The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [69]
We each took an arm or a leg, all four of us—Ma, Barbie, Jed, me—and carried Pa inside. Talk about heavy as a rock! Jed said Pa probably wasn’t much heavier than normal, though. “He just feels that way because he’s deadweight.”
“Ooh, deadweight,” said Ma. “I think that adrium stuff twisted your sense of humor.”
“I take offense at that, Ma,” said Jed. “My sense of humor has always been twisted.”
The chickens clucked and gathered around, expecting hand-outs of grain, but all they got was Pa plunked down with a THUD. “Here you go, ladies,” I said, rubbing my hands and making Ma laugh nervously as she adjusted Pa’s johnny to cover his sprawled legs.
“I still can’t believe what you told me on the way over here, Seb,” she said. “Colors flying out of chickens into rock walls. It sounds like some fantasy out of a children’s book!”
“How long does this take, anyway?” Jed said, looking warily down at Pa.
“The chickens only took a few minutes,” I said. “Do you feel anything?”
Jed looked down at his legs and smirked. “You know, I didn’t even think of that!”
“You could see if anything’s happening if you had the magic glasses on,” Barbie said.
“Dang!” I said, feeling my pockets. “I lost them.”
“They must still be here somewhere,” Barbie said. Both of us got on our knees and felt around in the blankets where we had gone to sleep just a few hours ago.
“So that’s where Grum’s quilt went,” said Ma.
“Aha, here we go.” I found the glasses and handed them to Ma.
She put them on and made the predictable noises. “Incredible. The stone is alive.” Then she stared intently at Pa. I couldn’t tell whether she was hoping he’d come back to life, or hoping he wouldn’t. I wasn’t sure what I thought about that myself. And then I felt bad for not being sure. You shouldn’t want your father to die, should you? But I couldn’t help but think it would solve a lot of problems. Then he wouldn’t have to decide to stay or go, to change or not change. We wouldn’t have to be scared of his temper anymore.
“Do you see any colors swirling out of him, Ma?” Barbie asked. Ma shook her head no and handed Jed the glasses. He gaped all around at the cave walls and tipped his head back to examine the ceiling. “Wow, this place is gorgeous. No wonder Stan couldn’t bear to mine his childhood getaway.”
“Huh?” I said. “What do you mean, his childhood getaway?! I mean, I know he owns the property, technically, but . . . but . . . ,” I sputtered. Everyone was giving me strange looks.
“Seb, this cave belonged to Stan before you were even a glint in Pa’s eye,” Jed said. “If not for this cave, Grum would probably still be living in the gore and Stan Odum would probably be a starving artist next door. He used to hang out here as a kid. The walls would sometimes seem to blink colors at him, and he became a scientist just to figure out the cause. That’s why he started ORC. He believes that the power of adrium could fuel distant space travel, if it can be controlled. There are exciting possibilities for adrium as a clean source of energy. At the very least it would have many uses in industry, medicine, defense, you name it. Anyway, this was Stan’s secret place first.”
“Oh,” I said.
Jed started pacing around, jostling elbows with everyone in the small area of the cave. He hit his head on the ceiling and rubbed it. “Shoot! Shouldn’t something have happened to Pa now?”
“He’s not a chicken,” I said.
“That’s for sure,” Jed said. “He’ll fight with anyone.”
But for once I wasn’t joking. “That’s not what I mean! The adrium flew out of the chickens quickly, but it didn’t leave my back right away. I don’t really even know when it happened.”
“Sometime after I scratched your back,” Barbie said. “Remember how itchy it was?”
Jed nodded along with me. “Itching is one of the early symptoms of adrification. My legs itched so much when I first woke up, I used to reach down my casts with chopsticks to scratch. When Dr. Mills caught me, she took away my chopsticks and gave me a turkey baster to squirt air instead. After the casts came off she