Sunny Sweet Is So Not Scary

by Jennifer Ann Mann

  “What do you mean, address them?”

  “It says you should speak to them, but only to explain politely that you would appreciate it if they would leave. It says to be loving because you don’t want to get them angry or they might stay around. It says that often this will do the trick and that the ghost will leave.”

  “Wow,” said Alice. “That sounds so easy. Go ahead, Masha, ask it to go.”

  “Nicely,” added Junchao.

  “Why do I have to do it?” I whispered so the ghost couldn’t hear me.

  “It was your negative energy that brought it,” Sunny said.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “That’s negative,” Sunny said.

  I growled.

  “Masha,” Junchao and Alice said together.

  “All right,” I snapped. Being nice to Sunny was just about impossible.

  I turned and faced the room. I didn’t know where the ghost was. I figured that if I were a ghost, I’d probably be under the desk in the corner. It was a really dark place and no one would step on you or anything if they didn’t know you were there.

  “Hi,” I said. And I gave the ghost the peace sign.

  “Don’t do that,” Sunny said. “The ghost might be French, and to the French that sign doesn’t mean good things.”

  “What?” Alice said.

  “Don’t get her started . . . ,” I said, but it was too late.

  “Some people claim that the two-fingered V sign came about during the Hundred Years’ War between the French and the English. The French would cut off the two arrow-shooting fingers of captured English archers so they couldn’t fire an arrow at them ever again. The English took to holding up two fingers to the French as a sign of defiance. In other words, they were saying to the French that they still had two fingers and could shoot them.”

  “In other words,” I said, “shh!” And then, because I was supposed to be nice to Sunny, I patted her sweetly on the head.

  “Ouch,” she said.

  Then I turned back to the ghost.

  “Uh, I was wondering if you’d mind . . . well, if you wouldn’t mind leaving. It’s not that we don’t like you. Because we don’t really even know you. I’m sure if we knew you, you know, when you were alive . . . not that you’re dead or anything. I mean, I don’t know exactly what you are.”

  This wasn’t going great. It wasn’t even going good.

  “I’m sure that whatever you are, it’s something nice. I bet it’s something very, very nice.”

  “Super nice,” Sunny added.

  “Yes,” I said. “Super nice.”

  “Super-duper nice,” Sunny said.

  “Of course. Super-duper nice.”

  “Super-di-duper nice,” said Sunny.

  I leaped at Sunny’s throat.

  Alice tried to hold me back, but I was all over my little sister.

  The lights in Sunny’s room flashed on and then off again. And I froze, mid-strangle.

  “Masha,” Junchao whispered. “You’re being mega negative.”

  “She started it,” I hissed.

  Sunny’s three-way radio blasted on.

  None of us moved. The scratchy garble on the radio was so loud that it seemed to be playing inside my head.

  But then Sunny reached over and snapped it off.

  The silence sizzled in my ears.

  “I think you made it angry,” Sunny said.

  The Story of Trudy Day

  Maybe it was already angry,” I said angrily.

  “A lot of ghosts are,” said Alice. “My grandmother says that this town has its very own ghost and that she is really angry.”

  “Why?” asked Junchao. Her eyes scanned the room. And I couldn’t stop mine from doing the same.

  “Her name was Trudy Day, and she lived here a long time ago.”

  “Where?” Junchao shivered and rubbed her arms with her hands.

  “I don’t know. My grandmother never said where. She just said that she was supposed to be majorly beautiful and that all the boys kept asking her out. But she never went out with any of them. She was saving all her love for her one true soul mate.”

  “What’s a soul mate?” I asked.

  “There is no such thing as a soul mate,” Sunny said.

  “You said that about ghosts,” I snapped. “And look at us now.”

  “Anyway, there is too such a thing,” Alice insisted. “My grandmother says that everyone has one. Your soul mate is the one person in the world that gets you more than any other.”

  I thought about Michael Capezzi and wondered if he was my soul mate.

  “And Trudy Day was waiting for hers to come,” continued Alice. “Then one day, this really cute guy came to town. Trudy and this guy went out a few times. He took her on long walks. He wrote her love letters. They held hands. Trudy fell totally in love and believed that this guy was her soul mate.”

  “Was he?” asked Junchao.

  Alice shook her head no. I didn’t like where this story was going.

  “One day, the guy brought her a beautiful red rose. He said that she was prettier than anything in the world, including the rose. But he told her that he didn’t love her and that he was going away.”

  “Oh no.” Junchao sighed.

  “Trudy got so mad. I mean, my grandmother said that Trudy got madder than anybody else has ever been mad before. And that her anger built up and up and up, until it became a monster that tracked down that guy and killed him.”

  “What?” I said. “Anger can do that?” I glanced over at Sunny. My anger at my little sister got pretty big sometimes.

  “Trudy couldn’t control her anger. It had a mind of its own. And it boomeranged right back at Trudy and killed her too!”

  “Wow,” I breathed. “People should learn how to not get so mad.” I felt a little sweaty under my arms.

  “And this is the worst part,” Alice continued.

  “There is a worse part?” squeaked Junchao.

  “My grandmother says that the day after Trudy died, guess who came into town looking for her?”

  “Her real soul mate!” Junchao yelled.

  “That’s right. And so Trudy rose from the dead to be with him. But of course she couldn’t because she was dead. And so her ghost haunts anyone in town who is filled with love.”

  “Oh no,” Junchao cried. “I’m filled with love!”

  “You are filled with love,” Alice said, patting Junchao on the arm. “But I think Trudy haunts people who are in love.”

  “Well then, our ghost isn’t Trudy because no one here is in love,” I said.

  “You like that boy Michael,” Junchao pointed out.

  “But I don’t love him,” I grumbled.

  “Are you sure?” Sunny asked.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “How can our ghost be here because of my negative energy and because I think Michael Capezzi is kind of cute?”

  “Maybe both things brought Trudy,” Sunny said.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts. And I thought you didn’t believe in soul mates. And now you believe in both?” I snapped.

  “You’re being negative,” Junchao whispered.

  I looked over at Alice for help. She squinted her eyes and gave me a little shrug.

  I let my head fall back on my neck. Trudy was haunting me for just liking a boy? I’d never even held his hand! It didn’t seem very fair.

  Ridding Your House of Unwanted Spirits: Dress for It

  How do we save Masha?” Junchao moaned.

  I wished that I could just crawl under the bed and forget about this whole night . . . except that now I knew there were little men under there that wanted to eat me.

  Alice hugged me. “It’s okay, Masha. We’re going to fix this.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “We have to get the ghost out, that’s all,” Alice said. “We’ll make her go. The first thing we should do is light lots and lots of candles. My grandmother says that candles keep ghosts out of your h
ouse.”

  “We aren’t allowed to light candles,” I said.

  “Also,” added Sunny. “Trudy is already in the house.” She looked at me and gave me a little smile that said: because of you.

  “Don’t call her that.” I scowled. It was so hard not to be negative with dinky Dr. Evil reminding me how this whole thing was my fault.

  “What about garlic? We can string garlic all around like Christmas lights,” said Alice.

  “Isn’t that to keep vampires away?” I asked.

  “Vampires,” Junchao whispered as she chewed on a long strand of her hair and searched the room with her eyes.

  Sunny gave a little sigh and then jumped off the bed and headed to her closet.

  “Sunny!”

  I know that I often wanted to kill my little sister, but I didn’t want her to be killed.

  “The ghost isn’t in here anymore,” she said. “The thermometer on the iPad shows that the temperature has increased in the room. That means she’s gone.”

  I shivered. She was in here?

  Sunny opened up her closet, fished around a bunch in the dark, and then pulled out new batteries.

  “You’re a genius,” Alice said.

  I coughed.

  Junchao and Alice looked over at me.

  “My throat’s a little dry,” I said.

  Sunny put batteries into the flashlight and turned it on. Light filled the room. We all took a big breath and relaxed . . . a little.

  Then Sunny turned back to her closet and started pulling down hangers and taking off the clothes. “If we’re going after Trudy, we need to protect ourselves,” she said.

  “Really, stop calling her that,” I said.

  Sunny handed us each a wire hanger. “We need to put these on our heads. UnwantedGhost dot com said that ghosts don’t like metal. Now, I know what you’re thinking—that these hangers are made out of steel, which is technically not a metal. But steel is an alloy of iron, and iron is a metal.”

  Something a ghost didn’t technically like was good enough for us. Alice, Junchao, and I quickly twisted our hangers into a shape that would stay on our heads.

  “Also, we need to attach these to the hangers,” Sunny said, handing us pencils. “The pencils are yellow. And the color yellow is used in the ancient Chinese system called feng shui to help create positive energy.”

  Alice and I looked at Junchao to see if it was true.

  “Why are you staring at me?” Junchao frowned. “Just because I’m part Chinese doesn’t mean I know a thousand years’ worth of Chinese history.”

  “It’s closer to four thousand years,” Sunny said. “The first written history in China is recorded at around 1700 BC.” She went on about some sort of dynasty as she got the tape from her desk, but we weren’t listening. We were busy taping as many pencils to the hangers as we could. When I was done with mine, I made a hanger hat for Sunny while she gathered up a bunch of equipment from her desk drawers.

  “Look at mine,” Junchao said, smiling and holding out her hanger hat. She had staggered her pencils so that there was a short one, and a long one, and then a short one, all the way around it.

  “It looks like the crown of a king.” Alice laughed. “Do you like mine?” Alice held hers up. She had taped all her pencils to the hanger only in the back.

  “Yours looks like an American Indian headdress,” I said. Alice smiled a giant curvy smile.

  Then they both looked at the hats I’d made. The pencils weren’t even at all or in any kind of pattern, but were sticking out everywhere. And there was so much tape that it looked like the pencils had gotten into a big fight with the tape, and the tape had won.

  When Junchao and Alice didn’t have anything to say about my hats, I started to giggle.

  And then my friends started to giggle.

  CLOMP. CLOMP. CLOMP.

  No more giggling.

  “We need to get to the bathroom,” Sunny said.

  “What about the ghost?” asked Junchao. “Maybe she’s in the bathroom.”

  “I don’t think ghosts like to hang out in bathrooms,” Sunny said.

  Wooo. Wooo. Wooooo.

  The four of us quickly put on our hanger hats.

  “Now we’re protected.” Sunny pointed at her hanger hat.

  Junchao did not look convinced. But the four of us—hangers on our head and with a backpack full of Sunny’s science stuff—lined up at the door. The bathroom was right across the hall from Sunny’s bedroom, so we only had to make it across about three feet of rug.

  I put my hand on the door handle.

  “Ready?” I whispered.

  Sunny might be in charge of information, but I was in charge of everything else. The three of them stood behind me, surrounding Alice on her crutches, their faces yellow in the glow of the flashlight.

  They nodded their heads.

  I opened the door.

  My heart was quietly thumping as I stuck my head a tiny, tiny bit through the door and peeked up and down the hall.

  Nothing.

  I listened hard.

  All I could hear was the ticking of the rain still coming down outside. I motioned that we were good to go, and then I swung open the door and jumped the three feet across the hall and into the bathroom. My bare feet hit the tile, and then Junchao, Alice, and Sunny all hit me. Alice’s crutches were so light that they flew over my head and hit the toilet with a clang.

  I scrambled out from under them and shut the bathroom door behind us.

  “Shh!”

  We were so loud that we were going to end up waking Mrs. Song for sure, and then Sunny and I would be left with a ghost and Alice would be on her way home.

  I looked in the mirror to fix my hanger hat, and that’s when I noticed the shower curtain behind us. It was pulled across the bathtub.

  Anything could be in there.

  I turned to face the curtain. Everyone looked at me looking at it. And then they all turned to face the shower curtain.

  “Do it,” Alice whispered.

  I squinted my eyes and reached up and grabbed the shower curtain, pulling it open with a CHHHHHHH.

  Junchao screamed.

  I grabbed her mouth with both my hands and Alice grabbed me.

  Sunny shined the flashlight into the bathtub.

  It was empty.

  We slumped onto the bathroom floor, panting.

  “Why are we in here?” I asked. I should have probably asked this before we traveled across the hall.

  “It says that the first step in any ghost hunt is to use the bathroom,” Sunny said.

  “Sunny!” I grumbled. Alice and Junchao shot me a warning with their eyes—I was being negative. “Great idea,” I quickly added, trying to save myself.

  “Also,” Sunny said, “I read that ghosts like it if you look like them a little bit. So I thought we could use Mommy’s baby powder to make ourselves look more like the ghost.”

  “That is a good idea,” said Alice. “My grandmother says that ghosts are really vain.”

  “What does vain mean?” I asked.

  “It means conceited or stuck-up,” Sunny said.

  “A stuck-up ghost?” I said. “You would think that you’d get over yourself by the time you’re dead. But I say let’s do it.”

  I took the flashlight from Sunny and found my mom’s baby powder in the bathroom cabinet and then dumped some over my head and all over my pajamas. Alice, Junchao, and Sunny did the same. We stood in the bathroom in a giant cloud of powder, coughing. Each of us was wearing our hanger hat filled with pencils and we were now covered in baby powder. Everything about us was white: our pajamas, our arms, our feet, our hair . . . The only thing not white, weirdly, were our eyes.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “It says,” Sunny read, “‘that if your ghost persists to stick around that it may have a reason to stay. The ghost might be trying to communicate with you.’”

  “You mean, tell us something?” I asked. “But we already communic
ated when I tried to ask her, I mean it, to leave.”

  “That was us telling it something. Not the ghost telling us something,” Alice pointed out.

  “Exactly,” said Sunny. “But it warns that ‘you should never try to communicate with the ghost. It says that an inexperienced person might make an error that could open up a portal and cause the ghost to haunt the house forever.’”

  “Forever,” Junchao moaned, covering her white face with her white hands.

  “That’s a really long time,” Alice said, looking over at me.

  “It can’t live here forever because we already live here, and . . . truthfully . . . I kind of like it here.”

  Sunny’s eyes opened in surprise. I’d never said this before. Or at least not when my mom didn’t ask me.

  Sunny and I always told our mom that we liked it here, but we only told her that because we knew she needed us to be okay with the divorce and the move and my dad having a girlfriend and all, and so we said we were. When really, both Sunny and I were secretly hoping that my mom would tell us that this whole divorce thing was off and that we were moving home—to be with my dad and to live in our actual home.

  But was I hoping that anymore? I kind of thought that I might not be. I looked around the bathroom. This place was home.

  “I like it here too,” Sunny said. “Did you know that New Jersey is the largest chemical-producing state in the whole country? And I love chemicals.” She smiled at me, and I knew that she wasn’t really talking about chemicals.

  “I like it here too, since I was born here and it’s the only place I’ve ever lived,” said Junchao.

  “I like it here too, because you guys are here,” Alice said.

  “That’s the best reason to like it,” I told her. “Gui mi group hug!”

  We all hugged—including Sunny. Our hanger hats clanked together and when we separated, I think Alice’s hat had a few of my pencils stuck to it.

  Ridding Your House of Unwanted Spirits: Show It the Way

  Okay, let’s get to work,” I said.

  The four of us sat down on the pink bathroom rug. Sunny read from my mom’s iPad: “‘The first thing you have to do is to cover up all the mirrors in the house with towels and open up all the windows at least an inch.’”