The Hole in the Wall (6 page)

Read The Hole in the Wall Online

Authors: Lisa Rowe Fraustino

Tags: #Technology & Engineering, #Mining, #Family, #Action & Adventure, #Environmental Science, #Mines and mineral resources, #Juvenile Fiction, #Family life, #Mysteries & Detective Stories, #General, #Supernatural, #Science, #Twins, #Fiction, #Soil pollution, #Brothers and sisters

BOOK: The Hole in the Wall
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“Uh, candy?” I said.
“Would you like some?” Miss Beverly said. “I’m sure I have goodies left from Halloween, and candy canes from Christmas. Come on in and let me find you a treat. But first you must tell me your names.”
“I’m Sebby and she’s the—”
“I’m Barb,” the Shish said quickly, glaring at me out of one side of her face while the other smiled sweetly at Miss Beverly. How did she do that?
“Thank you, Miss Beverly, but we really shouldn’t impose on you,” Barbie said. “We just came over to deliver these eggs to Mr. Odum.” She held the carton out. “And if it’s not too much trouble, my mother would like the carton back next time you want a refill.”
“Eggs? Oh, yes, Stanley had quite the sparkle in his eyes when he told me someone would be dropping by with them. Someone! That trickster! He knew you children were coming to make my day! Well, hurry in so we won’t heat the outdoors. The money’s in the kitchen.” She took the carton and shooed us inside.
The first thing I saw was myself in a hall mirror. Holy oops. I’d taken off without changing my clothes. My old jeans were frayed at the bottom from when they used to drag on the ground, but now my bed-knob ankles stuck out over my mismatched socks. Grass stains floated like green clouds above the knees. I’d always been kind of husky, but now I looked skinny, except across the shoulders. My T-shirt stretched tight on top. And it was on inside out. I didn’t have to sniff to know I was carrying half the chicken coop around on my grubby sneakers. The last time I combed my hair was before church last Sunday. No wonder Barbie was so embarrassed by me.
“You have a beautiful home,” Barbie said, and then I turned to take it all in. The room was all gussied up with antique furniture, paintings, statues, flowers. The floor was the glossiest wood I’d ever seen. Curtains, velvet. They looked like wine.
“It’s nice enough,” said Mrs. Odum, wincing, “but it’s hard to keep clean. Stanley pitches in when he can. He wants to hire a cleaning lady, but I told him I know how to keep house, thank you. People don’t belong anywhere they can’t take care of their own messes, that’s what I say.”
“Cleaning is hard work,” Barbie said sympathetically. “We do a lot of that at our house, too.”
“Miss Beverly, you got any . . . M&M’s?” I said, poking the Shish in the ribs.
“Why, Sebby, I just might!” Miss Beverly said.
“Will you please shut up?” Barbie whispered with an elbow back at me. Wow, she’d definitely gotten shorter. She stuck me in the arm instead of the head.
All the way to the kitchen Miss Beverly described the treats she might have hidden away, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was too in awe of the sights on the walls. The artwork was amazing. Paintings of ferns and broccoli and waterfalls, shells and Queen Anne’s lace and trees, all from different angles that showed the little details you usually never notice. Every nook and cranny held a sculpture. Even the antique furniture looked like it ought to be in a museum.
Barbie stepped on the back of my sneaker when I stopped to stare at the humongous painting at the top of the staircase. It showed a planet from outer space. The landforms looked like Earth, but it wasn’t your typical big blue marble. Beautiful patterns of color swirled down from the coastlines, meeting in the middle in whirls of lava. Somehow the artist had made the flat canvas seem like a magical globe, like you could reach inside the painting all the way to China. The water moved with the tides; the lava looked molten.
“You like that painting?” said Miss Beverly proudly. “My son gave it to me for Christmas. He used some newfangled paint he’s working on to make spacecraft stronger.
Land of the Adri
is the title, whatever that means. He tried to explain, but I didn’t understand. Too many fancy words. That one is called
Fractal.
” She gestured toward the broccoli we’d just passed.
Or was it broccoli? From this angle it looked like the coast-line on a map. One minute it was a head of broccoli, the next it was the world.
The next painting looked like one of the sketches I’d drawn of the maple branches at the Hole in the Wall. Only Odum’s was way better. I had a lump in my throat so big I couldn’t breathe. I always get this embarrassing lump when I see something beautiful. One time when I went to a museum on a class trip, I walked around with a lump in my throat all day, hoping nobody could see it from the outside. Looking at the art in Boots Odum’s house, I thought I’d suffocate.
Miss Beverly smacked me on the back to help me catch my breath. “Thank you,” I said. “Those paintings rock.”
“They certainly do,” Miss Beverly said with a smile. “I’m sorry about all this dust and cat hair.” She sounded discouraged. “Come along, we’ll fix you up with a glass of lemonade.”
She did seem the type to have twenty-seven cats, and on the way to the kitchen, I looked around for them. I didn’t see any cats, but I did see a few hairballs caught on chair legs.
Meanwhile, Miss Beverly kept talking. “I tell Stanley he should start an art gallery, he’s so talented, but he says he’s too busy with his engineering. It keeps him going day and night, that corporation. Lucky he never got married and had kids. They’d never see him! He’s a workaholic.” She made it sound like a compliment, though. I wondered what it would be like having a workaholic for a father.
The kitchen was a huge, sunny room. Miss Beverly made us sit at the wooden table while she bustled about, pouring glasses of lemonade and pulling candy out of cupboards. In the middle of the table a fruit bowl sat heaped with big, shiny apples that you just knew were crunchy instead of squishy. Juicy green seedless grapes, which we hadn’t had for weeks because they were too expensive in the winter. And huge, fat oranges like I’d never had in my life, the kind you buy one at a time. We always got the mesh bags of skinny faded oranges.
And then there was the pebble. At first I thought I’d imagined it. While I salivated over the oranges, I could swear I saw colors flashing somewhere near the fruit bowl. Like those occasional flashes of color in the slag piles that drove me so mad. When I looked straight at the colors next to the fruit bowl, though, all I saw was a plain gray pebble. It could have been any pebble from the brook at my oasis.
I picked it up and held it to the light of the chandelier, hoping something would happen.
It did. Something incredible! The colors returned, every color imaginable, blinking in swirling shapes that seemed to reach out toward me. In an instant I was surrounded by gorgeous colors and shapes like one of Odum’s paintings. Sounds like wind chimes filled my head. For some reason I thought of the foaming colors yesterday in the brook near the Hole in the Wall.
Then, suddenly, an alien with three gigantic nostrils and five enormous brown eyes appeared before me, saying, “Earth to Sebby.”
Barbie peeled my fingers back from what I held.
“A rock! You nerd boy. Leave it to you to forget all about candy and the most delicious fruit in the world at the sight of a boring pebble.”
Boring? Couldn’t she see what I saw?
“Have an orange, Barbie, if you’d rather. Eureka!” said Miss Beverly, hauling half a bag of M&M’s out of a fancy dish.
Barbie set the pebble back where I’d found it. I watched it flit a few more colors at me before going gray.
Man, I felt confused. My brain often takes me places that I like way more than my real life, but I kind of always know I’m playacting. This time I wasn’t sure. When I held the rock up to the chandelier, I was really
there
inside those swirling shapes.
A faraway voice said, “Do you like that rock, Sebby?”
Barbie poked my arm, swallowed politely, and said, “Miss Beverly wants to know if you like that rock.”
All I could do was nod, but Barbie had plenty to say. “My brother’s always bringing rocks home as souvenirs, everywhere we go. He has rocks in his head.”
Miss Beverly smiled as if she understood. “Stanley too! You know, he has lots of those lying around. I’m sure he wouldn’t miss one little rock. Why don’t you keep that one, Sebby?”
“Wow. Do you really mean it?” I was so happy, my grin made my ears ache. Now I wouldn’t have to borrow the rock without asking. Which had just crossed my mind.
“Oh, sure, don’t worry about it,” she said with a casual swipe of her hand. “Stanley is the most generous man in the world. He’d give anyone the shirt off his back.”
I was starting to appreciate the side of Boots Odum that hadn’t flooded our basement or made Grum steal my bedroom. Happily I reached down the tight neck of my inside-out T-shirt to drop the art rock into my pocket. And I’d just swallowed my first handful of M&M’s—the chocolate kind—when the rock started to wiggle around like it was looking for a way out.
For real.
I screamed and flew out of there before Barbie could finish digging her nails into her orange.
The Shish caught up with me at the top of Kettle Ridge. I was staring off toward the Hole in the Wall, wishing I’d gone there instead of to Odum’s, catching my breath, and wondering if I’d just gone crazy. Do sane people think rocks can move?
She must have been pumping the pedals hard. She’d worked up a dripping sweat, and I could barely understand her as she huffed and puffed her words. “What’s wrong, Seb? Why’d you take off so fast?” She was worried about me.
What could I tell her? The truth was too embarrassing. How could I have ever thought a rock was wiggling around in my pocket? It had felt like it was throbbing against my heart. But any ding-a-ling could figure out that it was really the other way around. I’d never felt so stupid in my life. And a lot of the time I feel pretty stupid.
“I have a stomachache,” I said. Which was the truth. But I was trying not to think of that.
“Then why did you grab your
chest
like you were having a coronary before you took off?”
Before I said any more I wanted to see what that weird rock was up to now. During the wild ride, I’d rolled it into my sock to get it off my chest. When I loosened the material, the pebble fell to the asphalt and spun in loops. It made a wind-chime sound that flashed my memory straight back under Miss Beverly’s chandelier. Crazy!
As the pebble fell still and silent, I looked to see if Barbie had seen and heard it too. Her bike stood leaning against an oak. She herself had ducked behind the tree. All I could see of her was half her face with one enormous surprised eye. She was scared.
I knelt to pick up the pebble.
“Leave that thing alone, Seb! There’s something wrong. It might hurt you.”
“Sheesh, take it easy. It’s just a rock. Hey, when I was fiddling with it at Miss Beverly’s, did you see anything strange?”
“You mean, like, besides you waving that thing around with your eyes crossed?”
“No colors?”
“You mean the colors from the chandelier?”
Oh, right. I hadn’t thought of that. The light was made of stained glass. Maybe staring into that had made my eyes go kaleidoscope. Had I imagined the whole thing after all? I wanted to find out.
The sun was an orange ball hanging low over the western hills. I held the pebble up so it was encircled by orange light and flopped it around in a figure eight. Well, I found out, all right. Instantly the pebble went blinky again. In fact, the more I flopped it, the more excited it got, swirling with bright colors in arcs like a butterfly’s wings flying toward me, and making that soft wind-chime music. It was so beautiful, I could barely breathe past the lump in my throat.
The next thing I knew, the music in my ears morphed into a wild shriek.
Aaaaargh!
Barbie. She’d come running up behind me to give my hand a hard smack. The rock went flying into the dead oak leaves beside the road and sat there looking gray, forlorn, and kickable.
“Hey!” I said, running to its rescue.
Barbie raced after me and tackled me to the ground. My hand reached the pebble first, and the moment I touched it, the thing started winking colors again. Then Barbie jammed her hand under my arm to tickle me. Me and Barbie probably had our first knock-down drag-out in the womb. She was born knowing all my weak spots. I doubled over groan-laughing, and she grabbed the pebble away. The colors instantly stopped. Jumping up she thrust her arm back as if to throw a shotput, aiming across the road and over the cliff into the gore.
“No! That’s my rock!” I cried, lunging at her knees, taking her down. And we rolled around wrestling, like we’d done so many times before. Except this time, as I pushed on her and she pushed back, I felt like I was the stronger one, like it wasn’t even a fair fight anymore. I knew I ought to quit before she got hurt. But I wanted that rock. It was awesome. It might even contain the secret to what Boots Odum was doing in the gore.
No way could I let my sister throw it over the cliff.
6
On second thought, maybe me having superior strength was just enough to make things even. Barbie was really limber. When I pinned her down by the arms, she flipped her legs up around my waist and rolled me over. So then I pinned her by the legs, and that was even worse. She tickled me weak. Finally I sacrificed my sense of honor and pulled her shirt up. I’m not proud of that, but it got the job done. She let go of me in shock, and I got hold of the pebble long enough to sink it deep into my pants pocket where I knew she would leave it alone.

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