The Book of One Hundred Truths

by Julie Schumacher

  Truth #31: Gwen and I tried to hold our breath by plugging our noses. We timed ourselves by the clock in her kitchen. I only got to forty-three seconds, and I felt like my head was about to explode.

  “Thea?” It was Jocelyn again. “The downstairs bathrooms are both full. Somebody’s using them. Nenna’s taking a shower.”

  I turned the page and clicked the little plastic button on the top of my pen.

  Truth #32:

  “I have to go to the bathroom right now,” Jocelyn whispered. “I can’t wait.”

  “Hold your horses.” Reluctantly, I shut the notebook. Thirty-one truths. Sixty-nine more to go. Maybe when I got to one hundred some kind of door would open in my head and I would never again in my entire life have to think about—

  “Thea!”

  “Okay, I’m coming.” I ran some water in the sink, then opened the cabinet underneath it to look for a towel. And there it was, as if I’d been searching for it all along: the perfect hiding place for my notebook. Behind the extra rolls of toilet paper and the boxes of tissues and the bars of soap and the stack of hand towels, there was a broken board. The back wall of the cabinet was cracked and loose. I wrapped the notebook in a garbage bag to keep it clean, then slid a piece of the board aside and hid the notebook between the cabinet and the wall. For added security, I plucked two hairs from my head and set them on top of the broken board. I closed the cabinet again. Like magic: no notebook. Then I unlocked the bathroom door and opened it as if inviting an honored guest into my home.

  Jocelyn stood on one foot in the hallway. She peered into the bathroom. “What were you doing in there?”

  “Just using the bathroom. I thought you were in a hurry.”

  “I am. But why were you in there for so long if you aren’t sick?”

  “I was smoking cigarettes.” A purple lie—diversion. “I didn’t want anyone to see me.”

  “Oh.” Jocelyn hurried past. “Cigarettes aren’t good for you.”

  I told her I was trying to quit (“It’s really hard once you get hooked on them,” I said), and she shut the door.

  During the next couple of days, we rode our Granda’s trike all over Port Harbor. I pedaled Jocelyn to the harbor lighthouse (it wasn’t open, but we walked around it), to the broken-down fishing pier (also closed), and to the Fairyland miniature golf course, where a life-sized Snow White and the seven dwarfs danced in a circle around the eighteenth hole. At Jocelyn’s insistence, we also spent some time lurking outside the hotel where Celia worked. I didn’t see anything very interesting, but Jocelyn claimed to have spotted Ellen’s car on the street. It might have been Ellen’s; I wasn’t sure.

  “Aren’t you getting tired of secrets and spying?” I asked.

  “No.” Jocelyn swatted a bug on her shoulder. “Celia was talking to someone on the phone last night,” she said.

  “Hmm.” I turned a corner on the trike; we didn’t have enough money for miniature golf, so I was pedaling all the way to the boardwalk again.

  “It was the middle of the night. I woke up because I heard her talking.” Jocelyn held on to the sides of the basket when we came to a bump. “And it wasn’t the first time, either. I bet she’s talked to both our parents.”

  “Why would Celia call our parents in the middle of the night, Jocelyn?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I heard her.”

  “She wouldn’t have talked to my parents without telling me.”

  “Yes, she would have.” Jocelyn turned halfway around in her seat. “I think I heard her say the name Fred a couple of times. And that’s your dad’s name.”

  “I know what my dad’s name is,” I said. We pushed the trike up the wooden ramp and rode past the haunted house, the spin-paint booth, and the arcades, which, as usual, were full of boys in black T-shirts, all pounding away at a huge assortment of beeping machines.

  Jocelyn said her legs were stiff and she wanted to get down. I parked the trike by the metal railing at the edge of the boardwalk and tied it up loosely with the bungee cord. We sat down on a bench. A lot of the benches had metal plaques on them: the plaque on ours read, IN LOVING MEMORY OF HARRY, WHO LOVED THE SEA. I wondered if Granda would ever have a plaque. Then I tried to erase that thought from my mind.

  Two old women in flowered dresses went into the fudge shop and came out with an enormous cone of blue cotton candy. They tore off pieces of the fluffy sugar with their fingers, then tipped their heads back and laughed.

  “That’s where Aunt Ellen and Aunt Celia were when we saw them. Right over there.” Jocelyn pointed. Directly across from us were a paperback bookstore, a bakery, the frozen custard booth, the fortune-teller’s booth, the man who painted people’s names on grains of rice, and an office that said PORT HARBOR REALTY. “I wonder what they were doing.”

  “Maybe they were buying something to eat,” I said. “They probably both like frozen custard.”

  “They wouldn’t come all the way to the boardwalk for frozen custard.” Jocelyn fidgeted beside me on the bench. I could tell that she itched. She had taken to wearing a pair of thin white gloves with little pearl buttons at the wrist. Nenna had bought them for her with the idea that Jocelyn would wear them only at night, so that she wouldn’t scratch herself in her sleep. But Jocelyn seemed to like wearing them. She wore them all day.

  “Maybe they were buying something to read,” I said, looking at the bookstore. “Or maybe Aunt Celia’s getting married.” I remembered my dream about Mr. Hanover and the bridesmaid fish. “They sell wedding cakes at the bakery. Maybe she’s secretly engaged to a man named Fred, and that’s who she was talking to last night.”

  “Really?” Jocelyn’s eyes were wide. “Do you really think she’s getting married?”

  “No,” I said. “I just made that up.”

  “Oh. What’s a reality office?” Jocelyn asked.

  “Realty,” I said, looking at the sign between the bookstore and the custard shop. “It’s a place where you go to buy a house. Or maybe to sell one.”

  “Are Celia and Ellen selling Nenna and Granda’s house?”

  “No,” I said. “They wouldn’t sell it. Anyway, they can’t; it isn’t theirs to sell. It’s Nenna and Granda’s.”

  “Probably no one would buy it anyway,” Jocelyn said. “It’s kind of old-fashioned.”

  I agreed that it was. I studied the blue and white sign on the office door: PORT HARBOR REALTY. “Here’s what I think,” I said. “I think you should stop worrying about other people’s secrets. First of all, they might not exist, and second of all, maybe if you didn’t worry about them so much, your rash would get better.” I leaned back against Harry-who-loved-the-sea. “Besides, when your parents get back, you can just ask your mother if anything unusual is going on, and if there is, she’ll tell you.”

  “She won’t tell me,” Jocelyn said as a silver ice cream cart rumbled by.

  “Maybe your dad will tell you,” I said.

  But Jocelyn just tucked her legs under the bench.

  “Are you sure you want to be wearing those gloves?” I asked. “Aren’t they uncomfortable?”

  No answer.

  A little girl walked past us carrying a hermit crab in a cage.

  “Maybe Aunt Celia and Aunt Ellen were getting their fortunes told,” Jocelyn said. She nodded toward the fortune-teller’s booth.

  I tried to picture my sturdy aunts sitting down beneath the sequined sign to get their palms read.

  Jocelyn rebuttoned her glove at the wrist. “Do you think she really knows what will happen to you?”

  “Who, the fortune-teller?” Just a few feet outside Madam Carla’s booth, a teenage couple held hands, the boy digging into the pocket of his jeans and coming up with a fistful of money. “I doubt it,” I said. “She’s probably just a regular person wearing a scarf and big earrings.”

  “But those people believe in her,” Jocelyn said. “I think she knows things.” The girl pushed the boy forward, her palm between his shoulder b
lades. “I think she can probably help people.”

  “She isn’t a nurse, Jocelyn,” I said.

  The teenage couple sat down.

  “I just wish she didn’t have to look at your hands to tell your fortune,” Jocelyn said. Her own gloved hands were folded in her lap. Her rash was definitely getting worse. It had spread to the insides of her elbows and the backs of her knees.

  We sat on the bench for a little while, then split a lemonade and a giant soft pretzel and walked back to the trike.

  “It’s hot.” Jocelyn lifted her bushy hair off the back of her neck. All week the weather had been getting warmer.

  “You can go swimming when we get back,” I said. “I could stand near the water and watch you.”

  “No, that’s okay.” She fiddled with her bungee cord. “Can we ride past the hotel on the way home? I think it’s a shortcut.”

  “Fine with me,” I said. “But I wouldn’t call it a shortcut.”

  Truth #32: Three Mile Creek wasn’t a shortcut, either. Walking home by the main road and the gas station probably would have been faster.

  Jocelyn and I rode to the end of the boardwalk and then retraced our path, riding past the Ferris wheel and the Skee-Ball and the sign for the world’s best Philly cheesesteak.

  “I think it was definitely your dad that Aunt Celia was talking to,” Jocelyn said. “You should try to find out what they were saying. Then you could write it in your secret notebook.”

  “Celia wasn’t talking to my dad. And I’m not going to write it in my notebook.”

  “Why not?”

  I stopped pedaling as we glided toward the bakery and the realty office and the custard stand and the fortune-teller. “Because the notebook is supposed to make me feel better,” I said.

  “Why do you feel bad?” Jocelyn asked.

  I didn’t answer. We were close to the fortune-teller’s booth. Madam Carla was alone in her little kiosk.

  “Don’t you wish you could know what’s going to happen to people ahead of time?” Jocelyn asked.

  Madam Carla looked up and seemed to lock eyes with us. KNOW YOUR FUTURE. With a long and skinny index finger, she pointed above her head at the glittering sign just as we rode by.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I didn’t really think that Celia was making midnight phone calls to my parents. What would she talk to them about? Would she call to tell them that I did a lousy job on the laundry? Would she ask about the book of truths? I tried not to imagine their conversation, but I couldn’t help it.

  Celia: Oh, so Thea’s a liar. That makes sense. Of course we were wondering.

  My mother: We’ve been trying to train her to stop, but you know it isn’t easy at this age. I bought her a notebook, but she—

  Celia: That’s what she’s been hiding, then. Ellen and I thought she was fairly unusual, even for a Grumman.

  My mother: Do you think she’ll grow out of it?

  “I’m going to give my parents a call,” I announced on Saturday morning. “I’ll just check in and see what they’re up to.”

  Nenna and Celia were straightening up the living room, Granda was reading (he held a book in his hands but had his eyes closed), and Ellen was hovering around the recycling bin. She had taken a dozen plastic containers from the bottom of the bin, and she was flattening them one by one on the kitchen floor.

  I picked up the phone. It was an old-fashioned phone with a very short cord, so you had to stand next to it when you were talking. “I figure since no one else has talked to them, I should call and say hi,” I said. “Just to check in. Is that all right?”

  “Of course it’s all right. Go ahead, Thea,” Nenna said.

  Celia had her back to me. I dialed.

  Usually on Saturday mornings my parents did errands—they went to the dry cleaner or the farmers’ market or the grocery store—so I wasn’t sure anyone would be home. But my father answered on the second ring. “Grummans,” he said, and I immediately pictured him in our kitchen: he was probably in the breakfast nook with the morning paper spread out in front of him, his square black glasses perched on his head.

  Truth #33: Sometimes I wonder whether my parents wish they had a better daughter. They probably wanted someone tiny and cute, a girl who would come home and do her homework without being asked and then go off with twenty of her best friends to cheerleading practice.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said. I had to turn toward the wall because of a sudden lump in my throat. “It’s me. Thea.”

  “Well, hey there yourself,” my father said. I could barely hear him because Ellen was crushing another container, which made a whooomph sound when it collapsed beneath her heel.

  “Is everything okay?” my father asked. “Are you having fun?”

  “Sure,” I said. The wallpaper in the kitchen was printed with blue and green teacups. “I just wanted to see what you were up to.”

  “Your mother’s grocery shopping. And I’m getting ready to fix the screen door. It’s pretty exciting here, overall. Is everybody taking good care of you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Whoooomph. Ellen crushed an applesauce container.

  My father told me a long and involved story about what had happened to the screen door, and how he had already tried to fix it twice, and what the person at the hardware store had told him about the new kind of bracket he should use.

  “Are you still there?” he asked.

  “I’m here.”

  “And everything’s fine in Port Harbor?”

  I told him it was.

  “Over and out, then.” He asked me to say hello to everyone, and he hung up the phone.

  I felt like an idiot. I should have just asked him if he’d talked to Celia. But what if he had? Wasn’t he allowed to talk to his sister?

  “Is there any news in Minnesota?” Ellen asked. She had flattened all the plastic within reach and seemed to be looking around the kitchen for something to crush.

  “No, not really,” I said. “My mother was out grocery shopping.”

  “I think I’m going out myself,” Ellen said. “Celia, didn’t I give you the—” She stopped and made a twisting motion with her hand.

  Jocelyn had wandered into the kitchen behind me.

  “Oh. That’s right,” Celia said. “I’ll get it.” She started rummaging through her purse. She found something inside it and tossed it to Ellen, but her aim was off. There was a clink, like a single high note on a piano, as something landed by my foot on the floor.

  It was a key—a single key on a silver key chain. I picked it up. Jocelyn was at my side in a split second. We looked at the little white tag attached to the key chain. In neat black letters it said 21 BAY.

  Ellen held out her hand. “I’ll take that, Thea. Thank you.”

  I gave her the key.

  “Where are you going, Aunt Ellen?” Jocelyn asked. “Can I please go with you?”

  Ellen tucked the key into her pocket. “Another time.”

  Truth #34:

  “Why didn’t she let me go with her?” Jocelyn whined.

  “I don’t know.” I was back in the bathroom, trying to work on my notebook. I could see Jocelyn’s toes through the narrow crack beneath the door.

  “But what do you think? Thea, tell me.”

  I waggled my pen above the page. I wondered how many lies the average person told in a week. Or even a year. I imagined what it would be like if everyone had their own container of lies and once they filled it they wouldn’t be able to lie anymore. My container was probably overflowing.

  “Do you think it was the same key we saw Ellen put in her purse at the boardwalk?” Jocelyn asked.

  It had to be, I thought. And what the heck was 21 Bay?

  She rattled the doorknob. “Are you coming out soon?”

  “Leave me alone. I need to pee and I can’t do it if you’re standing there waiting.”

  There was a pause of about six seconds. “Aunt Phoebe says if you’re smoking cigarettes in there you should definite
ly stop.”

  “Phoebe said what?”

  “She said cigarettes are bad for you and they’ll give you cancer and if you burn down Nenna and Granda’s house it’s going to be very hard for her to forgive you.” Jocelyn tapped her finger against the door. “Thea?”

  “What?”

  “Maybe something bad is happening,” she said.

  “Nothing bad is happening.”

  “How do you know?”

  I wrapped up the notebook and tucked it back in its hiding place. I flushed the toilet (even though I hadn’t used it) and opened the door. “So you told Phoebe that I was smoking cigarettes?”

  Jocelyn shrugged. Her shoulder bones were the size of Ping-Pong balls.

  I thought about lecturing her for being a tattletale, but since I hadn’t really been smoking, it didn’t seem worth the trouble. Besides, I reminded myself that Nenna thought I was being nice to her.

  “Why do you always take so long in the bathroom?” she asked.

  “Because the bathroom is great,” I said. “I love the bathroom. It’s so cozy. It’s probably my favorite room in the house.”

  “Really? I like Liam and Austin’s room better,” Jocelyn said.

  We went downstairs. In the living room, Granda was watching TV (the forecaster was calling for desertlike weather in Phoenix) and Nenna was playing crazy eights with Edmund. “Do you girls want to play with us?” she asked. Jocelyn did. It was hard to resist Nenna when she was playing a game. She could be playing the stupidest game in the world, but she would laugh and exclaim the entire time, as if in all her life she had never dreamed of having so much fun.

  I made a big stack of peanut-butter-and-honey-on-cracker sandwiches and went out to the deck with a paperback. I sat in a deck chair, my calves flattened out like two pancakes in front of me, and watched as a couple of girls about my age raced each other across the sand and into the ocean.

  Truth #34: I really miss Gwen.

  I read a few pages, realized I hadn’t paid any attention to what they said, and then read them again. What were Celia and Ellen doing with that key?