Нил Шустерман: The Eyes Of Kid Midas

It was like this when I got here. Did he really think they would buy that, knowing full well that he stayed home from school today?

We won it on a game show. What game show? How? Where? What a lame story.

Remember when the sweepstakes letter said "You May Already Be a Winner"? No, no, no! What was he going to do? Practically paralyzed by panic, Kevin sat at the foot of the stairs and watched as Josh paced a short path in the overstuffed room.

"We can't let them know! You've got to make it go away!" said Josh. "Wish it all back!"

"I can't," croaked Kevin. "You know the glasses can't undo what they've done." Kevin heard the troubled engine of his mother's Volvo backfire down the street. It was the only warning they got—and Kevin figured they had ten seconds, tops.

"Quick," said Josh, "do something! Your parents will just have heart attacks when they see this stuff, but mine will have heart attacks and give me a double-lifetime grounding without possibility of parole, no matter what the explanation is! DO SOMETHING."

"What?"

"If you can't just lose the stuff, then send it somewhere else!"

"Where?"

"ANYWHERE!"

The electric garage door opener cranked into action. Kevin could hear the car pulling up the driveway.

Kevin stood up, and without a second to lose, held his head together to keep it from splitting and made a desperate wish.

"Uhh.... Uh..."

"Hurry!"

"Uh . . . everything that I made today, go . . . Go next door!"

First came the blackness, then the colors, then the fingers reaching into his brain, and a flash of light. Kevin screamed, threw the glasses from his face, and they fell down upon

. . . an empty floor.

The house was exactly the way it was before they had begun their shopping spree. The same old TV. The same old furniture. Everything else was gone.

Mrs. Midas's car backfired once as it pulled into the empty garage.

There was a rumble then—a shaking of the ground and a creaking of wood, like an earthquake. Kevin and Josh raced out the front door in time to see it happen.

The house next door was a small home owned by the Kimballs, a pleasant elderly couple who never bothered anyone. The Kimball place was half the size of the Midas home and would not have the space for all the things Kevin had so hurriedly wished upon it.

Mrs. Kimball, sitting quietly on the front porch, could only watch as the walls began to buckle outward. Upstairs a frozenyogurt machine expanded through a window and crashed to the ground with the shattering of glass.

A grand piano bounced through the side of the house, landing in a flower bed, and the front door regurgitated stereo equipment, with a rasping of metal and plastic.

The front lawn began to ripple like an ocean as video games sprouted up from the earth, and from the garage came an awful crunching sound that could only be the two Lamborghinis flattening the old couple's Buick against the wall.

It ended with a blast of the chimney as hundreds of rare coins shot into the air, showering the neighborhood in shimmering gold and silver.

People came racing from their homes—but because it all happened so quickly, they could only see the results, not the cause.

"Cool!'' said Teri, who had come out of the garage in time to witness the end of the spectacle. Kevin's mom could only stand and stare like the rest of the neighbors, who scratched their heads and looked to the skies as if some cargo jet had unexpectedly dumped its load.

Mrs. Kimball gazed around her with her hands on her hips, then slowly made her way down from the porch and calmly climbed around the various artifacts that littered her lawn.

She smiled at Kevin's mom and politely asked, "Excuse me, may I use your phone?"

Kevin's mom nodded, and the old woman quietly disappeared into their house.

Kevin watched from his bedroom window that night as lookey-loos from all over town gathered to watch a troop of movers organize everything on the Kimball's front lawn.

An insurance adjuster, one step short of falling into a coma, just stood there on the lawn and gaped for an hour.

There was applause when Mr. Kimball drove a Lamborghini out of the garage, and then Frankie Philpot showed up, as everyone knew he would. Frankie, a dentist with a burning interest in the supernatural, had his own local—if somewhat cheap—cable TV show, devoted entirely to psychic phenomena. Frankie and his dental hygienist video crew interviewed the Kimballs right beneath Kevin's window.

Frankie Philpot deduced that the Kimball house existed over a space-time wormhole thingy that somehow opened up into the Bermuda Triangle or a distant department store.

The insurance adjuster, for lack of any better explanation, decided that the Kimballs were victims of a hit-and-run delivery truck.

Everyone else just figured it was "one of those things" and eventually went home.

While certain other parts of the world may have been engulfed in storm clouds, the suburban town of Ridgeline awoke to a bright, sunny day.

The sun rose behind the electrical tower on the hill in back of Kevin Midas's home, casting shadows of the girders on Kevin's white walls. The room had stayed cold all night, defying the thermostat's attempts to keep it the same temperature as the rest of the house. Only now, as the morning light began to shine through the eastern window, did warmth return to Kevin's life.

All night he had stayed bundled under the many blankets that his mother always insisted he keep folded up on the end of his bed. When he awoke at dawn, he couldn't move a muscle without feeling incredible pangs shoot through his head and then ricochet down through the rest of his body.

He had gone straight to bed the night before, without eating, so he felt weak, and he could do little more than lie there and watch the slow progress of the girder shadows as they moved across the wall.

There was a buzzing around him—a hum that could barely be heard. At first he took it for his father's electric razor, and then for the buzz of the high-tension wires outside—until he realized that the sound was coming from his desk.

The glasses were there, resting six inches from the wall—six inches from an electrical outlet. Kevin watched in amazement as a line of blue electricity arced across the air from the outlet to the glasses.

They're recharging, Kevin realized. They had taken the heat from his room, but it wasn't enough. Now they were sucking the very electricity from the walls! How much energy did they need? Kevin wondered. How much could they absorb? Kevin reached out and took a pencil from his desk. With it he gently moved the glasses away from the wall until the electrical arc was broken. The glasses just sat there now, glistening in the morning sun.

Kevin then crawled out from underneath his covers like a slug from underneath a rock. While everyone else in the house still slept, he suffered through a shower that didn't make him feel the least bit better.

When he returned to his room, the glasses were waiting.

He put them on even before he dressed and instantly felt the change. It began with his eyes—a soothing feeling that slowly spread down and out, reaching the tips of his fingers and the soles of his feet. He closed his eyes and let the feeling wash through him. He was better now, and he couldn't imagine why he had waited this long to put the glasses back on.

He dressed in plain old jeans and a shirt, then stared at himself in the tall mirror against his closet door. Plain, ordinary, boring—that's how he looked. That's how he always looked. There's no reason to dress like this , Kevin thought. No reason at all. He could look like . . . he could be whoever or whatever he wanted.