Read Online Mr. Chickee's Messy Mission by Christopher Paul Curtis - Free Book Online Page A

sure.”
    Richelle began tapping her left foot and said, “I hate sounding like Steven Carter, but huh? I don't get it.”
    “Don't get yourself all worked up, Ms. Cyrus-Herndon, it will become clear after you've been here for a while.”
    “A while?” Richelle started tapping her foot even faster. “If I'm not back home in fifteen minutes, my mother will bedown here looking for me. She'll turn Yourside, Ourside and Theirside upside down. She'll—”
    “Hold on, hold on. I need to explain that right away. You see, time is different here in Ourside.”
    Richelle's foot was tapping so fast that her shoelace came undone and retied itself four times.
    “A countdown has started, Richelle,” Mr. Chickee said, and handed her a really strange-looking watch. It didn't have hands or numbers or anything that would make you think it was telling time; instead it spelled out the words, “Twenty-nine days, twenty-three hours, fifty-six minutes, and thirty-two seconds,” and it was counting down a second at a time.
    Richelle turned hers over several times in her hand. “What is this?”
    “That is an Oops-a-Daisy. It tells how much time you can spend here before one second passes on Earth.”
    Richelle looked at the watch thingy, calculated and said, “So that means we can be down here for thirty days, a whole month, and only one second will go by on Earth?”
    “Correct.”
    “So then if we're down here for two months, only two seconds will go by on Earth?”
    “No! Exactly wrong. That's why I'm giving you this. Once you're here for one second more than one month, once this Oops-a-Daisy counts down to all zeroes, I'm afraid ninety-nine years, nine months and nine days will have passed on Earth.
    “I have to make certain you understand that, Ms. Cyrus-Herndon.If you stay down here one second more than a month, more than ninety-nine years will have passed on Earth and nearly everybody you know will have died before you get back. The only person who'll probably still be alive is Steven's neighbor, Dr. Taylor. It will be as though you've been frozen and have come back almost a hundred years later.”
    Richelle reached the Oops-a-Daisy back toward Mr. Chickee.
    “Thank you very much, but we won't be needing this. We're just looking for Russell's dog, Rodney Rodent. Once we get him, we're bye-bye.”
    Mr. Chickee's forehead wrinkled. “I'm hoping it isn't going to be that simple, Richelle.”
    It took that long for Steven's brain freeze to finally thaw out.
    He said, “Huh? I don't get it. You can see, Mr. Chickee? You're not really blind? Andre, Smudge, Daniel and Stevie Boy Collins were right when they said you've been pretending you were blind all of this time? You've been tricking us? I can't believe it!”
    “Steven, Steven, Steven. I've never pretended anything with you. When I'm on Earth, on Yourside, I truly am blind. When I'm here, in Ourside, I can see.”
    Steven said, “Huh? I don't—”
    Mr. Chickee interrupted, “We're not exactly certain why, but intragalactic, translateral, cosmal, xenogenistic, fifth-dimensional continuum travel is not as easy to do as itsounds. Moving from Ourside to Yourside does have its problems. And while we're around ninety-nine point nine nine percent successful in keeping a person whole when they go through the porch, that last point zero one percent has presented us with some rather interesting and thus far insurmountable difficulties.”
    Richelle said, “That sounds like nothing at all, Mr. Chickee, one-hundredth of one percent sounds like a drop in the ocean.”
    “A very good analogy, Ms. Cyrus-Herndon, it is an extremely small amount, but at the same time it is not nothing. As small as it is, it does make a tremendous difference.
    “Take my eyes as an example. Here in Ourside I have full use of them, I am completely sighted. But when I travel to Yourside, to your Earth, when I cross through the porch, something as small as a drop in the ocean changes, something that our