Sunny Sweet Is So Not Sorry (2 page)

“SHE'S NOT EVEN SORRY!” I screamed, and I couldn't stop myself from leaping at Sunny's throat.

My mom's stockings ripped as she held me back from strangling my little sister.

I sat shivering in the green chair in the corner of the living room. My hair was sopping wet and soaking through my favorite panda pajamas, and plastic flowers were still solidly stuck to my head. The green chair is where my mother used to give me time-outs when I was, like, two years old. And yes, I admit that I had been getting a little loud. So would you if you had just spent fifteen minutes with your nose pressed to the drain at the bottom of the kitchen sink while your mother practically scrubbed your scalp off. But still, I am
way
too old for a time-out.

Anyway, my mom thought it would be a good idea if I sat and “calmed down.” I told her that I would totally “calm down” as soon as this flower arrangement was off my head! But now I've decided to sit quietly because I could see my mom was getting upset. And I hate it when she gets upset.

Sunny came slithering down the hallway.

“Go away,” I growled.

She didn't listen. She never does. It's what makes Sunny so evil. She tortures me and then hangs around, not seeming to get the fact that she tortured me.

She came right up to my chair and leaned over, reaching out to my head.

“Don't touch me,” I told her, pulling my flowers away. I stared straight ahead of me, making a point of not looking at her.

“Remember that Halloween,” she said, “when Daddy took that box and pasted a tablecloth over it and then pasted plastic plates to it? And plastic cups and plastic forks and plastic knives and plastic spoons and napkins, but not plastic napkins, those were paper. And he made bacon and pancakes, and
we glued them to the plates. And he got an old hat of his and then we glued lots of flowers to the hat. And then he cut a hole in the top of the box, right in the middle, and I stuck my head through and wore the hat with the flowers glued to it.”

I remembered, but I was not speaking to her.

“I was a breakfast table!” she yelled. “Remember? Everybody loved it, especially the dogs. Remember the dogs jumping at me because they really wanted that bacon? I got knocked over by a hundred dogs that night. What were you for Halloween that year? Oh, I remember,” she said. “You were a mime.”

“I was a bank robber,” I said.

“Are you sure?” she asked, staring at me with her giant blue eyes. “I think you were a mime. Remember, you were all dressed in black and had that black hat on.” The fact that Sunny really seemed to remember me as a mime just made me want to strangle her even more.

“Mom! I'm going to be late for school and miss my test in science!” I shouted into the kitchen, making Sunny jump.

My test wasn't until after lunch, but still, I didn't want to show up to school late. Just the thought of showing up late made me feel sweaty. And I knew that I wouldn't get over that sweaty, late feeling by lunchtime. I liked things to happen the way they were supposed to happen. You know, like showing up for school at the time you were supposed to show up for school. Sitting in time-out with a sopping-wet garden glued to the top of my head with Sunny chatting away about Halloween was a pretty solid example of how things were
not
supposed to happen.

“I'm trying to think,” my mother called from the kitchen.

“She's thinking,” Sunny repeated, like I was deaf as well as stupid.

“CALL THE DOCTOR!” I shouted.

“Masha,” my mother yelled back, “Stop shouting!”

“But anyway, I made the glue myself,” Sunny said, sitting on the arm of my chair. “Move over.”

I purposely spread out farther, taking up as much pillow space as I could. There is an entire other chair in the room—and a couch. Sunny always wants to sit half on top of me.

“I bet those two girls at school that you always talk about—what are their names?—anyway, I bet they'll
love your flowers,” Sunny said, reaching out again to try and touch a bloom.

I snapped my head away from her finger and glared at her. Sunny was talking about Nicole Sims and Alex Ruez. Nicole and Alex were model fifth graders. They didn't have a single clothing mistake in their entire closets. They got sky-high grades in all their classes. They played sports without doing some silly sliding split when they went to catch a ball. They even did extra things like playing the cello and singing solos in the chorus. Everyone knew Nicole and Alex. And just the thought of the two of them standing in the hallway of Seward Elementary watching me pass by with my head full of plastic flowers made all the air in my lungs vanish … leaving me just enough to yell directly into Sunny's evil little face, “Go away!”

She fell backward off the arm of the chair and then jumped up and turned herself around in one motion, taking off down the hallway out of my sight.

My mother walked into the room with her cell phone pressed to her ear and a “you'd better calm down”
look boring into my soul. She spoke politely into the phone, “Yes, good morning. This is Jane Sweet. How are you? Yes, of course I'll hold.” That's when I remembered that I had decided to sit quietly so I wouldn't upset her.

I pulled my backpack up on my lap so I could open my
Longman Active Study English-Chinese Dictionary
without taking the book out of my bag. I was learning Mandarin Chinese but didn't want my mom or Sunny to know. Back at my old school, they had just begun to offer Chinese. It had been my dad's idea. Since I was a good Spanish student, I had been chosen to begin the new language classes. But then we moved. They didn't offer Chinese in my new school, so I decided to “borrow” the book and learn it by myself. I kept it a secret because Sunny would have just learned Chinese in a week and spoiled the whole language for me. The only one who knew my secret was my neighbor, Mrs. Song. She was really patient, even when it took me a ton of times to say something right.

Sunny crawled back into the room on her hands and knees, and I shoved my Chinese dictionary into
my backpack. She made her way over to my mother. “Who are you calling, Mom?” she asked.

My mother held her finger to her lips to quiet her. “Yes, hello. Well, I'm not sure,” she said into the phone. “Maybe I should speak with the nurse?”

“She's calling the doctor,” Sunny said to me, like I didn't get it. I zipped up my backpack and let it slide to the floor, ignoring her.

“Masha?” she said.

When I didn't look at her, Sunny repeated herself over and over again, with just a tiny pause between each time, “Masha … Masha … Masha,” until I finally stared over at her.

“Mom's calling the doctor,” she said.

“Shhh,” I hissed with my eyebrows locked together.

“Hi, Barbara, how are you? It's Jane Sweet.”

Silence … followed by my mom's fake laughter. I'm sure Nurse Barbara just made some “sour” joke. People are always making sweet-and-sour jokes when we say our name. They can't help themselves. Last summer, when we first moved here, I had to hear so many sweet-and-sour jokes that I stopped even giving
people that little smile you're supposed to give someone telling a bad joke. I'd heard them all … fifty times. People back in Pennsylvania were used to our name because it was my dad's name and he'd grown up in that town, just like me. Plus, he was in charge of the whole school, Principal Sweet, and everyone loved him, so “Sweet” just fit him naturally and wasn't funny.

“Well, Barbara, we're having a rough morning. It's Masha …”

I opened my mouth in horror. It's not me, it's her … the scrawny little being that plots world destruction standing right next to you!

“There was a bit of an accident with some glue and plastic flowers.”

Silence.

“Yes, plastic flowers. They sort of … got stuck in Masha's hair.”

I gawked at my mother and flung my body across the green chair. Sort of? Yeah, right, an accident.

I reached up and yanked at “the accident.” The
wet mass of plastic was totally and completely glued into my hair. And I have some serious hair. It's dark brown and goes all the way down my back almost to my butt. The flowers were glued into my hair at the very top of my head, close to my roots, so they looked like they grew out of my skull overnight.

My mother sat down on the edge of the couch, fiddling with the hole in her stocking and waiting—I guess—for someone to find “ungluing plastic flowers from heads” in a medical book. Sunny got up from her place on the floor and sat down directly next to my mother, putting her head on my mother's shoulder. My mom lifted her arm and put it around Sunny. The urge came over me to use the throw pillow from my chair just as its name suggests.

“Yes, I'm here,” my mom said into the phone. Kissing the top of Sunny's blond head, she stood up and wandered over to the front window. “Yes. Uhhuh. A goldfish? That sounds awful. Uh-huh. Yes, I've heard of the dime up the nose.”

WHAT ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT? I
shouted—but only in my head so my mother wouldn't have any trouble hearing when they gave her the secret recipe for getting this stuff off me.

“Okay, yes,” she said to the nurse into her cell phone, but her eyes were focused right at me in my green chair. “Thanks so much.” She hung up and didn't say anything, but she didn't have to. There was obviously no secret recipe.

“Let's try the freezer,” my mother said.

“What?” I whined. But I was up and out of the chair and heading to the kitchen.

“What's in the freezer?” Sunny asked, stumbling at my heels.

My mother thought that freezing the glue might make it possible to crack the flowers off my head. It didn't sound like it was going to work, but I stuck my head in the freezer while my mother changed her stockings and got the pocket-sized Dr. Frankenstein ready for school. The freezer reminded me of Antarctica, and not just because of the lonely coldness of it, but because it was such an alien place. I really hadn't spent much time in the freezer before. I laid my head
on a box of frozen pizza, and after ten minutes of staring at dirty ice cube trays my mother checked back in. First she pulled on a blue one. Then she yanked at a pink one. The daisies did not crack off my head.

“What about peanut butter?” my mom suggested. “That's what they use to get chewing gum out of hair.” I just blinked at her. She turned and reached for the jar of super-crunchy Skippy.

Sunny Sweet is going to be so sorry!

Sunny had to go to school, and my mom had to go to work. She had some huge meeting that she was stressed about. She always had some huge meeting she was stressed about. You could never say this to her, though. If you did, she'd remind you about how she's got a lot on her plate, blah, blah, blah, and make you feel all guilty—like it was my big idea to divorce my dad and move to another state.

Luckily Mom agreed that I should stay home. She wiped the last of the peanut butter off my forehead with a wet paper towel and told me to call Mrs. Song
next door if I needed anything. Then she promised we'd figure it all out when she got home. Sunny actually begged to stay with me. We go to the same school. And even though it was only three blocks away, my mom always dropped us off in the morning and Sunny and I would meet up after school and walk home together. Sunny hated school. She was in a regular first-grade class with kids her age, but the school pulled her out for a lot of the day and let her work one-on-one with these gifted teachers. Although she still had to be in with the other kids for lunch and recess and stuff. My mother said that it was hard for Sunny to relate to the other kids because she was so advanced and all.

Yeah, right. Maybe it's hard for the other kids to relate to pure evil.

I knew my mom would never let my sister stay home from school. But just in case, I made sure she understood that anyone in the house without plastic flowers glued to her head would be spending the day locked in a closet.