The Book of One Hundred Truths

by Julie Schumacher

  She licked her lips. “Two things.”

  “Don’t be greedy.” I started pushing the trike up the ramp. “Okay. I’m going to write one hundred things in it,” I said. “Exactly one hundred.”

  “Why exactly one hundred?”

  We reached the top of the ramp. “Because when I get to a hundred…” I was searching for words. “Then the book will be finished.”

  “And then what? Will you let people read it?”

  “No. But I might discover something,” I said.

  “What will you discover?”

  “I don’t know yet.” I climbed back on the trike. We rode past the haunted house, the taffy-pulling machine, the tattoo parlor, the photo booth, the house of mirrors, half a dozen small shops, and the arcades. Finally I coasted to a stop in the shade of a bandstand.

  Jocelyn struggled to turn around. “Why are we stopping?”

  “Because it’s hot up here,” I said. “And my legs are tired.”

  Just ahead of us, a boy was throwing pizza crust to a crowd of seagulls. Their squeaky cries and complaints filled the air.

  “I can’t believe I pedaled us all the way here and didn’t bring any money,” I said. “I’m going to die of thirst.”

  A man dressed as a giant hamburger waddled toward us, hand in hand with a woman dressed as a cup of french fries.

  I accepted a coupon from the human hamburger: 75 cents off any large sandwich!

  “What’s that?” Jocelyn asked. In one of the arcades across from us, two girls in shorts and bathing suit tops were dancing on a metal platform that boomed out music, a series of colored lights and arrows telling them where to move their feet.

  “It’s a kind of game,” I said. “I guess it’s supposed to teach you how to dance.”

  “Is it fun?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never tried it.”

  The dancing girls bent their knees and swayed their hips. Five feet away from them, a woman in a uniform came out of the fudge shop with a tray of free samples, little cubes of bliss.

  “Don’t your parents ever bring you here?” I asked. “You only live about an hour away.”

  “My father doesn’t like the boardwalk,” Jocelyn said. “But sometimes we come in the fall. When it isn’t crowded.”

  “Most of the boardwalk is closed in the fall,” I pointed out.

  The boy who had been feeding his pizza crust to the seagulls was staring at our trike. He threw a final piece of crust and a bird caught it neatly in midair, then sailed away over the ocean.

  “What’s that?” Jocelyn asked.

  I shaded my eyes and tried to figure out what she was looking at. I saw a store selling hermit crabs, a rolling cotton candy booth, and a lemonade stand. I was desperately thirsty. I tried not to think about the ice and the juicy lemons, about the soggy swirls of sugar at the bottom of the cup. “Are you asking about the hermit crabs?”

  “No. I’m asking about her.”

  Between a frozen custard booth and the turbaned man who advertised YOUR NAME PAINTED ON A GRAIN OF RICE was a fortune-teller. She was sitting at a table in a narrow doorway, filing her nails. Over her head was a sign made of tiny plastic silver coins that trembled in the breeze. The shiny letters spelled KNOW YOUR FUTURE.

  “Oh. I guess she’s a fortune-teller,” I said. “You give her five dollars and she looks at your hand, or at a crystal ball or something.” A smaller sign hanging from the edge of the table promised that Madam Carla Knows.

  “Then what does she do?” Jocelyn asked.

  “She probably tells you your fortune—you know, what’s going to happen to you. You probably ask her a bunch of questions and she answers them.”

  “What do you usually ask her?”

  “What?” I was still daydreaming about sugar and lemons. “I don’t ask her anything. I’ve never gone to her.”

  “What would you ask her for if you did go?”

  The fortune-teller had put her nail file away; she seemed to be gazing toward us. “She isn’t like Santa Claus,” I said. “You don’t ask her for stuff and wait for her to hand it over. You ask about the future. She’s supposed to know things about you.”

  Jocelyn looked almost frightened. “I know what I’d ask her for,” she said.

  A bell rang behind us. Two men on a double bike pedaled by. They were followed by a woman pushing an ice cream cart, a silver refrigerator on wheels. I wondered aloud if the woman might take pity on us and give us some water.

  “Do you want me to buy you something?” she opened her patent leather purse.

  I stared at her. “You’ve got money?”

  “It’s the change from the milk.” She climbed gracefully out of the basket.

  “That’s Nenna’s money,” I said. “But I guess she wouldn’t mind if we used it.”

  The ice cream woman paused beside us. “Can I get you two ladies something?” Her voice was gravelly and low, and she had a mole on her face that was shaped like a comma.

  “Do you have sherbet or Popsicles?” Jocelyn asked.

  “You don’t want an ice cream?” I studied the pictures on the side of the cart.

  “Ice cream is high-fat,” Jocelyn said.

  I looked her up and down. Some of the Grummans—Celia and Ellen, in particular—had what my mother called generous figures. I liked to consider myself medium-sized. But Jocelyn was a waif. She probably weighed about forty pounds.

  “Besides, I’m allergic to dairy foods,” she added.

  “They’re not good for my skin. I always have to be careful.”

  “You are always careful,” I said.

  The ice cream woman turned her head and bellowed as if she were in pain: “EEEEiiiiice creeeeeam! Get your ice-cold-eeeeeice-cream heeeeere!”

  Jocelyn bought two medium lemon ices, tucking the change back into her purse, and we sat on a bench with our backs to the ocean. We peeled away the sticky paper lids and licked them. “I think we should go exploring like this every day,” she said, chopping her lemon ice with a wooden spoon. “We’ll borrow Granda’s trike and we’ll ride everywhere in Port Harbor. And we won’t tell anyone where we’re going.”

  Truth #20: Not telling anyone where you’re going is incredibly stupid.

  I took a huge bite of lemon ice and let it melt against the roof of my mouth. “We should have left a note,” I said. “We should have left a note for Nenna.” I took another bite of lemon ice, then pinched the bridge of my nose with my fingers. The space behind my eyes was tingling: I was getting a brain freeze. “Ow.” I leaned forward on the bench. The brain freeze was creeping up into my sinuses, making me feel as if someone were ramming a pair of icicles up my nose. “Ow, ow, ow.” I pushed my fingers into my eye sockets.

  “You ate too fast,” Jocelyn said. “Don’t poke your eyes. I know what to do.” She quickly stood up, put down her lemon ice, and pressed her fingertips against my temples and the bridge of my nose. Then she squeezed my head gently, smoothing my eyebrows with her thumbs.

  The icicles in my nostrils were gradually melting. “Thanks,” I said. “How’d you learn to do that?”

  “Close your eyes,” Jocelyn said.

  I did. But then I remembered the peeling skin on her hand and I needed to see if it was touching my forehead. Was eczema contagious? Imagining my face looking like an iguana’s, I opened my eyes. Over Jocelyn’s shoulder, I saw someone who looked almost familiar: a middle-aged woman clutching an oversized purse.

  “That’s weird,” I said, nudging Jocelyn aside. “That woman over there almost looks like Aunt Ellen.”

  Jocelyn sat down beside me on the bench, our legs touching. The woman, dressed in a tan knee-length skirt and a flowered T-shirt—wasn’t that what Ellen had been wearing when she left the house?—looked at her watch and waved to someone. It had to be Ellen, I thought. I recognized the muscular legs beneath the hem of her skirt.

  “What are they doing up here?” Jocelyn shaded her eyes.

  “They?” I asked. And then I
saw Celia walk toward Ellen. Our aunts stood in the sun and seemed to be arguing. Nothing new there. Ellen held out her hand and Celia dropped something into it. Something small. It glinted in the sun for half a second, and then Ellen tucked it into her purse.

  “Aren’t they supposed to be at work?” Jocelyn asked. “Do you think they’re looking for us?”

  “No. They couldn’t be. They don’t know we’re here.”

  We watched Celia and Ellen walk away, still arguing, a crowd of people in shorts and T-shirts eventually blocking them from sight.

  Jocelyn opened and closed her little purse, playing with the clasp. Open-snap, open-snap. Her lemon ice had turned into a puddle. “Now you’ll believe me,” she said. “Now you’ll believe there really is a secret.”

  “I don’t believe anything,” I told her. But I had a strange feeling in my stomach, as if I had swallowed a large ball of cotton.

  Open-snap. Open. “Here, do you need this? We can share it.” Jocelyn offered me a folded wet cloth in a paper pouch.

  “A hand wipe?” I was amazed. “You actually carry these around with you?”

  Jocelyn took the wipe out of its little square pouch and ripped it in half. “Are your hands sticky?”

  They were. I took my half and wiped my hands and face.

  We sat on our wooden bench in the sun, the ocean a blue and gray murmur behind us.

  “I think you should write this down in your notebook,” Jocelyn said.

  “That’s not what my notebook is for,” I told her. I tossed my lemon ice into the trash.

  Truth #21: Maybe Ellen and Celia are up to something after all.

  CHAPTER NINE

  To avoid Jocelyn’s questions for a little while, I volunteered for salad duty that afternoon, which meant I had to spend an hour at the kitchen sink, washing heads of lettuce and getting the little black bugs out of their wrinkled leaves. Then I had to peel and chop what seemed like a zillion carrots and radishes and tomatoes.

  Ellen came clattering toward me, carrying a tray full of dirty dishes. “Are you cutting those radishes into quarters?”

  I looked at the cutting board. “I guess.”

  “Slices are better.” She started filling the sink with soapy water. Everyone was wandering into the kitchen, looking for a snack or a preview of dinner.

  “I always cut radishes into shapes,” Phoebe said, swaying by with Ralph. “You know, like flowers.”

  “Flowers?” I stared at the little red globes under my knife. She might as well have told me to carve them into statues of movies stars and famous athletes.

  “It doesn’t matter to me, though,” Phoebe said. “I’m not going to eat them. They aren’t good for Ralph.” She bounced the baby on her hip. “I think they make my milk taste funny. Or maybe—”

  “Please,” I said. I dumped the radishes into a bowl and went on to the carrots. Ellen insisted that they be grated instead of chopped.

  “Did anyone get their Granda his beer?” Nenna asked. Every afternoon, my Granda drank a single small glass of beer. When I was younger, I sometimes used to take it to him out on the porch, and after he sipped from the frosted glass we would both laugh at the foamy mustache on his lip.

  “I’ll get it,” Celia said. “Whoops. Shove over, Thea.”

  I took a step to the left but didn’t look up. I was concentrating on the grater. The last time I had used it, I’d torn off a piece of my index finger.

  “Man, I think I made about a thousand and one steak sandwiches today,” Liam said, taking a seat at the counter. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of grease we scrape off that grill. It’s truly disgusting.”

  “How was everyone else’s day?” Nenna asked.

  “Ours was fine,” Phoebe said. “Ralph and I had a little nap. Didn’t we, Ralphums?”

  Nenna kissed my newest cousin’s pale bald head. “What about you, Thea?”

  “What? My day? Oh, it was fine.” I swept the orange mound of vegetables into the salad. “Jocelyn and I just hung around. We went for a walk. We ate some lemon ice. You know.” (A yellow lie. I wasn’t making anything up, but I was leaving things out.)

  Edmund started yelling about a water-skier who was doing tricks, and everyone turned to the window to look.

  “What did everybody else do?” I asked. I arranged the radishes in a little circle around the salad.

  “Went to work,” Ellen said.

  Celia had poured Granda’s beer and delivered it.

  “Went to work is right.” She sat down next to Liam. “We’ve got an orthodontics convention at the hotel this week. It turns out that orthodontists don’t like muffins with their breakfast. They only like toast. And they don’t like the shower mats in their bathrooms. I had to call a meeting about those mats. I was in and out of meetings all afternoon.”

  I looked up from the salad—now a masterpiece of lettuce and vegetables—and spotted Jocelyn standing in the doorway. “What about in the morning?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Celia scooped one of Ralph’s plastic chew toys off the floor.

  “I just wondered.” I put the cutting board next to the sink. “You know—whether you were stuck in meetings in the morning, too. Because it was nice out. So I just wondered if you spent the entire day indoors.”

  There was a pause, like a quarter rest in a piece of music. “Unfortunately,” Celia said, “when you’re the manager of a hotel, you work indoors.”

  An orange lie—she hadn’t answered my question.

  I poured myself a glass of water and added a slice of lemon to it. The water in Port Harbor always tasted like metal.

  “I think dinner’s ready,” Ellen announced.

  Jocelyn stood quietly in the doorway, scratching her arm.

  Truth #22: Temperatures in Minnesota have ranged from–60, in the winter, to 114. The first freeze usually comes in October, and the last one can come as late as May. Maybe those are facts instead of truths. I had to use Nenna’s encyclopedia to look them up.

  “She was lying. Aunt Celia lied to us—you heard her.” It was ten-fifteen. Why wasn’t Jocelyn asleep? Weren’t people her age supposed to sleep? But she had obviously been waiting up for me in the attic, the lady-in-a-hoopskirt lamp shining its yellow light on her pillow.

  “She might have forgotten what she did today,” I said. “Maybe she got mixed up.”

  “No. She was lying,” Jocelyn insisted. “Because she knew you were asking about the secret.”

  “Whatever.” There was no use explaining to Jocelyn about all the different kinds of lies. And I had plenty of things to think about other than Celia and Ellen and their trip to the boardwalk. I turned out the light, then lifted my pillow, found my pajamas, and put them on.

  Jocelyn’s voice floated toward me. “Do you think you’ll have nightmares tonight?”

  “What do you mean? How do you know I have nightmares?”

  “Because I can hear you. You kick off your covers and flop around. And you talk in your sleep sometimes. Will you tuck in my covers?”

  I gave her blanket a quick yank. “What do I talk about? In my sleep?”

  Jocelyn fluffed up her pillow. “Tighter,” she said. “They have to be really, really tight. Or else I can’t sleep. I have insomnia.”

  She was going to drive me insane. I walked around her bed, pulling and tucking the sheet and the blanket as tightly as I could. When I was finished, she looked like a letter in an envelope. I climbed into bed.

  “Thea?”

  “What?”

  “Do you ever babysit in Minnesota?”

  Truth #23: I used to babysit.

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t like to.”

  “Oh.” Jocelyn yawned. “I know where you’re keeping your notebook,” she said.

  I sat up. “Have you looked at my notebook?”

  “No. But you should probably hide it somewhere else. It makes a bump in your suitcase.”

  I lay back
down. “I shouldn’t have to hide it, Jocelyn,” I said. “You should promise not to read it.”

  “Promises are hard,” Jocelyn said. “People break promises all the time.” Through the window at our feet, the moon was a perfect coin above the water. “Can we ride the trike tomorrow?” she asked.

  I told her we could.

  “And you’ll tell me one more thing about your notebook,” she said. “And then we’ll spy on Aunt Celia and Aunt Ellen.”

  I yawned. “People don’t like to be spied on,” I said.

  “If they don’t know you’re spying, then it doesn’t bother them.” Jocelyn struggled to turn toward me, her shoulders pinned beneath the sheet. A minute later I could hear her scratching.

  “Maybe you should leave that rash alone for a while,” I said. “Wasn’t Nenna going to buy you a new kind of cream?”

  “She already did.” More scratching. “But I don’t like the smell of it. Thea?”

  “What?” I straightened my pillow.

  “How do you always know the answer to the dinner game?”

  “I don’t always know it. I guess it seemed obvious tonight.” Phoebe had arranged us in order of appetite, with Austin first. I had glanced around the table and seen Austin and Liam shoveling food into their mouths; then everyone else at the table simply fell into place.

  “I didn’t think it was obvious,” Jocelyn said. “You could probably guess anything. Because you’re smart. And you figure things out.”

  “Good night, Jocelyn.” I heard a click from the downstairs hallway: someone was turning out the lights. A door closed below us, and the stairs that led to the attic disappeared in the dark.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I woke up the next morning because someone was poking me with a finger. “I want to draw a dinosaur,” Edmund said. “But I don’t know how.”

  I could feel a dream hovering, just out of reach. In the dream, Celia was marrying Mr. Hanover. One of her bridesmaids was a fish, and it wore a long green dress with a matching veil. “I love your outfit,” I told the fish.