The Book of One Hundred Truths

by Julie Schumacher

  I grabbed her arm. “You really know where it is? So we don’t have to wait for this place to open?”

  “They have a map anyway,” she said.

  And in fact, they did; a fairly large map was taped up in the window, only partly obscured by a layer of grime. I walked over and studied it. Across the top it said, PORT HARBOR: NEW JERSEY’S FAVORITE FAMILY PLAYGROUND!

  Scattered here and there across it were cartoonlike drawings of the town’s main attractions: the fire station, the jetty, the lighthouse, the boardwalk. The street names were written in large block letters, and without even looking for it, I found Bay Street (remarkably, it seemed to be located near the bay), a road about fifteen blocks from where we were standing.

  “You think that’s it?” I asked. “Twenty-one Bay? I guess it would be.”

  Jocelyn was fiddling with the strap on her purse.

  “We can ride there and find out,” I said. Something didn’t seem right.

  Jocelyn kicked at a nugget of caramel corn that had tumbled out of somebody’s bucket. “What if they see us?” she asked.

  “Celia and Ellen? They’re not going to see us. They were only going to see us if we went back to the hotel.”

  Truth #47: If it had been someone else at the creek with Gwen—someone who didn’t count things or care that they came out even—nothing bad would have happened.

  Jocelyn walked away from the realty office, past the bakery and the paperback bookstore.

  I followed her through a stream of people. “We’re both going home soon, anyway,” I said. “Jocelyn, wait for me. Where are you going?” I lost sight of her for a minute and felt almost desperate. “Jocelyn?” Dodging a man on a pair of crutches, I caught up to her in the doorway of the 99 Cent Store. EVERYTHING INSIDE ONLY 99 CENTS! The store window was streaked with dirt and sunlight, and it was crowded with inflatable sea serpents, Styrofoam surf-boards, shovels and buckets, books of postcards, and food.

  Truth #48: I used to wish that someone would ask me, What really happened to your best friend, Gwen?

  “You’re out of breath,” Jocelyn said, looking surprised. She had turned around.

  “I’m all right,” I told her. “I’m probably just thirsty.” I wiped the sweat from my forehead. “Maybe we can get something to drink in here.”

  We walked into the 99 Cent Store, where the cashier, a bored-looking woman clutching a pencil between her teeth, was watching a miniature TV by the register. Beyond her, on the ceiling, were rows of long fluorescent bulbs that sent out a shuddering artificial light; everything smelled of plastic. We walked past dozens of bins full of flip-flops and yo-yos, Super Balls and baby bottles and Krazy Straws and squirt guns and coffee mugs and shampoo. Some of the toys were already broken. Two giant fans sent clumps of dust across the floor.

  “I think we should go home after this,” Jocelyn said. “We should go back to Nenna’s.”

  I spotted a row of coolers humming in the back. “The soda’s only ninety-nine cents. Do you want one?”

  “No. Soda’s bad for your teeth.”

  Feeling calmer than I had outside, I plucked a root beer from the cooler. When I turned around, Jocelyn was poking through a bin full of bathing caps, some of them the old-fashioned ladies’ kind with chin straps, and rubber flowers all over. She picked up a daisy-covered cap.

  “What did Madam Carla say to you?” I asked. “Did you ever get a real fortune?”

  At the end of the aisle we were standing in, two girls were bouncing Super Balls next to a sign that said NO BOUNCING BALLS.

  Jocelyn put down the bathing cap and examined a pyramid of toilet paper.

  “Listen, Jocelyn,” I said. I opened my root beer and took a sip, even though I hadn’t paid for it yet. “I know you want to go back to Nenna’s, but I think we should finish what we started.”

  Jocelyn picked up a bundle of handkerchiefs (3 FOR NINETY-NINE!) and a pair of swim goggles.

  “Celia and Ellen aren’t going to bother us. If we get in trouble, you can just tell them it was all my fault.”

  Jocelyn stopped near a bin full of masks. Some were the Batman kind, just a plastic oval with two eyeholes cut in the center; others were stained or battered versions of Snow White or Tinker Bell or Sleeping Beauty. Jocelyn leaned over and picked up a gorilla mask, then handed me a mask that looked like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.

  “Does that make sense? We’ll ride past twenty-one Bay and find out what it is.” I looked down at the cheap mask in my hand. “It’s kind of early for Halloween,” I said.

  Jocelyn held the gorilla mask up to her face and blinked at me through the little round eyeholes. “They aren’t for Halloween,” she said.

  She left me standing in the aisle with my mouth half open and headed for the register, where the cashier was still watching TV. Jocelyn paid for the root beer and the masks, and we walked back into the glare of the afternoon.

  A couple of gears were shifting in the back of my mind. “Tell me you aren’t thinking what I think you’re thinking,” I said.

  Three girls in shorts and brightly colored tube tops staggered past us, laughing. Their bleached hair gleamed like copper.

  Truth #49: I still remember exactly what Gwen was wearing that day: tan corduroy pants and her favorite red sweater. I can still see her looking over her shoulder and laughing, dragging her backpack behind her along the ice.

  We were heading for the trike. “You’re the one who said you didn’t want anyone to recognize us,” Jocelyn said.

  I paused, then nearly tripped over a knothole. “You might not appreciate this, Jocelyn,” I said, “but it’s already fairly unusual for me to be pedaling an old man’s tricycle all over Port Harbor with a seven-year-old in the front basket. So I’m not going to wear a gorilla mask.”

  “You can be the Tin Man,” Jocelyn said. “I don’t mind being the gorilla.”

  Out on the beach, a lifeguard was standing at the edge of the water, pointing at someone on a raft and blowing her whistle.

  “Are you coming or not?” Jocelyn asked.

  Truth #50: That’s what Gwen said to me at the creek: “Thea, are you coming or not?”

  It appeared that I was. I was going to follow the path that lay in front of us, even though I felt nervous about where it led, and about the direction in which Jocelyn and I seemed to be going.

  Truth #51: The three worst mistakes I have made in my life so far all happened in the past five months:

  • going to Three Mile Creek with Gwen,

  • making Gwen a promise I never should have made,

  • agreeing to wear a gorilla mask (the Tin Man was too small) while pedaling a seven-year-old with a nearly shaved head on a giant tricycle through downtown Port Harbor, New Jersey.

  “Slow down,” said the Tin Man.

  The gorilla (me) was sweating like a pig. Do gorillas sweat? Pieces of fake gorilla fur were stuck to my forehead.

  “This street is bumpy. You’re going too fast.” The Tin Man was a real complainer.

  The gorilla slowed down and turned left at the corner. “I can barely see in this crazy thing. My entire face is falling off.” In fact, my eyeholes seemed to be slipping.

  I pulled over and we paused in the shade of a maple tree, two homely creatures under a leafy green umbrella. The Tin Man’s head was an odd shape, I decided. It looked like a water tower with eyes.

  I caught my breath and adjusted my mask. Bay Street was a narrow road with a column of houses on one side and a marsh on the other. Most of the yards were made of pebbles instead of grass. “It must be a couple of blocks ahead of us,” I said.

  Two boys on in-line skates rumbled by. One of them pointed at me. “Weird-looking monkey.”

  “I don’t want anyone to see us,” Jocelyn said. Her gloved hands gripped the sides of the basket.

  I told her that no one was going to see us; she should just relax.

  “We aren’t supposed to be here,” she said. “I want to go back to Nenna’s.”<
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  “In a minute.” I started to pedal.

  Jocelyn grabbed the hand brake and squeezed it, and we jerked to a stop.

  I pulled off my mask. I pulled hers off, too. “What is the matter with you?” I asked. The elastic had made a funny little line across the back of her haircut.

  “You know what the secret is,” Jocelyn said.

  “What? I don’t know what it is.”

  “You do,” she insisted. Her voice was high and unsteady. “You talked to Liam. That’s why he gave us that piece of paper.”

  “Jocelyn, I just asked him—you were sitting there next to me.” I wasn’t going to spend my time arguing with her. I started pedaling again, the gorilla mask dangling around my neck.

  “You were supposed to tell me,” Jocelyn said. She grabbed for the brake, but I swatted her hand away.

  We rode past a man walking a dog on a leash; they had stopped to examine a cluster of cattails. They looked happy together, as if both of them thought strolling along a mosquito-infested marsh was a wonderful thing.

  “I think you’re a liar,” Jocelyn said.

  I told her to be quiet. We were almost there. “And stop squirming around,” I said. “You’re going to get hurt.”

  She unhooked her bungee cord while we coasted through an intersection. “I know where your notebook is,” she said. “You keep it in the bathroom. In the back of the cabinet. I knew you weren’t smoking cigarettes.” She started to cry. “I know about your friend.”

  A ribbon of anger unrolled itself inside my chest.

  Jocelyn was on one knee, almost standing up. “Everyone lies to me. You broke your promise.” The trike was still moving.

  All I could think was You read my notebook.

  Jocelyn stepped on my wrist and tumbled against me, trying to get up.

  I was about to warn her that she was going to fall when she caught the strap of her shoe in the basket. I lunged for her, managing to grab one of her ankles in its ruffled sock. But it was too late. The trike tipped. It seemed to turn on its side in slow motion, inch by inch, with Jocelyn trying to catch her balance but approaching the street. How can a three-wheeler fall over? I wondered. I reached for the brake but missed. Jocelyn’s ruffled sock ended up, empty, in my hand. I wasn’t sure how it happened or which came first: the trike hitting the pavement, the handlebars scraping against the street, the sudden pain shooting through my arm—or Jocelyn falling, headfirst, against the curb.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It didn’t seem like a regular amount of blood—like the amount you usually see when someone gets injured. It seemed like a lot more than that. And it was sliding down Jocelyn’s forehead and staining the cottony yellow of her hair.

  “I hurt myself, Thea.”

  I dragged myself off the pavement, brushing some broken glass and gravel from my leg. Jocelyn was leaning against the curb. She touched her forehead and looked at her fingers, bright with blood.

  She isn’t dead, I told myself. She can’t be dead if she’s talking.

  “I got something on my shirt.” She rubbed at a patch of grease on her shoulder. A narrow ribbon of blood led from the cut on her forehead, down the side of her face, into her ear. She was so calm.

  “Jocelyn, don’t move,” I said. “Can you stay right here? Right here in this spot?”

  She looked at the blood on her fingers.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said. “We need someone to help us. But you’ll be okay. Everything’s fine. You’re going to be fine.” I turned around, ready to run in any direction. The street was empty. The man and his dog had disappeared.

  “I want to come with you,” Jocelyn said.

  “No, you need to stay here.” I tried to wipe the blood from her face, but there was too much of it. How much blood did a person have? “I’m just going to knock on the door of that house over there. Do you see it? I’ll be right back. You can sit here and watch me.”

  “I think I cut myself,” she said. “Will you really come back?”

  I wiped her face with my T-shirt and remembered how fast the temperature dropped at Three Mile Creek. “I’m sorry, Jocelyn.” I stood up as if in a daze. It can’t be happening again, I thought.

  “Thea, wait,” Jocelyn said.

  But I turned around and started running. I felt the frozen creek closing in on me, and the weight of a thousand lies above my head.

  Up the street, a car turned the corner. I sprinted toward it, waving my arms; I was screaming and shouting. The car pulled over. Celia was driving, and Ellen was beside her in the passenger seat. A few seconds later, they were running toward us as fast as they could.

  At the tiny Port Harbor Clinic, they put Jocelyn in one room and me in another. Nenna and Phoebe (carrying Ralph) had somehow appeared and were both with Jocelyn; Celia and Ellen were filling out medical forms in the hall. (“You’re using a pencil for that?” Celia asked. “Do you think this is elementary school?”)

  For a while I sat in the examining room by myself and counted stripes in the carpet; then a nurse came in and took my blood pressure and my temperature (“Normal,” she said) and cleaned Jocelyn’s blood off my arm. She also gave me a blanket because I was shivering. I didn’t feel cold, but my entire body was shaking; there were little earthquakes happening up and down my spine.

  Jocelyn had seemed okay during the trip to the clinic: Celia and Ellen had been talking to her. But what if she seemed fine, and then later she went into a coma?

  If anything happened to her, it would be my fault: instead of babysitting the way a normal person would, I had perched a seven-year-old on the front of a giant tricycle, without a helmet, and strapped her in place with a bungee cord. And even though Celia and Ellen had warned me not to take her past the nursing home, the place where my Nenna and Granda were probably going to be shipped off to die, I’d done it anyway, and of course Jocelyn had gotten upset and tried to leap off the trike. And now my Grumman relatives would all hate me, and the house would be sold, and I would never be able to set foot in Port Harbor again.

  I sat on the paper-covered table and shook.

  “So. Let’s see here. You’re Theodore. Or Theodora.” A white-jacketed doctor had breezed into the room, followed by the nurse, who was holding a tray. “Can I see that arm?”

  “What arm?” I asked.

  He smiled, took hold of my wrist, and turned it over. There was a jagged cut below my elbow. I hadn’t known it was there, but now that I saw it, it hurt. I made the mistake of looking at it when he bent my elbow; the skin on my arm opened like an ugly mouth.

  “Do you know how Jocelyn is?” I asked. “Have you seen her?”

  “Hold still. This might sting for a minute.” The doctor unwrapped a needle that looked like it was long enough to go through my entire body twice.

  “I don’t need any shots,” I said, pulling away. “I just want to see Jocelyn.”

  “You don’t want stitches without anesthetic.” The doctor seemed to be debating with himself: Should I give her stitches without anesthetic?

  “I don’t want stitches at all.” The world as I knew it was falling apart, and now this perfect stranger was determined to stab me with a needle.

  I didn’t like needles. I didn’t like the needly way they looked—their terrible, pointed, glinting shape.

  “Just try to relax,” the doctor said. He made some sort of gesture to the nurse, something that probably meant You strap her down and I’ll stick this thing through her. Maybe it was a truth serum, I thought. It would serve me right. I wouldn’t be able to lie anymore.

  The nurse stood beside me and blocked my view as something horrible and sharp pierced the cut on my arm. “Is your whole family here?” the doctor asked. “Don’t make a fist.”

  I could hear someone arguing in the hall. Was it Austin? Or Liam? Whose family was the doctor talking about?

  A few minutes later I felt a tugging near my elbow, as if someone was sewing me, actually stitching through my skin with a needle and thre
ad. I saw puckers of light around the edges of the room.

  Someone knocked on the door, and the nurse answered. “I don’t think we’re ready for visitors yet,” she said, but Nenna probably didn’t hear her.

  She was pushing Jocelyn toward us in a wheelchair. Phoebe and Liam were behind them. Jocelyn had a circle of gauze around her forehead. She almost looked like the man who painted names on rice.

  I stared at the wheelchair. This was what I had done to her. “Jocelyn, are you paralyzed?” I asked.

  “No.” She moved her legs. “They just want me to sit here.”

  Celia and Ellen crowded into the doorway. I thought I saw Austin somewhere behind them.

  Jocelyn wheeled herself toward me. “I’m sorry about your notebook,” she said. “I only meant to read a page.”

  “We still need a few stitches here,” the doctor said.

  “But then I wanted to find out what happened.” Everyone was quiet for at least fifteen seconds. It was probably a Grumman world record.

  “Tell me the truth,” Jocelyn said. “What happened to your friend? How did she die?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Truth #52: Three Mile Creek is fifteen feet wide, and it cuts through a tangle of poplar trees.

  Truth #53: The water in the creek isn’t very deep. When the weather was hot, in the summer, I used to sit on a wide, flat rock and let my legs dangle in the current.

  Truth #54: I used to love the way the water curled along the bank like liquid silver. On the bottom of the creek there are strange green plants like boneless fingers, and the underwater stones are round and slippery with moss.

  Truth #55: This is a story I don’t want to tell. I promised Gwen that I would never tell it.

  Truth #56: Some days in the winter, after school, the ice was full of little kids playing hockey. The creek was wide enough to play three kids on a side. But when Gwen and I climbed down the bank that day, the ice was empty, a fat white snake.