The Book of One Hundred Truths (3 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

I
t was only my second day in Port Harbor and already I had lost my mother’s notebook. Maybe
lost
was the wrong word. I just hadn’t come across it lately in any of the piles of clothes I was storing near the foot of my bed.

“What are you looking for?”

I turned around. My cousin Jocelyn had followed me up to the attic. She was like a miniature shadow. Whether I was reading or making a sandwich or just sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, Jocelyn would magically crop up beside me and ask me what I was doing.

Truth #4: It’s not that I don’t like little kids. I just shouldn’t spend a lot of time with them. I really shouldn’t be trusted.

“Nothing. I’m not looking for anything.” I pawed through a mound of T-shirts spilling out of my suitcase.

“You
look
like you’re looking for something. You’re lifting things up and putting them down. And now you’re pulling back the sheets on your bed. And you’re lifting your pillow.” Even though she was seven years old, Jocelyn looked about four. She and Edmund were both small for their ages, but Jocelyn was particularly tiny. Her hair was the largest thing about her: it was fluffy and yellow, like Easter grass. She had pulled it away from her face, but it frizzed and cascaded halfway down her back.

“I’m just moving things around.” I shook the pillow (it had a moldy smell) out of its case. Where in the heck was that notebook?

“Aunt Ellen told me you would play a game with me,” Jocelyn announced.

“Wasn’t that nice of Aunt Ellen,” I said, sitting down on the bed. The metal springs underneath me shrieked.

“We could play checkers. Or crazy eights or go fish. I’m good at go fish,” Jocelyn said. “And I know how to shuffle.”

“
I
know how to shuffle,” said a second voice.

“No, you don’t, Edmund,” Jocelyn said. “You haven’t learned.”

“I don’t want to play a game right now,” I told her. “Maybe we could play later.”

“Do you want to go swimming?” Like deer emerging from the woods, my cousins had crept a little closer. “I have my own raft this year,” Jocelyn said, “but you can use it. Edmund and I aren’t allowed in the water by ourselves.”

“No, thanks. I don’t want to go swimming.” I dragged my backpack from under the bed.

“Why don’t you want to go swimming?” Jocelyn asked.

The springs underneath me were chirping like crickets. “Because I just don’t.”

“Will you swim tomorrow?”

Truth #5: I really, really don’t like sharing a bedroom.

“No,” I said. “Probably not. I don’t want to be out on the beach in the middle of the day. Because of the ozone. You know. The ozone layer is disappearing.”

“Oh.” Jocelyn straightened her headband. She was wearing green shorts and a green sleeveless shirt that looked like someone had recently ironed it.

I emptied my backpack onto the floor but found only CDs and books and half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Edmund was driving a filthy toy dump truck over my pillow. “Our parents are taking a vacation,” he said. Edmund was so blond, he was almost white haired, with white eyebrows and lashes to match.

“They’re in Europe,” Jocelyn said, as if correcting him. “They’re going to bring us some souvenirs.”

“I think you might have told me that already,” I said. About every twenty minutes Jocelyn needed to share another tidbit of information about her parents’ trip. Her mother, my aunt Trisha, was leading a tour group through Italy and my uncle Gray had decided to go along. From Jocelyn I had recently learned that Italian pizza sometimes had fish on it, that the Pope wore a white gown and lived in Rome, and that even the little kids in Italy drank wine.

Edmund was grinning, driving his dump truck across my legs.

“Why haven’t you put your clothes away?” Jocelyn peered down at the mess at my feet. “I could unpack for you. I’m good at unpacking.”

I glanced at the surface of my cousin’s dresser. It was perfectly, almost mathematically, arranged: a lamp, a clock, a brush and a comb, a white patent leather purse, and a pink jewelry box with a ballerina on its lid. There was even a little pink plastic dish with a collection of ponytail holders, evenly spaced, in a circle inside it. “No, but thanks anyway,” I said.

“You shouldn’t leave your clothes on the floor,” Jocelyn told me. “If you do, you’ll get fleas.”

“Fleas?” Edmund’s truck had left a scratch on my leg. “No one in this house has a cat or a dog.”

“I’m talking about
sand
fleas,” Jocelyn explained, as if she were a teacher instructing a particularly slow student. “I have to be careful about my skin because I have eczema. Eczema is a rash.”

“I know what eczema is,” I said. But because she wanted me to, I examined the scaly pink patch on her forearm.

“Edmund, don’t touch that,” Jocelyn said. “That belongs to Thea.”

Edmund had picked up the plastic case that held my toothbrush and toothpaste and shampoo and nail clippers.

“That’s okay; he can look at it,” I said.

Edmund promptly cut a hole in the bottom of my toothpaste tube with the clippers. He squeezed some paste out onto the floor.

“What’s this?” Jocelyn asked. She had lifted the lid of my suitcase and found the notebook. “Is it your diary?”

“No.” I snatched the notebook away from her. I fingered the white star on its cover. “I don’t have a diary.”

“Then what is it?”

“It isn’t anything.”

“Can I read it?”

“No.” I stuffed the notebook under my pillow.

Edmund picked a scab off a mosquito bite and watched the blood trickle down to his ankle.

“I’m in the highest reading group at school,” Jocelyn told me. “Ms. McGhee says I’m a very talented reader.”

“I tasted my blood,” Edmund said. “Look.” He held up his finger.

“Don’t you guys have something to do?” I asked.

“We want to play cards with you,” Jocelyn said. “I brought the cards.”

“Oh. Right.” I put most of my clothes away in the dresser, Jocelyn making suggestions about where I should keep my socks, and then we played go fish until Phoebe shouted for us to come downstairs.

Jocelyn stood up and brushed herself off: we’d been sitting on my bed—the dreaded sand fleas were probably everywhere. “Maybe we can sit next to each other at dinner,” she said.

But Celia had seated us in alphabetical order of the cities we had been born in, so I sat between
L
for
Louisville
(my uncle Corey) and
P
for
Philadelphia
(Nenna). Phoebe accused Celia of cheating and Nenna had to tell them to behave themselves, but otherwise we had an uneventful meal.

Truth #6: My parents are probably worried about me.

Truth #7: Sometimes I’m worried about myself.

Truth #8:

“Thea? Are you up there? Are you awake?”

Yes, I was awake. It was only eight-fifteen, but I’d been up for an hour. It was impossible to sleep late in the attic. There was no curtain on the window, and by the time the sun came blazing in, Jocelyn was rustling around like a little housewife, making her bed and getting dressed.

“Yoo-hoo!” It was Celia, shouting from the bottom of the stairs. “Thea? Hello! Are you there?”

Of course I was
there.
I was in the bathroom. It was the only place I could get any privacy. I opened the door about two inches and put my mouth and one eye into the opening. “What?”

“Can you come down here, please?”

“All right. One second.” I shut the door again.

Truth #8:

“Thea? Can you hear me?”

I wanted to grind my teeth down to their roots. Four or five truths a day, my mother had said, as if they were vitamins. I clicked my pen.

“Thea?”

Truth #8: I wonder how many people my age have ever killed someone.

I stared at the notebook. “Coming,” I said. But my feet appeared, momentarily, to be stuck to the floor.

Finally I managed to get out of the bathroom and stuff the notebook into a zippered compartment of my suitcase. Celia and Ellen were waiting for me. They stood at opposite sides of the kitchen, like two homely bookends.

“There you are,” Celia said, as if I had been missing instead of shut in the bathroom two floors above her. “Ellen and I are off to work. Liam and Austin will be leaving soon, too.”

“Okay.” I opened the refrigerator and shook my head to clear my mind of the notebook. We didn’t have any juice. Had Celia and Ellen brought me downstairs only to tell me they were going to work? “We need more orange juice,” I said. “The kind without the pieces of orange in it.”

Ellen took the silverware tray out of the dishwasher, sorted the knives and spoons (they were dirty, but that didn’t stop her), and put it back in again. The backs of her legs were mapped with veins, a series of blue and purple threads beneath the skin.

I looked in the cabinets for a bowl and some cereal. All we had were bran flakes. I hated bran flakes. “We need more cereal, too,” I said. “Maybe something with a little sugar in it?”

Liam and Austin sauntered into the kitchen, scratching themselves and smelling of sleep. They were like woolly animals emerging from a den. “I hate getting up in the morning,” Austin said. “I’d rather not go to sleep at all. I’d rather just stay awake all night than have to get out of bed when it’s still this early.”

Liam found a stash of pancakes in the oven. He took one from the top of the stack, inserted it into his mouth like a funnel, and poured the syrup straight from the bottle down his throat.

“Can I have one of those?” I asked.

“You can make your own later,” Austin said. “The important people have to go to work.” He rolled his own pancake into a funnel. But Liam jabbed him in the stomach when he filled the funnel with syrup, and a sticky fountain erupted from Austin’s mouth.

Ellen pointed a spatula at him. “Stop acting like savages,” she said. She put three plates and three forks on the table, folded a napkin next to each, and said, “Sit.” Liam and Austin and I all sat. Liam turned his plate around in a circle.

Celia looked at her watch. “You boys have exactly eleven minutes to eat and get dressed,” she said. “And Thea, if you wouldn’t mind, we’ve started some laundry you could finish while everyone’s gone. Edmund had an accident last night; we’re washing his sheets.”

“Oh.” I picked up my fork. Did I want to hear about people wetting their beds while I ate my breakfast? I looked out the sliding door to the porch. Edmund was talking to himself and mixing up something with a wooden spoon in a yellow bucket. Jocelyn was reading a book of fairy tales. Her headband matched her shirt and her socks.

“We decided that it would probably be a good idea,” Ellen said, “for us to leave you a list in the morning, of any little chores that might need to be done. Things that you could take care of. By the way, the clothespins are in a plastic bag on top of the dryer. When you hang up the sheets, make sure you clip the pillowcases along the edges, not in the middle. If you hang them in the middle, they get a crease.”

“I’ll be sure to remember that.” I put some butter on my pancakes. Did they actually expect me to start my day with a list of chores?

“Man, there’s something sticky on me,” Austin said. He stripped off his shirt, turned it inside out, and then put it back on.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Why do I need to hang up the sheets if we have a dryer?”

“We never dry sheets in the dryer,” Ellen said.

“Why not?”

“Because we hang them outdoors.” She picked up a purse so large she could probably carry a set of encyclopedias inside it. “I’m sure Jocelyn will be happy to help you. And you won’t have to worry about Edmund, because we’re dropping him off at Phoebe’s.”

I looked down at my pancakes. “What do you mean, I won’t have to worry? Why would I worry about Edmund? Where’s Nenna?”

“She’s taking Granda to a doctor’s appointment.” Celia shut the refrigerator door with her hip. “They’re leaving in half an hour.”

Liam and Austin finished eating in about twelve seconds and went off to get dressed.

“So this is a one-time kind of thing,” I said, measuring my words. “My watching Jocelyn, I mean. I’m going to babysit today because Granda has a checkup.”