Belinda's Rings Read Online Free Page B

fast enough; it felt as though an eternity of speechlessness hung between them while Bartleby stared at her and she fiddled with the audio jack.

3 The Rings
    MUM LEFT HER WEDDING ring behind. She said she didn’t want to lose it on her trip.
    We’re going to be in the fields, she said, and we’ll probably have to collect samples. I’m not supposed to wear any jewelry.
    Yeah okay, I said, rolling my eyes. Maybe they’re afraid that if you wear metal you’ll get sucked into the circle’s vortex by the magnetic force field.
    Oh stop it, Grace, Mum said.
    Gray, I said.
    Crop circles don’t suck people in, Squid said. It’s not like a black hole.
    How do you know? I said. Have you ever seen one? What if the aliens are actually making booby traps, like in The Goonies? And all these people get curious and start doing experiments on the crop circles and doing tours like Mum, and then one day — sssschwwuuuuuup — sucked into oblivion.
    Squid curled his finger around his nose. He always does that when he’s worried. When he was really little he used to curl his finger around his nose while he sucked his thumb, but now he just squishes his fist against his lips when he does it.
    You remember The Goonies, Squid? I asked. He lowered his eyes, looked at the floor.
    Those guys had skulls for those traps, he said softly into his fist. And big rocks. They didn’t get sucked into anything.
    Squid’s been funny about skulls ever since we saw the homo erectus skull at the Tyrrell museum and I told him the brain was still in it. It wasn’t even a real skull, but he believed it. Once he believes something, he can’t un-believe it, not matter how hard you try to convince him.
    But I saw it, he’d said, I saw the brain! I asked him what it looked like and he said tofu covered in blood. Mum calls it a vivid imagination.
    The day before Mum’s flight, Squid wanted to help her pack for the trip. Mum let him help for about five minutes before she told him that’s enough, he was driving her insane, ’cause he kept taking things out of her suitcase.
    But Mummy, these pants have a zipper, he kept saying, and that shirt has a metal button on the pocket.
    Mum called me into her room, told me I had to play Hungry Hungry Hippos with him to keep him occupied. Squid perked right up, Yesssssss, ran to his room to get the game. I followed him out, glaring at Mum as I went. Playing Hungry Hungry Hippos with Squid meant sitting there for practically ten hours, letting Squid hammer madly at three hippos against my one hippo (always the yellow one, ’cause Squid hates yellow), and still just pretending I was actually trying to win. Squid got the game from his closet, was grinning at it like it was a triple-layer chocolate cake as he carried it with both hands, out of his room and down the stairs.
    We had to pass by Mum’s room to go down the stairs, and she’d left the door wide open and had turned on some music to listen to while she was packing. Tina Turner. Makes me wanna dance, she always says. As I was passing by Mum’s room, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. The wooden jewelry box that Jess and I got Mum for her birthday years ago. It was one of the best presents we ever got her ’cause it had little compartments especially made for earrings so that they wouldn’t get all tangled together. It had cost us forty bucks, which was a lot for two little kids. Mum had said it was brilliant, almost cried ’cause she knew how much it had cost us. That was a long time ago, so ordinarily I wouldn’t really think twice about it. But the reason I noticed the jewelry box that day as I was walking past Mum’s room was because it wasn’t where it usually was. Usually, Mum kept it in her bathroom on the counter with the lid open. Since she never moved it, it would get stuck to the counter because of all the toothpaste and soap scum and hairspray