Addison Addley
AND THE THINGS THAT ARE’T THERE
Addison Addley
AND THE THINGS THAT ARE’T THERE
MELODY DEFIELDS, MCMILLAN
Text copyright © 2008 Melody DeFields McMillan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McMillan, Melody DeFields, 1956-
Addison Addley and the Things that Aren’t There / written by Melody DeFields McMillan.
(Orca young readers)
ISBN 978-1-55143-949-5
I. Title. II. Series.
PS8625.M54A64 2008 jC813’.6 C2007-906964-9
First published in the United States, 2008
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007940947
Summary: Addison has to give a speech at school, but he’d
rather be fishing or playing baseball than writing.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Typesetting by Bruce Collins
Cover artwork by Peter Ferguson
Author photo by Justin McMillan
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
PO BOX 5626, STN. B
VICTORIA, BC CANADA
V8R 6S4
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
PO BOX 468
CUSTER, WA USA
98240-0468
www.orcabook.com
Printed and bound in Canada.
11 10 09 08 • 4 3 2 1
To Taryn and Justin
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my editor, Sarah Harvey, for all her help.
Chapter One
I hate doing speeches. I hate doing speeches more than I hate being the skinniest guy on the baseball team. Just because my name is Addison, everyone thinks I should be smart or something. Maybe they’re confusing me with Edison, the inventor of the light bulb. Maybe they think that my yellow hair sends some sort of weird Vitamin Cenergy to my brain. I don’t know.
My name may be smart, but I’m sure not. Not at school stuff, anyway. I could be, my teacher tells me, if I would “apply” myself. Apply myself to what? It sounds like I need a giant tube of glue.
“Now, Addison,” I can hear her say, “if only you would apply yourself, you’d grasp fractions in no time at all.”
Now I can think of a lot of things I’d like to grasp, like maybe the controller for my new video game or the reel of my old fishing pole, but fractions aren’t on the list. Besides, who would want to be an expert on fractions anyway? They’re useless except for the odd saying like I’m halfway done my ice cream or If I had half a brain, I’d be able to come up with a topic for my speech.
That’s what I was thinking about on Saturday morning. If I had half a brain, I’d be able to come up with some incredible idea that would stun all the other kids in my grade five class, I thought. Heck, I’d even settle for a quarter of a brain. It’s not that I don’t have much of a brain. It’s just that I choose not to waste my brain on school stuff. Personally, I think I’ve got more common sense than anybody I know, except for the guy at the gas station where I buy my worms. He’s got to be pretty smart to make people pay for those slimy creatures. I’d probably make a great worm seller.
If I could think of a really great topic, I might be able to just make up the speech right while I was saying it. No sense wasting energy, I told myself as I brushed my teeth. Let me get that straight. I wasn’t really brushing them, just giving them a quick scrape and then pretending they were clean. Sometimes I just let the water run and then I spit as loudly as I can into the sink to make it sound like I’m brushing them. I always pay for it at the next trip to the dentist though. Things have a disgusting way of catching up to you. In the back of my mind I knew I should be brushing longer. But that’s where the thought usually stays—in the very back of my mind, where it belongs. This was definitely going to be a quick-scrape day.
I spit one more time and closed my eyes, trying to force a quarter of my brain into action.
“Breakfast!” Mom called from downstairs.
Saved by the yell. That was enough work for now anyway. Little did I know that by the time breakfast was over, I’d have my incredible topic. And how was I to know that, like dirty teeth, fractions have a disgusting way of catching up to you?
Chapter Two
“What’s up?” I asked as I caught the piece of French toast that came flying through the kitchen doorway. Mom sometimes goes crazy in the kitchen. If she doesn’t get to cook a big meal for a couple of days, she saves up all her energy and throws it into the food. Once she made three different salads, four kinds of sandwiches and two types of pudding, all for my lunch and all in ten minutes. I bet she could make breakfast, lunch and dinner all at once, in between rearranging the kitchen furniture.
Saturdays were French toast days. French toast days were sometimes good, sometimes bad. It all depended on what wacky health-food-store ingredients Mom had decided to use that day. Last week it was honey and alfalfa sprouts—definitely not a good day. The week before it was organic sunflower with burnt crusts. I’m not sure if the burnt crusts were organic or not.
This week looked better. There seemed to be almonds and cherries flattened into the bread. At least I hoped they were cherries. They might have been kidney beans. With my mom you never know.
“What’s the big rush?” I asked as I watched her throw another piece into the frying pan.
“It’s the big astronomy event today,” she said between gulps of organic papaya juice.
Now, I might not know much about science, but I was pretty sure that the stars came out at night, not at eight o’clock in the morning.
“Ah, Mom...I think that maybe you’ve got your times mixed up,” I offered helpfully. Mom sometimes gets confused. I remember once when she showed up at the baseball field with five dozen carob chip and apple muffins. That was really nice of her and all, but completely unnecessary. Our team wasn’t even playing that day. It was the firefighters’ guinea pig races instead. I guess I forgot to mention to her that our tournament had been postponed. The firefighters liked the muffins though. I think the guinea pigs did too. If we ever have a fire, I bet the trucks will get to our house really fast.
Mom looked flushed for a minute, as if she actually believed me for once, but then she suddenly remembered.
“No, no, no. We’re driving to Williamstown to look at the new observatory. We’re eating lunch at the Galaxy restaurant. Then we’re having a meeting to discuss the election of officers next month. I would die to be the treasurer.”
I looked at Mom to see if she was sick. She looked fine but I couldn’t be sure. She’d been trying to keep really busy lately. Maybe she was too busy to think straight. Since she and Dad got divorced four years ago, she had tried at least eight different clubs. First she’d tried belly dancing. Next it was bread making. Then came basket weaving. I guess that was so she’d have something to put the bread in. Herb drying, yoga, Japanese gardening, Chinese lantern making and Greek cooking rounded out the list. I had used my calculator to figure out that was two clubs a year. She usually quit after a couple of
months, but maybe this one would stick.
But treasurer? It was a mystery to me why anyone would want to do a job without getting paid, especially a job involving numbers. Come to think of it, I didn’t really get what was so exciting about staring at a bunch of stars.
“Why do you like looking at stars so much?” I asked as I picked the almonds out of the toast and stuffed them in my pocket. The squirrels would like them better than I did. I had to do my part for animal welfare. I always leave the garage window open a crack just in case the bats need someplace to sleep. Mom’s not real keen on that one. She didn’t really like the toad house I built out of her new bamboo placemats either.
Mom looked at me like I came from Mars, which I’m sure she hopes to see at the astronomy club.
“How could you not like looking at the stars?” she asked, shooting me a look that said I must have been adopted. “I love the stars. And I want to be the treasurer because it’s a way of meeting people,” she explained. “I don’t think I stand much of a chance because the only experience I have working with numbers, in an official sense, was when I volunteered with the humane society. I had to collect and record the donations we received for the feed-a-kitten day. I don’t think that kitten food expenses are in the same category as big telescope expenses, but I’m going to try anyway,” she said happily.
“Besides, you know I love working with numbers,” she added, staring at me in a way that made me feel like I was supposed to share her feelings. I think Mom secretly wanted to be an accountant or some other strange math-loving creature. She was always trying to play little number games with me, like telling me to see if I could balance my bank account before the computer did it for me. She didn’t know that I just kept the money from my paper route in my underwear drawer, between all my holey socks. That was enough balancing for me. She even used to make number-shaped cookies to try to get me to add as I was eating. Instead of putting the two and the three cookies together like she suggested, I just ate the whole plateful. I figured that was the quickest—and tastiest—way to get to five.
She downed her raspberry tea in a single gulp. “Did you know,” she said, “that those stars that you’re talking about actually made that starlight thousands of years ago? It’s taken many years to reach us.”
“So that’s what you see when you look up there, some really old light?” I asked.
“No, that’s just it,” Mom explained, practically glowing now. “It’s what you don’t see.”
I scratched my head as I put my French toast into the microwave to warm up. I was sure I was adopted now. Either that or I took after Dad. He lived in Australia now, trying out a new career as a sheep farmer. He probably didn’t have time to look at the sky, just the fields. Besides, I bet the stars were upside down in Australia. I knew he didn’t like numbers. I guess he didn’t like letters either, since he’d only sent us two e-mails in the last year.
“There are so many unexplained mysteries out there,” Mom gushed as she threw the frying pan into the sink. “If it takes that long for starlight to reach us, don’t you wonder what those stars look like right now? We see a star—but maybe it’s something else by now and we won’t know for thousands of years. We see what that star looked like way back then. Because it’s so far away, it takes ages for the information on what it looks like now to reach us. Who knows? It might not even be there anymore. Scientists are constantly discovering things like new planets and asteroids or discovering that things they thought were planets aren’t really planets after all. Not everything is as it appears.”
“I see,” I said.
“What about black holes?” she continued. Her face lit up like the night sky. “Black holes are really dense areas in the universe that have such a strong gravitational field that nothing can escape from them, not even light. Everything just disappears into them. You can’t see them, so you can’t prove they exist. That’s what some people think, anyway. But you can’t prove that they don’t exist either. Like I said before, just because you can’t see something, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”
She blew me a kiss as she breezed out the door.
The microwave beeped. I stared at it for a minute. Then I got that flash of inspiration that sometimes comes my way. I had a topic for my speech, and it was sweet.
Chapter Three
“Things that aren’t there. Are you crazy?” Sam asked that afternoon as he helped me deliver the Saturday papers. My best friend sometimes thinks the worst of me. Maybe that means my worst enemy sometimes thinks the best of me. That would be nice. Sam snorted like he always does when he doesn’t approve of my undeniably brilliant plans. I remember the time that he didn’t believe me when I came up with this fantastic idea of how to get a day off school to go to the fair across the road. All we had to do was convince Principal Pierce that we were doing an art project. We needed to take a picture looking down at the school-yard filled with kids at recess. It had to be taken from a high point, like, say, a Ferris wheel. We couldn’t wait until the weekend because there’d be no kids in the yard then. The trouble was, Principal Pierce didn’t believe me either. He made us take the picture from his second-story office window.
Sam shook his head. “Why don’t you pick a normal topic, like the history of industrialization?” he suggested.
Now it was my turn to snort. Normal? The history of industrialization hardly sounded normal. I didn’t even know what it meant. Sam always used big words. The problem was, he usually knew what they meant too. Why Sam had to be so smart, I don’t know. I guess it was so I could look dumber. He’s a thoughtful guy.
I explained about starlight and black holes and Mom and the astronomy club. “There have to be lots of things that aren’t there,” I said. “Like this morning, when I heard the microwave beep. I couldn’t see those waves, but my French toast was hot, so they must have been there. I could just call my speech ‘Things That Are There But You Can’t See Them,’ but that’s too boring. My title’s better. Besides, a hundred years ago, people wouldn’t have believed that something as weird as a microwave really was there. It would have been a thing that’s not there back then. I bet there are some things that aren’t there today, but in fifty years from now, they will be.”
I was proud of myself. I’d come up with that one pretty fast.
Sam was quiet for a minute and then he spun around.
“Things that aren’t there!” he cried. “I get it now! You mean like how dogs can hear a whistle at really high frequencies even though we can’t? We’d never know that whistle was there, but the dog sure does. Things that aren’t there, they’re just not there. Not there.” Sam always repeats things three times when he gets excited or nervous. “At least to some of us. This has merit,” he practically shouted. “This could be good,” he translated for me.
“Like I said, this speech is going to be good. It will practically write itself,” I boasted. It’s hard to be humble when you come up with a really good idea. The problem was, I couldn’t seem to come up with any more of them. I couldn’t write a speech on just one or two things that weren’t there. I needed more.
“How about ufos?” Sam said, looking up at the sky. “So many people believe in them, but they can’t prove they exist. They’re not there, or...are they?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted someone to prove ufos were there, thanks just the same. Ever since I’d watched that movie about a giant football with lights landing in someone’s backyard, I had tried to avoid the subject. I’d had nightmares for weeks. If there really were ufos, I didn’t want to know about them. Let them stay where they were.
I slapped Sam on the back. “Just keep thinking,” I encouraged him. There was no use putting my brain to work when Sam could come up with the ideas for me. You know, energy conservation and all. I had to do my bit.
Besides, Sam had his speech on medieval times already written and probably memorized. I needed to concentrate on bigger things, like how I was going to help Mom become the treasurer of the as
tronomy club. After all, if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have my incredible speech idea. I told Sam that if he could concentrate on my speech for a while, then I could concentrate on helping Mom. Two heads are better than one.
I hadn’t seen Mom so excited in a long time. The way I figured, if she could get out and spend her time worrying about somebody else’s money, she wouldn’t have so much time to worry about what I was doing with mine. She’d have to expend all her worrying energy at the club. Heck, she’d probably even enjoy not having as much time to tell me to clean my room, and she might not notice when I stashed peas in the crack under the table so I wouldn’t have to eat them. If I could help her out, I’d be glad to do it.
It was sort of nice being around her when she was really happy. She always had a goofy faraway look on her face, as if she was imagining that she was on the moon. Sometimes I’d catch her humming something that I remembered from a long time ago when I was a little kid. It didn’t matter that it was out of tune. It sure beat listening to the sound of her crying.
The astronomy board needed to find out about Mom’s talents. She knew how to change the oil in the car. She was good at hammering nails and flipping over cards with one finger, but I doubted those skills would help. She could wake up at the same time every morning without even using an alarm clock, but that was no good because the club met at night.
She was a real genius at math. She could add up the number of times I didn’t do my homework last year without even using a calculator. Let me tell you, that’s a lot of adding. She could also multiply anything by 365 and come up with the right answer. That’s how she figured out how many times last year she had to remind me to shut the door and wipe my shoes. It was three or four times a day times 365.
Yep, I’d figure out something. Busy as I was, I’d find a way to get Mom elected. Some people just can’t do things without my help, even if they won’t admit it. Anyway, finding a sneaky way to turn the tables in Mom’s favor was a whole lot more interesting than writing a speech. That could be Sam’s job.
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