Free Lost Boys by Orson Scott Card Page B

outside toy, and we’re outside.”
    â€œWell, if it bounces into the street, you can’t chase it, you have to wait for it to roll to one side or the other, all right?”
    Robbie nodded hugely—and then kept on nodding, not so much to annoy his mother as because nodding with such exaggerated movement was fun. “Look, Mom, the whole world is going up and down!”
    Of course, he had not stopped bouncing the ball, and at this point the inevitable happened—it bounced off his toe and careened down the gutter away from them, rolling into the road and then drifting back to the curb, where it disappeared.
    â€œMy ball!” cried Robbie. “It went down that hole!”
    Sure enough, the ball had, with unerring aim, found a storm drain and rolled right in. This was the first time DeAnne had really noticed what the drains were like, and again she was appalled. They were huge gaps in the curb, and the gutter sloped sharply down to guide the flow of water into them. The effect was that any object that came anywhere near them would inevitably be sucked inside. And the gap was large enough that a small child could easily fit into the drain. Naturally the people who designed roads without sidewalks would think nothing of creating storm drains that children could fit into.
    â€œMom, get it out!”
    DeAnne sighed and set Elizabeth down on the neighbor’s lawn. “Stay right by your sister and don’t let her go anywhere, Robbie.”
    Of course, this meant that Robbie grabbed hold of Elizabeth’s arm and Elizabeth began to scream. “I didn’t mean tackle her and pin her to the grass, Robbie.”
    â€œShe was going to go into the street,” said Robbie. “She’s really stupid, Mom.”
    â€œShe isn’t stupid, Robbie, she’s two.”
    â€œDid I go in the street when I was two?”
    Elizabeth had stopped screaming and was tearing grass out of the neighbor’s lawn.
    â€œNo, Robbie. You were too scared that a motorcycle might come by. You had this thing about motorcycles. You used to dream that they were coming to get you and eat you. So you never went into the street because that’s where the Motorman was.”
    In the meantime, DeAnne was down on her hands and knees, trying to see anything at all in the storm drain. It was too dark.
    â€œI can’t see anything,” DeAnne said. “I’m sorry, Robbie. I wish you hadn’t brought the ball on this walk.”
    â€œYou mean you aren’t going to reach in and hunt for it?”
    â€œRobbie, no, I’m not,” said DeAnne. “I can’t see in there. Anything could be down in that hole.”
    Suddenly he looked terrified. “Like what?”
    â€œI meant that I just don’t know what’s in there and I’m not going to go reaching around for it. For all we know it’s eight feet down, or the ball might have already rolled halfway to Hickey’s Chapel Road.” She gathered up Elizabeth and took Robbie’s hand and they walked on toward the street where the Cowpers lived.
    â€œStevie said this was a bad place.”
    â€œStevie said what?”
    â€œA bad place ,” said Robbie, enunciating clearly, as if his mother were deaf.
    What could Stevie have meant by saying such a thing to Robbie? Did he mean the house? The neighborhood? School? Steuben?
    Robbie looked over his shoulder again toward the drain. “Do you think that someday they’ll find my ball down there?”
    â€œSince the ball isn’t biodegradable, it will probably still be there for the Second Coming.”
    Robbie was still trying to extract meaning from that last statement when they got to the second corner. DeAnne stopped there and counted down five houses on the right. The Cowpers’ was a one-story brick house with a station wagon in the driveway, with two kids climbing all over the top of it. DeAnne would never let her kids climb on the car.