Jelly Bean Summer

by Joyce Magnin

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  Copyright © 2017 by Joyce Magnin

  Cover and internal design © 2017 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover art by Andrew Bannecker

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Source of Production: Versa Press, East Peoria, Illinois, USA

  Date of Production: March 2017

  Run Number: 5008969

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Elaine

  “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

  One

  Westbrook Park, Pennsylvania, 1968

  As far as teenage sisters go, my sister Elaine is a doozy. And the thing about doozies is they can be good. They can be bad. Or they can be a combination of good and bad, which is Elaine. On the good side, she helps me with math, and she is an amazing artist—which I will get to in a second. On the bad side, she is boy crazy, listens to what she calls folk music, and, worst of the worst, she has this guinea pig named Jelly Bean that squeals like a banshee every chance she gets. But for some unexplainable reason, Elaine loves Jelly Bean—sometimes I think she loves the guinea pig more than she loves me.

  Oh, and Elaine believes in UFOs. She sees them pretty much every night. These sightings have gotten even more frequent since our brother Bud went MIA—missing in action—in Vietnam, a million light years away from us. I have no reason to believe tonight will be any different.

  I’m in my bunk—the top bunk—staring at the ceiling, waiting for Elaine to announce her latest sighting. Jeez, you’d think for a teenager she’d have more sense. But Mom says she’s ruled more by hormones than brain cells.

  “There,” she says. “A flying saucer. Quick.”

  Mom says I should humor her. “It’s best, Joyce Anne,” she says. She also tells me one day, my hormones will kick in and I’ll get all jelly-brained like Elaine. I’m only eleven, and I haven’t told Mom, but sometimes, I think my hormones are getting a bit riled up. But that’s a discussion for another day.

  I wiggle out of my sheets and get to the window even though I am pretty darn sure the alien invaders are all in her head or maybe something our dad calls swamp gas, which sounds gross and smelly.

  “Where?” I say with just a little bit of humor.

  Elaine lets go of a deep, deep breath and says, “You missed it.”

  “Of course,” I say. “I always do.” I give her a glare. “I think you’re seeing things.”

  “I am not seeing things.” She folds her arms across her chest and lets out a loud hummph noise. But when she does, she bangs into the pig’s cage, which is definitely a mistake because she startles Jelly Bean. The rodent squeals and whoops as though space aliens really are invading planet Earth.

  “Now look what you did,” I say. “You riled the pig, and you know that will rile Dad.” I climb into bed and toss my pillow at her because she is still sitting near the window. “Forget about the stupid UFO and go back to bed before we get into trouble.”

  “You’re just a kid,” she says. “What do you know?”

  Now she’s sounding all uppity and tough.

  Elaine opens the cage door and lifts Jelly Bean out like she’s handling a Fabergé egg. We learned about them in school. They’re super-fragile, jewel-encrusted Easter eggs worth millions of dollars. Sheesh. Like Jelly Bean is worth a million bucks.

  But I will admit that Jelly Bean is not just an ordinary guinea pig. No, leave it to weird Elaine to have a weird pet. Jelly Bean thinks she’s a dog or a very tiny cow. Jelly Bean likes to roam around the front yard and graze on grass and dandelions, and then she waits near the front stoop until someone brings her inside. Like I said, weird.

  “Suit yourself,” Elaine yell-whispers. “But I know what I saw. I can describe it exactly.” She holds her hands apart. “It was about this big.” I figure the ship is about the size of a regulation Rawlings football, which of course makes her story even more unbelievable because everyone knows spaceships are huge, definitely bigger than our house. Criminy, didn’t she ever see The Day the Earth Stood Still? That saucer was bigger than a baseball diamond, and the alien that guarded it was ten stories tall. Still, her descriptions are always pretty good. She once drew a picture of me—well, more like a cartoon—but she got my long legs and blond hair just right. Except in the cartoon, she drew a tail on me. I do not have a tail.

  “It’s OK,” she tells the pig. “It’s OK. We believe.” Then she looks at me while she cradles the pig like a baby, and it finally stops squealing.

  I laugh. “You’re a bona fide nutcase.”

  “I am not. The ship was all silver with a bright band of yellow lights around the middle and had two antennas sticking straight up and…and…”

  “And what?” I ask.

  “And the antennas had eyes on the ends. Human eyes. One looked that way, while the other looked this way. And then they both looked straight at me.”

  “Of course they had eyes,” I say. “Everything does.”

  Elaine has a thing about eyes. She sees them everywhere. In the clouds. In tree bark. In ripples in a stream. And to tell the truth, her own eyes are pretty magnificent. Elaine could spot a four-leaf clover in a nine-acre field if we were driving in the car going sixty miles an hour. I would never say this to her face, but I think it’s her weird-sightedness that makes her such a good artist.

  She’
s so good that if she draws an apple, you might try to pick it right up off the page and take a bite. She doesn’t draw apples all that much though. Now she’s more into painting psychedelic flowers everywhere—even on her face. Elaine claims to be a flower child, which means she wears hip-hugger jeans, gauzy blouses, flashes the peace sign whenever she can, and, like I said, she draws flowers on everything. She even painted a bright-yellow daisy with a peace symbol as the center on my father’s lunch box. He was not too thrilled.

  Elaine said it would make him smile—which is something Dad doesn’t do much these days. Not since Bud went missing.

  “The antennas did have eyes!” Elaine insists. “I saw them!” She puts Jelly Bean back in her cage, checks the latch twice, and climbs into bed. “You never believe me. No one does. Ever.”

  Thinking she is going to burst into tears, I roll onto my side and look over the edge of my bunk. “OK, did it make a noise?”

  “It made a low bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

  “Maybe it was a hummingbird. The rare Pennsylvania silver-and-yellow-streaked vampire hummingbird. They only fly at night. It wanted to suck your blood.” I say the last part with a Dracula accent.

  Elaine kicks the bottom of my mattress. “Shut up. Hummingbirds don’t come out at night. And there is no such thing as a vampire hummingbird.”

  “Think that if you want, but I’d wear turtlenecks from now on.”

  “Creep!” she hollers.

  “Pig nose!” I holler right back.

  That’s when the door flies open. It’s Dad.

  “Now you did it.” I try to hit her with my pillow.

  Dad steps into the room. “I’m hearing a lot of squealing and arguing.”

  “It’s her fault,” Elaine says. “She called me a nutcase because I saw another spaceship.”

  I swear that even in the darkened room, I can see my father’s eyeballs roll around like googly eyes on a sock puppet. “There are no alien invaders,” he says. He must have missed Mom’s lecture on how we need to humor Elaine. “Now go to sleep. Both of you.”

  Dad closes the door, and the instant I hear the click, Elaine says, “I did see it. No one believes me.”

  Jelly Bean grunts, and I hear small whoops like she’s gearing up to squeal like a banshee again.

  “Keep your stupid pig quiet,” I say.

  Elaine kicks my bunk. “If you don’t like it, why don’t you just move out?”

  “Maybe I will.”

  If I had a place to go, that is.

  I stare up at the ceiling and the weird shadows that always dance around at night, shadows from the streetlight outside and from the hall light that seeps under the bedroom door like a stream. The weird, scraggly shadows are the branches of the peach tree outside our window. But even though I know that, they’re still a little scary. I’m never sure if Elaine sees them or not, so I never say anything.

  She kicks at my bunk. “Someday you’ll see. Someday you’ll believe.”

  I close my eyes, trying to think about the things I do believe in. Things I believe even though I can’t prove them. Like Elaine believes in her UFOs. But I can’t think of anything except maybe electricity, so I lean over the side rail and say, “I believe you. I believe you see the flying saucers.”

  “That’s not the same,” Elaine says.

  So that night, while the house is quiet and the shadows dance, I think about believing. I stare at the ceiling and think about the night and the moon and the stars. I think about believing, and I think about seeing. Then the ceiling makes me think about the roof and how I can see the stars and the world so clearly when I’m up there. Bud and I used to go up and sit on the wide, flat roof and look at the stars sometimes. He taught me about the constellations. I think about them for a minute, and I think about Bud until I feel a tear form in my left eye. I swipe it away, and that’s when it hits me with all the gravitational pull the moon can muster.

  The roof.

  I will move to the roof.

  Two

  At breakfast, I sit at the kitchen table and work on three things:

  1. A bowl of Rice Krispies with a sliced banana on top

  2. How exactly to tell Mom the big decision I made last night

  3. My courage

  My mother is at the sink washing a large, blue mixing bowl. She’s not talking. Just humming a low tune like she always does when she washes dishes or sews hems or picks aphids off her African violet plants. The tune seems to take her miles away.

  I’m not sure how my mother will react when I tell her I want to move to the roof, even though I’ve been up there a thousand times. It’s…peaceful, quiet. The roof is flat like our patio. I’ve already set up a beach chair. I can sit up there, far from everything, and just be quiet. But not in the same way our house is quiet. I think the quiet inside a house when one of the family is missing is so sad, you can feel it with every breath you take. It even has a taste. To me, the quiet tastes like butterscotch. I know butterscotch isn’t supposed to be a bad taste, but that’s just it. Everything that’s supposed to be good isn’t anymore.

  Maybe on the roof, things will be better.

  Fortunately, I don’t have to deal with Dad right away. He’s already gone to work. Dad’s a plumber and always leaves early in the summer. “Want to beat the heat,” he says. Then he always tells Mom, “Find me if you hear anything.” Then Mom pats Dad’s cheek and says, “I will. I’ll send the mayor if I have too.”

  She always sends him off with a cooler of iced tea and two extra shirts because he sweats like a pig. Although I never saw a pig sweat. Not even oh-so-precious Jelly Bean.

  Elaine is sitting across from me, staring into her bowl of cereal. Probably trying to see what kind of pictures the Krispies make as she swirls the milk with her spoon. More eyeballs, I figure.

  Polly, our big, brown dog, sits under the table waiting for handouts. I slip her the piece of bacon Dad left on his plate. Finally, while Polly licks my hand, I muster up my courage and just blurt it out like I am a balloon and someone popped me with a pin and all the air whooshed out.

  “I’m moving to the roof today.”

  My mother stops humming. She snorts air out of her nose. Elaine laughs like a hyena.

  “Now why in the world would you want to move to the roof?” Mom asks.

  “Because I…just want to.”

  “Fine with me,” Elaine says. “I’ll get the room all to myself.”

  “And besides,” I say. “She keeps seeing flying saucers, and Jelly Bean squeals all the time, and…and everything around here is too damn sad.” I drop my spoon in the bowl. The milk splashes.

  “Joyce Anne,” Mom says. “We don’t talk like that.”

  “Well, it is,” I say. “Ever since Bud went MI…”

  “A,” Elaine says. “You don’t know anything.”

  “I know it’s A.” I glare at her. “I had to swallow before I could say it. And it is sad here. Ever since the news came, everyone is so mopey. Dad sits in front of the TV watching war news, or he hangs out in his garage building things he never talks about.”

  I push my bowl away and look at Mom, who’s still looking at me like she’s trying to vaporize my head with her eyes. “And I hear you crying sometimes,” I tell her. “I know you don’t mean for me to hear. But I do.”

  Mom closes her eyes for just a second, and then she looks away toward her violets.

  “And I’m sick of Elaine calling me a creep, and, well, I just want to live on the roof. I can do it. I’ll bring my sleeping bag, my books, my binoculars, and whatever else I need.”

  “What if it rains?” Elaine asks. And she mouths the word creep at me while Mom isn’t looking.

  I mouth pig nose back at her. “I have the big beach umbrella, and I’ll set up my tent. And if it rains too hard, I’ll come inside. Sheesh, I’m not stupid.”

>   “Why don’t you pitch the tent in the backyard?” Mom asks.

  “Because I…I like the roof. It’s quiet. I can see the stars.”

  Mom lets go of a huge sigh. She looks at Elaine. “You have been seeing a lot of flying saucers and—”

  Elaine stands up. Her milk sloshes. “You don’t believe me either. No one does.”

  Mom doesn’t say anything about believing or not believing. She just tells Elaine to sit down and “finish your breakfast and drink all that orange juice. It’s too expensive to waste.”

  Then she looks at me. “You sure about this?”

  I nod.

  Mom goes back to the sink. She rinses a bowl and sets it in the drainer. Then she turns back and says, “Fine, Joyce. If you want to spend the summer on the hot roof, go ahead. Just don’t fall off.”

  “I won’t. I’ve been up there plenty of times.”

  “And don’t take the dog,” Mom says. “Remember what happened the last time you tried that stunt.”

  I do remember. I made a canvas sling out of an old tent and tried to hoist Polly up to the roof. She was not happy, and I didn’t get her very far off the ground before Mom caught me. She unhitched Polly and grounded me for the rest of the week.

  I look straight at Elaine. “Maybe I’ll just bring Jelly Bean.”

  Elaine smacks the table. “You will not. Don’t you dare touch her.”

  Mom pats my shoulder. “But I am not bringing your meals up there.”

  “You can put them in the basket, and I’ll hoist them up,” I say.

  I already have a basket system in place for times when I go up to search for balls, Wiffle bats, and even Barbie dolls. Once, I lowered a baby bird with a broken wing down. It died an hour later. Mom said I rescued it too late.

  The other day, I hoisted up the beach chair and the beach umbrella. Made myself a pretty nice sitting spot where I can see the whole neighborhood—maybe even the whole world—clear down the street into our playground, called Scullion Field. I can see everyone’s backyards and driveways. I can see past the chain-link fence that separates the playground from the woods. And then there’s nothing but sky.