“Listen, I’m sitting at the bottom of a grave with mud caking on my ear from my phone and maybe about to be eaten alive by big ugly beetles. Please don’t yell at me.”
“I’m not yelling,” said Alice. “Let me see.” I could hear the crinkling of paper. “If I get on Fountain Avenue, it seems to make a circle toward the inside of the cemetery. I can zip around it and look for Sunny.”
“Thanks, Alice,” I said.
“NP, BFF.” She laughed. “This is getting kind of fun now.”
“No, it’s not,” I said.
She giggled. I could hear the motor on her wheelchair. “I put you on speaker,” she shouted.
I smiled in my hole.
“Are you flapping?” I shouted at the square of sunlight over my head.
“Yes,” I heard Sunny shout, out of breath.
“Keep flapping!”
My phone clicked. Someone else was calling me. I pulled my muddy phone from my ear. My mother’s picture smiled at me from the couch in our living room on Christmas morning. Oh no.
“Alice, it’s my mom calling. I’ll call you back.”
“What are you gonna tell her?”
It clicked again.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I have to answer it or she’ll freak out.”
I switched over to my mother.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, more like I was swallowing the words than sending them into the phone.
“Hi, sweetie. How’s the fair?”
“Um, it’s …”
“I’m having a great time too!” She giggled. Did my mother really just giggle? “This class is so much fun, Masha. We get to sit inside the museum directly in front of an Alexandre Benois watercolor. It’s so fantastic, Masha … and relaxing and exciting.” Then she giggled again. “Anyway, how’s Sunny’s experiment going?”
“Um …” I pulled my stocking foot out of the mud and looked around my hole.
“Did they get through the first round of picks yet?”
“The first round of picks?”
“I really hope they don’t just hand her the trophy after the first round like they did last year in Pennsylvania. I didn’t think it was fair to the other kids.”
“Yeah, me neither,” I said, glad to have something to say.
“Anyway,” my mom continued, “I just called Mrs. Song. She’s really looking forward to having you girls for dinner. Be sure and show up hungry, you know she loves that. And don’t forget to text me when you get there. I really mean it. I have my phone sitting right next to me on vibrate. Masha, you’ll text me, right?”
“Yes, Mom, of course.”
“What did you guys have for lunch?”
“Hamburgers,” I said.
“Okay, baby. I love you. Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it. And I know Sunny does too. She loves to be with you, Masha. She struggles so much, you know, with being different. But around you, she gets to be just, you know, Sunny. And I can’t tell you what a nice day I’m having. I really needed this.”
“NP, Mom,” I said, mimicking Alice.
“What, sweetie?”
“No problem, Mom, no problem,” I choked.
I so wanted to scream, “HELP, I’M STUCK AT THE BOTTOM OF A GRAVE!” But I didn’t. I couldn’t … not after hearing about my mom having a great time and her giggling about it and all. I reached out and touched the dirt on the side of the grave. I could handle this.
“Okay, see you soon. Eat lots of dumplings tonight.”
She smacked me a kiss and hung up.
I looked up at the large rectangle of light over my head and tears popped from my eyes and rolled into the mud on my cheeks. I was never getting us home.
And then I heard the whirring of a wheelchair motor.
Being the Load
“Alice!” I cried.
“Masha!” came her reply from just outside that rectangle of light above my head.
“How deep is it?” she asked. I knew her wheelchair couldn’t get too close to the hole because of the tiny black fence that surrounded it.
“Really deep,” I called out.
Sunny’s head popped back into view at the top of the hole. “I’d estimate it at six feet, four inches; possibly six feet, five inches.”
We both ignored Sunny.
“Alice, get me out of here!”
Silence came from the top of the hole.
“Ohhhh,” I wailed.
“Don’t worry, Masha, I’ll get you out,” Alice said. “Let me think for a minute.”
“Did you see anyone else in the graveyard?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“We didn’t either.” I groaned. “It’s such a beautiful Saturday. You’d think more people would be visiting their dead grandparents!” It’s funny how just a half hour ago I was so happy that there was no one in the cemetery to see Sunny’s experiment—me—and now I was wondering where the heck everyone was.
“Maybe I can go up to the front of the graveyard. Maybe there is a guard or a policeman there,” Alice suggested.
“We came in that way, and we didn’t see a guard,” I said. “Plus that will take so long, and I want to get out of this hole right now.”
“It won’t take that long. I’ll only be gone for twenty minutes, tops.”
“No,” I shouted. “Don’t leave me.”
“Okay, okay, Masha. I’m right here. I won’t leave you.”
“We might be able to get her out using a simple machine,” said Sunny.
“Like my wheelchair?” Alice asked.
“That’s not a simple machine,” Sunny said. “That’s a complex machine.”
“What other machine do we have?” I asked.
“We can make one.”
“How can we make a machine in the middle of a graveyard?” Alice asked.
“A simple machine is just a device that changes the direction or magnitude of a force,” Sunny said.
“Get to the point,” Alice said.
I smiled in my hole. I loved Alice.
“We need a mechanical advantage to pull Masha out of there. You know, leverage. You’re kind of skinny, Masha,” Sunny said. “But you’re still too heavy for us to just pull you out using our arms. We need a fulcrum and force, and then we can pull you out of the hole. We need to create a lever.”
“Okay, let’s do it,” Alice said.
“I don’t even get what she’s talking about!” I shouted.
“Give her a chance, Masha. I’m sure we’ll understand it better when she sets up what she needs.”
I wasn’t smiling right now, and I wasn’t loving Alice so much either.
I heard mumbling going on outside my hole, and I hugged my cast to the P on my chest. If only I really were a superhero—a real Paintgirl could get herself out of a hole in the ground.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked. But no one answered. I checked the mud around my feet for beetles again. I swear I thought I saw something move near my sneakerless foot.
“Guys!”
“We’re right here,” Alice called.
“Masha,” Sunny breathed down into the dark. “We found a lever.” A long object poked into the hole and knocked me in the head.
“Watch out! Why are you hitting me with a stick?”
“It’s a plank of wood,” Sunny said. “We found it behind one of the little grave houses. You’re going to hang on to the one end, and Alice and I are going to lift you out of the hole.”
“How are you going to do that?” I whined.
“We’re going to create a lever,” Sunny said. “Alice and I will be the force. The iron fence around the grave that you tripped over will be the fulcrum. And you will be the load, Masha. If the force applied is twice the distance from the fulcrum than the load, Alice and I will only need half the effort to pull you out than if we just used our own strength!” She was looking a little too excited about this. Whenever Sunny got excited, bad things usually happened to me. I looked down at my muddy, re
d-splattered, broken-armed self, and I knew that nothing good was going to come from this lever thing.
“ ‘Lever’ is just another name for a seesaw, Masha,” Alice called from over the top of my muddy prison. “Only the board of the seesaw is placed unevenly, with lots more seesaw board on our side. Sunny says it makes it easier to pull you out.”
“Okay,” I said. “Although I don’t know why I have to be called a load,” I grumbled.
“You have to be the load,” Sunny insisted. “You’re the one that needs to be moved out of the hole.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“Hold on to the wooden plank and get ready to be lifted,” she said, her eyes glowing. And then she disappeared. My hands tried to grip the wood, but it was too wide to really hang on to. Instead, I threw my cast and my good arm over it so I was holding on with both my elbows. I cringed, ready for something to happen but not wanting it to. I was just about to call out to Alice and Sunny to ask what was supposed to be happening when the wood jerked in my arms.
I held on, which wasn’t so easy with my cast.
My arms, wrapped around the plank, shot up over my head. My good arm shot higher than the arm with the cast on it, jerking me into a weird position.
And then both my arms felt like they were being pulled from their sockets. Before I could think, my feet lifted out of the mud and dangled below me.
I held on.
Within seconds my head was even with the hole. I blinked in the sunlight. Alice was leaning out of her wheelchair and Sunny was standing next to her, and both of them were pushing down on the other side of the long piece of wood, huge smiles on their faces. I couldn’t believe it—it was working!
“Now what?” I cried, huffing and puffing and trying to cling to the plank.
“What are you kids doing?” someone growled.
And … plop! I was on my butt in the mud again.
Three of a Kind
“I really did fall in by accident. We weren’t playing around,” I said for the sixty-millionth time in three minutes.
“Listen,” said the gardener. “I don’t know what you girls are doing running around in here without your parents. This isn’t a playground. You’re lucky I had my pruning ladder with me today.”
I looked down at the muddy mess that was me. “I would have been luckier if you’d come along before the whole lever thing,” I said.
“I’m going to call security,” he said, pulling a radio out of his tool belt.
“No need for that. My mom’s waiting for us by the back gate to the hospital,” Alice said, covering for me. “Thanks so much for your help.” She motioned for Sunny and me to follow her.
He nodded in her direction but didn’t look directly at her, and he didn’t say anything at first. And then he said, “Well, okay, get along.” It seems that he didn’t have a problem treating me badly, but he couldn’t treat Alice that way.
“My brother and I call it ‘blinky-eye,’” explained Alice, when he was gone and we were back on Fountain Avenue trudging toward the back gate that stood across the street from the hospital. “Because of the spina bifida, I don’t look like a regular person.” She snorted. “So people do a lot of blinking so they don’t have to actually see me. And then they give me anything I want and hurry away.”
“You do too look like a regular person,” I said.
“And the people that don’t get all blinky with me pat me on the head and speak really loudly and slowly to me,” she continued, “like I’m some old dog that doesn’t hear very well!”
“People may behave that way because your outward appearance is different, and that leads to them to believe that your inward appearance is also different,” Sunny stated in her annoying scientific tone while she swung her bucket of fly eggs at her side. “You know, like your mind may not be … regular.”
“Sunny!” I said.
“No, Masha. Let her talk. I want to hear more.” Alice spun her wheelchair around to a stop in front of Sunny. Her dark eyes that always seemed so ready to laugh at everything stared hard, like they were not so ready to hear what Sunny had to say. The late-afternoon sun created a red halo glow over the top of her black hair.
“Look at Masha,” Sunny said. “I made Masha look different with red dye. You were born looking different. Either way, neither of you looks like everyone else, even if you don’t mean to. Didn’t you notice, Masha,” Sunny continued, looking over at me, “how Jeremy’s mom didn’t really want to answer your question about which bus we were on? It’s the same thing as the gardener not wanting to look at Alice. You and Alice look different. And looking different makes people think you are different.”
“Like the janitor at the science fair,” I said. “He told me I didn’t belong, and he was right.”
Alice hiccupped and stared down into her lap. Then tears began to drop from under her dark eyelashes.
I ran to her.
“I don’t want to be different,” Alice cried.
“You’re not, Alice,” I said. “Sunny doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
“Of course I know what I’m talking a—” Sunny started.
“Sunny!” I hissed. “Enough.”
“I dream of having a beautiful, strong spine,” Alice spit through the waterfall rolling over her cheeks and into her mouth. “I picture all the bony vertebrae lining up neatly in a long, straight row. I picture them moving together as I walk down the street.” She looked out over the tops of the trees as she spoke. “Sometimes,” she said, looking back at Sunny and me, “I think about it so hard that I almost feel like I can make it happen just because I want it that badly. But it doesn’t ever happen.” Then Alice looked right at me. “I want to be regular, Masha,” she said. And then she hung her head. “I don’t want to be … different!”
“You’re not different,” I said, hugging her ponytailed head to my chest. The three of us formed a little circle in the center of a tiny cemetery road wrongly named Joy Path.
I saw Sunny take a breath to say something, and I shot her a “you better not open your mouth” look.
“I am too,” sniffed Alice into my shirt. “It’s just like Sunny said.”
“Sunny doesn’t know everything,” I told her while I stared Sunny down.
“Well, ‘everything’ is not really a true measurement,” Sunny mumbled, hugging the paint can to her chest.
I made a growling face at her.
“Anyway, Alice,” I said, unhugging her head and looking her right in the eyes, “people should look at you. And I mean really look at you. Because the you that I see is totally beautiful.”
Alice turned a little away from me, wiping her face with the palms of her hands. “Would you be mad if I told you that I want to be beautiful to everyone and not just to you, Masha?” she said.
I shook my head no. “Of course I wouldn’t,” I whispered. My lungs felt like two tubes of toothpaste being squeezed tight, and my eyes let go of a bunch of tears. “I know that teachers and moms say that it’s the inside that counts and all, but I want to be beautiful on the outside too. Everybody does.”
“I don’t,” Sunny said.
Alice and I looked up at Sunny. She looked back at us. “What?” she said. “I don’t.”
We turned back to each other and started to laugh.
“What is so funny?” she asked. My little sister didn’t really get why Alice had cried, and now she didn’t understand why we were laughing. As always, the word “weird” popped into my head to sum up Sunny. But this time the word didn’t exactly sum her up. When I realized what did, it made my heart burn in my chest.
Different.
All three of us … We were all different.
A Wet Wedding, a Real Wedding, and No Bus
“The lever would have worked,” Sunny mumbled, scraping and clomping along in her boot and my sneaker.
“I’m sure it would have,” I said, glancing at Alice. Our eyes met. We could tell that Sunny was still feeling hurt over us lau
ghing.
“Want to ride in my lap?” Alice asked her as a way of apologizing.
“Yeah,” cried Sunny, jumping up and down like the little six-year-old that she was. She scrambled into Alice’s wheelchair with her paint can. We rolled along the little cemetery roads. Sunny read Alice’s map, and we made the rights and lefts that she told us to. The sun shone from a little bit of a distance but still felt warm on my shoulders. The trees were as green as shamrocks, and everywhere I looked were these bushes covered in tiny yellow flowers that reminded me of a firework explosion frozen in place. I took in a big breath of graveyard air. It felt great to be out of that hole. I swung my arms just because I could and glanced at the tops of the trees where they met the blue sky. All of a sudden I remembered the dead bodies hanging in the tree branches that Sunny told me about. I kind of hoped that she made that up, but Sunny never made anything up. And then I remembered where we were supposed to be today.
“Hey Sunny, are you upset about missing the science fair?” I asked.
Sunny pulled out her phone and checked the time.
“Why do you keep caring about the time?” I asked.
Sunny just shrugged.
That was weird. Not having an answer is not like my little sister.
“Is there something in that paint can, Sunny? It kind of smells. And why don’t you take off the rain hat?” Alice asked. “Aren’t you hot?”
“I’m fine,” Sunny said, pulling the hat down tighter onto her head and the paint can closer to her chest.
Now I was getting suspicious. “What’s up with that hat?” I asked. “You are way too attached to it today.” I swiped at it and Sunny dodged me, almost cracking her head into Alice’s head.
“Stop, Masha,” Sunny cried.
“Just take it off,” I said.
“No,” she answered.
“Come on. Do it.”
“No. It’s my hat.”
“It’s Mom’s hat.”
“Guys,” Alice said, stopping her wheelchair. “What does it matter that Sunny won’t take off the hat, Masha? You’ve got a hat on too. And is that a P on your T-shirt?” she asked.
Sunny Sweet is So Dead Meat Page 6
