by Barbara Dee
“You mean I can?”
“Why not?” She smiled tiredly. “Grace wants to visit some colleges, and that’ll be a bore for you. And it’ll be good for you to get away. You’ve been so stressed lately.”
I jumped up and gave her a gigantic hug. “Thanks,” I said. “Really, Mom.”
“Glad that I’m not being unfair for once,” she teased. Then her cell phone rang. So she patted my butt and walked off into the kitchen, doing her Delightful Voice.
chapter 11
While Mom was on her cell talking over the details with Samantha Pattison, I stuffed my backpack for the weekend: two tanks, extra pair of shorts, underwear, flip-flops, flower-patterned bathing suit that sort of camouflaged my chest, Lily’s too-big San Diego Zoo T-shirt for sleeping, Spush notebook, earthquake books. Plus sunscreen, lip gloss, and my cell. Plus pens and my toothbrush and three packs of Bubblelicious, in case I got carsick. Or nervous. For a second I thought about taking my amber-mosquito necklace, but it was too precious to risk losing in the ocean. So I left it in my desk drawer. For safekeeping.
Early Saturday morning, Dad stopped me at the door. “So you were just planning to run out? Not even a good-bye kiss?”
“Sorry,” I said quickly. “I thought you guys were asleep.”
“Even if we were,” he answered, giving me a big hug that smelled like sleep. Then he looked in my eyes. “Have a little fun at the beach, kiddo. Don’t be nuts about schoolwork like your sister.”
From his bathrobe pocket his BlackBerry made a windchime noise. He took it out and groaned as he read the screen.
“Don’t you be nuts about work-work,” I teased. “And enjoy Grace’s colleges!”
“Yeah, I’ll certainly try,” he muttered, typing something and shuffling into the kitchen.
“And we’re OFF,” shouted Francesca as the black convertible screeched down the driveway. “Here we come, beach! YEEE-HAW!”
“Okay, girls, but put on sunhats,” said Samantha Pattison, who was wearing a pink Florida Marlins cap and these huge actressy sunglasses. “Or you’ll both scorch before we get there.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t!” Francesca answered. “We’re dripping with sunscreen. And besides, we want to feel the wind in our hair! Don’t we, Evie?”
“Sure!” I said. My mouth was grinning so much, it was hard to talk, especially over the hot wind.
Samantha turned on a country CD by some singer I’d never heard of, and then she started singing along in a beautiful alto voice that sounded like warm honey. (The whooshing car-air was so noisy, I couldn’t hear exactly what she was singing, but it sounded like, ‘Baby, this something pain in my something.’) Pretty soon Francesca joined in, mostly off-key, and then finally I did, even though I didn’t know any words. As soon as the CD was finished, Samantha popped in another, and then another, and we just kept speeding up the thruway singing our lungs out, with the wind snapping our hair in our faces. Yippee, I yelled to myself. Bye-bye, Blanton! For three whole days!
Finally, we were there. Or rather, a mile from there. When we got to a curvy little path sprinkled with beach sand, Samantha made us get out of the car and brush our hair. We watched her put on some glossy pale pink lipstick and stretch her mouth, as if she were about to go onstage. And then we got back in the car and drove up to the beach house, which was maybe the weirdest-looking place I’d ever seen. In my life.
Because it wasn’t just one house. It looked like four different teeny houses scotch-taped together: a gray-shingled bungalow attached to an ultra-modern glass room on one side and a run-down-looking white ranch on the other. The second story looked like something straight out of Blanton: much newer, painted in a color Mom liked to call “eggshell,” with huge, curvy windows and a little balcony. And then the garage, which was separate from the house, basically looking like a damp cardboard box just big enough to store two cars and a lawn mower.
“Well? What do you think?” asked Francesca, her eyes shining.
Before I could answer, two incredibly freckled, Mom-aged women came racing out of the house wearing serious navy blue bathing suits and no shoes.
“Frankie!” they shrieked. “Sammy! What took you so long!”
“Traffic,” Samantha lied, stepping gracefully out of the driver’s seat. Francesca leaped out of the back and started hugging the freckled women. And then two men, one sunburnt, the other with an enormous belly, came out of the house demanding hugs of their own.
I wasn’t sure what to do so I just stayed in the car and watched.
“Evie! Come over here!” Francesca ordered. “Meet Aunt Bitsy, Aunt Beebee, Uncle Croy, and Uncle Gib.” I took a breath and walked over to them and shook everybody’s hand. Omigod, I thought. How am I supposed to remember who’s who? They don’t even have real names! I looked them over frantically, trying to think of how to tell them apart.
Aunt Yellowteeth gave me an enormous smile. “We’re so pleased you could make it, Evie. Frankie’s told us so much about you.”
She had? “Well, thanks for inviting me. We’re really psyched about our project.”
“What project?” Uncle Big Belly demanded.
“Oh, it’s nothing. Just for school,” Francesca said. “We’ll tell you about it later.”
“You bet later,” Uncle Sunburnt said, smiling. “This is supposed to be a vacation, young lady.”
“So where’s Quentin?” Francesca asked, grabbing her bag from the car.
“He’s down at the shore waiting for you,” Aunt Ponytail answered. “With Timmybear, who we’re supposed to call Timmy, now that he’s started second grade.”
“Quentin?” I asked Francesca as I lifted my own backpack.
“My cousin. Fourteen. Staggeringly immature, but c’est la vie. Ooh, Evie, let’s see if we can have my favorite bedroom!”
She sprinted down the hallway to the ultra-modern side of the house, where two cots were set up in the middle of a room so empty, it could have been a closet. (Not Samantha’s, obviously—I mean a normal closet.) But the amazing thing was that it had enormous windows facing the water, and if you stood on a cot and looked out (which Francesca did, and which she made me do too), it almost felt as if you were out on the ocean.
“Mother Darling loves this room,” Francesca said happily. “She says it makes her feel as if she’s on a fabulous cruise ship.”
“You mean your mom comes here?”
“Once in a great while. She says it’s the only place in the States where she feels peaceful. Of course, to be peaceful, it has to be empty. Meaning no relatives.” She picked up a clamshell from a small table dividing the two cots. “She found this on the beach a few winters ago. It’s utterly boring, but for some reason I like it. Isn’t that odd?”
“It’s very nice,” I said. Even though, frankly, it was your basic normal clamshell.
Five minutes later we were in our suits and running down to the shore to join Quentin and Timmy. Timmy was just a little kid, but Quentin looked kind of like an eighth-grade jersey-wearer (except of course he was wearing swimming trunks). Immediately Francesca grabbed Quentin’s boogie board, and she and Timmy headed out for the waves, laughing and yelling these dorky pirate expressions. So then Quentin and I took after them, yelling even stupider taunts and splashing like crazy. We had a giant ridiculous sea battle until the water got black and freezing and Timmy’s lips started turning blue. And when we came inside the house, shivering and tired and dripping sand all over the kitchen, Quentin touched my elbow. “That was fun, Evie,” he said, and I grinned back at him because it really, really was.
“Don’t you just love it here?” Francesca said, looking up at the stars. We were on the beach, a few yards from the Pattison house, lying on a moth-eaten afghan that Aunt Ponytail had crocheted. It was about two hours after we’d finished an enormous dinner of fried chicken, corn on the cob, biscuits, and raspberry pie, and my shorts still couldn’t close at the top button.
“It’s perfect,” I said truthfully. I
looked up at the stars and started counting the ones on Orion’s belt. Almost everything that had been freaking me out recently—the fight with Nisha and Lily, the smashed-up soda can business with Zane—seemed far away that night. And I knew we’d be making progress on the Attic Project that weekend, so I wasn’t even stressed about that, for a change.
Francesca sighed. “I wish I could stay here forever.”
I stopped counting. “You mean like live here? And go to school?”
“Oh, forget about school. School is not the whole wide world. And neither is boring Blanton.” She rolled on her side and looked at me. “Evie, don’t you ever think about bigger things?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Cosmos questions. Like whether the stars control our destiny. Or if everything in the universe is utterly random.”
“Everything?”
“Not everything, maybe. I mean the truly important things. Like love.”
I laughed. “Actually, Francesca, that kind of question never crosses my mind.”
“How tragic,” she said sympathetically. “Okay, so think about it now. Do you believe in soulmates?”
“Soulmates?”
“You know. Like Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.”
I shrugged. “I’ve never read that book, Francesca. I looked at it the other day, but it’s just so … wordy.”
“Of course it’s wordy. It’s a book,” she said, laughing. Then she sat up and added casually, “Speaking of gorgeous words. Can I tell you this absolutely epic idea I had? Remember that letter you read on Espee’s computer yesterday?”
“Uh, sure.”
“Well, Evie. What do you think would happen if Theo Rafferty actually received it? Don’t you think it would be like this massive lightning bolt in their relationship? And then her life would change. Both of their lives. Happily ever after.”
“Francesca?” Now I sat up too. “What are you talking about?”
“I bet you anything she’d never send it to him. On her own. So then I started thinking: What if somebody else—”
The raspberry pie took a weird turn in my stomach. “Did what?”
“You know. Sent it to him somehow.”
I almost choked. “Are you psychotic? That’s the worst idea I ever heard in my life!”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“What’s wrong? Well, for one thing, it’s totally dishonest.”
“How is it dishonest? We wouldn’t be making anything up. We’d just be sending along her exact words.”
“Which maybe she doesn’t want.”
“Why wouldn’t she? You think she’s happy? All alone with her ice cream every night?”
I almost laughed. “First of all, you don’t even know if she sent it herself. Maybe she e-mailed it.”
“Of course she didn’t e-mail it. You don’t e-mail someone a love letter. You write it on really beautiful stationery.”
“And, anyway, maybe she hates ice cream. Maybe she’s ecstatic with her life.”
“Oh, please. You read what she wrote. ‘Cruel fate.’ If she’s truly so ecstatic, then why would she call it that?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Besides, haven’t you ever written some crazy, stupid thing you didn’t want anybody to see?”
“No,” said Francesca. “Why would I? That would just be a bloody waste of time.” She plopped back down on the blanket. “Oh, never mind! It was just an idea I had. Forget I even mentioned it.”
“Gladly.”
“All right, then. Sorry.”
I sat there in the dark, listening to the waves crash.
“It’s just that I feel so desperately sorry for Espee,” Francesca blurted out. “She’s such a tragic person, don’t you think? Stuck in that miserable little school, wearing those horrible pants. Assigning those deadly boring research papers to kids who think she’s a witch.”
I shrugged. Then I poked my finger in the sand and started drawing nervous circles.
She reached across the blanket to touch my arm. “Evie, can I tell you something personal? I just feel sometimes as if I have this amazing understanding of things. It’s like a gift I have, you know? To know what people truly want. And that makes me want to help them.”
“Francesca,” I said, trying to sound calm and normal and in control. “This is really not about your so-called psychic powers.”
“Don’t say ‘so-called.’ That sounds as if you don’t believe me!”
“I’m not saying that. It’s just incredibly not the point.”
She frowned. “Okay, you’re angry. Please, please, please don’t be.”
“Just promise me you won’t send Espee’s love note.”
“If you insist,” she said, pretending to laugh. “Are we okay now?”
“I guess.”
“Well, lovely, then.” All of a sudden she got up from the blanket and ran into the beach house.
For a few minutes I sat there shivering, looking up at the stars. But it made no sense to stay out on the beach all by myself, so finally I got up, brushed the sand off my legs, and followed her inside.
chapter 12
The next morning at breakfast, Francesca shocked me again.
“Yarrr,” Quentin said as he squirted maple syrup on a stack of French toast. “Shiver me timbers. I challenge ye guys to a second sea battle. This very morn.”
“We can’t,” Francesca said impatiently. “We’re busy.”
“We are?” I glanced quickly at Quentin. In the morning light you could see that he had fuzz on his upper lip. And a tan under the freckles on his cheeks, and wavy brownish hair. He wasn’t Zane-level cute, but he wasn’t deformed, either. And he was nice. And also not immature, whatever Francesca meant by that, anyway.
Francesca grabbed a box of Corn Flakes from the messy counter and poured herself a huge bowl. “Well, obviously, Evie. We have all that research for the Attic Project. You’re going to read those books and I’m going to investigate Angelica.”
“You mean you’ll be doing homework all day?” Quentin hooted. “Then what was the point of coming here, Frankie?”
“So I can interview my relatives,” she answered seriously.
I watched Francesca dump almost a full pint of blueberries over her Corn Flakes, and I thought: What exactly is going on here? Why does she suddenly care so much about the Attic Project? Is it because last night I freaked out when she talked about the love letter? Well, maybe it’s okay that I freaked out. That’s not such a terrible thing, actually.
“You know what?” I said enthusiastically. “We can take the earthquake books down to the beach. As long as we don’t get them sandy.”
Francesca nodded. Her hair fell into her cereal bowl, and she didn’t even push it back.
After breakfast we put on our dampish bathing suits and walked down to the ocean, lugging a blanket, the earthquake books, and also our Spush spiral notebooks. We spread the blanket carefully, then each took a book from the pile and started reading. My hands were greasy from sunscreen, but I managed to grip my pen tightly and take pages and pages of fascinating notes, all about San Francisco life right before the earthquake hit. And I even managed to tune out Quentin and Timmy, who were boogie boarding nearby and yelling, “Avast, ye scurvy dogs,” and other dorky pirate expressions.
The whole time, Francesca hardly said a word. She just kept reading her book, once in a while writing in her spiral notebook. Considering how long it had taken for her to focus on our project, I didn’t exactly want to interrupt her. But after an hour or so the un-Francesca silence was really starting to get to me.
“So,” I said finally, “do you know if Angelica lived on Nob Hill?”
“What?” She looked up.
“A ton of mansions were destroyed on Nob Hill,” I said, pointing to a photo in my book. “You said she lived in a mansion. Do you know the address?”
“No, I don’t,” she said, frowning. “I’ll ask my relatives about that after lunch.
”
“We don’t have to do this the entire day, you know.”
“Oh, I know.” She squinted toward the sparkling ocean. “Okay if I go for a swim?”
“Of course! You don’t need my permission!”
“I wasn’t asking,” she said, her face breaking into a grin. “I was just being disgustingly polite.”
I grinned back at her. Whatever weird feeling was left over from last night was suddenly gone now, and I was glad. I watched her jog into the ocean and tackle Timmy from behind. Then I opened her spiral notebook, just to take a quick peek. This is what she’d been writing:
SF EQ
4/18/1906
5:12 am
SPUSH
SPUSH
Spushhhhhh … … .
Stephanie Pierce
Stephanie Pierce Rafferty
Ms. Stephanie Pierce-Rafferty
History is a story
History is a story
we tell ourselves
Life liberty the pursuit of
happily
ever
after
“Hey there, scalawag,” said a teasing voice. “Making progress?”
Horrified, I shut the notebook. “Hi, Quentin. Yes, we are.”
“Cool. Then come battle.”
I nodded. “In a minute. Can I ask you something first?”
“Sure.” He squatted on the blanket and looked at me curiously.
“Um, maybe it’s none of my business,” I said. “But do you know why Francesca was kicked out of that other school?”
“Not really. Something about a paper she wrote. Or didn’t write, I forget which. Frankie’s never been much of a student. Even though she’s been to a ton of schools.”
“She has? Why?”
“Well, she’s kind of lived all over.” He shaded his eyes, and we both watched Francesca lift Timmy out of the water and then toss him back in, squealing. “I never heard the whole story from my mom. But Frankie’s family is unbelievably messed up, that’s all I do know.”
“You mean her mom?”
