The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [54]
“Jeez, Ma, it’s not your homework! Pa’s gone one day and now you want to tell me what to do every minute!”
Barbie put her head in her hands in despair. I guess I’d gone a little overboard.
Grum didn’t say a word for once, but she didn’t need to with that look on her face. She let her glasses slide down her nose and challenged Ma over the tops of them.
Ma was going to blow, I thought. But she spoke calmly and even sounded amused. “This morning in church your teacher asked me if I received the letter she mailed home last week requesting me to check and sign your homework each day. And I had to tell her that somehow her correspondence had escaped my notice. Now, how did that happen, Seb?”
I looked at my feet. My toes waved their sympathy.
“That’s what I thought. As long as I have to sign your homework because you weren’t taking responsibility for it yourself, my darling son, then, yes, I will be telling you what to do. Now sit your derriere down and get that homework done without another word of sass, or you’re grounded for a week.”
So I had a choice. I stared at her, squinting and biting on my lips, trying to decide what to do. It took about three seconds. “All right,” I said. “I’m grounded. C’mon, Shish.” And out the door I went.
“Barbie, not you? Barbie?” Ma sounded so surprised, she could barely choke the words out.
“Sorry, Ma,” the Shish said, running behind me. Over her shoulder she called, “I’ll make him do the homework when we get back, though. I promise!”
“Where are you two going?” Ma called out the door. I was already on my bike.
“Don’t worry, Ma, we’re just taking over the world!” I cackled an evil laugh as I headed up Kettle Road.
“What’s this about?” Barbie huffed, pedaling hard to catch up. “I thought we decided the commune was not an option. We’re supposed to be taking the hens to your Hole in the Wall.”
“Decoy,” I said. “We can’t let her see us go into the henhouse or she’ll follow us. I’d follow me if I was her.”
Ma was already out in the middle of the road with her hands on her hips watching us.
“You and your big mouth,” Barbie said.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
After we rounded a corner and Ma couldn’t see us anymore, we steered off into the woods and waited there behind a pine tree until she came by in her car. Then we looped back, got the chickens we’d packed up before church, and entered the gore through the only bike-sized gap that existed in the big wall of boulders posted with shiny white AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY signs.
Barbie had stuffed a bunch of stiff hens into her school book bag, and I had loaded the rest into the large wicker backpack Pa used to carry when we went camping. Sometimes when I was really little he’d carry me in that backpack along with the bedrolls and the cans of baked beans. He’d tell the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, pretending he was the giant taking me home to eat. That was fun. Anyway, the stiff wicker felt good against my stiff back and actually made it easier to carry all that weight.
With all the unusual activity in the gore today, we had to be extra careful not to be seen. First we took the back way, cutting to the end of the first rib road, then straight across the rear of the mine to the oasis. Then we had to walk the bikes because the dirt between ribs was so loose, and in the really wet places it practically yanked us down by the feet.
“You didn’t tell me we had to go through quicksand,” Barbie said accusingly, as if she wouldn’t have come here had she realized.
“I didn’t know,” I said, and it was mostly true. I knew the dirt was loose and soggy, and I was always afraid it might suck me down into the middle of the earth if I stepped wrong, but I never thought before to call it quicksand.
Eventually we rounded the last slag pile before the Hole in the Wall, and my heart caught in my throat the same as always. The ravine would have been pretty anywhere, but it looked like a work of art sitting where it was. The forsythia bushes blazed yellow under the budding maples. Tucked into a hill at the back, my little hideaway stood like