The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [59]
“Did not. You were here for lunch,” Barbie said.
“You make a better door than a window,” Jed said.
“Did I hear someone say ‘for Pete’s sake’?” Grum shouted from the bathroom. “The Lord knows . . .”
“Oh, there you are, Seb,” said Ma. “Did you have a good time on the roof? We ate all the goulash. Make yourself a peanut butter and jelly.”
“You know better than that, Claire,” Pa said. “Young man, get your sorry blankety-blank to bed without supper. That’ll teach you to miss a meal when it’s on the table.”
Nobody had even worried about me. I guess they’d already gotten used to me going off by myself. In fact, at this very moment, even though I’d been gone for hours and hours after she told me not to go anywhere, Ma probably wasn’t really worried about me. Mad, yes. Worried, no, not yet. She was probably sitting in front of the TV with her Word Search. Maybe sipping a glass of wine, since Pa wasn’t there. She never drank with him. Joking with Grum about how I’d be grounded for two life sentences when I got home. Make that three life sentences for dragging precious Barbie into my life of crime.
I didn’t want to spend my last minutes thinking about bad stuff. Barbie was sleeping so I took the magic glasses off her and let my imagination go wild as Sebastian Alfred Daniels, Space Explorer, finding new galaxies and discovering new kinds of natural resources for our dying planet, and sweet things to munch on, until Barbie woke up.
At first I thought she was having one of her nightmares, with all that screaming and kicking her way out of the covers. But she was wide awake. She grabbed me and hyperventilated, “Sebby, is the plywood caving in? Is this the end?”
And then I heard a noise humming outside like insects in your ears. A sound I knew well from all the time I’d spent in the gore. “Barbie, someone’s out there! Someone’s coming with a bulldozer!”
Breathing got really hard. I could hear Barbie wheezing. No, that was me wheezing. But someone was coming for us! We held each other and didn’t talk, just worked at breathing. I thought about all the new things I would do, and all the old things I wouldn’t do anymore, if only we could wake up alive in our own beds tomorrow. And then the engines stopped. What did that mean? Were they going away?
Oh, no! Maybe it wasn’t a rescue. Maybe the bulldozer had just come to tear up the oasis, finally mine every last ounce out of the gore’s rocks! I had no sense for how much time had passed. Maybe we’d slept through the night. Maybe it was Monday morning, a regular workday at ORC.
I leaped up and pounded on the door and screamed, “Help! Help! We’re in here!” I pounded like the door was someone I’d wanted to punch for a long time, pounded and pounded and screamed and screamed until I don’t think it was even real words coming out of me. I didn’t have the magic glasses on. And it was pitch-black, but I was seeing all sorts of bright colors all the same. I was in a rage. Man, I wasn’t ready to die. Not anymore. Not with actual people nearby.
And then I couldn’t scream anymore because my lungs had no air. I felt so dizzy, my legs melted out from under me as if they’d lost their bones. I was going to die five minutes before we were found. Typical me. It actually struck me as kind of funny. I started giggling between drags for breath. And crying. All at once.
Barbie knelt next to me and held my face and said, “Sebby, hold on! You can do it.”
And then another noise started, the most beautiful music in the whole world. It was the scrape scrape scrape of shovels in dirt.
Now Barbie jumped up to pound on the door and scream for help. Only not the wild and crazy way I did. And the scraping noise got closer. And finally the top of the plywood inched away. A strip of midnight blue sky appeared. Moonlight and voices poured through the crack—a man, a woman, hollering our names.
“Ma!” Barbie screamed.
“You kids in there?” The outline of a familiar left hand appeared, pulling at the edge of the plywood. I never thought I