The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [17]
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