Umbrella Summer

by Lisa Graff

  That’s what I wrote at the top. I did it in my very best handwriting, so the A in my name came to a perfect point and each s was two even curves. It was so pretty that if Miss Kimball had seen it, she would’ve felt awful about giving me a U for Unsatisfactory in penmanship.

  Then came the harder part. I sat there for what felt like an hour, kicking my heel against the bottom step and thinking about what it was I wanted to leave people—Chirpy and my snow globe and my roller skates and all my board games. Finally I did have a list, and I thought it was okay.

  I, Annie Richards, hereby leave the following stuff to people, just in case I die from yellow fever or something else bad.

  All my toys and clothes and things like that go to Rebecca Young, and also she can have my glitter pens that she’s had her eye on ever since I got them. And my stuffed turtle, Chirpy, too, but only if she lets him sit on her bed all the time, right by the pillows.

  Tommy Lippowitz gets all the books on my bookshelf because he likes to read, except the horse ones he doesn’t want he can just leave there I guess.

  My pictures I took at the beach last year and my blue ribbon from the Math Olympics are for my mom and dad.

  Mrs. Harper can have all my Junior Sunbird stuff, so maybe someone else can use it if they join Junior Sunbirds and they’re my same size so then they don’t have to buy a new ugly outfit for themselves and can just have mine.

  Doug Zimmerman doesn’t get anything.

  There were other things I wasn’t sure what to do with—like my diary, for one. Because I didn’t think I wanted anyone to know my secret business, like that I thought our principal, Mr. Oliver, was the handsomest man on the planet. But after a while I decided if I felt a real bad sickness coming on, I could throw the diary in the garbage so no one could read it. And all the other stuff probably wasn’t important anyway.

  At the end I wrote

  This is my very official will, the end.

  Signed, Anne Emily Richards

  When I was done, I ripped the page out of my notebook and folded it up into a square. And just so everyone would know that it was an extra-important document, and that no matter what they had to do what it said, I wrote a word on the outside in thick capital printing, each letter as big as a lima bean. It was a word from Dr. Young’s word wall.

  INDESTRUCTIBLE.

  And I underlined it three times. Then for safekeeping I stuck the folded-up will in my back shorts pocket, the one that was pink-and-blue and shaped like a flower.

  I was just thinking about going inside to get some Cocoa Locos, because I didn’t think they could be too unhealthy, otherwise the cereal company wouldn’t be able to make them, and anyway I was pretty much starving. But right then a moving truck pulled into the driveway of the haunted house across the street, and that made my stomach stop grumbling. Two muscly men hopped out of the truck and slid the back door up. I leaned forward to watch as they unloaded things. I wanted to see if there’d be anything haunted-looking I could tell Rebecca about when she got back from church.

  Pretty much, though, it looked like normal stuff. There was furniture and rugs and lots and lots of cardboard boxes. The only thing that was weird at all was that one of the boxes had fragile! written on the side in red letters so big you could probably see them from the top of Mount Everest. But I didn’t think Rebecca would be too interested in that. Maybe I’d tell her I saw a swarm of black cats or something.

  After a while a car parked on the street out front, and out stepped a lady who must’ve been Mrs. Finch. She was boring as socks in a drawer, with short white hair that was cut close to her head in an old-lady haircut, and maroon slacks with creases so straight you could’ve used them for rulers. She reminded me of the friendly old ladies who always stopped outside Lippy’s when we were selling Junior Sunbird cookies, the ones you could tell didn’t even like sweets but always bought six boxes of Royal Chocolate Ripples anyway.

  That was it!

  I jumped to the balls of my feet and my science notebook clattered down the steps, but I didn’t care. I’d figured out exactly how we were going to get inside the haunted house.

  six

  “Annie?” my mom called from out in the hallway.

  “In here, Mom!”

  I was lying on my stomach on my bed, with the big green book open on my right to the section called “Cholera and Other Waterborne Diseases,” and the Dr. Young dictionary open on my left to the page with the word waterborne on it.

  Mom stepped into the room. “Annie, Rebecca’s here.”

  “Really?” I snapped my head up. I’d been waiting for over an hour for Rebecca’s family to get back from church so I could tell her my genius idea about getting into the haunted house.

  “She’s downstairs,” Mom said. Then she peered down at my book. “What are you reading, Moby-Dick?”

  “Nah,” I said. “It’s that book I was telling you about.” I rolled over on my back, which made me accidentally squash the dictionary. “All about diseases and stuff. It’s really helpful. Also I’ve figured out that I probably don’t have leukemia.”

  Mom closed her eyes for a second and took in a big deep breath, slow and noisy. When she opened up her eyes again, she reached over me and plonked the big green book closed.

  “Mom!” I cried. “I didn’t even put a bookmark in there.”

  She picked the book up with two hands. “Annie, I really don’t think this is a good book for you to be reading.”

  “But—”

  “You do not have leukemia. You do not have cholera. You are just fine. Do you understand me?”

  “But—”

  “Now why don’t you go downstairs and say hi to Rebecca?”

  I sat up on my bed. “Can I have my book back at least?”

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “But—”

  “Annie.”

  “Fine.”

  I trudged out of the room while Mom waited in the doorway, still holding on to my book. I tried to lurk around at the top of the stairs for a while to see what she was going to do with it, but she saw me peeking and gave me a look, so I had to give up.

  When I got to the front door, Rebecca was waiting for me, her bike helmet strapped to her head. “Hi, Annie!” she hollered at me because of the helmet. “I got your signal!”

  “Which one?” I said. I was still wondering what Mom had done with my book. I hoped she was going to give it back. I hadn’t gotten to read anything about jaundice or ringworm or high blood pressure yet, and those sounded like important ones.

  “The leaf!” Rebecca shouted.

  “Oh, good.” I’d stuck a leaf halfway under Rebecca’s front door. That was our secret signal we used, to let the other person know that we had something important to talk about. But just in case the leaf blew away, we had a backup secret signal, which was leaving a message on the answering machine.

  “So! What did you want to tell me!”

  I smiled then, because I knew Rebecca was going to like my idea. “It’s about—” I pointed over Rebecca’s shoulder at the haunted house. “And how to get inside.” Her eyes got Ping-Pong ball huge again.

  We went upstairs to my room, because that’s where our secret planning spot was, in the space between my desk and the wall. The dictionary was still lying out open on the bed, but the big green book was gone, and so was Mom. I sighed.

  “What!” Rebecca shouted.

  I tapped my head, so she’d know to take off her bike helmet, and she did. “What is it?” she asked again, quieter. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Oh good,” she said, and she tucked herself into the planning spot. “So tell me how we can get into the haunted house.”

  I squeezed in right next to her, up against the desk. “Okay. We’re gonna sell Mrs. Finch some cookies.”

  “Cookies?”

  I nodded. “Junior Sunbird ones.” And I told her my whole plan, all about how I would pretend to be selling cookies,
and Rebecca would hide behind Mrs. Finch’s tree, and when Mrs. Finch went to get her checkbook, Rebecca would race quick like a fox into the house and look around while I did some distracting.

  Rebecca stuck a braid in her mouth and started chewing. I didn’t say anything, just let her think, and after a minute or two she spit her braid out. You could tell the part she’d sucked on because it was darker than the rest of her hair. “That’s a really good plan,” she told me.

  “Really?”

  “Definitely.”

  The one bad part of my idea was that I had to wear my Junior Sunbird outfit, and I hated that thing more than black licorice jelly beans. One time Jared said it made me look like a blob of chewed-up purple bubble gum, and he was right. Plus there were only three badges on my sash, and one was what they gave you for showing up on the first day. Rebecca had twelve, and she’d been in the troop the same amount of time as me, only obviously she was lots better at sewing and hiking and stuff. So my Junior Sunbird outfit wasn’t exactly my favorite thing. But Rebecca said it wouldn’t look real if I didn’t wear it, and if it didn’t look real, Rebecca wouldn’t be able to sneak inside the house. So I put it on.

  We walked across the street together, me dressed up ugly and purple, and Rebecca with my dad’s bird-watching binoculars hanging around her neck. She probably could’ve seen fine without them, but Rebecca really liked my dad’s bird-watching binoculars. Just as we reached the corner of Mrs. Finch’s yard, where the big oak tree was, Rebecca grabbed my arm and I stopped walking.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” she asked me.

  “I think so,” I said, but all of a sudden that got me worrying. “Why? You think something bad’s going to happen?” What if Mrs. Finch had laryngitis and she coughed on me? What if I dislocated my kneecap going up the stairs? How was I supposed to fix any of that myself if Mom had taken my book away?

  Rebecca chewed on her hair. “Well,” she said after thinking awhile, “I guess you’ll be fine. I mean, if any ghosts start flying out when the door opens, you can just duck and they probably won’t get you.”

  I was pretty sure I rolled my eyes at that one, but Rebecca didn’t notice. “Okay,” I said. I started for the door, hanging on tight to a box of Coconut Babies with my left hand and crossing my fingers with the right one.

  I was almost to the door when from behind me Rebecca called out, “Annie?” I turned. Rebecca was already hidden behind the tree, with only her head poking out to talk to me. “If you get in trouble,” she said, “just whistle.” And she gave me her best Sunbird salute.

  I nodded, even though I didn’t know how to whistle.

  Before I even climbed up the last step of the porch, Mrs. Finch opened up her door to greet me. “Why, hello there!” she said, all smiles. I took a good look at her. She didn’t look like she had any bad diseases, although you could never know for sure. But she looked mostly like a regular old lady, plain as a box of toothpicks, except for her short white hair that came to pointed curls like the tops of the lemon meringue pie Rebecca’s mom sometimes made.

  “Oh, dear,” she said to me, before I even had a chance to say anything myself. “Did you hurt yourself?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your arms,” she said.

  “Oh.” I looked down at my Band-Aids. “I’m okay,” I told her. “None of them are deadly.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear.” Mrs. Finch straightened up her back and smiled. “Can I help you with something?”

  I shook my head side to side. “Nope,” I said. “No, thank you.”

  “Really? I thought maybe you were selling cookies.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, remembering. “Yeah, I’m selling cookies.” I gave her the Sunbird salute.

  Her eyes seemed lit up a little bit, and I couldn’t tell if she was laughing at me or if she was just an eye-lighting-up kind of person.

  “What kinds do you have?” she asked.

  “Just this box of Coconut Babies.” I held it out for her to inspect. “It’s the last one left.” I was hoping Mrs. Finch wouldn’t look at it too close before she went for her checkbook, because one of the corners was seriously dented. Rebecca and I had found it in the very back of my kitchen cupboard, and I had a feeling that it might be older than the president. Which wasn’t too surprising, really, because Coconut Babies tasted like the inside of a shoe and no one ever wanted to eat them.

  “Well, coconut isn’t my favorite,” Mrs. Finch said. “But I do like to support the Sunbirds.” She held her hand out for the box then, so I gave it to her.

  “It’s five dollars,” I said.

  All of a sudden Mrs. Finch made a noise that sounded a lot like a snort. She looked up from the cookie box with a smile on her face that reminded me of a hot water bottle, warm from the inside. She held up the Coconut Babies and pointed to a date on the side. “Have you been selling all your customers expired goods, dear?”

  “Um…,” I said. The cookie plan was obviously not working. My mind gears started up, trying to think of another way to distract Mrs. Finch so Rebecca could get inside her house. “Can I use your bathroom?” I said at last, leaning over to see past Mrs. Finch.

  She laughed. “Spying on the new neighbor, are we?”

  “What? No.” I stood up straight. “I just have to pee.”

  “Ah. So why does your friend need the binoculars?”

  I whirled around. Rebecca had half her whole body poked out from behind the tree, my dad’s binoculars held up to her face.

  “What is it?” Rebecca shouted at me. “What’s going on?”

  “Whistle!” I hollered back at her. “Whistle! Whistle! Whistle!” And I bolted down the steps and down the lawn, all the way across the street, Rebecca right beside me. I lost the box of Coconut Babies somewhere near the oak tree.

  Once we were back safe inside my house with the door slammed shut tight, Rebecca and I hid beneath the living-room window and took turns looking at Mrs. Finch’s house through my dad’s binoculars. Mrs. Finch was still standing on her porch, chuckling.

  “She thinks we’re crazy,” Rebecca said, handing me the binoculars for good and scooching down underneath the window, her back to the wall. “No way we’re going to get inside there now.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and I knew she was right. I peered through the binoculars again at my new nonspooky neighbor. “At least she doesn’t have laryngitis, though.”

  Rebecca folded her arms across her chest. “Ghosts don’t have laryngitis either,” she said. And I had to admit she was right about that one.

  seven

  Rebecca stayed at my house the rest of the afternoon, the two of us trying to think up new plans to get into the haunted house, but we couldn’t come up with anything.

  “What if we just keep looking in the windows?” I said for the four hundredth time. “Sooner or later she’s going to forget to shut the blinds, and then we’ll be able to see inside.”

  Rebecca shook her head so hard, her braids smacked into the sides of her face. “No way,” she said. “You had a really great idea, about going inside. I don’t want to just look. I want to be in there.” She gnawed on her braid for a while, and then I guess she must’ve thought of something good, because all at once she spit the braid right out. “How about a human catapult?” she said.

  “No way,” I told her. “You could get a bone fracture.” You’d think she would’ve known that, with her dad being a doctor and everything.

  Around four o’clock Rebecca’s mom picked her up so they could take Fuzzby to the vet. Since I didn’t have my big green book to read, I played double solitaire with Chirpy. I was just starting my sixth game when Mom knocked on my open door. “Annie?” she said, coming into the room before I’d even answered. I didn’t know why she ever bothered with the knocking.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you come set the table for me, sweetie? We’re having meat loaf.”

  I hated meat loaf. “Okay, yeah. Just a second.” I stacked a
two of clubs on top of the ace and told Chirpy not to cheat. Then I went into the hallway, walking past Jared’s room, where the door was shut tight just like it always was. The day after he died, Mom went in there and spent hours vacuuming and dusting and tidying and straightening, till the whole place was cleaner than an ice cube. I watched her do it. Then she closed the door and locked it. And that was that.

  Mom was stirring things on the stove. “I haven’t run the dishwasher yet,” she told me without turning around. She must’ve had secret Mom-sense, because she always seemed to know whenever I entered a room even if she was looking the other way. “There should be plenty of plates in the cupboard, though.”

  I climbed up on the counter under the cupboard, even though Mom hated when I did that. But it was too much work to get a chair. There were exactly three plates left, the plastic ones that Mom called our “Not for Company Dishware.” I grabbed the plates and put them on the table. One for me, Mom, and Dad. Then I went to get the napkins and the silverware.

  “Thanks, hon,” Mom said, turning around. “Don’t forget to put out the—” And then she stopped talking and sucked in her breath real quick.

  I turned to see what she was looking at, the plates on the table. It wasn’t until I squinted my eyeballs that I saw it. Over at Dad’s spot, on the far end of the table, I’d put down the plastic plate Jared made for Christmas in first grade, the one with the drawing of the lopsided Christmas tree that said “Hapy Holidayes!” in big orange letters.

  “It was the only one left,” I said, my voice soft as snow.

  Mom didn’t say anything, just walked quick over to the table and scooped the plate up and returned it to the cupboard with a soft clank. Then she went back to stirring peas on the stove and cleared her throat, deep and gargly. “There are some plates in the dishwasher, Annie,” she said, not looking up. “You can wash one of those.”

  I didn’t move right away. I just stood there, blinking. Because all of a sudden I was feeling squirmy inside, with a lump in my throat like I was in trouble. It was exactly the way I felt when I’d broken Mom’s sewing machine last year, after she’d told me a million times not to use it. Only this time I wasn’t sure why I felt like that, because setting the table like you were supposed to shouldn’t make you a Huge Disappointment, Young Lady.