The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [52]
“Toward the commune!” Barbie realized. “Too bad Cluster’s gone. We could ask her if she knows of any caves back there that we could try. It could take us days to find an entrance on our own. And then, more days to find our way to the cavern. If there’s even a way at all.”
She was pretty right, because me and Grum’s binoculars hadn’t spotted any caves when we were on our Zensylvania reconnaissance missions. But then again, we were more focused on windows than holes in the ground. Anyway, I had another idea.
“There may be someone else up in Zensylvania who can help us,” I said, excitedly, since it would allow me to kill two birds with one stone, as Grum would say. Although really we were trying to keep the birds alive. “Jed.”
“Jed? At the commune? You mean, like, now?”
“Yeah, still,” I said, and then explained in a big long sentence with no breath (so Barbie wouldn’t have a chance to cut me off) the reasons why I thought he’d been living there all this time. “So, we should go up there right now, find him, and have him explain what the heck.”
And then in her own big long sentence of revenge Barbie talked me out of my idea because if our runaway brother had been living at the commune all this time, wouldn’t A) Cluster have let it slip to us, or B) Jed have moved away with the rest of the commune, or C) he have at the very least gotten out of there before Odum’s goons fenced him in?
“What do you mean, fence?” I said.
“The fence they already had half built yesterday afternoon. Don’t you remember us talking about it on the way to skating? How, like, dozens of goons were up on Kettle Ridge cutting branches and unrolling this thick wire mesh all around the tree trunks at the edge of the property?”
Uh, no. I vaguely remembered voices buzzing in the SUV, and one of them might possibly have been mine, but the major thing I remembered from that ride was hiding my petrified pet chick and planning how I was going to explain it to Barbie.
Yesterday afternoon seemed like a long time ago now.
“Oh, yeah, good point about the fence,” I said, taking her word for it. “But where else could Jed have been to know about that cookie dough in my guts? Can you answer me that?”
Barbie thought a moment, slowly turned, and pointed toward the boarded up feed closet.
I banged my hand on my head. Why didn’t I think of it first? “Of course! He’s been living in the tunnels this whole time!”
“Well, not necessarily. He could be living anywhere, but if he knows other entrances to the tunnels, he could easily sneak back here to keep an eye on us. Or an ear.”
“So to save the chickens, we have to find Jed.”
“Fat chance of that! No, we have to find another entrance to the tunnels. C’mon, Seb, when you and your spaceship brain are out exploring, have you ever seen another cave nearby?”
That question did it. Duh! Of course I’d seen another cave. Many a time. It didn’t lead to the tunnel where Celery got her life back, but it might work the same magic. It was in the same chunk of mountain.
So I told Barbie about the Hole in the Wall, and we decided to take the petrified hens there. We had to do something with those chickens, whether or not we could save them. We couldn’t just leave them sitting on their nests with their pathetic eyes and let Ma find them like that. She already thought Odum had kidnapped them anyway, so why not take them to the gore to live? (Or not.)
But first we had to suffer through the weekly butt torture better known as church. There was no getting out of it with the Ma and Grum tag-team ironing the dress pants and pointing to the shower. It was only an hour of sitting on the hard pew but it felt like eternity on my aching back. Slouching usually made it better, but that day it only made the pain worse. So did jiggling.
“It’s all the jiggling you do that makes your butt hurt,” Jed once told me. “Resistance is futile. You might as well sit still.” This was easy for him to say. After he started high school, Ma let him choose whether he wanted to go to church anymore, and he chose