My Cousin, the Alien Read Online Free PDF Page A

peculiar, nasty smell, kind of like rotten eggs. It wafted from a small round building, if you can call something with only pillars for walls a building. I remembered the picture in the brochure.
    “There’s the Vulcan Wasser Pavilion.”
    As we walked closer, the smell got worse. Inside the circle of pillars, a brick patio surrounded a tiled basin. We looked into it. Bubbles rose through brownish water, each one bursting with a new little stink.
    “You mean, people actually took baths in that?” Ethan said. “Of their own free will?”
    I nodded. “And drank it to cure stuff. Probably it just made people sick so they had to buy medicine the hotel sold.”
    The only other person in the pavilion just then was a white-haired lady sitting on a bench reading. She looked up and laughed. “Vulcan Wasser was supposed to be good for everything from cancer to arthritis. People can talk themselves into believing some pretty crazy things.”
    “They sure can,” I said firmly as I watched Ethan drop pebbles into the pool. I wished I could find some cure for him—something so he’d know he was an okay kid without having to pretend he was an alien.
    I had a sudden urge to talk with the white-haired lady about it. She gave off this glow of being kind and wise. But that was stupid. She was a total stranger. And anyway, a family came into the pavilion just then. Two giggling little kids ran in holding their noses and making noisy jokes about the stink. The lady smiled at us like we three were mature adults sharing a joke. Ethan and I left, feeling far superior to those crude rugrats.
    We headed back to the Japanese garden with its ferns and miniature temples. Crossing an arched bridge, we watched humongous goldfish cruising through the shallow green water.
    “There must be a fortune down there!” Ethan said excitedly.
    “Goldfish are expensive?” I said, confused.
    “No, dummy, the coins.”
    He was right. The scattered pebbles sparkling in the sun were really coins. Pennies mostly, but silver ones too.
    Ethan turned to me, eyes glittering like the coins. “Suppose we sneak out here at night and kind of clean up their pond for them? I mean, the people already got their good luck when they threw the money in.”
    The coins glinted temptingly like lost Spanish doubloons. “Could work,” I admitted. “Both our rooms have separate doors to the hall.”
    “Done! A major nighttime adventure, then wealth beyond our wildest dreams!”
    Probably not. I have some pretty wild dreams. But at least this adventure was firmly planted on Earth. Lost pirate treasure. Nothing to do with aliens or ever-present fat, bald guys.
    You’d think warning bells would go off when I think comfortable thoughts like that.

That night it was too cloudy to go looking for Ethan’s supposed home star. But the treasure hunt was still on. I’d been pretty sleepy after dinner, but the idea of a forbidden nighttime adventure woke me up. And, of course, it would have been forbidden, had we asked—which is why we didn’t.
    It took forever to get the adults upstairs and into bed. I crawled almost fully dressed into the canopy bed in my own room, then lay there listening to my parents’ water running and toilet flushing. When things finally quieted down next door, I gave them fifteen more minutes, then donned shoes and jacket and slipped into the hall.
    Ethan was already there, sitting on a cold radiator. “My folks always check on me once before they go to bed. But now we’re clear.”
    We headed down the stairwell at the end of the hall, plain cement stairs, not like the wide carpeted ones in the center of the building. We didn’t meet anybody.
    Once we passed through the door at the bottom, the air-conditioned quiet of the hotel gave way to warm, damp air full of sound. Things chirped and chugged rhythmically from the darkness—darkness lit by a fairytale sprinkle of fireflies.
    Places look different at night, but we managed to sneak around the rose