Free Us and Uncle Fraud by Lois Lowry

sounded like Tom.
    "Sit on your bed," he said, and pointed to the exact spot where he wanted me. "And wait. I'm almost through. Just wait there and see what happens !"
    Obediently I sat where he had told me to. He went back to his room, and I waited. I could hear small scraping noises from Marcus's side of the wall. They continued: rhythmic, digging sounds, through the sound of the rain outside, almost the same sounds we could hear occasionally in the shed when mice scurried and gnawed invisibly behind the old planks and boards.
    "What are you
doing?
" I called impatiently.
    The noise stopped, and Marcus appeared again in my doorway. "Watch your wall," he ordered in a loud and self-important whisper.
    I sighed. I hated it when Marcus ordered me around; after all, I was a year older than he. I thought of Mother, a year older than Claude, being ordered to learn a language and a set of laws for an imaginary kingdom. And I sat there on my bed, dutifully watching the wall, because whatever Marcus was up to, it was bound to be fun.
    A small flower on my wallpaper, slightly above the table beside my bed, began to shiver and move. I stared in amazement. Seconds later, a yellow petal on the flower disappeared. I blinked. Where
the petal had been, a shiny piece of metal appeared, and then grew larger. A tiny puff of plaster dust poofed into the air and fell to the table. With a final shove, the end of a screwdriver emerged into my room through the wall; it moved briefly in a rotating pattern and was withdrawn. I could hear Marcus's breath as he blew through the hole, and more plaster dust flew out and settled on the table.
    I leaned over to look more closely. I could see the light from Marcus's room. Then the hole darkened ; I could hear a rustling sound, and an instant later, something new began to appear in the hole. I reached for it and drew it through: a piece of paper rolled tightly into a cylinder.
    I unrolled it and read: HELLO FROM MARCUS THE NEWBOLD.
    I took it to my desk, found my pencil, and wrote: LOUISAMANDA SENDS GREETINGS. MOTHER IS GOING TO KILL YOU WHEN SHE FINDS OUT.
    ARE YOU GOING TO TELL? Marcus sent back.
    I marched to his room and found him hunched over his side of the hole.
    "No," I assured him. "I'm not going to tell."
    Later, when I was in bed, and Mother had checked the windows one more time, and outside the rain was still a heavy deluge against the roof and sides of the house, I heard the rustling sound
again, near my head. I reached toward the wall and felt the rolled paper appear. I turned on the light, and read:
    JUST PASSING THROUGH.

10
    It rained and rained. Mother's sheets flapped in the wet wind for days until finally she dashed outside with a raincoat draped over her head, took them down, rewashed them, and hung them in the basement in disgust.
    The forsythia blossoms were all gone by the first day, pulled loose from the fragile stems, smashed to the ground beside the driveway, and then washed away in the water that had changed from puddles to rivulets to torrents that streamed from the driveway into the wet street.
    The after-school Softball games were a thing of the past, now that the vacant lot where they had been played had become a brown sea in which Popsicle wrappers drifted and churned. Tom stayed in his room in the afternoons, working on a school project; Stephie, bored with her indoor toys, whined and made a pest of herself. One afternoon I held
her against the window and pointed to her sandbox, showing her that it was awash in the ocean that had once been our back yard.
    "It's a boat now, Stephie," I told her. But she wailed, following her favorite tin shovel with her eyes as it moved in aimless circles through the water. She kicked me angrily, pushed herself out of my arms, and ran to cling to Mother's skirt.
    School continued, with recess held indoors now. The distracted teachers dreamed up activities we could do at our desks: word games and art projects. But we misbehaved, making paper