It's a pretty good question: How the heck can two kids just disappear?
And the answer is: Sod.
Now: What is sod?
I'm glad you asked!
This is sod:
It's basically a carpet of dirt and grass. Lay it down on the ground and—boom!—now you have a lawn, a football field, or a mini-golf course. There are rolls and rolls of sod for sale at hardware stores, gardening shops, and sod emporiums. Yawnee Valley Feed Supply in downtown Yawnee Valley sells five kinds of sod: bluegrass, Bermuda, tall fescue, dwarf fescue, and meadow mix, which retails at fifty cents a square foot. The day before they disappeared, Niles Sparks, four feet nine inches tall, and Miles Murphy, five foot one, bought ten square feet of sod for five bucks and carried it out to the woods.
HOW TO JUST DISAPPEAR IN 4 EASY STEPS, USING SOD
Step 1: Miles and Niles dug one hole each, as long as they were tall, as wide as they were wide, as deep as they were deep.
"It's like we're digging our own tombs!" said Niles.
"Yikes," said Miles.
Step 2: They covered their holes with sod.
"Make sure you leave a little air tunnel," said Niles. "Otherwise you'll end up buried alive."
"Come on, man!"
Step 3: They each propped up one end of their sod with a big stick, like so:
"Well?" Miles leaned on his shovel. "Anything morbid to say?"
Niles smiled sweetly and ran his fingers across the turf. "Walt Whitman calls grass the uncut hair of graves."
"I don't know who that is, and I don't want to know who that is," said Miles.
Step 4: Twenty-four hours later, with Josh Barkin in hot pursuit, Miles and Niles exploded into the meadow. Niles could feel his lungs beating against his rib cage. He breathed in great gulps but still couldn't get enough air. He hated running.
"Come on!" Miles said.
He'd paused again to let Niles catch up.
Josh was crashing around in the woods behind them.
Miles held out his hand for Niles to slap as he ran by. Together they dashed across the meadow, over to the elm. They threw themselves into their holes and knocked away the sticks. The sod covered their bodies. By the time Josh got to the meadow, Miles and Niles were invisible, lying beneath blankets woven of hopeful green stuff. Sod!
