Holes (Holes 1)

I feel sorry for the little old lady who lived in a shoe. It must have smelled awful!

Love from both of us,

“What’s so funny?” Zero asked.

It startled him. He thought Zero had gone to dinner with the others.

“Nothing. Just something my mom wrote.”

“What’d she say?” Zero asked. “Nothing.”

“Oh, sorry,” said Zero.

“Well, see my dad is trying to invent a way to recycle old sneakers. So the apartment kind of smells bad, because he’s always cooking these old sneakers. So anyway, in the letter my mom said she felt sorry for that little old lady who lived in a shoe, you know, because it must have smelled bad in there.”

Zero stared blankly at him.

“You know, the nursery rhyme?”

Zero said nothing.

“You’ve heard the nursery rhyme about the little old lady who lived in a shoe?”

“No.”

Stanley was amazed.

“How does it go?” asked Zero.

“Didn’t you ever watch Sesame Street?” Stanley asked.

Zero stared blankly.

Stanley headed on to dinner. He would have felt pretty silly reciting nursery rhymes at Camp Green Lake.

17

For the next week and a half, the boys continued to dig in and around the area where X-Ray had supposedly found the gold tube. They widened X-Ray’s hole, as well as the holes Armpit and Squid had been digging, until the fourth day, when all three holes met and formed one big hole.

As the days wore on, the Warden became less and less patient. She arrived later in the morning and left earlier in the afternoon. Meanwhile, the boys continued to dig later and later.

“This is no bigger than it was when I left you yesterday,” she said after arriving late one morning, well after sunrise. “What have you been doing down there?”

“Nothing,” said Squid.

It was the wrong thing to say.

At just that moment, Armpit was returning from a bathroom break.

“How nice of you to join us,” she said. “And what have you been doing?”

“I had to … you know … go.”

The Warden jabbed at Armpit with her pitchfork, knocking him backward into the big hole. The pitchfork left three holes in the front of his shirt, and three tiny spots of blood.

“You’re giving these boys too much water,” the Warden told Mr. Pendanski.

They continued to dig until late afternoon, long after all the other groups had finished for the day. Stanley was down in the big hole, along with the other six boys. They had stopped using the wheelbarrows.