The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [29]
“You can tell Ma, Barbie,” I said. “I’ll be on my bike. On my way to Canada. You know Pa’s gonna blame me for this, and I for one don’t want to be around to see it.”
“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