The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [6]
I hopped to sixth grade homeroom on one foot pretending I was a stork, then quickly finished scribbling my math so I could get my sneaker back. I even felt pretty good about a couple of the answers. Not Ms. Byron. She shook her head sadly as she handed my page back, with a tiny red zero in the corner like a swatted gnat. I wondered if giving bad grades hurt Ms. Byron more than it hurt us.
“Sebastian, you’re obviously having some trouble with numbers. You did page 127 instead of 238. How about you and I stay after school and get you caught up?”
The class thought that was very funny. But Grum says there’s always a bright side, and there was. At least now I had a good excuse to walk home. It was only a mile if I cut across the gore, and I could go straight to the Hole in the Wall instead of having to slip through the clutches of Grum and Pa. They always had their own ideas about how I should spend my time.
That afternoon after doing page 238 (and 230, and all the pages in between) I zipped down the block to the IGA on Main Street. Behind the garbage dumpsters out back a big old tree had broken during an ice storm and left a branch leaning over the tall fence that surrounded the gore. That branch was how I got in A.O. on the town side. On the home side, I slipped between two gigantic boulders they hadn’t crammed together closely enough to stop me and my bike.
You wouldn’t use either the front or the back gates if you wanted to sneak around ORC, since both were guarded by goons with guns. The roads all had lampposts with surveillance cameras on top looking around like birds of prey, and they broadcast menacing caw-caw-caw noises to keep real birds from nesting there.
To me those caws translated to a challenge: “Dare you to sneak by! Dare! Dare!” How could I resist? Besides, I was getting bored snooping around Zensylvania. The most exciting thing I’d ever seen there was Marigold hanging diapers on the clothesline. No, wait, it was when I climbed one of their trees in the winter and could see in our kitchen window. I caught Grum waltzing with a mop.
Poking around inside the gore wasn’t anything like looking down on it from Kettle Ridge. It was still disgusting, in concept, but being in the middle of it was also very, very interesting. After two years of sneaking I knew the gore inside out. Well, everything that wasn’t inside the Onion, anyway. The inner compound was a lichen-green dome half buried in the middle of the triangle like a gigantic overripe onion. If you looked down on it from a plane, it would blend in with the ground so you wouldn’t even know it was there. To find it you’d have to practically bump into it, like I did the first year of the mining.
It had been a cold day in November, before the first snow. One second I was combing for rocks, and the next second I was staring through an electric fence that seemed to pop up out of nowhere. A big barking blur of black was coming at me. It was a hungry Doberman, and there were more where he came from. If not for the fence I’d have been Kibbles ’n Bits. Luckily my surge of terror adrenaline got me out of there before the goons could catch me.
After that I went back and found a slag pile where I could spy from a distance without getting the Dobermans stirred up from their underground kennels. Mornings when I didn’t have school I borrowed Grum’s binoculars and hid there. I saw how the goons scanned their hands in front of an electric eye to make the gate open, and then how they disappeared into a tunnel that led to some underground parking area. The compound had