“Hey, ugly. What’s up?”
I shaded my eyes and turned around.
Liam climbed the three wooden steps to the deck and stood beside me, a yellow surfboard creating a puddle of shade at his feet. “Are you planning to sit here all day by yourself?”
“I might. Why?”
“No reason.” He reached for one of my peanut-butter-and-honey-on-cracker sandwiches. “I just thought you might want to learn how to surf.”
Liam and Austin were good surfers. During the summer they surfed almost every day, whether the waves were six feet high or six inches. Ellen said they had salt water in their veins instead of blood. When I was younger, I used to stand at the edge of the water and watch them, a gray coil of ocean rising behind them to graze their shoulders.
“I’m not wearing my bathing suit,” I said.
“You could get up on your hind legs and go into the house and put it on.” A dribble of honey fell from his lips and landed on my deck chair.
“Liam, do you think anything strange is going on around here?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Do you mean strange like the regular kind of strange, or something different?”
I accidentally put my arm in the honey. “I mean something that’s happening but nobody’s talking about it,” I said.
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure. It probably doesn’t matter. Never mind.” Why did I care about Jocelyn’s ridiculous schemes, anyway?
Austin was thumping his way down the steps. “Are you ready, loser?” He grabbed his own surfboard.
“In a couple of minutes,” Liam said. “Thea’s coming with us.”
Austin stopped in his tracks, looking as if someone had slapped him.
The ocean was a hundred yards away, shining like a giant bowl of cut glass. “That’s okay,” I said. “You guys go ahead. I’ll watch from here.”
“Are you sure?” Liam licked his fingers.
I told him I was. “I don’t have a bathing suit. I forgot to pack one.”
Austin cocked his head. “You came to the beach—for three weeks—without a bathing suit? What did you bring with you? A down jacket?” He cackled at his own little joke, then reached out a long tan arm and swooped up the rest of my cracker sandwiches. “Man, we don’t have any decent food around here. I couldn’t find any donuts.”
“And there’s no bologna,” Liam said. “Tragic.”
I heard a click-clacking noise behind us: Jocelyn was coming down the outdoor stairs, carrying her purse and wearing her patent leather shoes. She held the handrail (she was still wearing gloves) with every step.
“Ah! The family royalty,” Austin said. “It’s always a privilege.” He put down his surfboard and fell to his knees. His hair was hanging over his face like a dirty blond curtain. “Your Majesty!”
“Be quiet,” Jocelyn told him. “Nenna’s watching you from the window. And she said she wants you both to be careful while you surf.”
“Hey, Nenna!” Austin yelled. “We’re going to catch some big ones!” He stood up and waved. Then he turned to Liam. “Are you ready to go yet? Or are you going to stand here flapping your lips all day?”
Liam bonked me lightly on the head with his surfboard. “Are you sure you don’t want to come? You could swim in your clothes.”
“She can’t,” Jocelyn said. “Thea can’t go into the ocean at all. She’s allergic to jellyfish.”
“She’s what?”
“They don’t even have to sting her,” Jocelyn added. “If she just goes in the water and they’re around, her whole body swells up. She gets enormous.”
There was a silence while Liam and Austin apparently mulled this idea over.
“I might actually pay good money to see that,” Austin finally said. “Does she look like the whale in Pinocchio?”
Liam was muttering to himself. “Allergic to jellyfish?”
“Just forget it,” I told him. “I don’t want to surf.”
Austin picked up a crab’s claw and sniffed it, then threw it at his brother.
“Hey, Liam,” I said. “You and Austin don’t know anything about twenty-one Bay, do you?”
“I don’t think so.” Liam tightened the string on his bathing suit, a pair of orange trunks that hung below his knees. “What is it, some kind of dorky girl band?”
“No. I don’t know what it is. I just heard the name. I thought you might have heard of it.”
He shrugged. “Nope.”
Daintily, Jocelyn climbed onto the deck chair next to mine. “I don’t think they know anything,” she said, as if Liam and Austin were nowhere around.
“Come on, let’s get out of here.” Austin elbowed Liam, then nodded to Jocelyn. “Au revoir, Your Majesty.”
“Don’t call me Your Majesty,” Jocelyn said.
Austin bowed, carving a flowery gesture into the air with his hand.
Jocelyn and I sat back in our deck chairs. To our left, half a dozen gray and white seagulls were tussling over some kind of carcass. “You shouldn’t have asked them that,” Jocelyn said.
“Why not? I thought you wanted to find out what the secret was.”
She straightened her glove. “I thought you didn’t believe there was a secret at all.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
If there was a secret—and maybe there was—it wasn’t any of our business. That was what I told Jocelyn. And if there was a secret, it was probably something boring. That was the way secrets were with adults. Maybe Ellen was sending for information about colleges for C-minus students like Austin, and she had a key to a private mailbox. Or maybe Celia was going to start her own business—a bed-and-breakfast or a pancake house.
“I don’t think a pancake house would be boring,” Jocelyn said.
I told her that was just an example. Maybe Celia and Ellen were going to start up a laundry service. “Grumman’s Laundo-rama,” I said. “We Put Wind in Your Sheets.”
“And in your pillowcases,” Jocelyn said. We seemed to be getting used to each other. From all the time we spent on the tricycle, I was used to the sight of her fluffy hair and her bungee cord, and her gloved hands gripping the wicker basket. She was probably used to my breathing on the back of her neck, and the squeak of the seat when I sat back down. Together we learned the location of every soft pretzel stand and water ice store in the town of Port Harbor. And while we rode, we talked about what the island probably looked like from above: a narrow cigar-shaped piece of sand tied to the rest of the state of New Jersey by two fragile bridges.
We developed a kind of unspoken agreement. Jocelyn left me alone (most of the time) about my notebook, and I didn’t interfere with her snooping and spying; I pedaled almost every afternoon right past the hotel where Aunt Celia worked. And if we stopped in the shade for a few minutes so that Jocelyn could look for Ellen’s car, what did it matter? We weren’t bothering anyone. We were just riding, and killing time. I doubted anyone knew.
“Thea? I was wondering if I could talk to you for a few minutes,” Ellen said.
It was nine o’clock, and Nenna had just sent Jocelyn and Edmund to bed. I had gone out to the back porch with a book of science fiction stories, and I was reading about a group of people in a spaceship who discovered that the planet they were traveling to had exploded.
“What do you want to talk about?” I asked.
“Doubles.” Ellen was standing in front of me, hands on her hips. “I’m just wondering whether you believe in doubles.”
“In what?” I dog-eared a page of the book and put it down.
“Some people say that everyone in the world has at least one person who looks a lot like them,” Ellen said. “Celia thought she might have seen your double this afternoon, in the parking lot outside the hotel.”
“Oh.” The sun was setting. Over Ellen’s shoulder, the ocean was calm and pink, almost transparent. “It wasn’t my double.”
Ellen leaned against the railing. “That’s what I thought. It seemed like too much of a c
oincidence for your double and Jocelyn’s double to be traveling through downtown Port Harbor together.”
“I guess that would have been a coincidence. But it wasn’t,” I said, “since those weren’t our doubles.” An assortment of moths were hammering against the yellow light above my head.
Celia opened the sliding door and came toward us, a cup of coffee and a newspaper in her hand. “What a beautiful night,” she said. “Do you mind if I join you?”
I looked at the headline splashed across her paper: Two-Headed Dog Bites Man. And I thought I was reading science fiction.
“Put your coffee down, Celia,” Ellen said. “We’re going for a walk.”
The three of us went down the steps and over the bulkhead and around the clumps of dune grass that sprouted up along the beach like little green swords. At night the sand on the beach was different: it felt powdery and cool, as if someone had poured it through a giant sifter. Ellen took Celia’s elbow and they walked ahead of me toward the water. I watched their two bulky shapes slowly wander away.
Finally Celia stopped in front of me and turned around. “You and Jocelyn have been doing some traveling.”
“I wouldn’t call it traveling,” I said.
Truth #35: You can’t see Three Mile Creek until you’re almost on top of it. It’s cut deep into the earth, about ten feet below a long curving path of rocks and trees.
“We all know that seven-year-olds aren’t easy to spend a lot of time with,” Ellen said. “And Jocelyn can certainly be—”
“Determined,” Celia interrupted.
“I was going to say difficult. In any case—”
“We do appreciate that you’re spending time with her,” Celia finished. “It’s very good of you, Thea.”
I wanted to tell her that they hadn’t given me much of a choice, but I didn’t have time to interrupt.
“Let’s get to the point,” Ellen said. “Shall we?”
We walked past the lifeguard stand in the direction of the jetty, a long black column of rocks that stuck out into the water. “We want to make sure you aren’t encouraging her,” Celia said. “That’s the main thing.”
“Encouraging her in what?”
“We’re not talking about rudeness or real misbehavior,” Celia went on. “She’s so well behaved most of the time. That’s why it’s such a shame when—”
“She followed me to the drugstore yesterday,” Ellen said.
“Jocelyn did? Well, she follows everyone. She likes to spy on people,” I said. “That isn’t my fault.” I stepped on a shell and stopped to pluck it from between my toes.
“She isn’t getting to the hotel by herself, is she?” Ellen asked.
They had both turned toward me, but it had gotten dark and I could barely see their faces. Behind them, the ocean looked heavier and thicker, more mysterious.
Truth #36: Gwen wasn’t allowed to go to the creek by herself until she was ten. We thought her mother was overprotective.
Celia coughed. “The problem here is that there are issues that—”
Ellen interrupted her. “What it boils down to, Thea, is that Jocelyn’s parents aren’t here, so it’s up to others to look after her welfare.”
“Thea’s parents aren’t here, either,” Celia pointed out.
“Jocelyn’s much younger than Thea,” Ellen said. “She isn’t prepared for—”
Celia cut her off. “We just have to be careful.”
“Okay,” I said.
We walked in silence for a little while.
“Careful about what, though?” I asked. “Because I don’t think I understand what you’re saying.”
We had reached the jetty. The rocks were black and shiny and enormous, a row of them extending into the ocean like a giant arm.
“Should we start to head back?” Ellen put a heavy hand on my shoulder. We turned around, the breeze blowing toward us.
“Here’s what we’re saying,” Celia said. “It would be better for both of you not to go creeping around town, poking into things that, well…”
“Things that what?”
“We can’t go into detail,” Ellen said. “It’s obviously an awkward situation.”
“You think it’s awkward that Jocelyn’s spying on you,” I said.
“That’s right. We do,” Celia said. “Because we’re trying to consider what’s best for Jocelyn. And for you, too, Thea. Even though there’s not much we can say on the subject.”
“What subject?” I asked.
“In fact, all we can tell you,” Celia said, “is that—”
“All we can tell you,” Ellen interrupted, “is that it doesn’t have anything to do with you personally, Thea. It isn’t any of your business.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
Ellen’s hand squeezed my neck. “How much longer are you and Jocelyn going to be here? Another five or six days? That’s not very long. You can help her find something constructive to do.”
“Can you teach her to knit?” Celia asked.
“I don’t know how to knit. And I think if you want me to keep an eye on her, you should—” I opened my mouth and then closed it again. How could I ask them if they were keeping a secret when they could ask the same thing of me?
“How much money has Thea earned so far, Celia?” Ellen asked.
“Oh. Probably sixty at least,” Celia said. “If we’re counting on three hours a day, five days a week—”
“It’s more like four hours a day,” I said. “Four hours at least.”
“At three dollars an hour, that’s sixty a week. So I suppose you’re already up to a hundred and twenty. A hundred and twenty dollars.” Celia whistled.
“Are you really going to pay me?” I asked.
“Why wouldn’t we pay you? We just want to make sure that there’s no more spying,” Ellen said. “Are we agreed?”
I nodded.
“Good,” Ellen said. “And of course you don’t need to tell Jocelyn about this conversation.”
“It’s a lovely night for a walk,” Celia said.
We started back toward Nenna and Granda’s, toward the squares of light that seemed to float above the sand.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I think you had another nightmare last night,” Jocelyn said.
I poured myself a bowl of cereal and sliced some bananas on top of it. Did Celia and Ellen count as some kind of nightmare? Maybe they did; I was feeling groggy and disoriented. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you woke me up.” Jocelyn plucked a slice of banana, like a fleshy medallion, from the top of my cereal.
Truth #37: Usually in my dreams it’s February. I don’t have to look at a calendar or even see that it’s winter. I can just tell what month it is. In the dream, I just know.
I discovered that we didn’t have any milk. What was I supposed to do with a bowl of dry cereal? “Did I talk in my sleep?” I asked Jocelyn. “Was I walking around with my arms out in front of me like Frankenstein’s monster?”
“No. You weren’t walking.”
I ate a spoonful of dry flakes. They made an enormous noise in my skull, like an army marching through a field.
Truth #38: In the dreams, I always have a terrible, heavy feeling. It feels like a thousand hooks are attached to my lungs and someone’s tugging on them, trying to pull them out.
I ate another spoonful of dry flakes and looked out the sliding door to the porch. The ocean was calm, as if someone had passed a giant hand across its surface.
Jocelyn was scratching herself again. She had a new patch of eczema at the base of her throat. “Edmund’s playing with Brian today,” she said.
“Hm.” I crunched my cereal.
“So we can go out and explore whenever we want. Nenna says she doesn’t need us. And it’s going to be nice all day.”
“Really?” It would be better for both of you not to go creeping around town, Celia had said. And she owed me a hundred and twenty dollars. “It looks like it might rain, though.”
Jocelyn shaded her eyes and looked at the cloudless blue sky and the brilliant sun. “It isn’t going to rain.”
I glanced over at Nenna, who was playing with Ralph. Phoebe had left him behind in his plastic carrier and gone to the dentist. “It might rain,” I said. “Anyway, I was thinking that we should stay home today for a change. Instead of riding the trike.” I felt Jocelyn staring at me. “There are a lot of things we can do around here. Maybe we could work on some arts and crafts.”
“Oh, Ralph, you’re the handsomest thing,” Nenna said. “Oh, bub bub bub.”
“Or maybe we could set up a sprinkler,” I said. “Or play with water balloons or something.” I sounded like an idiot. Who played with water balloons a hundred yards from the ocean? “Besides,” I said, dumping the rest of my cereal into the garbage, “my ankle’s bothering me. I think I sprained it.”
“Did you hurt yourself, Thea?” Even though Nenna was hard of hearing, she seemed to have a grandmotherly radar that went on alert whenever someone was wounded. She turned around, holding Ralph on her hip. Together they looked like a strange two-headed creature. She used to hold me like that, I thought.
“I must have stepped in a hole last night.” The lie seemed to burn its way up my throat. “People should fill those holes in when they’re finished digging them.”
“Sit down over here and let me see it.” Nenna patted a cushion on the couch, and when I sat, she plopped Ralph down beside me. He immediately turned his pale head and started gumming my arm.
“Is this where it’s bothering you?” Nenna squeezed my foot.
I tried to wince. “Kind of.”
She moved my toes gently, one at a time. “I don’t think it’s swollen. We’ll just keep an eye on it. Can I get you anything? Maybe some ice? Or a cold drink?”
“No thanks, Nenna.”
She patted my leg, then picked Ralph up (he had left a string of drool on my elbow) and carried him into the kitchen, singing “Three Blind Mice.”
The Book of One Hundred Truths Page 8
