It bugged me that The Lamp always seemed to know things before I did. Then again, her mother knew every bit of gossip in town, mostly because she started every rumor in town too.
“It wasn't really her house,” Tiffany continued. “The first time it was her shed. Stuff had been moved around like somebody was looking for something. The next time, someone messed with the lock on the garage. They didn't get inside though. Becky's mother found a note near the trash can by the garage that said
eight cents
.”
The garage. I'd never liked that creepy garage of Becky's. It was full of junk her family got at yard sales. Once I walked by when it was just getting dark and I thought I saw a moose hanging upside down in the garage. Turns out it was just an overstuffed chair with four pointed legs that had fallen sideways on the twisted wire frame of a lampshade. It must have been a Tiffany lampshade because it was really big. Those wires looked just like antlers, at least the antlers I've seen on cartoons. I've never seen a real moose. I'd probably have to go to the zoo. Do they have moose at zoos?
Tiffany flipped her hair away from her face. I guess it was so we could see her rolling her eyes better. “Some people just don't have any common sense,” she sneered. “Becky's family should have locked their shed. At least they locked their garage. I guess they've learned their lesson.”
It was too bad Tiffany hadn't learned to put a lock on her mouth.
Trent spoke up. “
Eight cents
. It was probably just some little kid counting up his pennies to buy a pack of gum. You guys get scared over nothing.”
I wondered if I could pay Tiffany and Trent eight cents to get lost. I doubted it. They probably couldn't count that high.
“Well, my street beats your street by a mile,” I said. Sam nodded. Tiffany lived in a new house a few streets over, not far from the school. Every house on her street looked exactly the same, like a row of Monopoly houses all lined up neatly on one side of the board. The streets were all named after trees. Tiffany lived on Willow Street. Her hair looked like a bunch of willow branches after a tornado.
“Don't listen to them,” Trent said to Tiffany. “They're just worried about the game next week.”
Our team was playing the Whinycats on Saturday. Trent was the pitcher. Why he would think we'd be nervous was a mystery to me. We would beat them hands down. We always did. The Whinycats had only won two games in the last two years. I guess Trent thought he was going to be the new hero and turn the team around.
Just then Trent waved his hands around like some crazy magician and then tapped his thumb three times with his other thumb.
Tiffany laughed, and they walked away from us.
“Secret signals,” Sam said. “He's probably going to use them at the game.”
“Well, they can keep their dumb secret signals,” I said. “We need to come up with some optical illusions. Some good ones.” I watched Tiffany and Trent cross the street. They were still laughing. It was too bad that I couldn't think of an optical illusion to just make them disappear.
“We need to come up with some money,” our teacher said on Thursday morning.
No kidding, I thought. It's funny how Miss Steane can read my mind. I was just thinking the same thing. I needed to come up with some money so I could buy some paint for the front door and some wood for the steps. Personally I don't mind that you have to jump over two holes in the second step to get to the third step, but I guess Mom does.
The money wasn't pouring in yet from the worm farm. I'd dug fifty-seven holes in the backyard with my special canoe-paddle hole digger but so far I'd only found three worms. I'm not good at math, but even I knew that three worms wasn't a whole lot for fifty-seven holes. I'd have to find out what worms ate. Maybe I could lure them out with some good worm food. I could trick them into thinking there was a feast waiting for them. Sam said it was easy to trick the eye. The problem was, I didn't know if worms even had eyes. And it would have to be a pretty cheap feast because I needed to save my money for paint. Good thing I didn't have to dish out any money for the statue I had in mind for the front yard. I knew where a few good rocks were hiding at the creek.
Besides reading minds, Miss Steane was a really great teacher. She was nice to everyone: the smart kids and the not-so-smart kids and the not-so-smart kids who thought they were smart.
Like right now, we were supposed to be having a math lesson, but she decided to use the time to talk about fundraising for new playground equipment. She could have talked about it during gym class or art class, but she didn't. She decided to take up time in our math class instead. She knows I hate math. Like I said before, she's the greatest. I didn't really want to talk about raising funds, but it sure beat talking about raising rates and moving decimal points. I bet the teachers at the Whinycat school weren't anywhere near as nice. There was just no way I could go there. There was just no way that I could move. I would rather eat all the worms in my backyard than move from my house.
“The kids in the younger grades really need some new playground equipment,” Miss Steane explained. “They need our help. Does anyone have any ideas?”
I had lots of ideas, but I wanted to keep them to myself. My worm-selling idea was a good one, but somehow I doubted the principal would want to fill the whole schoolyard with holes. They could probably make lots of money though, enough for a gigantic new piece of playground equipment. Too bad there wouldn't be any room left for it in the yard because of all the worm holes.
Everyone suggested ideas. Some were pretty dumb, like Tiffany's idea for pet-sitting. Who would want to pay Tiffany to sit with their pet while they were away? She'd probably sit
on
the pet instead of
with
it because she's so clumsy. Come to think of it, I can't understand why they call it “pet-sitting” in the first place. You don't just sit there with a pet. You play with it and take it for a walk to the creek. Same thing with babysitting, although I guess you wouldn't take a baby to the creek. Unless he liked fishing, of course. Those
sitting
words just didn't make sense. Sometimes words just have a weird language of their own.
I thought my idea was great. We'd sell lottery tickets for people to guess how many times I could bounce a tennis ball off the ceiling and into a garbage can in one week. Of course it would involve me missing some school because the only ceiling that I could use that had the right slant was the one in my bedroom.
“Good idea, but maybe you could practice that trick during the summer,” Miss Steane said with a smile. Miss Steane has a nice way of making “No way” sound like “Maybe,” even if she doesn't really mean it.
“What about a magic fair?” Sam suggested. He glanced over at me. “We could do card tricks and fortune-telling and optical illusions.”
That Sam. What a guy. What a way to sneak in the illusion bit. Now I wouldn't have to think as hard. I was almost jealous of his sneaking-in skill. He usually wasn't that good. He must have been hanging around me too much.
“Why, that's a wonderful idea, Sam,” Miss Steane said. “And it fits in perfectly with the unit we're starting in science today. It's on optics.” Miss Steane explained what optics was. “Optics is the study of the properties of light, especially the way it changes directions when it's reflected by a mirror or refracted by a lens,” she said.
I thought now would be a good time to look smart. There aren't too many of those opportunities floating around. I volunteered my information on refraction. “Sometimes light gets bent out of shape,” I said.
Miss Steane was impressed. “Very good, Addison. It's something like that. Do you ever notice on a hot day how the pavement or car roof seems to shimmer? The light looks like it's dancing. That's because it's traveling through hot rising air that has a different density from the air around it. The light is being refracted, or bent, and it looks like it's shimmering. It's the same as a mirage in a desert. The shimmering light from the hot air makes it look like there's a lake on the horizon.”
She went on to explain how our eyes can get tricked by all sorts of things. She said that optical illusions are eye tricks caused by weird use of lines or color that make the brain confused. The brain sort of guesses, or fills in the blanks, and comes up with what it thinks is real. I guess my whole life is pretty much an optical illusion, because my brain always has to fill in the blanks. The problem is, it usually comes up with the wrong answer.
“In art class we'll also be learning about illusions,” she continued. “Vertical lines guide our eyes upward and horizontal ones guide us outward. There are also ways we can draw pictures to make objects appear farther away. If we draw two lines and make them converge, or come to a point, then it looks like they are receding into the distance, like a set of railway tracks. It's another type of illusion.”
Those were good ideas. I didn't need to write them on paper though, because I've got a great memory for things that I can actually use. The problem is, the things that I think are important usually aren't the things my teacher thinks are important. Like right now, when she explained about converging lines and points and guiding our eyes upward, all I could think about was straight-up-and-down lines and sharp points and how I now had a fantastic idea for the front yard. I couldn't wait to get started.
The magic fair was going to be in two weeks, one day before the open house at the new development. We were going to have a card-trick table, a fortune-telling table, a magic-tricks area, an art-illusion area and a science-optics area. There would be a small admission charge, and we'd sell magic-wand cookies and disappearing juice. Becky was going to do an act with her ventriloquist dummy if she got it clean in time. Some goof had spilled punch all over it a while back. She wanted to clean it up before she gave it back to her uncle, who had let her borrow it. I personally didn't know why it mattered if it was clean or not. It was still worn out and old and creepy. Sort of like some of my great-aunt's old friends.
I was going to be in charge of the invisible-ink trick. That would be easy. I needed to keep my brain free so that I could think of more ways to convince Mom to stay in our old house. Besides, it would be fun to write messages about Tiffany; she wouldn't even know what I was saying.
My head was spinning with ideas on the way home. I was planning to stop at the hardware store to see about buying some cheap paint for the front door, but I decided to stop at the candy store instead. It was time to start solving the break-ins so Mom would feel safer about staying on our street. Solving break-ins meant eating candy. Lots of it. It helped me think. Sam was staying overnight at my house on Friday night so that we could watch out for anything suspicious. I decided that the paint would have to wait. We needed to buy other supplies instead, important stuff like root beer and chips to keep up our strength. I had a feeling we were going to need it. Sometimes you've just got to get your priorities straight.
Sam came over right after supper the next night. He brought his sleeping bag, his video system and a dozen eggs. I was happy because I thought the eggs were to throw at people, but he told me they were for his science tricks instead. He needed to practice squeezing a peeled hard-boiled egg into a milk bottle. It looked impossible to me. He put some hot water into the bottle, shook it up and then dumped it out. He put the egg on top, and after a little while it dropped inside the bottle. Sam was pretty excited with his magic trick. He went on and on about hot water and air pressure and how it forces air out of the bottle so that the egg could squeeze in. Personally I couldn't see the big deal about sitting there and watching an egg drop into a bottle, but I guess everyone's different. I could think of a whole lot of other things that I'd rather watch than an egg, like maybe the latest dragon-warrior movie or the baseball playoffs on tv or a frog-jumping contest.
To get the egg out, Sam mixed up some vinegar and baking soda and put it in the bottle. He turned it upside down and the egg slipped out. He said the pressure inside the bottle forced the egg back out. Sam kept practicing squeezing that egg into the bottle. I was glad I was doing the invisible-ink stuff. All I had to practice was how to squeeze lemon juice into a bowl without squirting it into my eye.
After I wrote some messages on paper with the lemon juice, Mom helped me iron the paper to make the words appear like magic. Sam told me that the heat makes the lemon juice appear. The acid in the lemon juice weakens the paper. When you heat the paper up, the weakened parts of the paper where the writing was turns brown.
SHOE BOX
. The words appeared out of thin air. “Shoe box?” Mom asked as she put away the iron. “What's that got to do with anything?”
“I didn't want to tell you, Mom,” I said. “That's the nickname for the new development that you like. People are calling it âthe Shoe Box' because it's so small.” It was partly true. Sam and I were calling it that. As far as I knew, we qualified as people.
Mom smiled. “We'll see about that at the open house,” she said as she put on her coat. “I've got to go to the astronomy club meeting now, but I should be back about eleven. Make sure you lock the door after me, and don't let anyone in.”
“Sure,” I said. We weren't going to let anyone in. Well, besides ourselves, that is. We'd need to let ourselves back in after we spied on Becky's house.
“By the way,” Mom said as she headed out the door, “what happened to the mirror that was here in the entryway?”
“Oh, I'm borrowing it for the magic show,” I confessed. That was partly true. Alex, the skinny kid who sat next to me in class, was going to use it to create some sort of illusion. He was going to lean the mirror up against a table. Then he was going to stand with one leg behind the mirror and the other leg in front of the mirror. He said if he lifted up his front leg it would look like he was floating in the air because you would just see his lifted leg and the image of his lifted leg.