“Do you think you’ll find out what the secret is—the one that Celia and Ellen are keeping?” Jocelyn asked.
“No.” I shook a pebble out of one of my flip-flops. “I really doubt they’re keeping secrets, Jocelyn.”
We pushed through the door of the Ocean Market. The air was cold. It smelled like the inside of a cardboard box.
“Everyone always keeps secrets from me,” Jocelyn said. “It’s because I’m still young. If I was older, would you let me read what you’ve written in your diary?”
“No. And it isn’t a diary. Do you want any candy? I’m getting something chocolate.”
“I don’t eat chocolate,” Jocelyn said.
I chose two candy bars and a postcard and stood in line at the checkout counter.
Jocelyn tugged on my shirt. “But if Celia and Ellen do have a secret, and if you find out what it is, will you promise to tell me?”
Truth #14: I used to think secrets were kind of fun. But that was before I started lying to my parents, back in February.
“Will you, Thea?” Jocelyn scratched her arm. “Please? Thea?”
Because I thought she’d never drop the subject otherwise, I made her a promise. If I found out what the secret was, I would let her know.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Most people think there are only two kinds of lies: “little white lies” and all the others. But that isn’t true. Lies come in a lot of different colors.
White lies are the kind that protect other people’s feelings. Yellow lies are the ones that tell only part of a story; they leave things out.
Then there are pink lies; the pink ones exaggerate.
Green ones invent. Little kids like to use them. (“I saw a dinosaur yesterday. It made a nest in my yard.”)
Blue lies are the ones that people use when they’re desperately trying to get out of trouble: “I didn’t rob that bank. Really. I don’t know where those bags of money came from.”
And there are red and purple and orange lies. Gwen and I made the colors up. We sat down one day and wrote up a chart.
That was before I turned into a liar myself. And of course the first few lies I told were all about Gwen.
It became pretty clear during the next few days that I was stuck with my little busybody cousin. It didn’t matter whether I was on vacation or whether I said I didn’t babysit. Liam and Austin were always at work (so were Celia and Ellen); Phoebe was busy with the baby (and had volunteered to entertain Edmund every morning, wearing him out so that he would take a nap every afternoon); and Nenna was usually cooking or doing some kind of housework. Besides, she had to help Granda. He needed help getting dressed and even getting in and out of his favorite chair.
Because Jocelyn was usually hovering somewhere nearby even when I wasn’t officially spending time with her, the only moments I had to myself were at night in the attic. Sometimes I read under the covers with a flashlight. Or I took my notebook from the zippered compartment of my suitcase, chewed the cap of my pen, and waited to find out what I would write.
Truth #15: I have a lot of nightmares.
I glanced over at Jocelyn, a tiny lump on the opposite mattress.
Truth #16: I don’t always remember them. When I sit up in bed, the details disappear. It’s like shaking an Etch A Sketch: most of the picture gets rubbed away, so all you can see is an outline of what used to be there.
I sat in the dark and twirled my pen. Sometimes the truths came to me in bunches. Sometimes I thought of them during the day and had to carry them around with me for hours, until I had time to open my notebook.
Truth #17: I used to spend a lot of time at Three Mile Creek.
I paused; the pages of the notebook were smooth and thick.
Truth #18: I will never go to Three Mile Creek again.
“Thea?”
The notebook leapt out of my hands. “Jocelyn! You scared me to death. Why are you awake?” My heart was pounding.
“I heard you writing something.” I could see the tangled fluff of her hair against the pillow. “You woke me up.” She turned on the light. The only lamp in the attic was an old-fashioned one on Jocelyn’s dresser. The bottom of the lamp was shaped like a lady wearing a giant hoopskirt.
“I couldn’t have woken you up,” I said. “I barely made any noise.”
“I’m a very light sleeper.” She rubbed her eyes and glanced at my notebook. “I have insomnia.”
“Kids don’t get insomnia.” I put the notebook on my dresser, then thought better of it—hadn’t Jocelyn told me she was in the highest reading group at school?—and stuffed it under my pillow.
“What were you writing about?” she asked.
“Nothing.” I turned over and faced her. Our beds were parallel to each other, a six-foot stripe of floor between them.
“If I had a secret notebook, I’d write about all the things that other people hide from me. That’s what I’d do. I’d write about secrets.”
“You can turn the light out,” I said. “I’m going to sleep.”
She turned it out. “Why haven’t you invited me to visit you in Minnesota?”
I could hear her scratching herself. She was always scratching. “I didn’t know you wanted to come,” I said.
“I do. If you invited me, I could go to school with you. And if it was winter, it would be cold outside and when we got home we’d drink hot chocolate with little marshmallows in it and play a duet on the piano.”
“That’s an interesting idea,” I said, “except that I don’t know how to play the piano. We don’t even have one.”
“You don’t?” Jocelyn rustled around beneath her covers. “I thought everyone had a piano. Do you play the flute?”
“No.”
“The clarinet?”
“I don’t play an instrument.”
It was quiet for several minutes. I thought Jocelyn might have gone to sleep. But then her voice floated toward me in the dark. “What do you do after school if you don’t play an instrument? Do you play a sport?”
“No.”
“Do you go to your friends’ houses?”
I looked out the window. The night was a black box full of stars.
“Thea?”
“What?”
“Does it snow a lot in Minnesota?”
“Not in the summer,” I said.
“Maybe when I visit you, we can go sledding,” Jocelyn said. “It doesn’t snow in New Jersey very often.”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t like thinking about the snow.
“Thea?”
“I’m tired, Jocelyn.” As soon as she stopped talking, I thought, she would fall asleep. But I fell asleep instead. The next thing I knew, it was eight o’clock, and Jocelyn’s bed was already empty, and very neatly made.
Dear Mom and Dad, It’s sunny here. But it’s not very hot. Everybody says hello. Love, Thea
Truth #19: I never know what to say on a postcard.
“Who are you writing to?” Jocelyn leaned over my shoulder. “Are your parents going to bring you a souvenir?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Unless they’re planning to wrap up something from my bedroom and give it to me.”
“My parents are bringing me something.” Jocelyn picked up a pink marker and wrote, This is from Jocelyn too, on the bottom of my postcard. “But I can’t write to them because I don’t know where they are. All parents argue sometimes,” she said.
“I guess so. Can I have my card back?”
Jocelyn was dotting the i in this with a little pink heart.
“Nenna, I’m going to the mailbox,” I called. The house was quiet. Nenna and Granda and Jocelyn and I were the only ones home.
“What did you say, Thea?” Nenna wore hearing aids in both ears, but sometimes they didn’t seem to work.
“I’m going out to mail a letter.” When I turned around, Jocelyn was in front of the door, struggling with the buckles on her sandals. Across her chest she was wearing her patent leather purse.
“
Where do you think you’re going?” I asked.
“I’m going with you.”
“Did you say you’re going to the store, Thea?” Nenna had taken the hearing aid out of one ear. She tapped it against the back of her hand. “Would you mind picking up a gallon of milk?”
“I’ll do it, Nenna,” Jocelyn said, raising her hand as if she were in school. “I’m going with Thea.”
“Good girl.” Nenna gave her a kiss. Then she kissed me, too. She tucked several bills into Jocelyn’s purse.
We bought the milk and a pack of gum (Jocelyn insisted that we buy sugarless), and I mailed my postcard on the way back. Hello, Minneapolis. It was ten in the morning. I figured I had seven more hours to kill until someone else might be interested in taking charge of my cousin.
“Aunt Celia said you would take me swimming today,” Jocelyn said. She lifted her hair—it was more like a scarf—off the back of her neck.
“Aunt Celia must have been confused about that,” I told her.
We delivered the milk to Nenna and went back outside.
“If I go down to the water and look for jellyfish and make sure there aren’t any, then will you go swimming?”
“No,” I said.
“But Aunt Celia said you would take me. We’re at the beach.”
“I know where we are.”
Jocelyn looked disappointed.
“All right, listen.” I didn’t want her tattling to Celia and Ellen, in case there was any chance of my getting paid. “If you’ll stop asking me about going swimming, I’ll tell you one thing—just one—about my notebook. But then you have to stop nagging me. All right?”
Jocelyn considered the rash on her arm. She seemed to be thinking. “All right.”
“Okay, then.” The wind changed direction and the air felt cooler all of a sudden, as if someone had opened a giant window.
“So what is it?” Jocelyn asked. “What are you going to tell me?”
What was I going to tell her? I took a deep breath. “Well, this isn’t something that I’ve written down, but it’s about the notebook. I’m using it to write down things that are true. True things that matter. So it isn’t a diary. It’s just a bunch of, you know, a bunch of true things.”
“So it’s a list,” Jocelyn whispered, as if I had revealed to her the secrets of the ancient pharaohs. “What kind of true things are they? How many pages do you have so far?”
I didn’t appreciate the way her mind worked. “I said one thing. One. Now, let’s look around for something to do.”
Jocelyn skipped behind me, suddenly cheerful, as we went around the outdoor stairs to the storage area, a musty cinder-block garage at the front of the house. It was stacked from cement floor to ceiling with broken beach chairs and rusted umbrellas and a rotting volleyball net and horseshoes and fishing poles. There was a metal shelf full of paint cans and batteries. Celia hated to throw anything out.
“Okay,” I said, looking at the piles of cobwebbed stuff. “Do you want to play horseshoes?”
“No. They’re all rusty.”
“What’s this problem you have with dirt and bugs and rust? Should we play croquet?”
“No. There isn’t enough grass here,” she pointed out.
I pushed a toolbox and a stack of apple crates out of the way.
“I know what you should write about in your notebook,” Jocelyn said. “You should write down everything we find out about Aunt Celia and Aunt Ellen’s secret.”
“They don’t have a secret, Jocelyn,” I said.
“Yes, they do. They drive to work together.”
I stubbed my toe on the toolbox. “So?”
“They work in opposite directions,” Jocelyn said. “Aunt Ellen doesn’t even work in Port Harbor.”
I turned around. She was right. Ellen spent the night at her own house, ten miles away, but came to Nenna and Granda’s every morning for breakfast. “She probably just wants to see Liam and Austin,” I explained.
“Look, there’s an inner tube.” Jocelyn pointed. “We can blow it up with the pump and take it in the—oh.” She looked at me sideways.
“That tube probably has a hole in it, anyway,” I said. “I know what we can do.” I nudged a path through the wreckage. “Do you know what the great thing about Port Harbor is?”
“No, what?”
“It’s small,” I said, “which means you can get anywhere on a bike. And this one—oof!—right here should be short enough for you.” I lifted the volleyball net and revealed a pink bike with a banana seat and moldy streamers dangling from the handlebars. “I used to ride this. It’s great. I can clean it for you. Help me get it outside.”
Jocelyn didn’t budge.
“Come on. What’s the matter? It’ll be fun.”
“I don’t know how to ride a bike,” she said.
Several streamers fell to the floor of the garage. “You don’t know how? You’re seven, and you can’t ride a bike?”
She folded down her ankle socks, aligning them perfectly along her skinny calves. I was desperate to go somewhere, to get away from the house and the list of chores Ellen had probably left on the refrigerator. (Thea: Replace engine in car. Pour cement for driveway. Reroof garage.) “We could ride double on one bike,” I said, glancing at the dark green model I’d been planning to ride.
“Riding double isn’t safe,” Jocelyn said.
Muttering darkly to myself, I shoved the pink bike back into place, then waded deeper into the garage. I pushed past the charcoal grill and the rusted lawn mower and the coils of garden hose that reminded me of bright green snakes, and then, in the corner, I discovered something I had almost forgotten: the giant trike.
“I think that’s Granda’s,” Jocelyn said.
It was. I squeezed the hand brake on the oversized three-wheeler and remembered that when I was little, my Granda used to put me in the rectangular wicker basket in front of him and pedal me around Port Harbor. He used to sing, too. He sang songs from old movies, from Oklahoma! and South Pacific. He had a soft, deep voice—the kind you could feel inside your chest. He probably couldn’t pedal the trike anymore. And I hadn’t heard him sing in years.
I shoved the grill and the hose out of the way and dragged the trike into the sunlight. “I bet you’d fit in that basket,” I said. I found a bike pump and started pumping up the tires. I plucked some spiders’ eggs from the spokes.
Jocelyn looked skeptical.
“Look,” I said. “We can sit here dusting and doing laundry all day, or we can go exploring. Which sounds more interesting to you?”
I helped her climb up. Her thighs weren’t much bigger than my wrists and easily slipped through the wicker openings. “We aren’t going very far, are we?” she asked.
“We’re on an island.” I pushed the trike onto the sidewalk. “There isn’t very far to go.”
“Thea, wait. I don’t have a seat belt.”
A seat belt? I found a yellow bungee cord hanging on a peg by the garage door. “Here. This’ll be perfect. Some people even use them in cars, they’re so safe.”
“Really? Do they?”
“Sure. Would I lie to you?”
Jocelyn fastened the bungee to the wicker basket, stretching it like a belt across her waist.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
She straightened her headband and nodded. “Let’s ride.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Port Harbor was small, and there was almost no traffic. As soon as we rode away from the house, I began to feel free, like a dog whose owner had unfastened its leash and let it run.
“What are we going to explore?” Jocelyn shouted. She looked like a statue on the front of an old-fashioned ship.
I was pedaling too hard to answer. I had to stand up because the trike was heavy. Wiry yellow strands of Jocelyn’s hair kept floating or blowing into my mouth.
“We’re going past the museum,” Jocelyn announced, like a miniature tour guide. “And there’s the fish store.” She pointed at a pee
ling wooden sign: LANDVIK’S FRESH FISH. “I went there with Nenna.”
I plopped down behind her on the vinyl seat. We rode past the Port Harbor Fire and Rescue, past the Knitting Niche, the Seaway Hotel, and Francisco’s Pizza. I turned right and headed into the breeze. “Can you tell where I’m taking us?” I asked.
“No.” Jocelyn’s legs were dangling on either side of the wide front tire like pale white fruit.
About eight blocks later, we glided to a stop.
“Look over there,” I said. “See the ramp? We made it all the way to the boardwalk.” About twenty-five yards ahead of us was a mile-long stretch of rides and bumper cars, fun houses, spin-paint booths, Skee-Ball, cotton candy, caramel corn, and a Ferris wheel with colored compartments that swayed and revolved above the ocean. “Get out and help me push,” I said.
Jocelyn scratched her arm. “I’m not allowed to go to the boardwalk.”
I could smell the pizza, the fudge, the cheesesteaks frying on a dozen grills. “You’re not allowed?” I asked. “Why not?”
She tried to turn around in her seat, but the yellow bungee cord held her in place. “They only sell junk food up there. I don’t eat junk food. Besides, there are pickpockets. And people who try to steal your money.”
“Pickpockets?” My legs felt like rubber. I got off the trike and moved aside for a woman with a stroller. “Do you have any diamond rings with you?”
“No.”
“Do you think someone is going to force you to eat a bag of candy?”
Jocelyn shook her head, then pushed her nest of yellow hair behind her ears. “I can only come here with an adult,” she said. “That’s the rule.”
“I’m twelve and a half,” I pointed out.
Up ahead I could see a juggler on a unicycle, and a mime with a white-painted face holding an oversized bouquet of helium balloons. I loved the boardwalk, even the parts of it I was too old for. I loved the smell of salt water and frying food, the pit-a-ping of the pinball machines, and the hollow thump of the boards beneath my feet. I looked at my cousin. I already knew she had a price. “I’ll tell you one more thing about my notebook.”
The Book of One Hundred Truths Page 4
