Read Online Addison Addley and the Things That Aren't There by Melody DeFields McMillan - Free Book Online Page B

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.”
    â€œSo that’s what you see when you look up there, some really old light?” I asked.
    â€œNo, 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.
    â€œThere 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.”
    â€œI see,” I said.
    â€œWhat 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
    â€œThings 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 waituntil 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