The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [30]
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