Addison Addley and the Trick of the Eye (5 page)

I started with the porch steps. I covered one of the holes with a broken shutter from the shed. I couldn't cover both of the holes, because the squirrels liked to jump through them to get under the porch. I guess I could have built a separate squirrel-jumping hole on the side of the stairs, but that would have been too much work.

I took a break with a can of root beer, and then I spent the next three hours repainting, repairing and replacing. I would have rather been replaying my old video game, but sometimes you've just gotta make the sacrifice. I had to make our property look like a million dollars. It would have been easier to do if I really had a million dollars. I would have filled the yard with neat things like a roller coaster and an arcade. Maybe a miniature golf course would look good next to a fish pond. It's good to think green.

Finally I was finished. I inspected my work. Good thing Mom was at work. I wanted her to be surprised when she saw what I'd done. I had a feeling she was going to be more than surprised. Just how much more was what I was worried about.

Chapter Eight

“What got at your bushes? Some sort of wild animal?” Sam asked when he dropped by the next morning.

I was waiting for Sam out on the sidewalk in front of my house. “Close,” I admitted. An animal hadn't attacked the bushes, but I'd spent half an hour cutting those bushes to make them look like animals. I wanted them to look like the ones in the theme parks in Florida. I'd seen commercials with smiling mice and flying elephants greeting happy visitors. I guess they made people feel welcome. Personally, I would rather have free tickets to the park to welcome me instead of a bunch of chopped-up bushes. I thought Mom would like them though. I figured they would take the attention away from the house. I guess the scissors I'd used weren't too sharp because those bushes sure didn't look like animals now. At least not any animal I'd ever seen. Maybe something from a zoo on Mars.

“What happened to your front door?” Sam cried as he stepped past me.

It was nice of Sam to notice the door. I guess he couldn't really not notice it since it was bright orange. I wasn't sure about this illusion stuff and different people seeing different things though. Me and the guy who had bought the paint before both saw the same thing: No matter how you looked at it, that paint was still the ugliest color in the world.

At least the door looked new. The orange didn't match the green shutters of the house, but it did match the new fence.

I guess Sam hadn't noticed the fence yet, because he wasn't saying anything about it. I caught up to him. He was just standing there on the sidewalk, staring at the corner of our yard where the old shed was. I guess he couldn't believe the fact that I had remembered some stuff from science and art class. I remembered how Miss Steane had told us how to make a painting look like a window. I'd painted a picture of a dog on the shed. Then I'd painted a big frame around it, with lines that looked like window panes. It looked like the dog was inside the shed, looking out the window. I knew Mom would feel safer now since we didn't have a real watchdog. Any dog is better than none, even if it is an orange illusion.

Sam's mouth was hanging open. For once he didn't have anything to say. I didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. He turned and looked at the fence.

He just shook his head three times. That Sam. What a guy. Sometimes he just can't come up with the words to describe my great inventions. He's just too impressed.

I had to admit that the fence sure did stand out. I'd wanted something to catch your eye out in front so that you wouldn't look at the old shed so much. Boy, did that fence catch your eye. In fact it caught both eyes without even trying.

That white picket fence in the new development couldn't begin to compare to this one. And it hadn't cost me a penny. All of those broken hockey sticks and bats looked good all lined up with their points stuck in the ground. They were held together with fishing line. I'd had just enough paint left over from the door and the dog to paint them orange.

“Let's go,” Sam finally said, shaking his head once more. I guess he didn't have time to look at the work I'd done on the gate. Good thing, because the gum hadn't really worked all that well. The gate still didn't shut.

Sam was a bit like Mom. When she'd seen the yard last night, she hadn't said anything either. She'd just stared at me and felt my head to see if I had a fever. I got the feeling that she wasn't too pleased. In fact I think it made her want to move out of that house even faster. I didn't get it. The house looked great. What else was I supposed to do? I swear, sometimes the harder I try the worse things get. I guess that explains why usually I try not to try.

Last night I'd overheard her on the phone to the real-estate agent. They were talking about mortgage rates and interest and other weird number stuff. For once I was glad that I was so bad at math. That way I couldn't understand what they were talking about. I didn't really want to know.

Mom hadn't even been impressed when I'd shown her the newspaper article about all the new stoplights and streetlights going up near the new development. I figured new stoplights meant more traffic which meant more idling cars which meant more pollution. I don't think she followed my thinking. It could have been that her brain was confused because she had just tripped over my bike on the way to the bathroom. I had been trying to show her how crowded the townhouse was going to be when I had to store all my outdoor stuff inside. I was starting to think that no matter how awful a picture I painted of the new townhouses, she wasn't going to be swayed. I knew what she was thinking. At least there were no break-ins on the neighboring streets over there, so the area was safe. I was starting to panic.

I grabbed the old wagon from the shed and followed Sam down the street. He was still shaking his head. He was probably kicking himself for not coming up with those decorating ideas himself. I let him pull the wagon to make him feel more important. Heck, I'd probably even let him pull it back after fishing too. It would be filled with rocks from the creek then. I needed materials to build my fantastic statue for the front yard.

I couldn't wait to get to the creek. It would be nice and relaxing to be fishing instead of renovating.

Fishing was fishing. That's why I liked it. It was nothing else. I didn't have to think when I was fishing. I'd tried that before and it didn't work. I think it's because the fish need to be nice and relaxed too if they're going to bite. They can't be relaxed if there's too much stuff going on around them, like thinking and worrying. That meant my brain had to be relaxed. I'm pretty good at a lot of things, but relaxing my brain is one of my specialties.

When we got to the creek, I sold the seven worms that I had dug out of the backyard that morning to some old guy who forgot his bait. I think he forgot his glasses too, because he was doing an awful lot of squinting. Business was looking up. That guy probably didn't even see how many worms he was buying. I probably could have sold him seven pieces of my chewed-up gum instead and he wouldn't have noticed the difference. I would have felt bad for him though. Not to mention the fish. I don't think fish even like gum.

I had just leaned back against the old oak tree and closed my eyes when I heard an annoying voice drifting toward me. I guess
drifting
isn't the right word. A nice soft voice might drift. Tiffany's cackle cut through the air like a dentist's drill. I could hear her little group of friends laughing with her.

“Well, look who's here, the two losers themselves,” she said loudly when she got to my tree. “Do you honestly think you're going to catch anything?”

“We might have a chance if you get lost,” I said without looking up. It was bad enough that I had to listen to Tiffany. I didn't want to insult two senses at once by having to see her too. “Your voice is enough to scare a whale away.”

“Yeah,” Sam said quietly.

Tiffany tapped her foot on a tree root. “Those fish are smart. They're going to stay as far away from you as possible.”

“Yeah, well maybe you should listen to the fish,” I said.

“Maybe if you painted the worms orange you'd have better luck,” Tiffany said. Her friends giggled.

She must have seen the house. Tiffany had visited our street two weeks in a row. Wow. How lucky could we get? No wonder the real estate prices were going up.

“We were just at Becky's,” she explained, not that I cared. “I wanted to invite her to my birthday party.”

Yeah, right. That made about as much sense as me wanting to do some extra homework to raise my marks. Tiffany didn't like Becky. Tiffany's birthday wasn't until the summer. She just needed an excuse to spy on her and try to get some more gossip about the break-ins. Becky would see right through that. People like Tiffany couldn't be tricky if they tried, because they just weren't smart enough to cover the tracks of their tricks.

“Becky's mom found another note,” Tiffany gloated, nodding like a bobble-head doll. “There was just a torn piece of paper,” she said. “Becky showed it to me. Her dog had been trying to bury it.”

Tiffany knew that I was itching to hear what was on the note, but she took her own sweet time telling me. I guess it made her feel important.

“Yeah, well that's nice, but why don't you go for a walk and leave us alone,” I suggested, yawning.

“I bet it's got something to do with money or metal,” she continued. “The note was just two words.
Coin
and
pin
. The last note said
8 cents
.”

Tiffany had a one-track mind, which was probably good because her brain probably couldn't handle two tracks at once. Also, she had no clue about the note that said
Sam 11,
and I wasn't about to tell her. “Yeah, well maybe it was a list of ideas for a fair, like a coin toss and a knock-over-the-bowling-pin game that cost eight cents to play.” I was proud of myself for coming up with that one so fast. “Of course you wouldn't know about games like that, because you're about as athletic as this worm,” I added as I tossed it at her.

“You're just stupid, Addison,” Tiffany muttered as she stomped away.

Stupid or not, at least I knew how to get rid of annoying people. Now all I had to do was get rid of the annoying problems that were floating around my head. There were only seven days until the open house. Was Mom seeing our place in a new light yet? Sure, I hadn't made much from the worm-digging business yet, but things were bound to pick up in the summer. Did she see that we really did need all that room? Did she see how easily you could fix things up to make the place look better? Did she feel safer on the street? Plus there was something else bugging me. There was something about those dumb notes that seemed familiar. I didn't know exactly what it was yet, but there was an idea simmering in my brain that hadn't come to the front yet. My brain takes its time to simmer.

I decided to put everything aside and think about it tomorrow. My dad had once said that things always look better in the morning. I sure hoped my ideas did. And my house too.

Chapter Nine

On Friday morning we had a rehearsal for the magic fair the next day. I was glad it was almost the weekend. I had been busy all week, building my statue in the front yard and improving my worm-selling operation in the backyard. I even impressed myself.

The practice meant that math class was cancelled again. It was my lucky day. Science class too, although I couldn't complain too much about that one. I sort of liked the stuff we had been doing recently in science. We were still learning about optics. One day Miss Steane gave us each a shiny spoon. I thought we were going to get some ice cream to go with it, but she had something different in mind. She told us about lenses. A convex lens, like a doorknob, curves outward. A concave lens, like a bowl, turns inward. We looked at our reflection in the spoons. My face was upside down when I looked at the bowl of the spoon. When I got really close to it my face was suddenly right-side up! When I looked at the other side of the spoon my face was really long or really fat, depending on how I turned the spoon. It was like the spoon was tricking me. Optics was pretty cool. Anytime you could trick somebody into thinking something else was pretty neat.

Everyone practiced their magic tricks for the class. Lynne showed us how to do this cool trick with a paper-towel roll. You hold the tube up to one eye and then put the palm of your other hand about one inch away from the end of the tube. With both eyes open, you focus on something across the room. Then it looks like there's a hole in the middle of your hand.

Claire was the fortune-teller. She had a big round marble that she was using as a crystal ball. I was going to see if I could borrow it after the fair. It would look great on top of my statue. Claire said she could read palms and tell your future by looking at the lines on them. I wondered what she would be able to see from the two twisted scars on my palm from when I got a fishhook stuck in it. Probably she'd be able to predict that I wouldn't try pulling a fishhook out of a tree anytime soon.

John and David, the brainy twins in our class, had set up a whole optics table. They used stuff from a science kit one of them got for Christmas. I don't know why anyone would ask for a science kit as a present. Maybe they thought it was some kind of a video game. The experiments were sort of fun though. They made a blue sky appear by shining a flashlight on a mixture of milk and water in a pop bottle. They said it was because the mixture scattered more blue wavelengths than any other color. Then they made a pinhole camera out of an old potato-chip canister. I had lots of empty pop bottles and chip tins hiding under my bed. I could probably make tons of money by selling my own science kits. I stored that idea away for later.

Scott did a trick with disappearing Easter eggs. He showed me how he did it. He used something called the French drop. He pretended to drop the egg into his left hand and then steal it with his right hand. When he opened up his right hand the egg wasn't there because it was still in his left hand, which by now was in his pocket. Then he pulled the egg out of his pocket and showed everyone. I could have made those chocolate eggs disappear faster than he did in just one gulp.