My Cousin, the Alien Read Online Free Page B

fire escape and starts climbing up from the bottom?”
    “Then I’d pull out my pendant and see if I can make it work as a weapon.” He yanked at the chain until the weird metal disk was swinging against his chest. “I keep thinking that if I press the bumps in the right order, the crystal will fire a death ray or something. But I haven’t found the order yet.”
    I looked at the shimmering pendant. The bumps seemed scattered with no pattern at all. “Have you tried drawing lines between them to see if they make a picture, like connect-thedots?”
    “Yeah. It just makes a mess.”
    A raindrop bounced off the disk, and several more off my head. “Let’s go in. If we’re soaked at lunch, our folks will know we didn’t stay inside like they told us.”
    The rain was getting more serious as we struggled to open the window. Finally we forced it up in a shower of dust and dry paint flakes. Dramatically, Ethan scanned the empty corridor, then gestured for us to slide in. If I could just get over feeling overprotective, I admitted to myself, this game could almost be fun.
    After lunch, which fortunately had no bald waiters, the adults went to play tennis in the indoor pavilion. Ethan and I just sprawled on the plush couches in the lobby, feeling a little heavy after our triple-decker sandwiches, fries, and large chocolate sundaes.
    Even so, sitting out in the open like this, Ethan made us take turns being on guard. One of us would sit up watching for enemies while the other lay back in an overfed stupor and stared at the fancy ceiling. It was painted with cupids and with people wearing flowing bed sheets and riding chariots. They were surrounded by stars connected by gold lines forming constellations.
    “You know,” I said lazily from where I was slumped amid big squishy pillows. “That pattern of stars over there looks sort of like the dots on your pendant.”
    Ethan swiveled his gaze from suspicious doorways to the ceiling. “It does! Maybe that’s the secret of the pendant? It’s not only a weapon, it’s a map showing where I’m from! What constellation is that?”
    “Don’t know. Maybe there’s a star guide in the gift shop.”
    In seconds, Ethan was off to the hotel gift shop, where he snapped up a nature guide on stars. Back on the couch, we began thumbing through the book comparing the constellation patterns with the dots on the pendant. None quite fit.
    I had to look at everything sideways, because he was hogging the book. “You know,” I said as he turned another page, “if you look at that one sideways and count all those little dots too, that might be it.”
    Ethan stared from the pendant to the page and back again. “That’s it! If the crystal is where the book shows the star Rigel, then the pendant’s pattern is Orion. Maybe I come from some planet of Rigel’s? I’m a Rigelian!”
    Ethan practically glowed with happiness. His belief in this alien thing was contagious. “Okay,” I said. “Tonight we’ll go out and look for Rigel. It’s stopped raining.”
    Sunlight, having finally torn free from the clouds, was slicing through the lobby’s tall windows. Others had noticed the weather change too. A couple guys were already marching through the lobby toward the front door, golf bags over their shoulders. I wished they weren’t fat and bald—and that they hadn’t stared at us like we were littering the lobby.
    As they looked our way, Ethan hurriedly palmed his pendant and stuffed the star book into a pocket. “Right. More evasion. Let’s duck out the back way. Plenty of exploring to do outside.”
    The newly appeared sun was turning the rain-soaked gardens into a giant steam bath. Funny how you don’t notice air-conditioning until you’re away from it.
    The gardens were certainly fancy. One had masses of rosebushes and smelled like, well, masses of roses. Another had hedges cut into animal shapes, and beyond that sprawled a Japanese garden. Near the Japanese place we noticed a