by Lisa Graff
“Yeah,” Rebecca told her, and she said it soft. “That’s her favorite part.”
Mrs. Finch smiled at me and wiped her hands on her apron, even though they weren’t dirty. “Well then,” she said, and she scooched the bowl across the counter in my direction, “I suppose Annie should be the one to do it.”
I looked at her, my hands tight around both sides of the bowl, and then I looked at Rebecca. And even though she blinked real quick and looked down the instant her eyeballs met mine, I thought she didn’t look quite so mad as before.
“Thanks,” I said. I stuck my hands deep in the cookie dough and felt the squishy way it oozed between my fingers.
While the cookies were in the oven baking, I asked Mrs. Finch if I could take Rebecca on a tour of the house. “Just to see if any of the haunted things are still left,” I said.
“Sure thing,” Mrs. Finch said, setting the timer on the oven. “Feel free to snoop around wherever you like. Oh, and be sure to check the hall closet, will you? The door squeaks horribly. It’s probably an enraged spirit.”
So I showed Rebecca all over the house. She was more excited than a mouse in a cheese factory. She peeked her nose between the coats in the hall closet, stuck her head under the bed, even lifted up the toilet seat in the bathroom.
“What are you looking for in there?” I asked her, sitting on the edge of the bathtub.
Rebecca shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe water ghosts. They like to haunt the pipes, you know.”
“Oh.” I thought about that for a second and then turned on the tub faucet to check in there. I couldn’t see anything that didn’t look like water. I turned it off. “Rebecca?”
“Yeah?” She was looking inside the medicine cabinet.
“I’m sorry about Fuzzby.”
She stuck her braid in her mouth and chewed, still peeking into the medicine cabinet. “It’s okay,” she said after a while, plopping her braid out. She didn’t look at me, though. “You were right. He was just a hamster. It wasn’t like when Jared died. I shouldn’t have got so mad at you.”
“But I liked him,” I said. “Really. You still want to have a funeral for him? I’ll help you, I promise.” I didn’t really want to do that, but I figured sometimes friends had to do things they didn’t want to, especially if they’d said mean things and maybe hosed the other friend too.
“My mom helped me,” Rebecca said, lifting up a jar of face goop to peek underneath. “With the funeral, I mean. It was okay.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I’m getting a new hamster. Next week.” And finally she looked over at me. “Want to help me pick it out?”
I didn’t. Not really. I didn’t want to pick out a new hamster for Rebecca when there was no new Jared for me. But it was different, I knew it was, and I could tell Rebecca knew it too. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll help.”
“Cool.”
When we got back to the kitchen, Mrs. Finch was just pulling the last batch of cookies out of the oven. “Well?” she asked us. “How’s my house look? See any spirits?”
Rebecca shook her head, so her two blond braids whipped across her shoulders. “I didn’t see anything,” she said. “But I’m pretty sure I felt their presence.”
While we were eating the cookies, Mrs. Finch and I taught Rebecca how to play gummy rummy, only without the gummy part. We played for about an hour until Rebecca’s mom called and said it was time for Rebecca to go home. After Mrs. Finch packed her up with extra cookies, we walked Rebecca to the door while she strapped on her bike helmet. “Well!” she hollered at us. “I’m going home now!”
“Okay!” I said, shouting loud like I had a bike helmet on too. “I’ll see you later!”
And Rebecca didn’t say “maybe” or “I’ll think about it” or “don’t hold your breath.” She said, “Yeah! Call me later!”
And she biked off down the street.
It wasn’t until I got all the way back to my house that I realized something. I hadn’t worried about Ebola or gangrene or E. coli or poison oak once all afternoon.
twenty
Dad dropped me off at the Bowling Barn Friday evening, and I was ten minutes late, but Tommy and his parents hadn’t started bowling yet. Mrs. L. was picking out a bowling ball and Tommy was typing on the computer that kept track of the scores.
“Hey, Annie,” he said when he saw me coming. He typed out some letters on the keyboard. “You ride your bike here?”
“What?” I said, because I thought that was a weird thing to ask. But then I remembered I was still wearing my bike helmet from the car, and I took it off quick and plopped it on one of the red plastic seats. “This is for you,” I told him. I held out his present, which was the chocolate chip cookies I’d baked at Mrs. Finch’s house stuffed into a Christmas tree tin I’d found in the hall closet. That was Rebecca’s idea. She’d come over to my house that afternoon with a bag of gummy bears, and we’d spent almost the whole day playing gummy rummy.
Tommy opened the tin and took a bite of one of the cookies. “Thanks,” he said. And then he went back to typing.
After that Mr. L. took me to get bowling shoes. I was size five, but even the size sevens weren’t big enough to fit around my feet with my ankle bandages on.
“Can’t you take those off?” the shoe guy asked me. His name tag said CHARLES.
“But they’re for ankle sprains,” I told him. “What if I twist wrong while I’m bowling and I have to go to the hospital and they end up amputating my foot off?”
He looked at Mr. L., who shrugged.
“I really don’t think that’s ever happened before,” Charles said after a second.
I thought about it. “Can’t I just wear my regular shoes?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Bowling Barn rules.”
“You don’t have to play, Annie,” Mr. L. said. “You can just watch, if that’s what you want.”
I sat there for a minute, with my regular shoe in my left hand and the bowling one in my right hand. From behind me I could hear bowling balls shuttling down the lanes and pins knocking over crash! Oldies music my parents liked was blaring out of the speakers, and people were laughing and talking, and lights were flashing green to red to blue.
I could call my dad, I figured, and have him pick me up and go home and not have any amputations to worry about ever.
Or I could bowl.
“Annie?” Mr. L. said again.
“I’ll wear the shoes,” I said, bending over to unwrap my ankle bandages.
By the fifth frame I was in second place to Tommy, but I was pretty sure Tommy’s parents were losing on purpose.
“You’re up, Batgirl!” Mr. L. called when it was my turn to go. Tommy had given us all weird names on the screen, which he said were out of comic books. I didn’t mind mine too much. At least I wasn’t Major Disaster. That was Tommy’s mom.
I picked up the neon pink bowling ball that Mrs. L. had helped me pick out. It was the lightest one they had—so even if I dropped it on my foot, it probably wouldn’t bruise me too bad. It also had extra-big finger holes, so I wouldn’t get pinched.
“Come on, Batgirl!” Mrs. L. hollered as I stepped up to the line.
“It’s going to be a strike,” Mr. L. told me. “I can feel it.”
I pulled back the ball with my right hand, aimed just the way Mr. L. had showed me, and swung, making extra careful sure not to let it go too soon and accidentally whack someone. It thundered down the lane.
Strike!
Tommy’s parents stood up and cheered, and the screen hanging from the ceiling flashed BATGIRL! BATGIRL! BATGIRL! Tommy gave me a thumbs-up.
“Hey, pretty good,” he said when I sat down.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Oh, by the way. I was supposed to give you this.” He picked up a piece of paper from under the pile of sweaters on the seat next to him and handed it to me. The paper was bright yellow and folded in half, and scotch-taped at the edges like it was a top-secret document.
&nb
sp; “What is it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I dunno. Doug handed it to me at the store today and told me to give it to you.”
“Doug Zimmerman?” I peeled off the tape with my fingernail and opened it.
It was a yellow flyer that used to say “Cheap Art Lessons with Louise!” but Doug had crossed out most of the words and written in new ones. Now it read “Free Obstacle Course Lessons with Doug!” And there was a picture on it that I think was supposed to be a person limboing under a pool noodle, but Doug definitely needed to take Louise’s art lessons, because it looked more like a German shepherd getting hit over the head with a giant pencil.
“That’s weird,” Tommy said, reading over my shoulder.
“Yeah,” I said. I put the flyer back underneath the pile of sweaters.
“Wolverine!” Mr. L. called, pointing to Tommy. “It’s your turn.”
Tommy won that game with ninety-six points, and I came in second with seventy-two. For the second game, Tommy named us all after pirates. I said no thank you to the hot dog Mr. L. offered me, but I did eat half the nachos, because those didn’t have meat in them so I figured I probably wouldn’t get food poisoning.
While we were waiting for Charles to unstick Mrs. L.’s ball from behind the pins, I shifted in my hard red chair to look at Tommy. I couldn’t stop thinking about how today was his twelfth birthday. And how even though Jared’s twelfth birthday was coming up in just two days, Jared would never be twelve.
I guess Tommy saw me staring at the side of his face, because he scrunched up his eyebrows and looked at me funny. “What?” he said.
I ran a finger along the seam of my shorts, just studying the stitches for a while. “I’m sorry you have to have your birthday with me,” I said finally. “Instead of Jared. I know it’s not as good.”
Tommy let out a puff of air. Then he told me, “I’ve been thinking about what you said, you know.”
“Huh?”
“What you were asking about before. About wills. What I’d give to people and all that?”
I clacked the heels of my bowling shoes on the floor and noticed a pencil rolling around by my left foot. “Oh, yeah,” I said. I waited for Tommy to keep talking, but he didn’t. “So?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding slow. “I was just thinking that I don’t think I’d have one.”
Down at the very end of the lane, I could see Charles’s head bobbing behind the pins, still trying to get Mrs. L.’s ball. “How come?” I asked.
“Well, I guess if I had a million dollars or something I would.” He picked up the cookie tin from the seat between us and took out another cookie. “But I just have stuff. And I think people don’t need my stuff to remember me.” He took a bite and held out the tin to me so I could take a cookie too. “I guess I think people will just remember me ’cause of things I did.”
For someone who didn’t talk much, Tommy sure had lots to say. I ate the rest of my cookie thoughtful slow. And then, after the last swallow, I bent down to snatch the pencil off the floor, and I pulled the yellow flyer out from the sweaters.
“What are you doing?” Tommy asked me.
“Writing down the things I remember about Jared,” I said. I wrote “burrito game,” on the back of the flyer, on the blank side.
Tommy nodded and pulled one leg underneath him. “Put down ‘tackle baseball,’” he said.
“Ooh,” I said, scribbling fast. “That’s a good one.”
Tommy and I thought up lots of things to remember about Jared, dozens and dozens, and I wrote them all down.
“You know,” I said, halfway through writing “Cheerio-eating contest,” “I think Doug stole this off the bulletin board in front of your store.” There was a pinhole at the top, right in the center.
Tommy just shrugged. “That one’s been up forever. I bet the whole town’s seen it fifty times already.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I went back to writing.
But that got me to thinking, with an itch in my brain that I just knew was the start of a good idea. The more things Tommy and I thought up to write down, the itchier my brain got, full of thoughts about Lippy’s, and the posters Mrs. Finch had told me about in Italy, and what Tommy had said about remembering. And by the time we’d finished our second game of bowling, me and Tommy had come up with the perfect way to celebrate Jared’s birthday.
twenty-one
About ten o’clock Saturday morning I strapped on all my gear and walked down to Lippy’s. While Mr. L. was stocking the warmer full of chicken wings, Tommy and I worked on our plan for Jared’s birthday the next day.
“So you’ll type it up on your computer?” I asked him, smoothing out the piece of scratch paper we’d been writing our rough draft on.
“Yep,” Tommy said. “I’ll make it look real professional, I promise.”
“Good.”
After I huffed my way back up Maple Hill, I figured I’d spend the rest of the day playing gummy rummy at Rebecca’s. But when I got to her house, her mom said she wasn’t there.
“Really?” I asked, yanking on my helmet strap. It was awfully sweaty under the chin. “But I thought she’d be back from ballet by now.”
“She went over to Doug’s house,” her mom said. “About twenty minutes ago.”
“She did?” That was weird. Now that Rebecca was friends with me again, what did she need to hang out with stupid Doug Zimmerman for?
“Apparently they’re working on a top secret project.” Rebecca’s mom laughed. “But I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you went over too.”
“Oh,” I said. I tugged at my helmet strap again. “Yeah. Well, maybe.”
I decided not to go to Doug’s. I didn’t know why Rebecca was there, but if I went over, Doug would probably try to give me obstacle course lessons, whatever those were. And I definitely did not want to do any obstacle courses.
Instead I figured maybe I’d do some reading. But since I didn’t have my big green book anymore, it had to be Charlotte’s Web. I dug it out from the pillows on top of my bed, where I’d stuffed it after the fireworks. Six of the pages were bent halfway over, and page fifty-eight was ripped in the middle. I was hoping Mrs. Finch wouldn’t be too mad about that. Dr. Young always said that books were for reading, and if people wanted to keep them pristine and beautiful, they would’ve put them in museums instead of libraries. Personally I thought that was a pretty good way to think about things, but I put a piece of Scotch tape over the rip just in case Mrs. Finch didn’t agree. Then I plopped down on my bed to read the chapter called “Uncle.”
It wasn’t a bad book, really, if you liked books about pigs. Anyway, the part about the fair was interesting. Fern rode on the Ferris wheel with a boy, and Wilbur was hoping to win a big prize, and Templeton the rat went off to stuff himself full of carnival food.
But when Charlotte the spider said she was “languishing,” I closed the book with a snap. That word had been up on Dr. Young’s word wall once, and I knew for a fact it wasn’t a good one.
I was out my front door and halfway across the street before I realized I’d forgotten to put on my bike helmet. But I looked both ways and didn’t see any cars coming, so I kept going, the book tucked close to my chest.
“Hello, Annie Z.,” Mrs. Finch greeted me after I rang her doorbell six times all in a row. Then she got a good look at me and frowned. “Is everything okay? You look upset.”
I held out the book to her. “Charlotte’s sick,” I said. “You didn’t tell me that was going to happen.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Mrs. Finch said, her voice thick as cream. She took the book and then grabbed hold of my hand too. “Come on inside. I’ll put the tea on.”
Fifteen minutes later we were sitting on the back deck, on Mrs. Finch’s brand-new wooden porch swing with the dark blue flowery cushions. Mrs. Finch rocked softly with her feet, tipping the swing back and forth, back and forth. I kicked off my sneakers and socks and tucked my legs up to my chest, and took a small sip of my heartache te
a, fresh from the teapot. Mrs. Finch opened up the book where I’d told her.
I closed my eyes while she read, her words coming out like rainwater. Mrs. Finch was a good reader. When she got to the chapter called “Last Day,” I took another deep swallow of tea, and I concentrated hard on the words Charlotte was telling Wilbur, about how one day, after the winter, everything would be nice and warm and sunny again.
“‘The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again….’”
But Mrs. Finch stopped reading after that, and I opened my eyes to find out why. She was gazing out at her backyard, still rocking the swing slowly back and forth. I could tell just by the look on her face, the look that wasn’t-quite-happy-wasn’t-quite-sad, that she was thinking all the same thoughts I’d been thinking about Jared. Only hers were about her husband.
I set my teacup down careful on the deck, and then I leaned over in the swing and scooped the book out of Mrs. Finch’s lap. She looked up at me, surprised, and I started to read, right where she’d left off.
“‘All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur—this lovely world, these precious days.’”
By the time we got to the last word on the last page, our cups of tea were empty and I had a lump in my throat that ached when I swallowed. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t tonsillitis.
“That was a good book,” I told Mrs. Finch.
“I’m glad you liked it, Annie Z.,” she said.
“You know,” I told her, rocking the swing slowly with my feet, “I think maybe my umbrella really is closing a little bit, like you said.”
“Really?” Mrs. Finch asked.
“Yeah. Maybe just a smidgen.”
twenty-two
That night I woke up all of a sudden, and I could tell from the mud-darkness outside that it was later than I’d ever been up before. At first I couldn’t figure out what had woken me up like that, and I worried for a second that I might have a sleeping disorder. But then I heard a noise coming from outside my bedroom, which was sort of like the sound Mr. Normore’s wiener dog made when he was sniffing out something tasty, and I figured that must’ve been what woke me up. So I stuffed my feet into my alligator slippers and went to investigate.
