Umbrella Summer (2 page)

When I got home, I sat down on the porch steps
to change one of my Band-Aids, because the edges were looking kind of grimy. Then I noticed some bumps on my left leg, just above the knee. There were two of them, red and itchy, and they looked like bug bites, but I checked all over to make sure there weren't more of them, because that could mean they were chicken pox. I'd never had that one before, and there'd been a boy at the library last week who looked pretty itchy. I'd told Mom the kid seemed chicken poxy right when I saw him, but she just rolled her eyes.

Mom was always saying I shouldn't worry so much, but I knew for a fact that she didn't worry enough. Because last February when Jared got hit with a hockey puck playing out on Cedar Lake, Mom took him to the hospital, and the doctor said he just had chest pain from where the puck had hit him, and Mom believed it. And then two days later, Jared died. There was a problem with his heart. The doctors at the hospital said it was incredibly rare, that's why no one had thought to check for it. But rare didn't matter for Jared, did it?

The problem was, you couldn't just look out for the big things—cars on the highway and stinging jellyfish and getting hit by lightning and house fires and pneumonia. Everyone knew that stuff was dangerous. But there was a lot of other dangerous stuff that most people didn't even think to worry about. You had to watch out for everything.

I was checking underneath my sock for more red bumps when a head popped up on the other side of the hedge and scared me so bad, I lost my balance and fell right over in the grass.

“Why, hello there, Annie! Oh, I'm so sorry, dear, I didn't mean to startle you.”

It was Mrs. Harper, our next-door neighbor, who did not normally scare the bejeebers out of me.

“That's okay,” I told her. I stood up and patted all my bones to make sure none of them were broken. They weren't. “I'm all right.”

“Glad to hear it,” she said.

Mrs. Harper was a fairly large lady, as big around as one and a half of most people, and she liked giving hugs. Every time she saw you, she'd squeeze you up tight into a hug and hold on to you so long that you could sing the whole “Star-Spangled Banner” before she was done. She was our troop leader for Junior Sunbirds, so every meeting the hugs could go on forever. “What are you up to over here?”

“Just checking to make sure I don't have chicken pox,” I told her, brushing the grass off me.

“Oh.” Mrs. Harper cleared her throat then, even though I could tell it didn't really need clearing. “I see. Well”—she cleared her throat again—“anyway, Mr.
Harper and I are having a yard sale today. Would you like to come over and take a look? We have some of the kids' old toys and things.”

I peered over the hedge into their yard, and sure enough, there was Mr. Harper, arranging a pile of old mugs on a fold-out table. There were tables all over the yard, actually, but I couldn't tell what was on most of them. A couple of people from our neighborhood were already wandering around looking at things. “I don't have any money,” I said.

Mrs. Harper nodded. “Well, how about this then? Why don't you come be our helper? You can help Mr. Harper and me watch the tables and count money, and then you can pick out one thing to keep, anything you want.”

I thought about it. If I went over there, she was going to hug me for sure. But there might be some good loot on those tables. Like one of those mats with the bumps to make sure you didn't slip in the shower. I'd been telling Mom and Dad we needed one, but they weren't listening. “Anything?”

“Anything.”

“All right, I guess.”

Sure enough, as soon as I walked around to Mrs. Harper's yard, she gave me a hug, a fourteen-year-long one. When she was finally done with all the hugging, she set me up at a table full of chipped plates and cups and a stuffed dead badger that she said was from when Mr. Harper was in his taxidermy phase. I knew it was a badger because its feet were glued to a piece of wood that said badger on it. She gave me a shoe box to put money in and gave me one last hug-squeeze and left. There wasn't anything I wanted at that table, but I thought I saw a stethoscope a couple tables over. It was either that or headphones. I'd have to check later.

It wasn't three seconds before stupid Doug Zimmerman from down the street spotted me and zoomed his way over to my table. He had a forest green bandanna wrapped around his forehead.

“Hello, Aaaaaannie,” he said. He held the “An” part out really long, to be annoying I guess. “What are you doing?”

I straightened out the stuff on the table—a waffle iron, an old pair of dolphin socks, a suitcase with a typewriter inside it—and didn't even look at him. “I'm helping Mrs. Harper. What's it look like?”

He shrugged and picked up the waffle iron. “You going to the Fourth of July picnic this year?” he asked, opening up the waffle iron and closing it again. “We could make an obstacle course.”

“I don't like obstacle courses anymore,” I said.

“Sure you do.” He set down the waffle iron and opened up a box of playing cards. “We could make a real good one, half on the grass and half in the lake. And I could show you some good safari ninja tricks for keeping the geese away.”

“You smell so bad, no geese'd go near you anyway,” I said, grabbing the cards from him and setting them back on the table.

Doug stuck his tongue out, and I stuck mine out right back.

Ever since Doug's best friend Brad moved to Texas a month ago, he'd been trying to hang out with me, but
no way that was going to work. Because no matter what Doug Zimmerman thought, we were not friends. We
might
have been friends in kindergarten, and
maybe
I used to go over to his house sometimes and help him build obstacle courses in his yard, with tires to leap through and chairs to crawl under and trees to climb up and everything. Which was sort of fun, I guess, if you liked that kind of thing. But then Brad showed up, and Doug stopped being my friend and started being a stupid annoying boy who called me “Annie Bananie” and pinched the underside of my arm in the lunch line. Which was why building an obstacle course with him wasn't exactly the number-one thing I felt like doing.

“Anyway,” I told him, “obstacle courses are dangerous because you could fall and break your skull open. Are you gonna buy something or what? This yard sale is only for paying customers.”

Doug just shrugged and picked up the badger. It was real heavy, so he had to hold it with both hands. “Is this thing real?” he asked, poking it in the left eyeball.

“Don't do that!” I yelled, and I grabbed it from him.
“You're going to ruin it and then no one will buy it.”

“Maybe
I
want to buy it,” he said.

“Do not.”

“Do too. How much is it?”

I checked the price tag, which said $2.00. “Three dollars,” I told him.

Doug stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a bunch of one-dollar bills, probably ten of them, so many that I wished I'd told him the stupid stuffed badger cost more. He handed me three and I grabbed them quick before he could change his mind.

“What are you going to do with it?” I asked him as I stuck the bills into the shoe box. I didn't like talking to him, but I was kind of wondering what you did with a stuffed dead badger once you bought one.

“I dunno.” He tugged at the edge of his forehead bandanna. “Maybe I'll sneak it into Trent's room when he's sleeping and stick it right next to his bed. That'd give him the willies for sure. Might even pee his pants.”

Doug and his brothers were always trying to scare
each other silly. Mostly they liked to hide in trees and leap out at each other when the other person wasn't expecting it, which Doug said was being a stealth safari ninja. But they did other stuff too, like once Aaron and Trent told Doug there were werewolves on the loose and then they snuck outside Doug's window while he was sleeping and howled all night long. You were supposed to scare the other person so bad he peed his pants, that was the rule. As far as I knew no one had peed them yet, but I didn't really want to ask.

“Don't you think that'd freak him out?” Doug asked me. He sounded real excited about it.

I rolled my eyes and went back to straightening stuff on the table. I was hoping that if I pretended Doug wasn't there, he'd go away. But I guess that didn't work, because he kept talking.

“Hey, you want to know something?”

“Nope.” I stacked a ballerina plate on top of a tap dancer one.

“Yes you do. It's interesting.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“How do you know? You haven't even heard what it is yet.”

“So tell me already then.”

“Okay, I will.” Doug took a deep breath like he was going to say the most important thing there was. “Someone bought the old haunted house across the street.”

“No they didn't.”

“Did so.”

The house across the street from ours had been empty for a while, ever since the Krazinskys moved out a year before. Rebecca was the one who decided it was haunted. She said the reason no one wanted to move in was because it was cursed, and she made me go over there a million times, trying to peek in the windows. Rebecca was wild for spooky stories, and she was dying to find out what the inside of a real haunted house looked like. Only too bad for us all the windows had blinds on them, so we never even saw the edge of a haunted carpet, no matter how hard we tried.

I wouldn't ever say it to Rebecca, but I was pretty
sure the house wasn't haunted. For one thing, it didn't
look
haunted. It wasn't old and spooky-looking, and not a single one of the windows was even boarded up. Rebecca said that a house didn't have to be spooky to be haunted, maybe that was the ghosts' secret trick to lure people in with their un-boarded-up windows, but I didn't believe that. Because for another thing, I didn't think there were really any ghosts. I didn't know what happened when you died, if there was heaven like Mrs. Harper said, or if it was more like what Mr. L. told me one time, where it was just the end, no sadness, no happiness or anything. But I was pretty sure that after Jared died, he didn't do stupid stuff like hang out in the Krazinskys' house howling at dust bunnies. I figured he was smarter than that. But Rebecca believed it for certain, and anyway it was fun trying to peek through the windows.

I kept on with the plate stacking, but I guess Doug wasn't through talking about the haunted house. “Someone bought it,” he said. “They're moving in tomorrow.”

“I don't believe you,” I said.

“Well, it's true. Mr. L. told me. Hey! This badger is only two dollars. You said three.”

“That's 'cause Mrs. Harper told me the price tag was a mistake. It's really three.”

“Liar. Give me my dollar back.” He reached for the shoe box with the money in it, but I squeezed it close to my chest.

“Can't give it back,” I said. “There's a lot of dollars in here and I don't remember which one's yours anymore.”

He growled at me for a while, but I wouldn't give him that dollar. Thank goodness Mr. Harper finally came over and said he had a collection of shark teeth Doug might be interested in, because I'd heard one time that being around someone you hated could give you allergic reactions, and I was pretty sure Doug was starting to give me hives.

I stayed at that table the whole rest of the
morning, organizing all the stuff so it looked nice and pretty. Mrs. Harper even brought me two cups of lemonade. It wasn't too bad a job, really, because I got to be in charge of stuff and talk to people. I kept glancing at the not-really-haunted house across the street, wondering who was going to live there. When Rebecca got back from her ballet class later, I could go over and tell her about it. She'd want our new neighbors to be zombies or vampires, I bet. Something spooky. I just hoped they didn't have a mean dog, like a pit bull or
something, because I'd seen on the news one time how pit bulls could attack you when you least expected it.

Round about eleven I started to notice the sun huge in the sky like a yellow beach ball, and I realized I wasn't wearing any sunscreen. Which was bad, because you could get a sunburn even in the shade, and sunburns gave you skin cancer, and that could kill you. I learned that from a brochure at the doctor's office.

I tucked the shoe box tight up under my armpit and found Mrs. Harper, who was selling pillowcases to a lady I didn't know. I tried not to be fidgety while Mrs. Harper counted out change, but I swear I could feel the rays from the sun warming up my skin and making cancer molecules right there. I yanked on Mrs. Harper's elbow.

She ignored me. “Here's two dollars back,” she told the lady.

I yanked again. “Mrs. Harper?”

When the lady with the pillowcases finally left, Mrs. Harper said, “Yes, dear? How's it going?”

“Good,” I said. “I mean, okay. I mean, I might be getting cancer.”

“Sorry?” She tilted her head to the side.

“Here.” I held out the shoe box for her. “I have to go home before I get sunburned.”

“Oh,” she said, and she laughed tinkly like a bell. “Well, you know, I have some sunscreen if you'd like to use it. Then you can stay for a while. Only if you want to, of course.”

I thought about that. I wouldn't mind helping some more, as long as it didn't give me cancer. “What SPF is it?” I asked. Ours at home was only fifteen, which according to the brochure was not very high, but Mom said she wasn't buying more until we used it up.

“Forty, I think,” Mrs. Harper said.

“You have anything else?” I asked. “Like SPF a thousand?”

“I don't think it goes that high, dear.”

“Oh.”

“It's in the cabinet in the bathroom,” she told me. And then she turned to help a woman holding a purple turtleneck sweater.

I went into the house and I found the sunscreen in
the bathroom, right where Mrs. Harper said it would be. I spread it everywhere I had skin showing, my arms and legs and even my earlobes. I was extra careful to get every centimeter of my face, because the skin on your face is supersensitive, that's what the brochure said. But I made sure not to get any in my eyes.

When I was walking back outside, I passed the bookshelf in the hallway. Mr. and Mrs. Harper had a million trillion books, all stacked on top of each other and spilling off the bookshelves, and I'd never really looked at any of them before. But just at that moment, I noticed a big green fat one, with a spine as big as my fist, that was poked out just a couple inches farther than the other ones. Trailing down the spine in thick yellow letters were the words:
The Everyday Guide to Preventing Illness
.

I yanked it off the shelf.

I flipped through it and knew right away it was exactly what I needed. The book had everything—smallpox and liver disease and acid reflux and anemia, and what to do to once you got it and how to make
sure you never got it in the first place. It was perfect, just perfect.

I found Mrs. Harper outside lining up baby shoes in a tidy straight row.

“Mrs. Harper?”

“Yes, dear?” she said, looking up from the shoes. “What've you got there?”

“A book. I found it in the hallway.”

She took it from me. “Ah, yes,” she said, after she'd read the title. “It's one of Mr. Harper's. From his physician phase.”

“Can I have it for my freebie?”

“Your freebie?”

“Yeah. You said if I helped out, I could pick one thing for free. Anything I wanted.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “I meant something out here. This book isn't for sale, honey.”

“But—”

“Besides, I just can't make you work all this time and then send you home with an old medical book. Let's check out the toy table, shall we? I'm sure we'll
find something nice over there.” And she set the big green book down behind the baby shoes and stuck her fat hand behind my back, leading me over to the toys.

When we got to the toy table, Mrs. Harper showed me about one million things she thought I might like—LEGOs, an old dump truck, a doll with one eye permanently blinked closed—but there wasn't anything I wanted as much as that book. Mrs. Harper wouldn't give it to me, though.

Finally I picked a red wooden top, even though I hadn't played with tops since I was two. Mrs. Harper told me I'd made an excellent choice. I just nodded.

“Would you like to stick around for a little while longer, Annie?” she asked me. “You've been a great help.”

I shook my head. “I think I'm going to see if Rebecca's back from ballet class. I want to tell her about the haunted house.”

“The haunted house?”

“Yeah, you know, the one across the street. Someone's moving in tomorrow.”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Harper said. “I met her when she came to take a look at the house.”

“Her?” I asked. “Is it a lady with a dog?”

She shook her head. “I'm afraid she doesn't have one, dear, sorry. Or any children, either, at least none your age. Mrs. Finch must be in her seventies at least.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I'm gonna go tell Rebecca then.”

“Of course. Thanks so much for your help, Annie. I really appreciate it.” She straightened up an old rag doll that was threatening to fall off the table. “And in case I don't see you before then, don't forget our Sunbird car wash on Tuesday. Nine a.m. sharp!”

“Yep. Thank you for the freebie,” I said, because that was polite.

But what wasn't polite at all was what I did next, when I passed the table with the baby shoes on my way across the lawn—I picked that big green book right up and tucked it under my T-shirt, and hustled all the way back to my yard. I looked over my shoulder twice to see if Mrs. Harper noticed, but she was so busy sorting
through her husband's harmonica collection that she never even looked my way.

The closer I got to my front door, the more I started to think that maybe I should turn around and put that book back. It was big and heavy and sweaty against my skin. If I ran back right that second, maybe I could slip it onto the baby shoe table without anyone noticing. I was pretty positive it wouldn't be stealing if I returned it before I really took it for good.

But then I looked up at my house and saw Jared's window, with his blue curtains shut up tight so you couldn't see inside, just the way it'd been since February.

There were lots of worse things to worry about than taking an old book, I realized. Because for all I knew, right that very second I could get bitten by a rattlesnake and need to know how to suck out the poison, or I could step on a nail and get tetanus, or I could develop a cough that turned out to be bronchitis. And there were probably millions of more things I didn't even know about, and the only way to make sure
I was always safe and that nothing bad could happen to me was to know exactly what could get me and all the ways to stop it. I had to be prepared, that was all there was to it.

I took one last look at the Harpers' yard over the hedge, at the empty spot on the table where the big green book had been. And then, before I had a chance to change my mind, I turned the doorknob to my house and ran up the stairs two at a time to my room. If I was going to read that entire book before anything got me, I figured I better get started right away.