The Magic Spectacles Read Free Page A

having a terrible time. Being bored was his second favorite thing to do. His first favorite was causing other people trouble.
    John knew that Harvey had seen them ride up. Harvey hadn’t waved because he wanted to let them know how bored he was. That meant Harvey hadn’t seen the fishbowl, which was good. Harvey had a problem with stealing things, and he wouldn’t look nearly so bored any more if he had seen it.
    The fishbowl felt extra heavy, as if John had been carrying it for ten miles instead of ten blocks. When he was sure that Harvey wasn’t looking, he took the spectacles out of the marbles and put them into his jacket pocket. At once the fishbowl felt about half as heavy, as if the spectacles had been too full of gravity. He wondered if that was scientific. Did gravity make things heavy by filling them up? Or did it just sort of
sit
on things, and mash them down? He would have to start a gravity chapter in his book.
    Carefully, he put the fishbowl down on the porch, hiding it behind a potted plant. Across the street, Mr. Skink paused to light his pipe, and just then the wind picked up his pile of leaves and blew it in every direction. Mr. Skink tried to stop them by waving his bamboo rake around as if he was trying catch butterflies in a net. Harvey Chickel burst into loud laughter and fell off his skateboard onto the grass. He rolled around and beat his hands on the ground.
    “It wasn’t
that
funny,” Danny said. Danny didn’t like Harvey Chickel at all.
    Mr. Skink said something to Harvey then, but John couldn’t hear what it was. Harvey stood up and said something back, and then Mr. Skink pointed at him with the stem of his pipe and said, very loudly, “I oughta…” and Harvey rode away on his skateboard before Mr. Skink had a chance to say what he oughta do. When he was half a block farther down the street, Harvey turned around and laughed out loud again, as if he had just then remembered how funny the whole thing was.
    A door shut a couple of houses down, and an instant later their friend Kimberly stepped off her front porch. Actually it was the front porch of Mrs. Owlswick’s house, Kimberly’s aunt. Kimberly was a year older than John. She had long blonde hair and dreamy eyes. Her hair was tied into a pony tail with a red ribbon, and for some reason she was wearing a dress.
    “Are you looking at her hard enough?” Danny asked. “Maybe you should take a picture.”
    “It’s
you
that should take a picture,” John said.
    Smiling, Danny said, “Right.”
    Harvey Chickel hadn’t turned the corner toward home, but was skating up and down at the end of the block now. He must have seen Kimberly come out. Go home, John thought, but Harvey sat down on the curb as if he was waiting for something. He flipped his skateboard into the air so that it banged down onto the street. Then he pounded it against the curb a couple times, showing off.
    Kimberly carried a red metal box about half as big as a loaf of bread. “Look at what I found,” she said, walking up to John and Danny and holding out the box.
    The lid had a picture of a fountain on it, like the fountain in the Plaza. Beyond it sat a house on a hill. The house had diamond-paned windows and smoke curling up out of three chimneys. Flowering vines grew across the porch. On the roof stood a weather vane shaped like a fish skeleton. It pointed toward the rising moon, which was coming up between two hills. Under the picture were the words, East, West, Home’s Best.
    “What a great can,” John said, staring at the fish skeleton. “Where did you get it?
    “It used to belong to my uncle,” Kimberly said. “I found it under the house, behind where the old window was. Look at all this stuff.”
    She opened the lid. Inside was a heap of costume jewelry, with big rhinestones that looked like diamonds and emeralds. There were glass prisms and tiny glass perfume bottles and a glass saltshaker shaped like… a fish.
    “You found
all that
under the house?