Unhappy Appy by Dandi Daley Mackall

Author:Dandi Daley Mackall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUVENILE FICTION / Religious / Christian, JUVENILE FICTION / General
ISBN: 9781414364230
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2003-04-01T05:00:00+00:00

Dad and I didn’t speak until we were halfway to Loudonville. He gave in first. “I hope you’re not going to keep this up at Madeline’s. We want you and Mason to be friends.”

We? As in Dad and Madeline? Dad, Madeline, and Mason? I thought of Hawk’s cuckoo shoving the warbler egg right out of the nest.

Dad glanced over at me. “Don’t make me sorry I brought you.”

That’s exactly what I wanted him to be—sorry he brought me. Sorry he’d brought her into our lives. My stomach knotted, and it was hard to breathe.

Neither of us said anything more until we hit Loudonville city limits. Then Dad sighed and white-knuckle gripped the steering wheel. “I want to tell you a little bit about Mason before we get there. He’s—”

“I don’t want to hear about Mason,” I said, my voice low, sounding a hundred times calmer than I felt. Nothing he could say would make me want to be friends with the kid. They were the cuckoos. I was being shoved from their nest.

Dad turned up a street with look-alike houses too close together.

I stared out the window. One tiny lawn had a dozen cars on it, some up on concrete blocks instead of tires. “Can we please get home before dark?” I asked, not looking at Dad. “Maybe Hawk and I can still ride.”

“I’ll try. And I’m sorry I spoiled your ride, Winnie. But we did make these plans first.”

We?

“There’s a chance they’ll want to drive over to the barn yet this evening, though,” Dad explained. “Get things started . . . if things go well here.”

Note to self: Do your part to make sure things do not go well here.

Dad pulled up under a leafless tree, and we got out of the truck. We walked up the short, cracked sidewalk to a wooden, A-frame house, smaller than our rental. The little front lawn had been plowed into dirt rows. Houses on both sides looked run-down, and the one across the street was deserted. Apparently, Madeline Edison’s inventions weren’t selling much better than my dad’s.

“Welcome! Welcome to the Edisons’!” The weird, computerlike greeting roared down from the roof, which was covered in curvy antennae.

“It’s automatic,” Dad explained, pointing to a giant speaker. “A security system Madeline invented a few years ago. Announces everyone who steps onto their property.”

I lagged behind him as he knocked at the yellow front door. The rest of the house had been freshly painted white. Peeking around to the side yard, I saw boxes of wires and metal gizmos scattered around. It looked like our yard, minus the appliance parts. No odd jobs, just inventions.

The door opened, and Madeline Edison grinned down at us. She wore a one-piece black work suit, kind of like Dad’s, only with a belt. “You made it!”

We walked in, and I was hit with the same eerie feeling I get stepping into Coolidge Castle, only in reverse. Instead of leaping back in time, we’d jumped into the future. A silver net and tiny lights covered the whole ceiling, turning it into a starry sky.

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