Umbrella Summer (4 page)

“Great!” Rebecca said. “Let me just get my helmet.” She leaned over in front of Fuzzby's cage so she was eye to eye with him and said, “Don't worry, Fuzz. You'll be just fine.” And then she picked up the cage and headed to her room.

When Rebecca got back, I was staring at the word wall, that word
despondent
staring back at me. I didn't like it.

“I'm ready to go!” Rebecca hollered at me, her bike helmet already strapped to her head. For some reason she always talked super loud whenever she was wearing her bike helmet, even if I was standing right next to her.

I lugged the dictionary off the counter and looked back at the word wall, trying to find the perfect shouting-out word. And then I found it.

“Shish-kebab!”
I said.

“Shish-kebab!”
Rebecca cried back. And we raced for the door.

When I woke up Sunday morning, there was
a word rolling around in my brain, the word
despondent
, and for a second I couldn't figure out where it came from. But then I remembered it was the dead-brother word Dr. Young had written up on his word wall. I wriggled out of bed and found the dictionary and plunked it open on the floor. You could tell just by looking inside that it was a Dr. Young dictionary, because there were squiggly notes all up and down the margins, and half the pages were marked with Post-its or tiny pieces of paper, and some words were
highlighted and other ones were circled or had check marks next to them. It was like a word jungle in there, and you had to trek through all the scribbles to find the word you wanted.

Des Moines
,
desperado
,
despise
…Yep, there it was,
despondent
. “In low spirits from loss of hope or courage.” That's what it said.

I thumped the dictionary closed.

Dr. Young was the one who'd told me I was perfectly healthy, inside and out, and now he was saying I was
despondent
? Well, he was wrong about that one too. I wasn't despondent, I knew that. I was…I opened the dictionary up again just to make sure I had the right word, and finally I found it, outlined with a rectangle in dark blue ink.
Cautious
. “Attentive to potential problems or dangers.”

I read the big green book for a while, learning about lots more diseases and sicknesses and stuff. When I went downstairs for breakfast, Dad was in the kitchen already, sitting at the table reading the paper.

“Good morning, Moonbeam,” he said, shaking the
fold part in the paper just a teeny bit so it stuck up straight. He took a sip of coffee, still reading.

“Hi,” I said. Then I stood there in the doorway, frozen still like a Popsicle, to see if maybe he'd remember.

It used to be, on Sundays, Dad and I would read the newspaper together, him sipping his coffee and me snuggled in close in the chair right next to him. We'd read the whole thing, front to back, even the stuff I didn't always understand, like what the president said about China, and floods and stock markets and everything. We'd been doing it for as long as I could remember, since before I could read a single word myself. Every Sunday I'd come down to the kitchen early, still in my pajamas, and Dad would be there, already sipping his coffee. And he'd smile at me and say, “Good morning, Moonbeam. Care to read with me?” And I'd squeeze right up next to him with my cereal bowl, and we'd spend the whole morning reading. Sometimes I even helped him with the crossword, because he said I was his good luck charm for finishing.

But we hadn't done that since February, not once
since Jared died. Every Sunday I'd wait and wait, but Dad only ever remembered the “Good morning, Moonbeam” part, and forgot the rest.

Dad turned a page in the paper. “Got any fun plans today?” he asked, shaking the newspaper flat again.

I just shrugged. “I might go to Rebecca's when she's back from church.”

“Oh,” he said, eyeballs stuck like glue to his newspaper. “Well, that sounds fun.”

“Yeah.”

Maybe he didn't forget the second part, I thought. Maybe he just didn't feel like reading with me anymore.

After I found the cereal I wanted in the cupboard, I opened up the bread box on the counter just to make sure my bread was in there. I'd saved half an old loaf of sandwich bread, and I'd told Mom and Dad about fifty times not to throw it away, but you never could be sure about things like that. I'd put it in there a week ago, and I was waiting for it to get good and stale, so we could feed it to the ducks on Tuesday, when we went to
the Fourth of July picnic at the lake. We did that every year, feeding the ducks. You got five points if more than one duck went for your piece, and ten if one of them caught it in its mouth. Jared made that part up. I poked the bread through the bag. Good and stale, just the way the ducks liked it.

Mom came into the kitchen and gave me a kiss on the forehead. “Hello, sweetie,” she said. Then she saw the box I was holding. “Annie Richards,” she said with a smile squished up in the corner of her mouth, “are you eating your father's
bran flakes
for breakfast?” I nodded and she laughed, plopping a slice of nonstale bread into the toaster. “No Loco Cocoas today? I thought those were your favorite.”

“Nah,” I said, getting out a bowl from the cupboard. “Anyway, it's Cocoa Locos. And I'm watching my fiber. So I can prevent against colon cancer.” I poured in the milk.

Mom sighed. “You realize that you absolutely do not need to be worrying about colon cancer at your age, don't you? What even put that in your head?”

“This new book I got,” I said, putting the milk back in the fridge. “It's a real good one. It tells you all the things to watch out for.”

Mom turned to look at Dad like he might have something to say about that, but he was busy reading the newspaper, not even listening at all. “Annie,” she said again in her Mom voice, all concern and wrinkles, “you know I don't like you worrying so much. You are absolutely fine. Reading that book is only going to make you
think
you're sick.”

“But what if I really am, and just no one knows it yet?” I said. “You thought Jared was fine too, until—”

“Annie!” she said, and she sounded real mad. But then her face went back to normal so fast, I thought maybe I made the madness up. “Just eat your breakfast, all right?”

So I sat down at the table across from Dad, with my cereal and a spoon. I thought about asking if we could get soy milk at the grocery store later, because the book had said that was healthier than regular, but then I saw Mom scrubbing at the stovetop with a sponge and I figured it
was best not to ask her. When her bread popped up out of the toaster, she didn't even bother to get it.

After one bite of my cereal, I realized that bran flakes might be good for you, but they tasted worse than dog food. When I grew up, I was going to figure out a way to make Cocoa Locos the healthiest food on Earth. I mashed my cereal down the garbage disposal and grabbed a banana from the fruit bowl. Then I found my pencil with the star-shaped eraser and my old science notebook in the den, and I went outside to sit on the porch steps, careful to sit down in a spot that didn't look too splintery.

If there was one thing that big green book had made me realize, it was that I couldn't wait any longer to make a will. Cholesterol, typhoid fever, ticks, rabies, lung cancer. There was tons of stuff that could get me, and I wasn't even halfway through the book yet. Plus there were loads of things that weren't even in there—nondisease things, like crashing airplanes and runaway zoo animals and earthquakes and falling off the monkey bars. And hockey pucks. You never knew what was going to get you, and you never knew when. Jared's twelfth
birthday was exactly one week away, and he hadn't made it to that. So who knew how long I'd be around?

I opened up my science notebook to a blank page in the back and propped it up against my knee. Then I peeled my banana and chewed it slow, one bite at a time, staring at the blue lines in my notebook and thinking about what I was going to put down there. And when I was all done eating, I had it. I licked the tip of my pencil, the way they did sometimes in movies, and I began to write.

 

Annie Richards's Will

 

That's what I wrote at the top. I did it in my very best handwriting, so the
A
in my name came to a perfect point and each
s
was two even curves. It was so pretty that if Miss Kimball had seen it, she would've felt awful about giving me a U for Unsatisfactory in penmanship.

Then came the harder part. I sat there for what felt like an hour, kicking my heel against the bottom step and thinking about what it was I wanted to leave
people—Chirpy and my snow globe and my roller skates and all my board games. Finally I did have a list, and I thought it was okay.

There were other things I wasn't sure what to do with—like my diary, for one. Because I didn't think I wanted anyone to know my secret business, like that I thought our principal, Mr. Oliver, was the handsomest man on the planet. But after a while I decided if I felt a real bad sickness coming on, I could throw the diary in the garbage so no one could read it. And all the other stuff probably wasn't important anyway.

At the end I wrote

When I was done, I ripped the page out of my notebook and folded it up into a square. And just so everyone would know that it was an extra-important document, and that no matter what they had to do what it said, I wrote a word on the outside in thick capital printing,
each letter as big as a lima bean. It was a word from Dr. Young's word wall.

 

INDESTRUCTIBLE.

 

And I underlined it three times. Then for safekeeping I stuck the folded-up will in my back shorts pocket, the one that was pink-and-blue and shaped like a flower.

I was just thinking about going inside to get some Cocoa Locos, because I didn't think they could be
too
unhealthy, otherwise the cereal company wouldn't be able to make them, and anyway I was pretty much starving. But right then a moving truck pulled into the driveway of the haunted house across the street, and that made my stomach stop grumbling. Two muscly men hopped out of the truck and slid the back door up. I leaned forward to watch as they unloaded things. I wanted to see if there'd be anything haunted-looking I could tell Rebecca about when she got back from church.

Pretty much, though, it looked like normal stuff. There was furniture and rugs and lots and lots of
cardboard boxes. The only thing that was weird at all was that one of the boxes had fragile! written on the side in red letters so big you could probably see them from the top of Mount Everest. But I didn't think Rebecca would be too interested in that. Maybe I'd tell her I saw a swarm of black cats or something.

After a while a car parked on the street out front, and out stepped a lady who must've been Mrs. Finch. She was boring as socks in a drawer, with short white hair that was cut close to her head in an old-lady haircut, and maroon slacks with creases so straight you could've used them for rulers. She reminded me of the friendly old ladies who always stopped outside Lippy's when we were selling Junior Sunbird cookies, the ones you could tell didn't even like sweets but always bought six boxes of Royal Chocolate Ripples anyway.

That was it!

I jumped to the balls of my feet and my science notebook clattered down the steps, but I didn't care. I'd figured out exactly how we were going to get inside the haunted house.

“Annie?” my mom called from out in the
hallway.

“In here, Mom!”

I was lying on my stomach on my bed, with the big green book open on my right to the section called “Cholera and Other Waterborne Diseases,” and the Dr. Young dictionary open on my left to the page with the word
waterborne
on it.

Mom stepped into the room. “Annie, Rebecca's here.”

“Really?” I snapped my head up. I'd been waiting
for over an hour for Rebecca's family to get back from church so I could tell her my genius idea about getting into the haunted house.

“She's downstairs,” Mom said. Then she peered down at my book. “What are you reading,
Moby-Dick
?”

“Nah,” I said. “It's that book I was telling you about.” I rolled over on my back, which made me accidentally squash the dictionary. “All about diseases and stuff. It's really helpful. Also I've figured out that I probably don't have leukemia.”

Mom closed her eyes for a second and took in a big deep breath, slow and noisy. When she opened up her eyes again, she reached over me and plonked the big green book closed.

“Mom!” I cried. “I didn't even put a bookmark in there.”

She picked the book up with two hands. “Annie, I really don't think this is a good book for you to be reading.”

“But—”

“You do not have leukemia. You do not have cholera. You are just
fine
. Do you understand me?”

“But—”

“Now why don't you go downstairs and say hi to Rebecca?”

I sat up on my bed. “Can I have my book back at least?”

“We'll talk about it later.”

“But—”

“Annie.”

“Fine.”

I trudged out of the room while Mom waited in the doorway, still holding on to my book. I tried to lurk around at the top of the stairs for a while to see what she was going to do with it, but she saw me peeking and gave me a
look
, so I had to give up.

When I got to the front door, Rebecca was waiting for me, her bike helmet strapped to her head. “Hi, Annie!” she hollered at me because of the helmet. “I got your signal!”

“Which one?” I said. I was still wondering what
Mom had done with my book. I hoped she was going to give it back. I hadn't gotten to read anything about jaundice or ringworm or high blood pressure yet, and those sounded like important ones.

“The leaf!” Rebecca shouted.

“Oh, good.” I'd stuck a leaf halfway under Rebecca's front door. That was our secret signal we used, to let the other person know that we had something important to talk about. But just in case the leaf blew away, we had a backup secret signal, which was leaving a message on the answering machine.

“So! What did you want to tell me!”

I smiled then, because I knew Rebecca was going to like my idea. “It's about—” I pointed over Rebecca's shoulder at the haunted house. “And how to get inside.” Her eyes got Ping-Pong ball huge again.

We went upstairs to my room, because that's where our secret planning spot was, in the space between my desk and the wall. The dictionary was still lying out open on the bed, but the big green book was gone, and so was Mom. I sighed.

“What!” Rebecca shouted.

I tapped my head, so she'd know to take off her bike helmet, and she did. “What is it?” she asked again, quieter. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Oh good,” she said, and she tucked herself into the planning spot. “So tell me how we can get into the haunted house.”

I squeezed in right next to her, up against the desk. “Okay. We're gonna sell Mrs. Finch some cookies.”

“Cookies?”

I nodded. “Junior Sunbird ones.” And I told her my whole plan, all about how I would pretend to be selling cookies, and Rebecca would hide behind Mrs. Finch's tree, and when Mrs. Finch went to get her checkbook, Rebecca would race quick like a fox into the house and look around while I did some distracting.

Rebecca stuck a braid in her mouth and started chewing. I didn't say anything, just let her think, and after a minute or two she spit her braid out. You could tell the part she'd sucked on because it was darker than
the rest of her hair. “That's a really good plan,” she told me.

“Really?”

“Definitely.”

The one bad part of my idea was that I had to wear my Junior Sunbird outfit, and I hated that thing more than black licorice jelly beans. One time Jared said it made me look like a blob of chewed-up purple bubble gum, and he was right. Plus there were only three badges on my sash, and one was what they gave you for showing up on the first day. Rebecca had twelve, and she'd been in the troop the same amount of time as me, only obviously she was lots better at sewing and hiking and stuff. So my Junior Sunbird outfit wasn't exactly my favorite thing. But Rebecca said it wouldn't look real if I didn't wear it, and if it didn't look real, Rebecca wouldn't be able to sneak inside the house. So I put it on.

We walked across the street together, me dressed up ugly and purple, and Rebecca with my dad's bird-watching binoculars hanging around her neck. She
probably could've seen fine without them, but Rebecca really liked my dad's bird-watching binoculars. Just as we reached the corner of Mrs. Finch's yard, where the big oak tree was, Rebecca grabbed my arm and I stopped walking.

“Are you sure you're going to be okay?” she asked me.

“I think so,” I said, but all of a sudden that got me worrying. “Why? You think something bad's going to happen?” What if Mrs. Finch had laryngitis and she coughed on me? What if I dislocated my kneecap going up the stairs? How was I supposed to fix any of that myself if Mom had taken my book away?

Rebecca chewed on her hair. “Well,” she said after thinking awhile, “I guess you'll be fine. I mean, if any ghosts start flying out when the door opens, you can just duck and they probably won't get you.”

I was pretty sure I rolled my eyes at that one, but Rebecca didn't notice. “Okay,” I said. I started for the door, hanging on tight to a box of Coconut Babies with my left hand and crossing my fingers with the right one.

I was almost to the door when from behind me Rebecca called out, “Annie?” I turned. Rebecca was already hidden behind the tree, with only her head poking out to talk to me. “If you get in trouble,” she said, “just whistle.” And she gave me her best Sunbird salute.

I nodded, even though I didn't know how to whistle.

Before I even climbed up the last step of the porch, Mrs. Finch opened up her door to greet me. “Why, hello there!” she said, all smiles. I took a good look at her. She didn't look like she had any bad diseases, although you could never know for sure. But she looked mostly like a regular old lady, plain as a box of toothpicks, except for her short white hair that came to pointed curls like the tops of the lemon meringue pie Rebecca's mom sometimes made.

“Oh, dear,” she said to me, before I even had a chance to say anything myself. “Did you hurt yourself?”

“Huh?”

“Your arms,” she said.

“Oh.” I looked down at my Band-Aids. “I'm okay,” I told her. “None of them are deadly.”

“Well, that's good to hear.” Mrs. Finch straightened up her back and smiled. “Can I help you with something?”

I shook my head side to side. “Nope,” I said. “No, thank you.”

“Really? I thought maybe you were selling cookies.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, remembering. “Yeah, I'm selling cookies.” I gave her the Sunbird salute.

Her eyes seemed lit up a little bit, and I couldn't tell if she was laughing at me or if she was just an eye-lighting-up kind of person.

“What kinds do you have?” she asked.

“Just this box of Coconut Babies.” I held it out for her to inspect. “It's the last one left.” I was hoping Mrs. Finch wouldn't look at it too close before she went for her checkbook, because one of the corners was seriously dented. Rebecca and I had found it in the very back of my kitchen cupboard, and I had a feeling that
it might be older than the president. Which wasn't too surprising, really, because Coconut Babies tasted like the inside of a shoe and no one ever wanted to eat them.

“Well, coconut isn't my favorite,” Mrs. Finch said. “But I do like to support the Sunbirds.” She held her hand out for the box then, so I gave it to her.

“It's five dollars,” I said.

All of a sudden Mrs. Finch made a noise that sounded a lot like a snort. She looked up from the cookie box with a smile on her face that reminded me of a hot water bottle, warm from the inside. She held up the Coconut Babies and pointed to a date on the side. “Have you been selling all your customers expired goods, dear?”

“Um…,” I said. The cookie plan was obviously not working. My mind gears started up, trying to think of another way to distract Mrs. Finch so Rebecca could get inside her house. “Can I use your bathroom?” I said at last, leaning over to see past Mrs. Finch.

She laughed. “Spying on the new neighbor, are we?”

“What? No.” I stood up straight. “I just have to pee.”

“Ah. So why does your friend need the binoculars?”

I whirled around. Rebecca had half her whole body poked out from behind the tree, my dad's binoculars held up to her face.

“What is it?” Rebecca shouted at me. “What's going on?”

“Whistle!”
I hollered back at her. “Whistle! Whistle! Whistle!” And I bolted down the steps and down the lawn, all the way across the street, Rebecca right beside me. I lost the box of Coconut Babies somewhere near the oak tree.

Once we were back safe inside my house with the door slammed shut tight, Rebecca and I hid beneath the living-room window and took turns looking at Mrs. Finch's house through my dad's binoculars. Mrs. Finch was still standing on her porch, chuckling.

“She thinks we're crazy,” Rebecca said, handing me the binoculars for good and scooching down underneath the window, her back to the wall. “No way we're going to get inside there now.”

“Yeah,” I said, and I knew she was right. I peered through the binoculars again at my new nonspooky neighbor. “At least she doesn't have laryngitis, though.”

Rebecca folded her arms across her chest. “Ghosts don't have laryngitis either,” she said. And I had to admit she was right about that one.