The Book of One Hundred Truths

by Julie Schumacher

  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 sh
e 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.”

  “That’s today’s schedule,” Celia said.

  “What about tomorrow’s?” I asked. “I don’t want to spend my vacation watching Jocelyn.”

  Ellen turned around. “Do you have any important plans in the next few days? Anything you won’t be able to reschedule?”

  “No, but—”

  “Your Nenna is seventy-four years old,” she said, leaning toward me. Her nostrils were as dark as caverns. “Do you want her to chase after a pair of kids while you eat potato chips and watch TV all day?”

  “Do we have potato chips?” I asked.

  We didn’t.

  Celia said she was sure it would all work out. She was sure I understood that a family vacation meant that every member of the family had to pitch in and help.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Truth #9: I don’t think I would have come to Port Harbor if I’d known that so many people were going to be here.

  Truth #10: But I didn’t want to stay home, either. Sometimes I wish I had the courage to run away.

  “I’m okay by myself,” Jocelyn said after everyone else had left. “You don’t have to pay any attention to me. I know I’m supposed to leave you alone and not bother you.”

  I put my notebook in the zippered pocket of my suitcase and stuffed the entire thing under my bed. “Who told you not to bother me?”

  “You did.” She contemplated the objects on her dresser, then moved her jewelry box half an inch to the left. “Yesterday you told me I’m not supposed to follow you.”

  “Oh.” I stood up and stretched, then looked in the mirror above my own dresser. My face was too round, I thought. Worse, my chin had a cleft in it, like a misplaced dimple. I had tried to flatten it out with masking tape once, but it hadn’t worked.

  “You’re different this summer than you were last year,” Jocelyn said.

  “Am I?” I headed downstairs. “How am I different?”

  “Your hair was longer last summer,” Jocelyn said. She was following me again. “You let me braid it.”

  I remembered sitting on the living room floor watching some kind of movie while Jocelyn’s fingers twined through my hair.

  “And you were nicer,” she added. “This summer you aren’t as nice yet.”

  I turned around at the bottom of the steps. “Do you think I’ll get nicer?”

  Jocelyn scratched herself. “I have eczema on this arm now, too.” She held her pale forearm up to the light, and I saw the peeling skin on her wrist and her hand, which was pink and rough.

  I looked out the sliding door to the porch. The sun was hammering a silver path across the water. “I guess I’m supposed to do laundry now,” I said. “If you want, you can help. But we have to do it Ellen’s way, which means we’re probably going to need a compass or a calculator.” I opened the folding doors in front of the washing machine and dryer. Deep in the washer, Edmund’s sheets were tangled up with socks and pajamas and a tablecloth and Granda’s handkerchiefs. Old people used handkerchiefs, I had noticed. Why didn’t they use tissues, like other people? I tugged at the heavy, soggy bundle. It was like trying to pull an octopus out of a hole.

  “I saw you writing in your diary,” Jocelyn said.

  “It isn’t a diary; I already told you.” I dumped the laundry, including the balled-up sheets and a tiny pair of pajamas printed with elephants, into a plastic basket.

  “Then what is it?” Jocelyn handed me a bag of clothespins. “Will you tell me what you wrote in it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I just won’t. It’s private. How often does Edmund wet his bed?”

  “Not very often.” She helped me carry the basket past the dryer (which looked almost new) and down the outdoor stairs. “I think at home it only happens a few times a week.”

  We set the basket down on the walk. The wind was blowing, and when I pulled the first sheet from the top of the pile, it flapped and clung to me, the cold cloth sticking to my legs.

  “You haven’t gone swimming yet.” Jocelyn couldn’t reach the clothesline, so she sat on one of the three wooden steps that led over the bulkhead to the beach. “You didn’t go in the water yesterday or the day before. And you haven’t gone in it today, either.”

  “Maybe I don’t like swimming.” I peeled the wet sheet off my legs and draped it over the line. By the time I pinned it into place, one long white edge was covered with sand. “Or maybe I went swimming before breakfast. Maybe I snuck out of the house and you didn’t notice.”

  “There’s no wet bathing suit on the clothesline,” Jocelyn said. “And I would have noticed. Because I’ve been watching you.”

  “Why are you watching me?”

  “Why aren’t you going in the water?”

  I pinned Edmund’s pajamas and Granda’s handkerchiefs to the clothesline. “I’m not going in the water because there are jellyfish,” I said. The lie came to me easily, like a bubble rising up in a glass. “I’m allergic to jellyfish.”

  “Everyone’s allergic,” Jocelyn said. “Just like with bees.”

  “But I’m allergic in a different way,” I said. “If I just put my toe in the water and there are jellyfish anywhere around, even ten feet away, my whole foot’ll swell up and I won’t be able to walk.” I pinched my thumb with a clothespin. “It’s called jell-itis.”

  Jocelyn studied me. “I never heard of that.”

  The sheets were flapping behind us in the breeze.

  We didn’t have anything else to do, so once I was finished with the laundry, I suggested that we walk to the Ocean Market, a candy, magazine, and grocery store a few blocks down the beach. We went upstairs to get our sandals and some money. Jocelyn insisted on bringing her purse.

  We climbed over the bulkhead and walked down the beach, past the lifeguard stand, which was bristling with signs that said, NO DOGS. NO PLAYING BALL. NO SWIMMING OUTSIDE THE GREEN FLAGS. NO TALKING TO GUARDS. The lifeguards both wore dark glasses. They stared at the water as if hypnotized.

  “Do you think you’ll ever show it to anyone?” Jocelyn asked.

  “Show what to anyone?”

  A man with a sunburned belly the size of a beach ball walked past us and tipped an imaginary hat.

  “Your secret notebook,” Jocelyn said. “Will you ever let anybody read it?”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” I said. The sand was warm on top but cool underneath; I took off my flip-flops.

  “You’re not the only person here who’s keeping a secret,” Jocelyn said.

  We saw a boy about Edmund’s age sitting on a towel with a mountain of seaweed in a bucket beside him. He was popping the rubbery brown bubbles between his fingers.

  “I guess you want me to ask you who has a secret,” I said. “Okay—is it you?”

  “No.”

  “Is it Nenna or Granda?”

  “No. It’s Aunt Celia and Aunt Ellen. I heard them whispering. They were in the kitchen and they didn’t see me.”

  “They could have been whispering for a lot of reasons,” I said. I remembered Ellen sifting through the mail, then tucking a single envelope into her purse. “Anyway, it isn’t polite to eavesdrop.”

  “I’m good at eavesdropping,” Jocelyn said.

  We watched two girls in matching red bathi
ng suits playing lacrosse at the edge of the water.

  “Do you want to know what Aunt Celia and Aunt Ellen were whispering about?” Jocelyn asked.

  “No.”

  The taller of the lacrosse-playing girls dropped the ball and had to run into the water to find it. I imagined the two of them going shopping together and seeing the bathing suits and deciding to buy them.

  Jocelyn touched my arm. “Are you going to have friends here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if you have friends here, then you’ll spend time with them. Edmund already has a friend named Brian. He lives next door.”

  When I was little—Jocelyn’s age—I used to play in the sand with any other kids in Port Harbor who were building castles or digging holes or dragging water around in buckets. But I was too old for that now. “Maybe you’ll have friends here,” I said.

  “No, I won’t,” Jocelyn said. “I don’t have very many friends.”

  We left the beach, climbing the splintery stairs that led over the bulkhead. “Why don’t you have very many friends?”

  Jocelyn stopped to put on her sandals. She seemed determined to brush every single grain of sand from her feet. “Because I just don’t.”

  Truth #11: I’ve never had very many friends, either.

  “Some of the girls at school say I’m bossy,” Jocelyn said.

  “Are you bossy?”

  “Kind of.”

  Truth #12: I used to have a best friend.

  Truth #13: And her name was Gwen.

  We had reached the street. Leaving the beach and going into the town of Port Harbor always felt strange to me. It was like opening a door and finding an entirely different world on the other side.