The Universe of Fair by Leslie Bulion

Author:Leslie Bulion [Bulion, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781561459995
Publisher: Holiday House
Published: 2012-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

I jab Lewis with my elbow.

“Ow! Right. I want fries!” he says.

“Friarfrighter fies!” Andrew joins in.

I raise my eyebrows at Penny.

She heaves a big, dramatic sigh. “Oh-kay,” she says. “Fries.”

“We have four minutes. Go!” I run toward the Firefighters’ booth, holding onto my pants so Penny’s quarters don’t pull them down.

“Mill!” Lewis yells.

I spin around in time to see Penny, Andrew, and Lou-Ann disappearing in different directions as if they have just blown apart in the Big Bang. Not one of them is following me. They already look smaller. In another second they’ll be tiny particles lost in the roiling frenzy of the Fair universe.

“STOP!” I bellow.

A surprisingly large number of people on the Fair path stand still. And all of them stare at me.

“Impressive,” Lewis says.

“Why is Miller Sanford yelling at everybody?”

A girl is pointing at me. I recognize her from Room 24, the sixth-grade class next door to ours. But I can’t worry about her now.

Lou-Ann is farthest away from me, because she’s the fastest. For the moment she’s not moving, and neither is Penny. Andrew is closest to me because he tripped and is picking himself up. Although losing the three of them in the mob of Fair-goers could solve many of my problems, it would probably cause many more. So I imagine myself in a parallel universe where no one knows me or will ever see me again and I yell, “COME BACK NOW!”

And they do. This is so surprising that for a few seconds I think I actually am in a parallel universe. The crowd oozes down the Fair path around us.

“What?” Penny demands, as if I’m annoying her. “You said we were going to Firefighter fries.”

I check my watch. Two minutes to one. A bunch of high school kids carrying band instruments swarms us and for an instant I lose sight of my sister, Lewis, and the others. I stick my hand through a gap between a girl and a tuba and grab onto Penny, because now I’m truly desperate.

“Hold hands and don’t let go,” I order, hoping no one will notice or, even worse, take our picture for the Holmsbury Times.

Andrew holds onto Penny’s other hand and Lou-Ann clomps into line behind him.

“Go!” Lewis calls from the back. “Full speed ahead!”

He raises his camera and we whip down the hill like a vibrating string decorated with Fair ribbons, a yellow duck backpack, and pink boots—a string that clanks eighty-four pounds of quarters as it goes.

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