The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [31]
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,