by Lisa Graff
“How did you like the tea?” she asked, walking to the counter and refilling her teacup.
“It was good,” I said. “My scrape feels a little better, I think.”
“See?” she said. “What did I tell you?” She held out the teapot. “Would you like another cup?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I mean, it’s real good tea, but I think I should get going.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I have to go to Lippy’s.”
“Who’s Lippy?” she asked, sitting back down with her tea.
“It’s the store at the bottom of the hill,” I told her. “It’s the best store there is. Mr. L. has everything. I’m going to get vitamins.”
Mrs. Finch took a slow sip of tea. “Vitamins?”
“Mmm-hmm. They’re an essential part of maintaining healthy overall body wellness. At least that’s what they said on TV.”
“You know, Annie Z.,” Mrs. Finch said, looping a finger through the handle of her teacup, “vitamins can be dangerous if you don’t know exactly which ones to take. It’s best to talk to a doctor about it first.”
“Really?” I twirled my teacup on the table. “The commercial didn’t say anything about that.” I wished I could look it up in my book. That’d be in there for sure. Then I snapped my head up to look at Mrs. Finch, because I had a really good idea. “You don’t have a book called The Everyday Guide to Preventing Illness, do you? You have a lot of book boxes.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t have that one.”
“Oh. Well, you should get it maybe. It’s really helpful for making sure you don’t get sick and die. I used to have it, but I sort of lost it.”
Mrs. Finch blinked at me a few times like she was going to say something, but she didn’t right away, so I waited. “Actually,” she said at last, “I think I may have an even better book for you.”
“You do? Is it about vitamins?”
“Not exactly.”
“Lyme disease?”
She drank the last of her tea. “You’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you? It’s in one of my boxes. You up for a search?”
So Mrs. Finch and I went back to the living room, and she started poking around inside the boxes that said books on them. I searched too, even though I wasn’t quite sure what we were looking for. When I found a book that looked old and important, I’d take it out of the box and hold it up, to see if maybe that was the right one, but Mrs. Finch just kept shaking her head.
“It’s a short book,” she told me, her head buried deep in a box. “You can probably read it all by yourself, although I’d be happy to help you with it if you like.”
I had just finished up my third box, and was putting the books back inside it, when I noticed again the box that said fragile! on the table across the room, with its top closed up tight and tape still around it. “Maybe it’s in that one,” I said.
Mrs. Finch looked up where I was pointing, and she shook her head quick. “No,” she said. “It’s not in there. I’m sure.”
“Oh.” I could sort of tell she didn’t want to talk about it, but she was making me curious. “What is in that one?”
Mrs. Finch picked up three books from her box and set them down on the ground, one at a time, before she answered me. “Just some things I’m not ready to open yet,” she said at last. Which was not actually an answer at all, but I figured that was probably the best I was going to get.
I was starting on a new box of books when all of a sudden Mrs. Finch cried out, “Aha! Here you go, Annie Z. Here’s the book.”
I scurried over quick to see, and she handed it to me. It was short, like she said. I looked at the title. And that’s when I realized that Mrs. Finch might be bonkers.
“Charlotte’s Web?”
She nodded. “I used to read it to my nephew all the time. It’s very good.”
I’d heard about that one in school, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t about diseases. I flipped through it. There were pictures of a goose, and a spider, and lots of ones of pigs. “You sure this is the right book?” I asked.
Mrs. Finch smiled. “I’m sure.”
“Okay,” I said, flipping through the pages again. At least the printing was a lot bigger than in the other one. “I’ll try it. But I can stop if I want.”
“It’s a deal,” she said.
ten
When I got home, I started reading right away, flopped down on my left side on the couch, so my arm scrape wouldn’t get irritated against the couch fabric. But after three chapters it was becoming pretty clear to me that Charlotte’s Web was a book about a pig. I tossed the book down on the floor.
I decided to go to Rebecca’s house to ask Dr. Young about vitamins. Normally I would’ve ridden my bike, but even going turtle tracks you could never be sure about stupid safari ninjas jumping out of stupid trees. So I decided to walk. I still wore my Ace bandages, though, wound up tight around my ankles. Because you could get sprains just from walking, if you fell over or stepped the wrong way. And I checked the whole way for Doug Zimmerman hiding in trees, thinking about how dumb he was for saying I wasn’t fun anymore. Of course I was fun. The careful sort of fun.
I rang the Youngs’ doorbell and Rebecca answered. Her eyes were red and puffy and her nose was running.
“Do you have pollen allergies?” I asked her, stepping inside as she closed the door.
“No,” she said. She wiped her nose.
“Well, what do you have then? You’re not contagious, are you?”
Rebecca frowned at me. “You’re late,” she said, and she wiped her nose again. “Come on.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she started walking through the house and out the sliding glass door to the backyard, so I followed her. Her babysitter, Tracey, was standing out there holding a shovel, and she didn’t look too happy about it. Tracey never looked too happy about anything, though. She had dyed-black hair that was always pulled back in a tight tight ponytail, and she wore black makeup all around her eyes and the ugliest clothing I’d ever seen. Today she had on black jeans and a long-sleeved purple T-shirt that said I Dracula.
“Where’s your dad?” I asked Rebecca.
“At work,” she said, heading toward Tracey and the shovel. “We already dug the hole. We were just waiting for you before we buried him.”
I stopped walking. My body felt like ice all over, all at that very second. “What?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
Rebecca turned around to look at me, her shoulders drooping. “Fuzzby,” she answered. “We’re burying him. Didn’t you see my leaf? I left four messages, too.” She sniffled. “I even went over to your house this morning, but your dad didn’t know where you were.”
Over by the fence, Tracey rapped her fingers on the handle of the shovel. “Are we going to do this or what, guys? I’m ready to go inside.”
There was a hole in front of her, I noticed now, about a foot square and not too much deeper. And next to it was a box, a small one, Rebecca’s box of 64 Crayola Crayons.
I took a step back. Fuzzby was in that box, I knew he was.
“He died?” I said, staring at the crayon box. My voice came out a whisper.
“Yeah,” Rebecca said. I could see tears in the corners of her eyeballs. “When we took him to the vet yesterday, they said he was real sick, and this morning he was dead.”
“Oh.” I was sweating all of a sudden, like I’d been running in the Olympics, but I was still icy all over. Cold sweats was a bad sign, I remembered from the book, except I couldn’t remember what it was a symptom of. Probably something awful.
“Guys?” Tracey called from the fence. “Hello? Are you ready yet?”
I put my hand up to my forehead. I thought I had a fever, but I couldn’t tell for sure. “I have to go home,” I told Rebecca.
“What?” she said. “But we have to bury Fuzzby. I need your help, to make sure I do everything right.”
“I can�
�t.” I shook my head. My eyes were still stuck like glue to that crayon box by the fence. “I can’t.”
“But—” Rebecca began, but Tracey cut her off.
“This is ridiculous,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You two can figure it out yourselves. I’m going inside for some air-conditioning.” And she dumped the shovel on the ground and walked back through the sliding door to the house.
Rebecca turned to look at me, sniffling and wiping her nose, and I knew she wanted me to stay worse than anything. But I couldn’t do it.
“I have to go,” I told her, shrugging my shoulders. “I’m sorry. I have to go home right now. I’m sick.” And I raced around the house toward the side gate.
“You know what?” Rebecca called after me as I went, and she sounded mad, but I didn’t look back. “I hope you do get sick! I hope you get malaria!”
The whole way home, every time I blinked, I could still see that crayon box behind my eyelids, and all I could think about was how Fuzzby was dead, just like Jared. I ran faster and faster, my feet pounding on the sidewalk. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.
As soon as I got home, I raced up the stairs two at a time and plugged the stopper in the upstairs bathtub, turning on the water full blast. Because I didn’t know what the big green book would say about cold sweats, but I thought maybe cool water would be a good thing for it. When the water got high enough, I dunked myself inside, clothes and all, and I puffed out my cheeks and held my breath so I could get all my hair and my eyelashes and every last bit of me soaked. I pulled my head out and sat there for a long time, resting against the back of the tub, with the water dripping off my bangs and down my cheeks. And after a while my breathing went back to normal and I stopped seeing Fuzzby’s crayon box behind my eyelids.
I drained the tub and got out, changing into new clothes and dumping my soggy ones in the washing machine. Then I switched all my Band-Aids—the one on my knee and the six on my legs and my stomach ones and even the big one from Mrs. Finch—because they’d gotten ruined in the tub. When I was done, I pulled back my wet hair into a ponytail, stuffed my feet into my alligator slippers, and went on a search to find my green book.
Dad was working in his office, but I already knew the book wasn’t in there anyway. So instead I checked Mom and Dad’s room. I looked in the closet, under the bed, and inside the dresser. It wasn’t there. Then I checked the den, and the living room, and the kitchen. I even checked inside the freezer. It wasn’t anywhere. I thought for a second that maybe Mom had locked it up inside Jared’s room, because she knew I couldn’t get in there. But then I remembered the look I’d seen on Mom’s face when she shut Jared’s door the day after he died—like she was shutting that door forever, for good. And I knew my book wasn’t in there.
I decided that the only chance I had to make myself better was to read that pig book from Mrs. Finch. Maybe if I kept going, there’d be something helpful. Like about asbestos poisoning or something.
I scooped the book off the floor by the couch, and I read the whole rest of the afternoon. I kept waiting for Rebecca to come over and tell me she was sorry for making me go to a surprise funeral and wishing I’d get malaria, but she never did. After dinner I walked over with my ankle bandages and my bike helmet, too, and left a leaf under her door as a signal that it would be okay for her to apologize, but she didn’t call that entire night.
eleven
The next day was the Fourth of July, which meant the Junior Sunbirds had to do their Cedar Haven Community Summer Service Project. We did one every year, to raise money for something. I didn’t ever really know what we were raising money for, but this year we were raising it by doing a Junior Sunbird car wash. Washing cars was not exactly something I liked very much. I could think of about fifty more fun things I’d rather be doing, and four of them involved math homework.
Dad drove me over right after breakfast. I sat in the passenger seat in my ugly purple Sunbird outfit with my seat belt strapped tight around me, and I tugged at my arm-scrape Band-Aid. The new one I’d put on there wasn’t quite as big as the one from Mrs. Finch, so part of the scrape showed on the sides, and I was worried it was going to get dirt inside and become infected. I should’ve put on two.
Dad pulled to a stop in the parking lot of Sal’s Pizzeria, but he didn’t turn off the car, just said, “Have fun, Moonbeam!” as I plopped myself onto the pavement. Then he drove off again, quick as a flash.
Right away I spotted Rebecca at the bake-sale table by the front door, so I went over to talk to her. She was standing next to Nadia Dwyer from school, and they were scooping brownies out of a Tupperware onto plates.
“Hey,” I said when I got there.
Rebecca didn’t look up. Nadia did, but as soon as she saw me, her eyes darted back to the brownies lickety-split. Which was weird, because me and Nadia had been aardvarks together in the school play last year, and Rebecca was my best friend in the whole world, and so I knew for a fact that neither one of them was deaf.
“How come you’re not wearing your uniforms?” I asked them. Because they weren’t. They were just wearing normal clothes—shorts and a T-shirt for Nadia and a red-and-white checkered dress for Rebecca.
Nadia rolled her eyes. “Because,” she said, and I knew just from the way she said it that no matter what came next was going to make me angry. “We weren’t supposed to wear them. It’s not a regular service project, it’s a car wash, so Mrs. Harper didn’t want us to ruin our outfits. She called all the parents last night to tell them.”
“She didn’t call mine,” I said.
Nadia licked a crumb of brownie off her thumb. “Oh,” she said. “Well, too bad for you, I guess. What the heck happened to your arms, anyway?” Nadia asked, pointing to my Band-Aids. Rebecca still didn’t look up, just went on scooping.
“Rebecca—” I started, but Nadia cut me off.
“Rebecca’s mad at you,” she said. “She told me so. That’s why she’s not talking to you. She’s mad at you because you didn’t care when Fuzzball died—”
“Fuzzby,” Rebecca said, cutting an extra-large brownie in half with a plastic knife.
“Right, Fuzzby. Anyway,” Nadia said to me, “you didn’t care about Fuzzby, so Rebecca doesn’t care about you.”
“But that’s not fair,” I said. Because it wasn’t. “I had to go home. I was sick.”
Rebecca took the last brownie out of the Tupperware and shut the lid with a woopft. Nadia just shrugged.
“I was sick,” I said again. “And I didn’t even have my book about diseases to check things, either. I only had the book Mrs. Finch gave me, which isn’t even helpful at all.” I didn’t know why I was still talking, except that I was sort of hoping that if I talked enough, maybe Rebecca would talk back. But she didn’t. She started laying out cupcakes.
Nadia plucked a brownie off the table and stuck it in her mouth, even though I was almost positive she didn’t pay fifty cents for it like she was supposed to. “Who’s Mrs. Finch?” she asked me.
I tugged at the bottom of my Junior Sunbird sash, the one with only three badges on it. “She’s the old lady who moved into the haunted house,” I said. “I was over there drinking arm-scrape tea and—”
“You went over to the haunted house?”
That surprised me, because it wasn’t Nadia who said it. It was Rebecca.
“Yeah,” I said, glad Rebecca was finally talking to me again. “She’s pretty nice, actually, only she—”
“You went over there without me?” Rebecca’s arms were folded across her chest, and her eyebrows were scrunched-up angry. “You went inside and you didn’t even tell me?”
“Well, yeah, but…” I was starting to get squirmy, and sweaty under the armpits. I wondered if that meant I had tuberculosis or it was just from wearing my stupid Junior Sunbird outfit in the hot sun. “I was going to tell you when I went to your house,” I said. “But you were all freaked out and stuff, so I didn’t get a chance.”
Rebecca glared at me
. “I was not freaked out,” she said, and I wanted to say that yes she was, plus she looked sort of freaked out at that moment, but I didn’t. “I was sad. I was sad because of Fuzzby.”
“Yeah,” Nadia said, shoving the last of the brownie into her mouth. “If you were a good friend, you’d know that.” And she linked elbows with Rebecca, like they were best friends, which I happened to know for a fact that they were not.
“Yeah,” Rebecca said.
And that made me madder than anything. “Fuzzby was just a hamster,” I said. My words came out so sharp, you could’ve chopped carrots with them. “He didn’t even do anything but poop anyway. It’s not like it matters. It’s not like your brother died.”
Rebecca’s mouth dropped open when I said that, and so did Nadia’s.
“And just so you know,” I told Rebecca, “I probably do not have malaria, so it looks like your wish didn’t even come true about that.” And I walked away with a stomp that would’ve been nice and loud if I wasn’t wearing my stupid dress shoes with the soft plastic bottoms that weren’t good for stomping.
Right at that moment Mrs. Harper called us over to form a circle and do the Sunbird salute. I got there first, and she wrapped me up in a hug.
“You did bring some street clothes, didn’t you, Annie?” she said as she pulled back to look at me.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”
“Oh.” She raised an eyebrow. “I talked to your father last night, but I suppose he forgot to mention it. That’s all right. You can work at the bake-sale table so you won’t get your uniform wet. I’m sure Nadia and Rebecca will be happy to have the help.”
“No!” I said. It came out a lot louder than I wanted it to, which sort of made it sound like I was being attacked by the Loch Ness monster. “Sorry,” I said, softer. I looked over at Rebecca and Nadia, who were almost all the way to the circle, still with their arms linked. “I mean, I want to wash cars.”
“Okay,” Mrs. Harper said. “That’s fine, Annie. You can wash cars if you want.”
