Sway

by Amber McRee Turner

  Copyright © 2012 by Amber McRee Turner

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney•Hyperion Books, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney• Hyperion Books, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4231-7452-3

  Visit www.disneyhyperionbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  thirty-four

  thirty-five

  thirty-six

  thirty-seven

  thirty-eight

  thirty-nine

  Acknowledgments

  Being awake all night long is not such a good thing when it comes from eating spoiled mayonnaise or hearing raccoons fight over garbage outside your window. But being awake all night long is a perfectly fine thing when it comes from gladness beyond the stars that your mom is coming home for the first time in four months. Because when your mom is coming home for the first time in four months, you’re not so concerned that your tired eyeballs feel like they’ve been rolled in corn-bread crumbs. And not so peeved when your weather alert alarm clock goes off for no reason every so often with its fake thunder sound. And not so upset when you lie in bed and, twenty-eight times in a row, fail miserably to make the Eiffel Tower out of finger string. Because your mom will soon be wiping the crust from your eyes. Your mom will soon be telling you her own stories of powerful wind and lightning. And your mom will soon be making your Awful Tower be Eiffel again.

  It was the first Saturday of summer that I started my day just so, with almost no sleep, some gritty eyes, and a sparkling pile of excitement about my mom coming home that very day.

  For as long as I could remember, Toodi Bleu Nordenhauer had been a Diamond Level Volunteer for the Southern Mobile Aid Response Team. If a twister struck or a hurricane swept or something the size of golf balls fell from the sky, there she went in her little white car, all loaded up with bottled water and first-aid supplies.

  To me, though, her being gone was a lot like my favorite deep-dish pizza. When you take a piece away, it leaves behind a valley of no-cheeseness, but for just a moment, and then the other ooey-gooey stuff comes flowing in fast to fill up the space. The good work I knew my mom was doing always seemed to fill in the empty of her being away for so long.

  That morning, with every smack of my snooze button, I’d already pictured what she might have been doing on this, her longest rescue mission ever. Mom and all her SMART associates rowing from house to house, pulling huddled families from the roofs they’d scrambled onto to escape the rising floodwaters. I’d wondered what it would be like to be right there alongside her on the next rescue, and how exactly I planned to convince her that a certain groggy, disheveled ten-and-a-half-year-old was more than ready to be her partner-in-rescuing.

  As usual, despite my lack of skill, finger-stringing seemed a good way to fill up the wait, and to avoid other less productive habits. Like pulling at my eyebrows. Or clenching my teeth together to see if they still lined up. Or fiddling with my kiddy cell phone, the one with chunky MOM, DAD, and POLICE buttons that I’m only allowed to use if 1) my mom calls in from the road, or 2) my head falls clean off my shoulders. So that morning, to avoid tugging my brows mangy, gritting my teeth jagged, and rubbing that MOM button totally blank, I resorted to finger-stringing my own custom design. That is, until from outside my bedroom window came a holler so loud it sent a cold squirt of scared up my back.

  “BAM!” someone yelled.

  Following just a split second behind the BAM!, the entire upper half of my cousin Syd lunged right through my open window, stretching the screen with his face and hands till it gave way right onto my bed.

  “BOO!” he shouted, landing with an oof on my lap, all tangled in my string like a bug in a red spiderweb. If my fingers hadn’t been tied to his ear I would have thumped him hard on the forehead.

  “Syd! You scared the daylights out of me! I thought you were a prowler or something.”

  “What?” He smushed at my cell phone with his nose. “You mean you don’t have holler ID on this thing?”

  “Very funny,” I said. “Are you aware how wrong it is to crash into a delicate project like this?”

  “Oh.” He wriggled free of the string. “Are you saying I had me some wrength?”

  “Some what?”

  “You know. Like strongness is strength? And longness is length?”

  “Okay.”

  “So wouldn’t wrongness be wrength?”

  “I guess it would be if it weren’t so not,” I said, trying hard not to let Syd muddy my excitement with his wandering thoughts. My cousin was twelve, but that fall he would be repeating the sixth grade—mostly because of these random notions of his.

  “Come on, Cass. You’ve got to see what my dad’s making for Aunt Toodi’s welcome home party! It’s so awes.” To Syd, words like awesome are way more awes when they’re split in half.

  “Tell me what it is.”

  “Nope. You already got two hints.”

  “Well, let’s see,” I said. “You gave me a bam and a boo. Could it be something to do with…oh, I don’t know…bamboo?”

  “No duhyees, Einstein!” Syd slid himself back out my window hole and was gone in a dust-puff.

  “I’ll meet you in a sec,” I yelled after him.

  Hopping into the cleanest jeans I could find on the floor, I stuffed the phone into my back pocket and made my way to the kitchen. There I found Dad, for the third morning in a row, trying to lure a family of doves out of the vent above our stove. For bait, he had shoved stale hot dog buns into a paper sack.

  “Breakfast?” he said, pointing toward a Pop-Tart with the charred edges pinched off. “I whipped you something up before the dove hunt.”

  The pastry looked like a big frosted postage stamp on a plate.

  “No thanks, I’ll just grab something at Syd’s.”

  The mound of anticipation in my stomach had taken the place of food anyway.

  “Yeah, I can’t say I blame you for refusing that gourmet meal,” Dad said with a grimace toward the table.

  My dad’s name is Douglas Nordenhauer, but the kids in my class usually call him “Sluglas” or “Buglas.” As Olyn Elementary School’s groundskeeper, Dad is in charge of keeping creepy-crawlies off the pansies that make up the big OES in front of the school, squirting bird poo off signs, and scrubbing graffiti from the bricks. In the summertime he works a second job as a door-to-door meat salesman in our neighborhood. And pretty much, that’s my dad. Pansies, poo, paint, and pork chops.

  “Are you coming to help decorate for Mom’s party?” I asked, helping him hold the paper sack steady.

  “Not this time, Casserole.”

  The scrunch of Dad’s forehead showed off his constellation of chicken pox scars. When he conc
entrated like that, he bit his mouth in a way that made both lips totally disappear under his salt-and-pepper beard.

  “But Syd says Uncle Clay is making something special.” I even sang it all slow like speshaaaaalll, but Dad was unmoved.

  “No doubt about that, Cass,” he said. “But I really need to evict these little poopers before your mom gets here.”

  Dad had always been nervous about Mom’s homecomings, but this time he seemed extra that way. All week he’d been doing stuff like pouring salt in his coffee, putting junk mail in the fridge, or spreading butter on a sponge. This morning, his unsure smile made it hard to tell whether he was feeling the Christmas kind of nervous, or the dentist kind of nervous.

  “And besides,” he said, “your Uncle Clay’s not the only one who can brew up a surprise, you know.”

  “What? You mean you’ve got a surprise for today, too?”

  “Perhaps.”

  A bonus blub of excitement squeezed its way into my gut. “For Mom or for me?” I said.

  “Maybe both. You just wait till the party,” said Dad. “Now go on out there before Syd breaks a window. We sure can’t afford that.”

  As I walked out the door, I felt the little cell phone squeezing its way up out of my back pocket with every step. Unlike the MOM button on my phone, the DAD button is totally unsmudged. There’s never really been any reason to press it because my dad is always right there. Right there melting my shirts with the iron. Right there asking me to play Scrabble every night. Right there trying to be mom enough and cool enough to make me not care that all the real momness and coolness is hundreds of miles away from little Olyn, Alabama.

  “And speaking of not affording things,” Dad added. “We may have to get rid of that phone of yours now that your mom’s going to be back for a while.”

  Which was more than fine with me. I couldn’t tell my dad this, for fear of nerving him right over the edge and making him pour his salted coffee into a frozen junk mail envelope and then having to clean it up with a buttered sponge. But the way I saw it, that day was going to be the last time I’d welcome Mom home from a rescue trip anyway. Next time, Dad would be welcoming us home.

  Syd shuffled rainbow shapes with his feet into the dirt outside our back door.

  “Is your dad ever going to crank that grungy thing up?” he said, nodding toward the old motor home that filled my backyard. Hidden under a blue plastic pool cover, that RV had been sitting there lifeless since March, when Dad puttered it down our driveway for the first and last time ever. It used to be The Roadstar, but some of the letters fell off when he squirted it with the hose, so now Dad just calls it The Roast.

  “I don’t know when he’s going to drive it,” I said. “He’s been working on it a lot.”

  Syd shot me a look of disbelief.

  “I mean he’s been working on getting it running,” I said. “Not so much on the grunginess part.”

  “You can say that again,” he said, but I didn’t see fit to discuss The Roast any more than that.

  “Hey! Watch out for the nevergreen!” warned Syd as we made the short one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi journey from my yard to his. He then leapt clean over the hapless little Castanea dentata tree that shares my name—a tree that could easily be mistaken for a branch jammed into the ground if it weren’t for the tiny wire fence around it. I’m pretty sure the only way to even prove it’s a Castanea dentata is the torn-off tag that stays at the bottom of my underwear drawer.

  “So how long will it take Aunt Toodi to drive home from Misery?” asked Syd.

  “Not Misery,” I said. “Missouri. There was a big flood in a town called Gwynette. And I don’t know how long it takes to get from there to Alabama.”

  In fact, I didn’t know how long it took to get from anywhere to Alabama. I’d hardly even seen the next county.

  “Well then, couldn’t they call it the Flood of Misery anyway?” asked Syd.

  “I guess they could.” I shrugged.

  “You going to show her your Book of Scribbles?” Syd asked, both of us swatting hard at a mess of curious gnats.

  “It’s called the Book of In-Betweens, Syd. And it’s not scribbles. It’s my noodling. My swirlies and jaggeds. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I don’t think I want to understand,” he said. “Besides, isn’t noodling catching catfish with your bare hands?”

  “To you, maybe.”

  Syd had some nerve insulting my Book of In-Betweens, the journal I’d filled with doodles of everything Mom might want to know from the days in between her being at home. Only I don’t call them doodles, but noodles instead, because I draw the dreams and memories straight out of my noodle, the way that Cass and only Cass thinks about things. The binder itself isn’t much to look at; the front cover just an empty plastic sleeve I’d reserved for one of those photos where your mom is standing behind you with both her arms clasped around you tight like she’s telling the world, This one belongs to me, and don’t you even think about messing with her.

  Syd kicked a dandelion bald. “If you ask me, your brain is swirly.”

  “Well, nobody asked you. And just wait. I’m going to cover my whole room in noodling someday. When Mom and I travel together, I’ll ditch the book completely and noodle our big adventures right onto my own bedroom wall when we’re home between rescue missions.”

  “Whatevs,” said Syd. “Your dad isn’t going to let you draw squat on those walls. I bet you haven’t even busted open that pack of Sharpies we gave you.”

  “Sure I have.”

  Syd was right. I turned ten like eight months ago, and I hadn’t even so much as uncapped one of those permanent markers, but not because of Dad. Truth is, I was scared of making anything permanent. Most all of the permanents in my life had so far been bad ones. Dad’s permanent grass stains, Syd’s permanent roof-surfing scar, Uncle Clay’s permanent paralysis, the countless bad perms Aunt Jo had gotten at the salon. I’d always wanted to noodle a big something across the wall and have it be my first-ever good permanent, but I hadn’t even put the first molecule of ink on there. I’d yet to come across anything permanent-noodle-worthy in all of Olyn.

  “So where’s your mom going next?” said Syd.

  “She doesn’t make the storms, Syd. She cleans them up. I’ll let you know where she goes next when we get there.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “She’s going to let you go with her?”

  “No duhyees,” I said. That is, if no duhyees means man, I sure hope so.

  “But you don’t even know how to rescue,” said Syd.

  “I know some,” I said. “I bandaged your head that time. And I left cold water for the mailman. I figure I can learn the rest.”

  “Yeah, but that duct tape near snatched me bald,” said Syd. “And if I remember right, that water spilled all over the mailbox and ruined your dad’s bills.”

  There was no wrength at all in Syd’s argument, but it still annoyed the stew out of me.

  “You know, if you really want to learn about rescuing, you ought to watch The Fearless Fenwick Show,” he said.

  My left ear got itchy from the surge of aggravation in my head. “Syd, Fearless Fenwick does not rescue. Fearless Fenwick covers his head with bees and lets people shoot him in the backside with paint balls.”

  “Well, I bet he could rescue,” he huffed. “Maybe even better than you and your mom put together.”

  Two itchy ears.

  “I highly doubt that, Syd,” I said. “Since my mom pulls kids from floating cars and grandparents from under houses and dogs from the tops of trees, and since she is going to have months to teach me to do all that before her next trip, and since I’ll learn it so fast we’ll even have one whole month left over for nothing but finger-stringing.”

  “Well, whoopdeedoo dot com!” he shouted. Syd tacked a dot com onto a lot of things to try and sound cool, never mind that his computer was old enough to have a driver’s license.

  “Hey there! You two are jus
t in time!” Uncle Clay waved from the screen porch. A few years back, when Uncle Clay had his stroke, everything on his right side quit moving. It made him half able to talk and even less able to walk. Syd tells people that his dad’s left is all right, but that his right up and left him.

  That morning, like usual, Uncle Clay sat squished into a beat-up gold corduroy recliner. In front of him on his workbench was a stick of green bamboo plucked right from their yard and squeezed tight into a vise. The vise pinched the bamboo steady while Uncle Clay’s good hand carved into it with a pocketknife. “Where’s that dad of yours?” he asked, in that gurgly way of talking that our family has come to understand. “Tidying up the Nordenhauer nest for Toodi’s return?”

  “Evicting poopers,” I said.

  “He’s a little on edge this week, huh?” Uncle Clay said.

  “More like the last few weeks,” I told him.

  “Well, you just be extra patient with your dad, Cass. He’s trying to figure some things out.” He tapped on his forehead.

  I wondered what in the world could be so hard to figure out that it would make a man accidentally brush his teeth with sunscreen.

  “All I know is, poopers or not, the forecast for today calls for fun.” Uncle Clay pointed over to Aunt Jo’s clothesline. From a wire, there dangled the biggest cloud-shaped piñata ever. Fashioned from scraps of newspaper weather reports, the cloud, like all of Uncle Clay’s homemade piñatas, had been customized for the celebration at hand. Across the picnic table below it, Aunt Jo and the wind played tug-o-war with a red tablecloth. Uncle Clay loosened the vise and handed the stick over for my inspection. There were tiny lightning bolts scraped into the tough green skin.

  “I’ve named it Ye Olde Piñata Whacker,” he said. “You think your mom can handle this thing, Cass?”

  “Yes, sir. This is really neat,” I said, tracing my pinkie over the lightning grooves. “My dad told me he has a surprise too.”

  “So I’ve heard,” said Uncle Clay.

  “You know what it is?” I asked.

  Uncle Clay said “Nope,” but he wasn’t very convincing.

  “Oooh! Can we try that out?” interrupted Syd. He swiped the bamboo stick and whacked at the air, way too close to me for comfort.