Sunny Sweet Is So Not Scary

by Jennifer Ann Mann

  We were each wearing our hanger hats, we were covered in jewelry, and we were glowing white from the baby powder. Our little line crept together down the hall and into the kitchen, our jewelry clinking the whole way.

  Once in the kitchen, I remembered that thought I had about the forks and knives coming after me, and I didn’t like being in the kitchen at all. I quickly put down the flashlight and jumped up on the sink and opened the window. The kitchen had no mirrors. I jumped down, my necklaces jingling, picked up the flashlight, and whispered for everyone to get ready to move again.

  All we had left were the living room and dining room. There were two windows in each and one mirror. But the mirror was on top of the piano right by the front hall closet. Just thinking about it put a cramp in my heart.

  I turned around before we walked out of the kitchen and whispered to my bejeweled team. “Let’s open the dining room windows first, and then the windows in the living room. We’ll cover the mirror over the piano last. And then let’s head back into the bathroom to re-powder ourselves. Got it?”

  Their nodding faces glowed in the beam of the flashlight. I turned around and headed out into the living room.

  Four windows, one mirror. We could do this.

  We entered the living room. I stopped for one second by the armchair and everyone bumped into me.

  “Sorry,” I whispered.

  I started around the chair and over into the dining room, keeping my feet as far away from the chair skirt, and the little men, as I could.

  There weren’t too many dark hiding places in the dining room because there was only the dresser thing that held my mom’s nice dishes, along with the table and chairs. We walked around the table on the side without the dresser thing. I wasn’t taking any chances—a ghost could hide anywhere. The windows were big. I took one and Alice took the other.

  We were getting so close! Two more windows and one mirror to go.

  Getting back into formation, we headed over to the living room windows. I remembered Sunny hiding behind the drapes. That seemed like days ago. How I wish we could go back to when we thought Sunny howling behind some drapes was about as close to a real ghost as we’d ever get.

  Again, Alice took one window and I took the other. Again, we reformed our line.

  One mirror to go.

  I shined the flashlight on the mirror over the piano.

  Then I shined my flashlight on the front hall closet. The door seemed like it had opened up even more since earlier.

  I shined the flashlight back on the mirror over the piano.

  “What are you doing?” Alice asked.

  “Stalling,” I told her.

  “Did you see anything . . . by the closet?” she asked.

  “No,” I told her. And I heard Junchao sigh.

  “Let’s cover the side away from the closet first,” I said. “Then we’ll do that other side.”

  I still couldn’t make myself move.

  “You’re doing great, Masha,” Sunny said.

  I smiled down at my little sister.

  “That’s good,” whispered Junchao. “The ghost won’t like all this positive energy.”

  “Group hug,” Alice said.

  We all came together in a big clinking-and-clanging hug. But when we pulled away, we were a tangled mess of jewelry.

  “Oh no,” I whispered.

  “Shine the flashlight,” Junchao said. Her little fingers tried to untangle us. “I can’t do it.”

  I didn’t like standing here like this. We were like a tasty ghost snack just waiting to be eaten. I couldn’t stop myself from picturing Trudy Day floating at us with her mouth open and her sharp teeth gleaming in the moonlight, and I lost it . . . I grabbed the three of them and dragged them toward the piano mirror.

  “Ouch,” Alice cried.

  “My hair,” Junchao yelled.

  “Towel,” I whispered.

  Junchao handed me one.

  I only had one hand because I was using the other to hold on to everyone, so I shook the towel open and tossed it up and over the mirror.

  “Oh no,” Alice said.

  “What?” I asked. I couldn’t turn to see.

  “It slipped behind the piano,” Sunny whispered.

  “Towel,” I shouted to Junchao.

  “It’s the last one,” she said.

  I ripped it from her hands and shook it out. My neck ached from our human knot, my heart beat as if it had a monster truck motor in it, and I was sweating like a marathon runner. I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.

  CLOMP. CLOMP. CLOMP.

  This time the footsteps of the ghost sounded as if they were right on top of us. I threw the towel up into the air without aiming.

  “You did it!” Alice cried.

  Wooo. Wooo. Wooooo.

  We didn’t hang around to celebrate.

  I dragged our clump the heck away from the front hall closet and back down the hall—tripping and stepping on each other the entire way to the bathroom.

  Once inside, we fell onto the bathroom rug in a panting hot mess of jewelry, hangers, pencils, and powder. I closed the door as quietly as I could with my foot.

  We certainly didn’t look like professional ghost hunters. But we had done it!

  When Flushing Doesn’t Work

  I shined the flashlight while Alice worked to separate us.

  “Can’t we just snap the chains?” asked Sunny, while she bent over my mom’s iPad, reading.

  “No,” I said. “This is Babushka’s stuff.” Although if Alice couldn’t get us untangled soon, I was thinking that we might have to break some of it.

  Junchao leaned her head against the bathroom wall. Her eyes were closed. “You tired, Junchao?” I asked. “Junchao? Junchao!”

  She snorted awake. “What? The ghost? Where?”

  “Junchao!” I yelled. “How could you fall asleep?”

  “She is experiencing sleep deprivation and so is microsleeping. That is, taking short little periods of sleep to make up for not getting enough sleep,” Sunny said.

  “That’s right,” Junchao said. “I’m microsleeping because it’s after three in the morning.” She yawned. “Isn’t the ghost going to leave now anyway?”

  “They don’t just leave on their own,” Sunny said. “We just made it possible for Trudy to leave by opening the windows and covering the mirrors. Now we have to get her to leave.”

  I groaned. “Stop calling it that.”

  I was actually in need of a little microsleep myself.

  “So . . . how do we do that, Sunny? Do I have to ask it again?”

  “Well, there seems to be a list of ways to do it. You can wish the ghost gone on an old spoon. You can clap your hands three times in every room in the house.”

  “I’ve heard of that one,” Alice said. “My grandmother is always clapping her hands.”

  “It says that you can even vacuum the house,” added Sunny.

  I turned to Alice. “So ghosts don’t like vacuum cleaners?”

  Alice shrugged. “How should I know?”

  “I just thought since your grandmother . . . never mind,” I said.

  “There are more,” Sunny continued. “You can flush your toilet ten times.”

  “Let’s try that one,” said Junchao.

  Sunny kept reading. “Or you can sprinkle a mixture of dill and salt and fennel in front of all your doors to draw the ghost out.”

  “What’s fennel?” I asked.

  “It even says that if everyone in the house chews on cloves and then spits out the window, then the ghost will go.”

  “I don’t know if we can convince Mrs. Song to spit out the window in the middle of the night,” I said.

  “But the most effective way to get a ghost to leave,” read Sunny, “is to travel out into the night in sight of the moon and gather tall grass. And then go to where you believe the ghost resides and tie a knot in the grass. And then you are to take that grass and bury it in the dirt to confine the spirit to i
ts grave.”

  “Let’s just flush the toilet,” I said.

  Junchao hopped up. She leaned over and flushed the toilet once. And then again. And again. And then four more times. She tried it for the eighth time, but nothing happened. “Try jiggling the handle,” Alice suggested.

  Junchao jiggled it.

  Then she tried to flush it.

  Nothing.

  She jiggled it again.

  And then tried to flush it again.

  Nothing.

  I threw my face into my hands and moaned. Of course it couldn’t be as easy as flushing a toilet.

  “Let’s try the spoon thing,” Junchao said.

  “We need to go outside. Sunny said it’s the best way to get rid of it.” I adjusted my jewelry and my hanger hat and pencils. Then I stood up and got the powder back out and gave myself another dose.

  Alice got up and did the same.

  “Wait! No!” Junchao wailed. “Let’s spit. Let’s spit.”

  When we didn’t answer her, she sighed and took the powder from Alice and poured it over her long black hair. Sunny stuck her monitor in her pocket and powdered up as well.

  I looked out the bathroom window into the dark. It had stopped raining, but there was still the popping sound of the raindrops falling from the trees.

  “I say that we head into Mrs. Song’s yard. She has that long grass in her back garden over by her pond. Do you know it, Sunny?”

  “You mean the Pennisetum ruppelii,” Sunny said. “Or, as it’s more commonly known, fountain grass.”

  “Or even more commonly known as long grass,” I said, frowning.

  “Masha!” Junchao said.

  “Oh yeah, I forgot.” I sighed. I was getting really tired. And because I still sounded a little negative, I added, “Let’s go dig us up some fountain grass.” Sunny was actually being terrific tonight. I should cut her some slack.

  The route we needed to take to the grass was out the back door, because I wanted to avoid the front door and the closet. Going out the back made it harder to get into Mrs. Song’s yard because we’d have to walk into the little woods behind our houses so we could get around the fence that separated our yards. But I’d still rather do that than risk running into the ghost that was probably sitting right behind my mom’s umbrellas in the front hall closet.

  But going through the woods was not so much the real problem, even though it did sound kind of scary in the middle of the night. The real problem was Alice’s crutches. How would she get through the woods with those things?

  The edge of the woods was thick with bushes, old dried leaves, and fallen branches. Both my mom and Mrs. Song threw all the old leaves and sticks that fell in our yards back there, so it made it hard to walk through. For Alice, it would be nearly impossible.

  I looked at the broken toilet. Why couldn’t that have worked?

  I had no idea how to get Alice through the woods, so I figured that I’d get us out there and hope an idea came to me then.

  “Line up,” I said. “We’re going to go out the back door.”

  “But if we go out the back, then we have to get around the backyard fence by going through the woods,” Sunny said.

  Why did my sister always have to know everything?

  “Through the woods?” Alice said.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Alice smiled, her mouth made that curvy shape I loved, but I could see the sadness sitting behind it. She was trying to tell me that she had to stay here.

  Junchao got it too.

  “No,” Junchao said. “We can’t separate. You know what happens if we do.”

  She was right. We’d all seen enough movies to know exactly what would happen if we separated. We’d be doomed, goners, the ghost would have us all.

  “You three go,” Alice said. “I’ll stay here in the bathroom.”

  I stood there, my brain whirling.

  “Plus, I can keep trying to flush the toilet.”

  “No, we all go,” I said.

  “How, Masha?” Junchao asked.

  “What about the wheelbarrow?” Sunny suggested. “Mommy keeps it right outside the back door against the house. We can wheel Alice through the woods.”

  “Great idea, Sunny!” I patted her on the shoulder. I had to remember this moment. Sunny Sweet could so get on my nerves, but tonight she was really saving us.

  “The wheelbarrow?” Alice said. But I was already lining us up at the door.

  I cracked the door open about two inches and pointed the flashlight out into the hallway. And then I turned around and nodded to my posse. We started out and down the hallway again and back into the kitchen. I took us straight to the back door.

  “Should we try the wishing on the spoon thing, since we’re here?” Junchao asked.

  I looked out the kitchen window into our dark backyard. I didn’t like the thought of all the forks and knives chasing us around the house, but the idea of traveling out into the night in sight of the moon was freaking me out even more right now. I opened up the utensil drawer.

  First, I picked up a tablespoon. But then I put it back and picked up my mom’s giant spoon that she serves ice cream with. This was better. I turned around and handed Sunny the flashlight. “What do I do?”

  “It just says to wish the ghost gone,” she said.

  I shrugged. And then I held the big spoon in both my hands and closed my eyes, which felt like the right position for a wish.

  “Be polite,” Alice whispered. “My grandmother says that sometimes ghosts have been haunting around so long that they’ve forgotten they’re dead. So maybe you should remind her nicely, and that this is your home now, and it’s time to move on to the light.”

  I opened up one eye. “What’s the light?”

  Alice took her hand from her crutch and pointed up.

  I closed my eye and took a big breath and said, “Dear ghost—”

  “You should call her Trudy,” Sunny whispered.

  “I don’t want to,” I whispered back. And then I started again. “Dear ghost, I hope you’re having a good night.”

  Junchao gave a snort.

  “We are not having the best night because . . .” Now how to say this nicely? “We’re not sure if you remember this or not, but you’re . . .” I didn’t want to use the word dead. It seemed kind of harsh. “You’ve passed away.” I hugged the big ice cream spoon to my chest. “And it’s time that you moved on . . . to the light.” I gestured up to the sky with the spoon, just in case the ghost didn’t know which direction the light was. “I bet it’s a really nice place up there. I bet it’s like Disneyland, only with free soda and no lines at the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride.”

  Alice cleared her throat. Maybe I was getting off track a bit.

  “So, again, about the light. We were thinking . . . actually, we were wishing that you would take that nice trip up into the air toward the light.” I squeezed the spoon tightly in my hands. “And we wish that you would do it, um, now.”

  I was afraid to open my eyes. After a few seconds of silence, I blinked them open. Sunny, Junchao, Alice, and I were standing in the middle of the kitchen in a tight little circle. Sunny was the last one to open her eyes. Then all four of us stood blinking in the light of the flashlight. The kitchen clock ticked away on the wall. None of us moved.

  Was it over? Maybe it was over. It could be over. And we didn’t have to go outside into the light of the moon!

  But then it happened.

  CLOMP. CLOMP. CLOMP.

  It’s like the ghost was walking around in the same place and for the same amount of time, almost as if it were doing some weird dance move.

  Wooo. Wooo. Wooooo.

  I quickly slammed the utensil drawer shut before the forks and knives could get out.

  The Wheelbarrow Probably Wasn’t a Good Idea

  The kitchen door opened up with a loud squeak. The sound would have made my heart start pounding, but the thought of going out into
the dark night already had it beating away. Even the wet night air smelled spooky.

  All four of us piled onto our tiny wooden back porch. It took me and Junchao holding onto each of Alice’s elbows to help her down the step from the kitchen door to the porch. There was a little roof over the porch so it was dry. Sunny held the flashlight and a bunch of kitchen towels I told her to grab in case the wheelbarrow was wet. I closed the door behind us.

  Sunny shined the flashlight out into the yard. The beam of light only made it about halfway across, making the yard seem so much bigger than I remembered it being yesterday. Our swing set, which was blue and pink and happy in the sunshine of the day, looked like a giant metal monster crouching in the corner of the yard under the big tree. The big tree, which I loved to climb just about every day of my life, seemed as if it were bending and stretching its branches, getting ready to grab us. I was glad that we didn’t have to go anywhere near them. I looked over to where we did have to go, toward the shed.

  For the first time ever, I noticed exactly how scary our shed looked. It was short, fat, and wooden, with a door that didn’t close right because it wasn’t the right fit for the shed. Sunny had destroyed the real door this past spring. She said that she was doing experiments on turning wood into gas. I don’t know if the shed door turned into gas, but it did turn into a black and twisted mess. Mom left it out for the trash men and put an old closet door that we had down in the basement on the shed.

  But because it wasn’t the right kind, it didn’t go all the way down to the bottom of the frame, so there was a three- or four-inch gap at the bottom. When I stared at it in the dark, I swear that I saw the shadow of feet under the door. And we had to pass right by that shed to go into the woods to get around the fence and into Mrs. Song’s yard.

  I looked for our wheelbarrow. The moon lit up the back side of our house, making the windows look like dark eyes staring out into the yard. The wheelbarrow leaned against the side of the house between the windows, making it look like a giant nose.

  “Wait here,” I said. I stepped off the porch and walked along the wet pavement toward the wheelbarrow; my jewelry clanked in the night like the bones of a skeleton. I held the chains to stop them from making the scary bone sound.