Addison Addley and the Trick of the Eye Read Free Page A

to though. I’m sure Mom doesn’t need her old canoe paddle anymore.”
    Sam nodded. “That’s not a bad idea. You could make some extra money that way! You can also get rid of some weeds at the same time.”
    Now Sam was catching on. I liked the words at the same time . There was no use wasting energy when I could get two things done at once. The way I looked at it, I had three problems to solve. One, I had to get Mom to look at the house from a different angle; two, I had to make the street safer by solving the break-in mystery; and three, I had to come up with some money to give to Mom for the monthly budget. Mom and I had already talked about ways of making more money. I had one paper route. I didn’t want to take on another one. Sometimes I was chased by a little dog with three legs and sometimes I was chased by a little kid throwing stones at my bike. Selling worms would be a dream job compared to that.
    â€œNow, you start thinking of some ideas to spruce up the old house,” I encouraged Sam. He was probably better at home improvement than me. He liked everything to be neat and clean. He wouldn’t even get his fingernails dirty when we tried to see if mud stuck to rocks better than it did to our feet. I was better at the money-making ideas.
    â€œMaybe we could phone one of those home-makeover shows on tv, and they could renovate the house for free,” Sam suggested.
    I shook my head. “No, Sam,” I explained patiently. “Think about it. The whole house would look brand new when it was done. Then people would think we were rich. Then our house would be the next one broken into.”
    When we got to my house, we looked at it from across the street. Did you ever notice how things look better when you know you might not see them anymore? The house did look sort of old and lopsided, but I liked it that way. It was comfortable. The only thing that looked fresh were all the trees in the backyard. Trees always look good because they grow new leaves every spring. They’ve got it easy.
    â€œWe have to fool Mom into looking at the house from a different angle,” I said. “We need something out front to catch her eye.” I’d seen the pamphlet for the new development. It had a white picket fence, a statue of a fat lady in a toga and a big rose garden in front of it. I’d think of something better. I only had three weeks until the open house. I’d have to move fast.
    â€œYeah, you’re right,” Sam said. “If you had something out front to focus on, your house might just fade into the background. It’s got something to do with perspective. I learned that at summer camp last year when we tried to draw a picture of the lake. We had to make the trees in the front of the picture bigger than the ones in the back so the ones in the back looked farther away. It’s easy to trick your eye into believing things. Remember how we made those flip books when we were in grade three? We drew stick people on the corners of a pad of paper and then flipped through the sheets as fast as we could. It looked like the stick people were moving. We tricked our eyes into thinking they were.”
    Sam was squinting at the house. I guess that makes him think better. He was just about to say something when Tiffany popped into view. She’d just rounded the corner of our street. What a way to wreck the scenery. Her cousin, Trent, was with her. The only good thing I could say about Trent was that his hair wasn’t as puffy as Tiffany’s. Her head looks like a lampshade, and sometimes her face gets as red and shiny as a Christmas-tree bulb. That’s why I called her The Lamp. Tiffany always tries to annoy me. She really doesn’t have to try too hard though, because annoying me is the one thing that she’s good at. She’s mean to every single person she knows. Heck, she probably even taught that little kid how to throw stones at my