“Me neither. Maybe I’ll go with you.”
We grimaced at each other. It was a moment of true desperation. I was briefly aware of kind of liking my sister, and sorry I got the curly blond hair she wanted, because straight and brown wouldn’t have bothered me. The thought occurred to tell her about the Hole in the Wall. But I got over that quickly.
“Sebby!” Ma shouted from the kitchen door. “Don’t make me come out there and get those eggs myself!”
“On the bright side, we found ’em!” I said to Barbie. “My stomach kills if I bend over in the closet. How about you throw me the eggs and I’ll put them in the basket?”
She picked up the closest one and shook her head in wonder. “It looks perfectly normal, but it feels like a rock,” she said, then pitched it to me like a baseball.
Man, I wished I’d had a glove on when it hit my hand. It smarted! And the egg didn’t even crack! The instant I caught it, colors started shimmering in the shell just like Odum’s pebble did when I held it. Come to think of it, that pebble was getting pretty worked up in my sock right now, pulling on my ankle like it was trying to drag me into the chicken pile.
I put the egg in the basket and stepped outside the closet. The egg and the rock both calmed down. Then I looked in at Barbie, hoping she hadn’t seen any of the wondrous special effects. Luckily, she was leaning into the hole with the flashlight. Then she turned and pitched me another egg. My stomach lurched again, and suddenly I realized what was going on.
The cookie dough in my stomach was attracted to the petrified chickens and their eggs! And so was Odum’s rock! They all had something in common. Something to do with the strip mine?
At that moment what I wanted more than anything was to figure out what Boots Odum was up to. And the last thing I needed was Barbie running into the house screaming about the magic evil that had possessed me. Ma would call the doctor and the minister and maybe even a lawyer, and then any chance of solving the mystery on my own would be all over. Odum would find out and make everything go his way.
To keep Barbie from seeing the eggs go Easter on me, I caught the rest of them in the basket as she threw them. It was the most fun I’d had all day. Then Barbie paused and said, “Aw!” in a sad kind of voice. “Come see this, Seb.”
I leaned in as far as my cookie dough would let me and looked where she shone the light. On top of a hen sat a half-grown chick, not moving a feather.
“What if it’s still alive?” she said.
“Pick it up and find out.”
“No, you.”
“Mister Sebastian Alfred and Miss Barbara Arleene, now!”
On the bright side, Ma was just screaming her lungs out from the front steps. The next stage would be, well, not worth going there. We had to hurry. “So, Shish, what do you want to do?”
With her toe she nudged at the chick until it lay next to the hen I’d pulled out through the door. Both of them stared at us like unwound cuckoos. “Aw,” she said again.
“You know,” I said, “it’s not like telling Ma the whole truth now would bring her chickens back to life. We could wait until, say, after roller skating.”
Skating is Barbie’s favorite two hours of the week. It’s the one thing that might tempt her to forget she’s a goody-goody who would never expect Ma to waste her money on selfish fun when her only source of extra income was expiring behind the chicken coop.
“Hm. Yeah, it’s bad enough that we have to hand her a basket of eggs that could be rocks. We should let her get used to that idea first. We can break it to her gently about the chickens.”
“After Pa goes out,” I added.
Miss Barbara Arleene Daniels smiled. I had her. “I’ll take the eggs in for you,” she said. “I still have to clean the bathroom, anyway.”
She didn’t need to know that Ma had told me to help her with that. “Good idea. I’ll stay out here and work on this mess.”
9
At Skate Away, you can lose yourself to the speed with the wind in your face. Your only problem is the people in front of you and how to aim yourself between them without knocking them over or slowing yourself down. It’s great to be alive. But it’s not so great to be in a crowd of people when you have a half-grown chick stuck to your belly. That’s why, instead of buying tickets when we got to Skate Away, I steered Barbie out the back door. Where no one else could see my newest complication, I unzipped my raincoat and pulled up my hoodie to show her.
The chick she’d found in the hen pile faced her, sticking to my T-shirt like a magnet on a refrigerator.
“You freak!” Barbie yelped. She jumped back and rustled the shrubs. Water sprayed my face. And my chick. “No wonder you wore your raincoat to lunch. And Ma believed you when you said it was your space suit. Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?”
“Don’t worry, Shish. My cookie dough and my chick are very happy together.” I patted the chicken’s head dry. “It happened by accident when I was cleaning up the henhouse.”
I was gonna toss the chick and that first chicken back where they came from, shut the door, and stack some junk on the shelves so there wouldn’t be any explaining to do if Ma or Pa happened to come in. But the moment I picked up the chick, it felt like a magnet yanking on my hands. It flew itself to my stomach and stuck there. I pulled and pulled but it wouldn’t budge. But I sorta didn’t mind. It took my bad stomachache away. In fact, my stomach felt kind of happy, in a woozy driving-over-a-hill kind of way. But one small chicken on the stomach was enough. To play it safe I used a shovel to move the bigger one.
I wanted to explain all this to the Shish, except I had barely started the first sentence when she put her hands to her big open mouth and bit back a scream.
“Now what?” I said. I was losing patience.
“Did you see that? The chick’s eyes moved! It’s still alive!”
“You’re nuts.”
“Pet her head again and watch her eyes.”
This time I bent my neck like Miss Beverly to get a view of the chick’s face. “Awesome!”
“Only you would find this acceptable.”
“Don’t you think she needs a name now? How about Celery?”
“Why Celery?”
“After that science experiment when Ms. Byron had us put celery in colored water to show us how the Petrified Forest turned to rock. My celery turned blue the fastest. Remember?”
“And you can’t remember that is is a verb! So, are you and Celery planning to live happily ever after, or are you going to let Ma take you to the emergency room like a sane person?”
“No, I want to go see Miss Beverly. She invited us back any time, didn’t she?” While I talked I waved my hand back and forth in front of Celery, watching her eyes move. It was so cool.
“What’s Miss Beverly gonna do? She’s no doctor.”
“But she’ll let us into Boots Odum’s house, and I have to find out what he’s up to.”
She just shook her head, staring at me and Celery like we were crazy.
“Well, hey, I’m the one with the chicken blinking up at me, not you. I’m going. You can come with me, or you can go skating. I don’t care.”
Without looking back at her, I headed off toward the bike trail that ran through the woods behind the businesses on Main Street. Pretty soon I heard feet squishing behind me on the wet ground.
“Does it hurt?” the Shish whispered. I was a tiny bit glad to hear her voice.
“No, it actually makes me feel better,” I said, and explained everything as we trudged along. It didn’t take long for my socks to get soaked up to my ankles because of the holes in my sneakers.
After a while Barbie said, “Look, there’s Boots Odum’s house.” She pointed at some trees where the shingles showed between them.
As the path turned, the mansion appeared to grow in under the shingles. But the backyard didn’t seem to belong to the front, it was such a mess. From the road you couldn’t see the tumbledown stone wall, overgrown garden, old cars, boats, and
other junk holding up weeds. At the end of a path to the house stood a weather-beaten barn that could have come from the gore, it looked so ramshackle. And suddenly, due to no plan of my own, I was heading straight toward it.
Celery and Cookie were pulling me by the stomach. I could either go where they wanted or hang onto a tree and scream. I had to pedal my legs hard to keep up with them.
“Seb, where do you think you’re going?” Barbie yelled as I reached for the doorknob.
“In out of the rain,” I said. I had a feeling that if I didn’t open the door, I’d be stuck to it. Like Celery was to my belly. So I went inside and whoa!
A flash of rainbow colors flew across the room straight at me. I turned around just in time for whatever it was to hit my back with a SPLAT! I doubled over screaming with the pain I expected to stab me. Only it didn’t hurt at all. Celery stopped pulling so hard. My stomach felt swirly, however. Was I finally going to lose the dough?
Barbie slipped through the door. I turned around to show her what had hit me. She gasped. Again. She’d been doing a lot of gasping lately, and putting her hands over her mouth, like she was right now.
“How did that happen?” she said.
“What do you see?”
“It’s that pattern again. The curlicues. Like the black marks on the henhouse wall. Except in color.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“What did you expect? A picture of your chick from the back?”
I had to smile. That would make a good T-shirt. But Barbie wasn’t smiling. “Let’s get out of here, Seb!”
Instead I stepped deeper into the barn and looked around. What a mess! Books and papers crammed between piles of tools, gadgets, beakers, burners, and jars. Even in the bathroom. Walls plastered with maps and design drawings. Newspaper clippings. The cluttered desk had a bulletin board over it pinned with papers and pictures going every which way. A couple of the notes looked so much like Jed’s handwriting that my heart skipped a beat. I took one down and studied it. It said:HOW CAN YOU TELL IT’S RAINING CATS AND DOGS?
YOU STEP IN A POODLE
It even sounded like Jed! I guessed Boots Odum must have a decent sense of humor.
Littering the floor was a trail of empty Styrofoam cups cut from an egg carton, all stained like they’d had paint in them. Which they probably did before the colors decided to fly onto my raincoat. As I walked by them, they jiggled a little. One of them stuck to my sock like a burr. Yes, the same sock with my rock rolled up in it. I yanked the egg cup off me and tossed it into the garbage can. At least Barbie hadn’t noticed—too busy peeking between the window blinds.
The trail of egg cups ended in front of the folding closet doors at the far side of the room, where a painting of a giant Easter egg sat on an easel. The egg was decorated with dozens of swirling curlicues made up of hundreds of swirling rainbows made up of thousands of millions and billions and trillions of colors, or at least it looked that way to me. The colors seemed to be in motion. “Is that what it looks like on my back?” I asked Barbie, pointing.
“Yyyeeesss. Can we go now?”
As I walked closer to study the details, a faint musical sound rang in my ears. Suddenly I felt like part of the painting, swirling among the colors, invisible. I vaguely sensed Barbie calling to me from far, far away. Then I felt a yank on my arm, but something stronger was pulling me toward the Easter egg. With a clattering sound, the canvas jiggled on the easel. Barbie gave up on pulling me and pushed the easel into the bathroom, then slammed the door and leaned against it.
“Now can we go?”
“Uh, yeah!” I wished. I stepped toward the entrance, but Celery wanted to follow the painting into the bathroom. She pulled, I pulled back, and we turned in circles like a corkscrew as Barbie nagged me to stop goofing off and hurry.
On one of my spins, the computer screensaver on Odum’s desk caught my eye. My brother’s cat! Or at least I thought so. Stupid’s face flashed briefly on the screen, then split apart into dots and stripes that twisted and turned. Then they became the cat again.
“Quick, Barbie, look, it’s Stupid!”
“What now? Everything’s stupid to you.”
“On the computer. It’s Jed’s cat! Oh yeah, that reminds me, Ma said to stop giving him milk. It’ll make him sick.”
“What are you talking about? I didn’t give the cat anything.”
“That’s what I said. Must be Grum, then. She doesn’t want Stupid to get osteoporosis.”
“Well, I doubt that was Jed’s cat you saw here, anyway,” Barbie said.
By now the screen saver had moved on to other pictures. “Wait until it comes back around and you’ll see,” I said.
She crossed her arms and jiggled her foot nervously as she waited through photos of places around Kokadjo, B.O. and A.O. Meanwhile, I sat down—Celery didn’t seem to mind that—and pawed through some things on Odum’s desk, papers and books with big words I didn’t get. I rifled through the closest science book.
“Shish, what’s an isotope?”
“No clue. Look, Seb, waiting for the cat is taking too long. Can we go now?”
“What about turbulence? Or chirality?”
“That would be the sound your head will make when Boots Odum catches us in here. Will you hurry up?”
I spun the big globe on the desk. It had pins pricked into it here and there around the world. One was exactly where Kokadjo would be if Kokadjo were big enough to be on a globe. There were pins in every continent and ocean. Why had Boots Odum marked those places?
I jumped up to study the maps on the walls. One had a picture I’d seen in school of the continental divides showing all the tectonic plates. That map had a pin stuck in the Atlantic. And in very faint colored pencil lines, someone had drawn a swirling pattern with shading to make it look three-dimensional. Beginning at the pin and going underneath the ocean. All the way back to a pin marking Kokadjo. Around the edges of the map were newspaper clippings about natural disasters all over the world—earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis.
“Oh . . . my . . . Godzilla,” I said. “Look at this, Barbie. Does this mean what I think it means? ORC’s mining is causing all this damage!”
Barbie took a quick look and shook her head really fast. “No way,” she said. “Impossible. Boots Odum is just . . . just an artist. A really good artist. This must be his plan for a painting.”
The sketch was beautiful, just like all of the artwork Miss Beverly had shown us in the house. But what if it was more than that? What if whatever ORC was mining did have some powerful connection to other places in the world? It could be like when you pull a loose thread on the front of a sweater, and you wind up with a hole in the back. And somehow the cookie dough in my guts had put me in the middle.
Okay, now I was good and scared. “Hold the door, Barbie, I’m gonna make a run for it.”
“About time!”
We’d have been out of there in a flash if a dog in the next yard hadn’t picked that moment to start barking its head off. Was it barking at us, or was someone coming? I held my breath to listen.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel walkway leading to the barn.
10
“Hide! Someone’s coming!” I said, looking frantically around the room. The closest escape was the bathroom with the painting that liked me. Not a good idea.
“In here!” Barbie slid open the folding closet doors at the far end of the workshop, and we burrowed into the hanging coats as the barn door creaked open.
“Stanley? Stanley?” Thank goodness, it was Miss Beverly. I pictured her twisting her sorry neck around, searching for him. “Good afternoon, dear,” she said toward the bathroom door. Her voice sounded stretched out, worried. “Forgive me for intruding, but I heard you out here, and thought you could use a cup of coffee after being up all night trying to find an antidote for, you know. . . .”
She walked into the room, her footsteps creaking the wood planks, then lightly knocked at the bathroom door. I could har
dly hear it with my heart thundering in my ears. I held my breath, hoping she wouldn’t discover that Boots wasn’t in the john after all. Even though his latest masterpiece was.
“I’m sorry, Stanley,” she said with tears in her voice. “I know you told me not to use those eggs, but I thought you just meant for cooking. They were the only ones we had in the house, and they looked perfectly fine, so I didn’t think it would hurt to use them in the balm recipe. Who would have thought it would . . . oh, please don’t be mad. . . .”
Now I was holding my breath so I wouldn’t miss a word. Eggs? Our petrified eggs? Miss Beverly had used them, and now Boots was mad at her? Why? What had gone wrong? If I wasn’t trespassing I’d have popped out and asked her.
The Hole in the Wall Page 8