The Book of One Hundred Truths

by Julie Schumacher

  Truth #39: Gwen and I thought no one else was at the creek that afternoon. But we were wrong.

  “You didn’t tell me you went out on the beach last night,” Jocelyn said.

  “What do you mean?” I was feeling rattled.

  “You said you stepped in a hole in the sand.”

  I stood up and stretched, then opened the sliding glass door to the porch. Out on the beach, people were sunning themselves and playing Frisbee and swimming and eating watermelon in the shade of a hundred umbrellas. Sunlight was flashing across the ocean in liquid sparks.

  “It doesn’t look like your ankle hurts,” Jocelyn said. “You aren’t limping.”

  I thought about trying a limp or two, but I couldn’t remember which foot I had shown to Nenna. I went down the outdoor stairs and around the side of the house to the front sidewalk. Jocelyn followed me. Someone had left a folding chair by the mailbox. I tried to unfold it, but the hinge was stuck.

  “Austin says it isn’t true about the jellyfish,” Jocelyn said. “He doesn’t think you’re really allergic.” She watched me struggle with the chair. “You have to push that silver button. He says it isn’t true about the i-zone, either.”

  “Ozone.” I pushed the button she was pointing to and the chair sprang open. “It might not be completely true,” I said. “I might have been exaggerating a little.”

  A woman with a Chihuahua on a leash was coming toward us. The Chihuahua’s eyes stuck out of its head like giant marbles.

  “I knew that,” Jocelyn said. She watched the little dog trot past, his toenails clicking. “You wouldn’t exaggerate if it was something important, though. Like if you were talking about the secret.”

  I stuck my legs out onto the sidewalk.

  “Because you promised,” Jocelyn said. “That’s how I know. Because you promised to tell me what it was when you figured it out.”

  “I haven’t figured it out,” I said. “I don’t know anything about a secret. They didn’t tell me anything.”

  Jocelyn found a second folding chair beneath the stairs, dragged it out to the sidewalk, and put it next to mine. She opened it in about two seconds. “Do you mean Aunt Celia and Aunt Ellen? Were they on the beach with you?”

  It was probably only nine in the morning, but I was exhausted. “Do you wear other people out like this?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer. I could tell she was willing to hound me all day.

  “All right, fine. I went for a walk with them,” I said. “They made me.”

  “What did they want?”

  “Well, first of all, they definitely want you to stop spying. Did you follow Ellen to the drugstore?”

  Jocelyn set a pebble on the arm of her chair.

  “And they don’t want us hanging around the hotel anymore,” I said. “But the whole thing was weird.”

  “What was weird?”

  “The whole conversation. They don’t want us being curious about anything. We’re supposed to stay here during the day.”

  Jocelyn picked up another pebble. “We don’t have to listen to them,” she said. “They aren’t our parents.”

  I remembered Ellen saying that they were looking out for Jocelyn’s welfare.

  “We’ll just be more careful,” Jocelyn said.

  Wasn’t that what Celia had told me, out on the beach? “Careful of what?” I asked.

  “That they don’t see us.”

  I leaned forward in my chair. “Jocelyn, we’re riding around town on a giant tricycle. It’s hard not to see us.”

  Jocelyn suggested that we could park the trike and walk.

  I told her she was being ridiculous.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. They’ll see us. They could probably spot you a mile away because of your hair.”

  “My hair?” Jocelyn’s shadow, on the ground beside me, touched its frizzy head. “I could tie it back. Or you could braid it for me.”

  Two boys with a kite shaped like a dragon walked past us, arguing on their way to the beach.

  “Your hair’s too hard to braid,” I said. That wasn’t a lie. “We’re staying here.”

  I couldn’t believe how slow the day was. Jocelyn and I colored in coloring books and made primitive animals out of pipe cleaners and played about a hundred games of solitaire. We ate lunch with Nenna and Granda and froze orange juice in ice cube trays and read Edmund some books. We baked cookies, and almost all of them burned. They looked like flat little pieces of charcoal. (“Did you mean to use the broiler for these, Thea?” Nenna asked.) Not even Liam and Austin would go near them when they were done.

  By six o’clock, I was half-asleep on the couch. Celia was setting the table for dinner. “It’s time to eat,” she said. “Thea? Dad?”

  I rubbed my eyes and watched my Granda shuffle inch by inch across the floor, his dark, hard hands lightly knocking against the furniture. It was like he was frozen in there, I thought. Underneath, he was still the same person, but on the surface he was slowly turning into wood.

  We found our places.

  Phoebe picked up her slip of paper, pulled out her chair, and glanced around the table. “Okay, let’s see. Is it degree of tan?” She pointed at Austin and Liam sitting together, a possible end to a spectrum.

  “Nope.” Celia grinned.

  “Jocelyn isn’t here yet,” Edmund said.

  “Shoe size?” Austin reached for a baked potato. He took two, split both of them quickly down the middle, and added butter, salt and pepper, and sour cream. As usual, seeing Liam and Austin eat was like watching a pair of vacuum cleaners suck up a pile of food.

  “Annual income?” Uncle Corey asked. He was rocking Ralph’s little plastic chair with his foot.

  “I’ll go get Jocelyn,” I said. I went to the bottom of the stairs and shouted, “Jocelyn, are you coming?” No answer. I could see that the bathroom door was closed. I went up and knocked on it. “Jocelyn?”

  “Don’t come in,” a voice said. “I’m not ready.”

  “Ready for what? We aren’t having a beauty pageant down here; we’re eating dinner.” I rattled the knob, but the door was locked.

  “I’m almost done,” she said. “Go away.”

  “Well, whatever you’re doing in there, hurry up. Your food’s getting cold.” I went back to the table.

  “Talkativeness?” Ellen guessed when I sat back down. Obviously Granda and Ralph would have been last in that category.

  “There were no good waves today,” Liam grumbled. “The water’s too calm.” He reached for the platter of tomatoes and slid almost all of them onto his plate. “Is there any dessert after this?”

  “There are two kinds of pie,” Nenna told him.

  “Eye color?” Phoebe asked. Everyone stopped eating long enough to glance around the table at each other’s eyes.

  “Is Jocelyn coming?” Corey asked.

  “She said she is.” I buttered my roll. “She’s in the—oh.” Jocelyn stood in the doorway. “Bathroom,” I said.

  Everyone turned around.

  Jocelyn had cut her hair. At least a foot of it, maybe more. She looked like a prisoner or an orphan. I wondered what she had done with the hair. Maybe she had stuffed a large pillow.

  Austin opened his mouth, but Celia slammed her elbow into his chest. “Not a word out of you,” she said.

  “Did you cut your hair, Jocelyn?” Edmund asked. He had a milk mustache.

  Jocelyn pulled out her chair and sat down. “I don’t think it’s even yet,” she said. “I might need someone to help me with the back.”

  When she turned her head, we could see that the hair had been hacked off in enormous clumps. What was left looked like wads of yellow cotton glued to the sides of her head.

  A sinking feeling came over me, as if my bones had been filled with cold water.

  “Didn’t you like the way it looked?” Phoebe asked. “You should have told us.”

  Jocelyn shrugged.

  Ellen was holding an ear of corn
in her fist like a weapon.

  “Mom? Are you going to eat that?” Liam asked.

  Nenna reached across the table, unfolded Jocelyn’s napkin, and handed it to her. “I think short hair is very practical,” she said. “Especially at the beach. I’ve kept my hair short for forty years.”

  “Mom,” Celia said. “I think this is different.”

  “And I think Jocelyn’s hair will look very nice after someone at a beauty shop touches it up. Maybe tomorrow,” Nenna went on. “Maybe Thea wouldn’t mind taking her.”

  I nodded.

  “Wonderful,” Nenna said. “It’s all settled, then. We don’t have to discuss it.”

  “May I be excused now?” I asked.

  Austin reached over and took the roll from my plate. “She ate almost everything,” he said.

  I went out on the beach. I found out later that Celia had seated us according to number of freckles: Liam had the most and Ralph, his face as smooth and white as a bowl of cream, had none at all.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Okay, so I guess I’m curious,” Liam said. He had followed me out to the beach after dinner. “Did you dare her to shave her head or something?”

  “No. I just told her—oh, forget it.” I sat down on the ruins of a sand castle. “You and Austin go to work every day. I have to babysit. You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “I helped babysit you once,” Liam said. He did a handstand. “You were in a playpen or something, and I gave you a bottle.”

  “You gave me a bottle?”

  “Yup.” He lost his balance and tipped over. “And I remember I was jealous, because Austin got to push you around the block in a stroller. I was mad because he was allowed to and I wasn’t.”

  “Austin babysat me?”

  Liam brushed some sand off his forehead. “I think you were right,” he said, “the other day on the deck. I think something’s happening.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know. I just…My mom told me you were acting weird because you were homesick. But you’ve come here every summer.”

  “Ellen said I was homesick?”

  “And Austin and I thought we’d be going home sometimes on the weekends, but my mom doesn’t want to. And now you’ve got Jocelyn shaving her head.”

  “She didn’t shave it,” I pointed out.

  “Do you know how you can tell when a tidal wave’s coming?” Liam sat down next to me, facing the water. “Tidal waves give you a warning. The water pulls back—it pulls away from your feet and from the shore. And all the stuff that was hidden on the bottom is right there in front of you. All the weird rocks and pieces of drift-wood and even fish.” He picked up a fistful of sand, then opened his fingers and let it go. “I get that feeling sometimes. Like something’s coming.”

  We looked out at the water.

  “Do you have that feeling now?” I asked.

  “Kind of.” He shrugged. “Uh-oh. Heads up.”

  I turned around. Edmund was running toward us, hopping a little with every other step. He was wearing a long-sleeved button-up shirt that was much too big for him, because Jocelyn had told him he didn’t want to get X-rayed by the sun. Now the sun was going down and the sky was pink, but Edmund was still dressed as if it were noon in the Sahara desert. “I came outside to play with you,” he announced, as if he were doing us a favor.

  Liam reared up and tackled him, grabbing his legs and rolling him over in the sand. “You’d better say uncle, or you’re a goner.”

  “Uncle!” said Edmund.

  “Wrong!” Liam sat on him. “I’m not your uncle; I’m your cousin. Ha ha!”

  Edmund grinned. “I want to find sand crabs,” he said. “But someone has to watch me.”

  Liam helped him up, and both of us followed him to the darker sand at the water’s edge. It was the closest I had been to the ocean all year.

  Edmund plunged his fingers into the sand, but they came up empty. “I can’t find any crabs. Thea, help me.” He bounced up and down.

  I dug around in the wet sand until I found a tiny dust-colored creature about half an inch long. I handed it to Edmund, but he jumped and dropped it. “It’s not going to hurt you,” I said. I found the crab again and made Edmund hold it with his palm open. He watched it scuttle across his wrist as if crossing a bridge.

  Liam found a slipper shell and a mermaid’s purse. “I was trying to remember the number you asked me about out on the deck,” he said.

  “Do you mean twenty-one Bay?”

  “Yeah.” He dug a trench with his foot. “It’s—I think I might have seen something.”

  “I need another crab,” Edmund said.

  “Hang on a second.” I grabbed Liam’s elbow. “What do you mean, you think you saw something?”

  “I’m not sure if I remember it right,” Liam said.

  I thought of telling him about seeing Celia and Ellen at the boardwalk, and about the key. But Edmund was jumping up and down between us, clamoring for attention. I tried to find him another crab but couldn’t; maybe they had all moved on to a better part of the beach in some kind of great sand crab migration.

  “Liam, where are you going?” Edmund asked. “I want to play a game with you.”

  I turned around. Liam was headed back to the house.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, waving to Edmund. “You can play a game with Thea. She likes really long games best. Things that take about a hundred hours. Ask her to teach you how to play Monopoly.”

  “I don’t play Monopoly,” I said.

  “You used to play, before someone lost all the pieces.”

  “No, I didn’t. I never played.” A blue lie—I clenched my teeth.

  “Whatever.” Liam turned and walked away, his T-shirt flapping in the breeze behind him.

  Edmund and I found two or three more crabs, but they were small and sickly. I took him back to the house and Nenna told him he needed to get ready for bed. And she asked me to go upstairs to check on Jocelyn.

  “I’m sure she’s okay, Nenna,” I said. But because it was Nenna who had done the asking, I went to check on Jocelyn anyway.

  At the top of the steps, I heard water running. “Jocelyn?” She was in the bathroom. I knocked. “What are you doing in there?”

  The water went off, then on. “I’m brushing my teeth.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “No. You never let me come in.”

  “That’s different,” I said.

  “No, it isn’t.” She opened the door. She wore a white nightgown with a ruffle at her knobby knees, and she held a toothbrush in her hand, but it didn’t look wet. It was a shock all over again to see her hair. It was flat in some places and pointy in others. She looked like Bozo the Clown’s younger sister.

  “Go ahead, tell me,” I said. “Why did you do it?” I watched her squeeze a perfect stripe of toothpaste onto her brush.

  “Because.” She put the toothbrush into her mouth, then took it out again. “You said they’d recognize me.”

  I looked at the black and white tile floor beneath our feet. Some of the black tiles were missing, which always drove me crazy; the zigzag pattern was all thrown off. “You’re talking about Celia and Ellen,” I said.

  Jocelyn brushed, then spat daintily into the sink. She nodded.

  “But both of them saw you.” I was speaking patiently and slowly. “They just saw you at dinner. So both of them know that you cut your hair. How in the world are they not going to recognize you?” I wanted to strangle her. But first I wanted to strangle myself.

  Jocelyn set her toothbrush down on the counter. “A woman’s hair is what makes her beautiful,” she said.

  “Who told you that?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  I studied our reflections in the bathroom mirror. Jocelyn looked forlorn and lonesome, like a sheep that had been badly clipped and sent away from the herd. “It might not look bad after someone fixes it,” I said. I patted a tuft of her hair and a few wi
ry strands came away in my fingers. “Does it feel strange?”

  “Kind of.” She took the hair from my hand and threw it into the basket beneath the sink. We turned off the light and made our way to the attic. Jocelyn wiped off the bottoms of her feet and got into bed. I tucked her in, making her covers as tight as the skin on a drum.

  “I wonder what souvenirs your parents are buying you,” I said, trying to cheer her up.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Maybe it’s something to wear. Maybe clothes from Italy.”

  “They’re probably just regular clothes,” Jocelyn said.

  “I bet they’re not. They wouldn’t have told you they were bringing you something if it wasn’t going to be good. Maybe they’ll bring you a new purse and new shoes.”

  “I don’t want anything new,” Jocelyn said. “I like the things I already have.”

  “Thea?”

  Truth #40: When I got back from Three Mile Creek that afternoon, I went in the back door and ran up the steps and made sure my parents didn’t see me.

  “Thea!”

  Someone was clutching my shoulder. I was still trying to run up the steps. There were so many steps.

  “You have to wake up. Someone’s out on the porch,” Jocelyn hissed.

  Truth #41: I was so cold, it was hard to move. But I quickly got changed and put my clothes into a plastic bag in the back of my closet.

  “Thea!” Jocelyn was kneeling on my bed, pinning me to the sheets.

  The attic was dark.

  I sat up with a jolt, sweaty and out of breath. “It’s probably just birds, Jocelyn,” I said.

  “It isn’t birds. I can hear people talking. They were throwing something at our window.”

  I tried to push my hair out of my face, but my arm was asleep. It felt like a dead thing fastened to my body. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, pulling my dead hand out from under me. “It’s probably just—”

  Something hit the window screen and bounced off. I could hear someone laughing on the porch below.