The Summer of Bad Ideas

by Kiera Stewart

  “Yeah,” she says slowly. “And you’re Edith, right?”

  I nod. “You just look so different from your school pictures.”

  She tucks her chin. “From when? Fourth grade? Yuck. I looked like such a dweeb with those huge glasses—”

  Her words stop. My own glasses now seem to be under some sort of bright spotlight. They feel suddenly massive, like those oversized glasses people sometimes wear as a joke. I push them up the bridge of my nose and look away.

  “Never mind, I just mean . . . burn those pictures when you get back, okay, Edith? Burn them.” She gives me an awkward smile. “Well, welcome, I guess. I’ve been here all day. Our flight got in at the butt crack of dawn.”

  A nervous sensation bubbles up in my throat. It starts as a laugh, but by the time it reaches my mouth it’s become a shriek. I basically turn into a human fire alarm.

  Because on a plaque on the wall, right above the couch where my cousin is sitting, is a five-foot-long snake, spotted like a leopard and shaped into a S. My eyes squeeze shut, my hands are like claws attached to my head, and over my scream, I hear her ask, “Oh, this?”

  My scream stops. My eyes open. She is pointing to the viper.

  “Uh, yeah?” I say.

  “He’s stuffed too. Herbie,” she says. “I think he was her favorite.”

  The nerves ping throughout my body. My eardrums reopen. “She had a favorite viper?”

  “No, Herbie was a ball python.” She pauses for a second, sighs, and says, “There’s more snakes out back, in enclosures. Rat snakes.”

  I wonder if I look anything like I feel. I guess I do, because she looks at me a little strangely and asks, “You okay? You’re not afraid of snakes, are you?”

  I try to make myself laugh. “No, I mean, what’s there to be afraid of?” And then I find myself actually quoting Henry. “More people die from bee stings than snakebites.”

  “Oh, phew,” she says, wiping imaginary sweat from her forehead. “’Cause, wow—that would get old really fast. They’re everywhere down here!” And she laughs. Like a breeze.

  I try the breeze-laugh thing too, but I sound more like an electric can opener. But she’s too busy joking around and reaching up and PUTTING HER FINGERS IN THE SNAKE’S MOUTH to notice.

  “So,” I say, trying to collect myself, “have you been here before?”

  “Just a couple times. Mostly she came out to visit us. She liked the surfing in California. You ever been surfing?”

  “Me? No, never!” The words blurt out way too fast. No wonder Taylor is probably off cliff diving and mountain climbing and god knows what else with Sophi Angelo. “I mean, it’s because of my mom. She would never let me do anything like that, but you know, I would.”

  “Oh. I don’t really have one of those mom moms,” Rae says.

  I suddenly remember that Rae’s mom doesn’t live with her. Everything I say seems to be uncomfortably wrong. Still, I keep talking. “Also we live near the northeast coast and our waves just—well, there’s probably not enough wind velocity.”

  Wind velocity. What?

  I need to stop talking as soon as possible. But what I start to do is laugh. And it comes out in a weird, gurgly, snorty sound, like a pig rooting around in its trough. Snort, wheeze, gurgle, chortle, snort. Very unfortunately, this happens sometimes when I get extremely nervous. Especially when I’m around someone I like.

  I try to hold my breath, but it bursts through once again.

  “You’ve got the funniest laugh,” Rae says. She looks entertained, at least. “That is a laugh, right?”

  For once, I’m glad to hear my mom calling me from outside. “Well, I should—” Snort. I point to the front door.

  “Okay, I’ll come with you.” Rae pops up off the couch, and somehow I end up following her to the front door.

  Outside, my family is sorting through the luggage. The twins have been assigned to collecting the trash in the van.

  “Did you find the bathroom?” my mom asks without looking up at me.

  “Well, no. But I did find—” The words your niece sound, ironically, too familiar. So I just say, “Rae.”

  “Hi,” Rae says. “Aunt Hannah?”

  My mom smiles big. She steps toward Rae and pauses. For a second I wonder if my mom will do something completely out of character and hug this near-stranger. But she doesn’t. Instead, she takes Rae’s hand into her own and shakes it with a little extra gusto. “Dr. Hannah Posey-Preston,” she says, like she’s at a statistics convention and not her own childhood home. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

  My dad embarrasses me in an altogether different way. He does this little circle-like wave in front of his head and bows. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Rae. I am Walter Posey-Preston, aka Uncle Walt.”

  “Oh, hi,” Rae says with a bewildered giggle.

  “Allow me to introduce the twins,” my dad says, in his mock-formal attempt at humor. “Beatrice, the girl child, of course, and Henry, the boy.”

  “Awesome to meet you guys,” Rae says to them.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Henry says, like he’s eighty years old, not just eight.

  “So, twins, huh?” Rae asks, sizing up the two inches of height Beatrice has on Henry, and Beatrice’s brown hair versus Henry’s white-blond. The glasses are back on Beatrice.

  “We’re dizygotic,” Henry answers, shrugging.

  Rae tries to repeat it—with a question mark—but stumbles over the pronunciation.

  “It just means fraternal twins,” I interpret.

  “Yeah, we came from different eggs,” Henry adds, igniting within me an impulse to flee.

  But Rae gives me a secret smile, as if releasing me from the guilt of association. “They’re adorable,” she says.

  “Mom, she said the A-word!” Beatrice announces.

  “Beatrice, it’s fine.” My mom smiles apologetically at Rae. “Really, it’s fine.”

  “That word makes us feel trivialized,” Henry tells Rae.

  “Henry!” my mom softly scolds him. To Rae, she says, “I’m so sorry, they’re sometimes a little sensitive. . . .”

  Which clearly translates into freakishly weird, but I’m too mortified to speak, let alone attempt to interpret again.

  “I’m . . . sorry, I guess?” Rae says. “Cute, then? Can I say cute?”

  The twins take a communal gasp.

  “Even worse,” Henry says.

  “Now, twins,” my dad says. “Rae is trying to say something nice to you. It’s a compliment. Just say thank you.”

  The twins mumble their thanks, and my mom turns to Rae again, looking a little defeated. “I’m really so sorry, Rae. They haven’t exactly mastered the concept of tact.”

  Would it really be too much to ask to have my family, just once, act like normal people? I’m starting to feel like I did when I was nine and went to Wurstland with Taylor. We went in the spinning sausage ride, and the minute I got strapped in, I realized I wanted off. I needed off. I cried and screamed until they stopped the ride just to get me out of there.

  But let’s face it. No one’s going to rescue me from this spinning sausage of a summer.

  My dad hands me a huge duffel bag to take inside. Rae grabs a small suitcase, and the two of us head up the porch steps and set the luggage down inside the foyer. After finally getting that bathroom break, I start back outside, but Rae says, “Hey, let’s go upstairs. I want to show you something.”

  I know my parents are expecting me to help unpack. I know the twins want me to help lug their stuff into the house. “Oh, but, I should—” The words come out like a reflex. I’m so used to those words. I should keep an eye on the twins. I should make good choices. I should follow the rules. I should be sensible. Careful. Smart. Safe. I should, I should, I should.

  She smiles at me. “Oh, come on, cousin.”

  I like the idea of being related to someone like her. She wouldn’t be curled up in the tent while her friends went swimming in the lake at nigh
t. She’d be the first to dive in.

  So I shut the shoulds up and follow my cousin up the stairs.

  Chapter 3

  Good Ideas

  “Ta-da!”

  Rae spreads her arms and twirls around. We’re in an untidy and dust-coated upstairs room at the back of the house. An old desk is covered with stuff—bills, mail, an old calendar, yellowed newspapers. A purple suitcase, half emptied, lies open on the brass bed, like she’s already started to unpack. Across the room is a worn olive-green couch.

  Rae’s obviously comfortable here, but it feels a little strange to me to be standing in a room that’s been so lived in, when I don’t really know the person who did the living in it.

  “So.” She throws her arms out wide. “What do you think?”

  “About this room?”

  “Yeah.”

  I want to say the right thing, I do. My problem is that I don’t know what that is. Having spent enough time on the sidelines watching popular girls interact, I know that answering these kinds of questions truthfully sometimes has a negative effect. So I stand there like a dummy, with a leftover smile that’s starting to make my face hurt.

  “Okay,” she says, “I know. It’s a little messy, but trust me, it’s the best room in the house.”

  I look around and notice the strange things covering the surfaces. An assortment of animal figurines dot the shelves—a thick metal lizard, a replica of an iguana, a cobra head carved out of quartz. A few framed photos perch on a bookshelf. A snapshot of two toddlers—my mom and Uncle A.J, probably—stands next to a photo of an alligator. And an old black-and-white image of a teenage girl, holding a snake across her forearms. A thick snake.

  “Oh, classic photo,” Rae says. “That’s Petunia with her first pet snake.”

  For a second, I’m confused. This shy smile doesn’t seem to belong to the fearless grandmother I’ve heard about. But it does look familiar—her smile looks a little like mine.

  I walk over to the shelf to get a better look at the young Petunia, but when I pick up the picture, a hook on the back of the frame swings open. Out falls a folded piece of paper—lined and hole punched, like the paper we use in school. It’s brittle with age, and I carefully unfold it, trying to keep it from cracking apart.

  “What is it?” Rae asks.

  “It’s some kind of list,” I say, looking it over. The items are written in loopy cursive, in different inks—a graying black, a faded blue. I flatten it out on the desk, and we look at it together.

  Petunia’s Good Ideas for Summertime, 1962

  Caution: Not for the Fainthearted!!!

  1. Catch a snake bare-handed.

  2. Discover hidden treasures.

  3. Dance in the hurricane.

  4. Master flirting.

  5. Wish upon a shooting star.

  6. Write something scary.

  7. Cross Corkscrew Swamp under a FULL MOON.

  8. Hug the person you least want to.

  9. Kiss the charmer.

  10.

  The last item on the list is blank. “Looks like she had a busy summer—too busy to complete the list,” I say.

  “Sounds like Petunia. She was always off on some kind of adventure,” Rae says, looking amused.

  I try to sound more curious than horrified at the first item on the list. “I wonder why she wanted to catch a snake in the first place.”

  “Yeah, too bad we can’t ask her now. The only thing we do know is that she’s got a bunch of them out back.”

  Thanks for the reminder. I make myself smile. It takes real effort.

  “‘Discover hidden treasures,’” Rae reads from the list. “I know what I’d do if I found any. I’d sell it all and buy us a real summer vacation!”

  We laugh, and I glance back at the piece of paper. “‘Dance in the hurricane’! That sounds kind of crazy.”

  Rae shrugs. “I don’t know what that’s like. We don’t really have hurricanes in California.”

  “Well, it would be really dangerous. Even Category One hurricanes have winds over seventy miles an hour—that can rip a roof off a house. If it’s a Category Five, winds are like a hundred and fifty miles an hour! That’s why they evacuate coastal areas when—” Ugh. I stop myself before I start rattling off advice on flashlights and bottled water. It’s not like Rae has signed up for a safety seminar!

  She looks at me like she thinks I’m slightly insane. Distraction seems to be the only defense. I read another item off the list. “‘Master flirting.’” I crinkle my nose. “It’s a little weird to think of your grandmother in that way.”

  “Not if you knew her. I bet she was a huge flirt when she was young.” Rae scans her finger down to the last item on the list and glances up with a wry grin. “‘Kiss the charmer,’ in case you need proof of that.”

  It embarrasses me to even think about it. I look at the list. “‘Wish upon a shooting star.’ I wonder what she wished for.”

  But something else has Rae’s attention. “‘Write something scary.’”

  It makes me miss Taylor all over again. I think about our latest unfinished writing attempt—a story we titled “The Year I Was Gina.” Will we ever finish one of our stories now?

  “How about this for something scary?” Rae mimics writing in the air with her pointer finger as she speaks. “Once upon a time there were two girls. Cousins. One day, their parents told them, ‘Guess what? You’re going to have to give up two weeks of your summer and spend it in an old house in Florida, where you will scrub and clean and fix things and probably sweat to death before you can escape.’” She laughs. “Because that sounds pretty scary to me.”

  Meeting Rae has made the idea of spending two weeks here almost bearable, but her joke makes it seem like she doesn’t feel the same. I force that smile again. “Yeah. Scary.”

  “Well, okay, not scary, exactly. But sooo boring.”

  There’s that word again.

  It was the last day of school, just a few days before Sophi’s camping trip. Taylor had already been invited, and I was still hoping to be. I was in the car with my dad and the twins; the carpool line was inching forward. Glancing in the side mirror from the passenger’s seat, I saw Taylor and Sophi walking down the sidewalk in our direction, clueless to the fact that I was within earshot. I could hear them chatting about the trip.

  Then I heard Taylor say, “What about Edith? Weren’t you going to invite her?”

  Sophi’s response felt like a slap to me. “Edith’s no fun.”

  And Taylor said something I couldn’t hear, and then laughed. Actually laughed.

  “Seriously, Taylor,” Sophi said. “Don’t you think she’s boring?”

  But it was Taylor’s next words that were daggers in my heart. She said, “Well, yeah, but just invite her anyway. Her mom probably won’t let her go.”

  My soul sank as I thought about all the fun I thought we’d had over our two years together. Not just writing, but the Yoda sodas (allergy friendly). Mad Libs. Chess club. Trivia with the supertwins—even they seemed tolerable around her. I thought she understood me and my weird family, as I understood hers, and now she was being lured away because it was all so boring.

  “Hey, you okay?” Rae asks me now.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” I say, trying to pull myself out of my head. I pick up the photo again. Even though the idea of holding a snake makes me want to run off and curl into a tight little ball, I can’t stop looking at the photo. This is the person I never got to know.

  Rae notices me staring at the picture. “Petunia used to say, ‘Do something every day that scares the daylights out of you.’”

  I think about that, and the fact that she’s holding a snake—her first snake—in the photo. Did it once scare the daylights out of her? I scan the other items on her list of ideas: cross Corkscrew Swamp under a full moon; hug the person you least want to. Did these things once scare her?

  Then Rae lifts her chin, furrows her brow, and says, in a dramatic voice, “Carpe diem. Sei
ze the day. Make your life”—she closes her eyes—“extraordinary.”

  “Was that one of her sayings too?”

  “No.” She smiles. “It’s what I say.”

  I look at my cousin. My cool California cousin. My seize-the-day cousin. “I like that,” I say.

  The door opens and Beatrice barges in. “It’s almost time for dinner.”

  “Okay, we’ll be right there,” I say.

  “Rae’s dad is here.”

  “Fine, we’re coming,” Rae says.

  “We have a dog,” Beatrice says. “Odysseus.”

  “Oh, that’s Albert,” I say. “But I’ll be—”

  “His name’s Odysseus now,” she declares.

  “All right. Now go, please.”

  But Beatrice still doesn’t budge. “Is this where you’re going to sleep?” she asks.

  “Beatrice, can you please just— We’ll be down in a minute.”

  When she leaves, finally, Rae says, “So, are you going to? Sleep in here, I mean? You can have the couch. It’ll be fun.”

  I hesitate. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, Edie, I’m sure. When we leave here in a couple weeks, I’m going straight to Shakespeare camp. Then I’ll have three roommates. So I should probably get used to sharing a room.”

  I’m struck—not just because she’s basically inviting me to move in with her, but because she’s just called me Edie. I’ve always wanted to be an Edie, but every time I’ve tried to launch a “call me Edie” campaign, it’s been like trying to change an ocean tide, and I end up stuck with the stodgy-sounding Edith. But now, in just a matter of two seconds, she’s made me feel twenty times cooler.

  “Okay, sure,” I say, trying not to smile too big.

  The door opens again. My mom pokes her head in. “Downstairs in five minutes, okay, girls? We’re going out to eat.”