

  The Lamp raised her hand.

  “Not now, Tiffany,” Miss Steane said. “We’re in the middle of a speech. It’s rude to interrupt it.”

  That was nice of Miss Steane, but for once I wished she had given Tiffany what she wanted. No sooner had she put her hand down than she bolted up from her desk, took two steps toward me and threw up the most disgusting stream of liquid I’d ever seen.

  It was brown, like the color of mud at the creek on a rainy day. About one and a half cups of it, I reckon.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Everyone gasped as Tiffany flew out of the room with the disgusting junk dripping from her mouth.

  Miss Steane ran after her but came back to the class in a couple of seconds.

  “Mrs. Wilson has taken Tiffany to get cleaned up,” she said. “Let’s all try to settle down and hear the end of the speech. We’re sorry for the interruption, Addison.”

  “No problem,” I said. Heck, it was great. I’d have to thank the Lamp after school for throwing up. I guess she was telling the truth—I really did make her sick. Miss Steane had said that we could use props to make our speech better. I couldn’t think of a better prop than that.

  Besides, it had given me a few extra seconds to think. My brain kicked in at last.

  Without Tiffany in the room, those lines decided to come back from vacation.

  Black holes, wormholes, atoms and ghosts.

  With an open mind, you can see the most.

  I bowed. The class clapped, real clapping this time, not the polite stuff.

  Miss Steane looked at her watch. “It’s a few seconds short, but I guess that’s understandable since you were probably thrown off by Tiffany.”

  Like I said before, I like Miss Steane. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I liked Tiffany, but she’d sure come in handy today. I couldn’t have timed her green face any better if I had tried myself. Which, of course, I wouldn’t have.

  After Miss Steane recorded her marks, we all voted for our favorite speech. I voted for Becky.

  Miss Steane counted up the votes. We all held our breath. I thought for sure that Becky would win because everyone felt sorry for her. As long as it wasn’t Tiffany I didn’t really care.

  Miss Steane looked surprised. “This year’s contest was close,” she said, “but we have a winner. I have to admit that it was a strange but interesting speech. The favorite speech trophy goes to Addison Addley for The Things That Aren’t There,” she announced with a half-smile. She probably didn’t want to look too happy for me, even though she was.

  I couldn’t believe that I had actually won! As I said before, sometimes a big mouth is as handy as a big brain.

  I accepted the trophy from Miss Steane and took a big bow. The trophy was a cup with two little handles and a plaque. I would have preferred a gold medal or something I could sell later on, but winners can’t be choosy.

  I don’t like to brag, but maybe I really did deserve the trophy. Miss Steane had said that the speech had to be entertaining, and, boy, had I been entertaining. Well, at least my special effects had been. I guess everybody had enjoyed watching Tiffany throw up. It sure beat listening to the history of industrialization or learning how to be polite. I guess T
iffany had learned something from her own speech though. After all, she had tried to excuse herself politely before she got sick.

  I was just about to take another bow when Mrs. Wilson stormed into the class. She practically ran right at me.

  “What did you put into that punch?” she yelled.

  The punch? Mom’s prize-winning punch? What did that have to do with anything?

  Then I remembered the stream of stuff coming out of Tiffany’s mouth. She must have been drinking it. That would explain the mud brown color she had spit out. What I couldn’t understand was why it would have made her sick. It was Mom’s prize-winning punch. Everybody liked it.

  “Answer me,” the Lamp’s mother continued to yell. I didn’t know why she was so upset. If her daughter hadn’t been so greedy, none of this would have happened.

  “I followed a recipe,” I explained. At this point I didn’t want to tell her it was Mom’s recipe. I had the feeling Mrs. Wilson wasn’t too impressed by the punch.

  I fumbled around in my pocket. “Here. See for yourself,” I said, handing her a crumpled piece of paper with some used gum on it. I pulled off the gum to save for later.

  Miss Steane took the recipe from the Lamp’s mother. She smoothed it out and read the list of ingredients and instructions. “Are you sure you followed the recipe exactly, Addison?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I multiplied everything by three to get enough for the class,” I said proudly. “I didn’t even use my calculator.” Miss Steane read the list back to me.

  1 cup organic grape juice x 3 = 3 cups

  2 cups organic cranberry juice x 3 = 6 cups

  1 cup organic orange juice x 3 = 3 cups

  2 cups organic iced tea x 3 = 6 cups

  3 tsp organic honey x 3 = 9 tsp

  2 tsp organic flaxseed oil x 3 = 6 tsp

  ½ cup organic soy milk x 3 = 3 ½ cups

  “Three-and-a-half cups?” Miss Steane asked. “That’s wrong, Addison. One half cup times three is three half cups or one-and-a-half cups. It’s not three-and-a-half cups. You put in far too much soy milk.”