Sunny Sweet is So Dead Meat

by Jennifer Ann Mann

  I quickly pulled my cast to my chest to cover the “P.” I was a little hurt that Alice took Sunny’s side. “The difference between my hat and hers,” I said, ignoring the “P” comment, “is that she’s up to something with hers. I know my little sister. And whatever it is that Sunny is up to, it isn’t good for me.”

  “Are you up to something with your hat, Sunny?” Alice asked her.

  “I don’t understand the question,” Sunny said, avoiding Alice’s eyes.

  “You’ve never not understood anything in your life,” I shouted. “You are totally up to something.”

  “What could she possibly be doing with a hat?” Alice asked.

  I stared down at Sunny sitting on Alice’s lap. Sunny stared up at me.

  And then she smiled.

  I leaped at her throat.

  “Masha!” cried Alice, muffled by my body. “Get off. You’re getting mud all over us.”

  I got off, still breathing heavily from my attempt to strangle my little sister.

  “Okay,” Alice said. “Let’s talk about some other piece of clothing. Why are you wearing Masha’s sneaker? Where’s your boot?”

  “Masha threw it up onto the roof,” Sunny said, trying not to smile again.

  “After she did this!” I yelled, gesturing at the red dye. “And if you’re going to get a ride the whole way to the hospital, give me back my sneaker.”

  Sunny plucked off my sneaker and threw it to the side of the road using one hand while holding onto her stupid rain hat with the other hand.

  “I’m not going to touch your stupid hat,” I snapped, going for my sneaker. “In fact, you can wear that hat to your stinkin’ wedding! I couldn’t care less.”

  Sunny and Alice giggled.

  “She’d have to wear high-heeled rain boots,” Alice said.

  “And I could carry an umbrella instead of a bunch of flowers,” laughed Sunny.

  “We’d all throw buckets of water at her instead of rice,” I grumbled.

  “You could release ducks into the air instead of doves,” giggled Alice.

  “And my honeymoon would be to the rainforest,” Sunny added.

  We were all laughing when we came around a corner and saw a group of people huddled together under two trees by a large flowered area—a real wedding! All fifty or so pairs of eyes were staring over at us. And all fifty or so mouths were twisted down into a frown. We made our way past them as fast as we could without breaking down in laughter. Once we got over a small hill, Alice burst out, “Who would get married in a graveyard?”

  We couldn’t hold it in any longer. We exploded into giggles … forgetting all about Sunny Sweet’s rain hat as we headed out of the cemetery through another set of giant, black iron gates.

  “I don’t want to go back to the hospital,” Alice said. The hospital was across the street, with the front entrance just down a half a block. “This was so much fun!”

  “Really?” I said, motioning at my red-speckled, muddy self. “This isn’t much fun.”

  “Well, for me it was fun.” She laughed. “Except maybe for the part where I was alone in the graveyard. That part wasn’t fun.”

  “When the gardener ruined my lever experiment,” Sunny said, “that wasn’t any fun for me.”

  “Yeah, for me either,” I said. And we all laughed.

  “I love hanging out with you two.” Alice sighed. “I’m going to pin up the cemetery map right next to my bed,” she said, smoothing out its wrinkles.

  Sunny looked over at me and smiled. I smiled back.

  We walked Alice to the front door of the hospital. “Where will you tell them that you’ve been?” I asked.

  “I told the nurse that I was going to read to the patients in geriatrics, so nobody is even looking for me. If they were, the nurse would have texted me.”

  “What’s geriatrics?” I asked.

  “Old people,” said Sunny.

  “Why would you read to old people? Why don’t they just read to themselves?”

  “Lots of times they can’t read anymore because their eyes are bad. Or they’re too sick. I like to go read to them anyway. It’s fun.”

  “So you really do read to them? It wasn’t just an excuse to get out today?”

  “No, I really do it. Not today … Today I had to go dig my friend out of an early grave,” she laughed. “But other days I do. This week I am reading them Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.”

  “That’s cool,” I said. “Maybe I can come listen one day.” We were in front of the doors to the hospital. I gave her a hug. After I stood back up, I saw the old Alice looking at me, the Alice who could handle anything. Maybe being near the hospital made her strong. “I wish you could come home with us, Alice,” I said.

  “And eat some of Mrs. Song’s dumplings,” Sunny added.

  “Me too,” she sighed.

  “Sunny and I will visit you one day this week. That is, if I can get us home without my mom finding out about any of this. Otherwise, she’ll never let me out alone again for the rest of my life!”

  “Okay,” Alice said. “Then get home.”

  Home. It was like it had become some mystical place that didn’t really exist anymore. “I’ve been trying all day.” I sighed. “Anyway …” I gave her wheelchair wheel a little kick. “Thanks for saving me, best friend.”

  Alice winked. I loved when she did that. She’s the only kid I knew who did that.

  Sunny squeezed Alice around the arms and then crawled off her. “Yeah, Alice, thanks for helping us.”

  “Hey,” she smiled before she turned and rolled in through the automatic doors, “we’re like Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Although instead of being wizards, we’re just weird.”

  “You can be Ron,” I shouted after her. I heard her laugh before the doors shut.

  Sunny and I turned and headed back for the bus stop and the number 68.

  “What did she mean by weird?” Sunny asked.

  “You know, that the three of us are all different, just like you said.”

  “I’m not different,” Sunny said.

  I looked over at Sunny, making a point to look at her big rain hat and her feet, with one socked foot and one foot in a rain boot, and the paint can in her hand filled with a half-eaten hamburger loaded down with fly eggs. And then there was the whole being-a-genius thing, which definitely made Sunny different. “And I thought you were the smart one,” I told her.

  She was quiet.

  “I’m just teasing, Sunny.”

  We walked to the bench at the bus stop and sat down. We sat for a while staring off down the street. A bus came. It was the 66. Two more 66 buses came, but there was no sign of the 68.

  “So are you really sad about the science fair?” I asked. “You never answered me. This will be the very first contest I ever saw you enter that you won’t win.”

  She shrugged.

  Again I did not like the shrug. It made me nervous.

  “This will be your first time as a loser,” I told her, trying to get her mad.

  Again she shrugged.

  “Stop doing that,” I snapped. “And take off that stupid rain hat!”

  She leaped off the bench, and I jumped off after her. I chased her around the bench. Just as I had her bucket of fly eggs within reach, I heard the engine of a bus roaring up the street. I stopped chasing Sunny and scooted over to the curb, straining to get a look at which bus it was. Another 66!

  I stomped over to the bus stop sign and squinted at the schedule. Maybe the 68 only came once every half hour or something. Sunny came up and stood next to me.

  “It says that it should come every ten minutes,” I said.

  “Except on weekends,” noted Sunny, pointing to a horrible red line that ran down the length of the schedule under the words “Saturday and Sundays.”

  I let out a very heavy sigh. “Figures.”

  It Ain’t Over Until … Never, Because the Universe Is Always Expanding

  Sunny checked the time on her ph
one.

  “What time is it?” I asked her.

  “It’s three p.m.,” she said.

  “I’d better text Mom.”

  “What are you gonna tell her?” Sunny asked. Her eyes were staring out into the world, but I could tell they were really staring back into that giant brain of hers and doing calculations of some sort.

  “That the fair is almost over and we’ll be getting on the bus soon.”

  “You’re gonna lie?”

  I sat down on the bench and put my head in my hands.

  “I’m sorry, Masha,” Sunny said, sitting down next to me. “Why don’t you text her that everything is good. That’s not a lie.”

  “That’s not a lie?” I asked. “Look at us, Sunny. We’re stuck at the hospital. I’m covered with red junk and mud, and you’re wearing one boot and carrying a can of old meat. Are things really good?” I looked over at her. Her mouth was turned down in a tiny frown.

  I looked around me at the big pots of flowers and the bench I sat on. This bus stop was the place where I’d first seen Sunny bald after she’d glued those flowers to my head and we both had our heads shaved. This hospital was the very place where she had said that she was sorry to me for the first time ever in our lives. And believe me, there had been ten million other times that Sunny Sweet should have said those words to me.

  Sunny’s phone buzzed. “It’s Mom,” she said. “She sent a picture.” Sunny turned the phone so I could see. It was a picture of my mother’s watercolor in progress. I looked up at Sunny, and we smiled.

  “It’s pretty,” I said.

  Pretty, Sunny texted.

  “Hey,” I said. “Let’s take a selfie and send it to her.”

  “What about the red dye all over your face?”

  “She’ll be seeing it soon enough,” I said.

  We stuck our heads together, hat to hat, and smiled for the camera. I held Sunny’s phone away from us to snap it. Then I checked to be sure that our heads completely filled the screen so you couldn’t tell where we were. Sunny and I grinned out at me from her phone. I was indeed a picture of red splotchiness, but we looked happy—like we weren’t stuck on a bench.

  I texted, The red paint is part of Sunny’s experiment, and then clicked Send.

  Pretty? my mom texted back, followed by like a thousand smileys. She loves those silly yellow faces.

  I handed Sunny’s phone back to her and gave her hand a little squeeze.

  She clicked on the picture of the two of us and stared at it. “Am I really different too?” she asked.

  It wasn’t so often that Sunny asked me a question she didn’t already know the answer to.

  “Yes,” I told her.

  She nodded.

  We sat on the bench together in silence except for when someone walked by. And then I’d put my cell phone to my ear and say loudly, “Yes, Mom, we’re sitting right here on the bench in the front and we won’t move an inch.” I didn’t want anyone asking us where our parents were.

  Each person that passed noticed us. They all tried to hide it, but there is something about eyes that make them really hard to miss. They glow. The first look always came with that eye-opening surprise. And then they’d swerve their eyes away for a moment, maybe to figure out what they just saw. Then their eyes would come back, like they couldn’t stop from taking another look. I guess they did it in a hidden way because it’s rude to stare at people. But I could tell that they also hid it because they didn’t want me or Sunny saying something to them. Anyway, they didn’t have to worry. You couldn’t catch spina bifida—or what Sunny and I had, which was a very bad case of a way-too-stinkin’-smart-little-sister—like you caught a cold.

  A lady wearing a black-and-white-checked jacket walked by with a small, fluffy dog in a black-and-white-checked sweater. I’d never seen anyone match her dog before. When they got about two feet away, I did my fake-conversation thing with my mom and Sunny reached down to pet her dog. The lady caught sight of me and yanked the dog away before Sunny’s hand could touch it. Then she hurried down the street, dragging the little dog with her. Sunny and I scooted closer to one another on the bench.

  “Dumb lady,” I said.

  “She just doesn’t understand us,” Sunny said.

  “So does that give her the right to treat us badly?” I said.

  “People are afraid of differences,” Sunny explained.

  “Well, then, they’re dumb,” I said.

  “Not necessarily. Sometimes it’s important to be aware of stuff that is different. It can keep you safe.”

  “We’re not going to hurt anybody,” I snapped. “And what about Alice? She isn’t going to hurt anybody either.”

  “That’s true,” Sunny said. “But people don’t understand spina bifida. They don’t understand that Alice’s backbone and spinal canal did not close before birth. And they don’t understand that because of this, Alice can’t move her muscles the way other people can. And because they don’t understand, they’re afraid of her.”

  “So,” I said, because truthfully, I hadn’t understood any of that stuff either, “if people understood why Alice looked different, they wouldn’t be afraid.”

  “That’s right,” Sunny said. “They wouldn’t be afraid.”

  “And this is what your experiment for the fair is all about?” I asked. “If we knew why people looked and acted differently, we wouldn’t be afraid of them?”

  “Pretty much, yes,” she said, reaching up and adjusting the rain hat solidly onto her head. “My hypothesis is that the more we understand what makes others different from ourselves, the less those differences will matter.”

  I thought about Batman and Robin back at the school, and how no one even looked at them funny. Everybody at that school understood that the boys wanted to be superheroes. In fact, maybe everyone in the world understood Batman and Robin. But a red-speckled girl like me, or a kid with spina bifida, they just needed more explanation.

  I leaped off the bench and pulled out my cell phone and dialed.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “I’m calling Junchao at the science fair.” The phone kept ringing.

  “Why?” Sunny asked.

  “To see if we can still make it,” I told her.

  Sunny jumped off the bench, pulling out her own phone. She took a look at the screen and then looked up at me, her eyes shining. “We can make it!”

  I had no idea how she knew, but I never knew how she knew anything. I clicked off my phone, grabbed Sunny’s hand, and started to run.

  “Back through the graveyard?” Sunny asked, already out of breath.

  “Yup,” I said, laughing. “And this time, we take a map!”

  Graveyards Are Scary

  “Do you see him?” Sunny asked.

  I peeked through the gate of the cemetery but didn’t see the gardener or anyone. “No, come on.”

  We scurried through the gate and over to the little shed that held the maps. Sunny grabbed a map, and I pulled her around the back of the tiny building while we read it.

  “It looks like we need to take Poplar Avenue to Walnut Avenue to Spruce Street. This will take us back to the gate by The Mug.”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Sunny folded up the map and stuck it in her jeans pocket.

  “Good job.” I smiled.

  I stuck my head out from behind the shed and looked around. I saw no one. It was getting pretty late in the afternoon, and the trees were making shadows across the darkening grass. They didn’t look like broccoli anymore, but like dark figures waiting to grab us as we ran by. The headstones, which just an hour ago had looked like friendly rocks sunning themselves on a spring afternoon, now looked cold and hard. All of a sudden the cemetery seemed a little spooky to me.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Sunny.

  “Uh … uh,” I stammered. “Nothing.”

  “Did you see something?”

  My heart jumped at her words. “No,” I said, staring down at her.
“Did you?”

  Her eyes grew big.

  “Never mind,” I told her. “Let’s just run.”

  We took off down Poplar Avenue. I could see the road twisting ahead of me and knew that if we cut across the graves we’d get there faster, but I wasn’t about to do that now. The idea of running over graves completely freaked me out. Sunny was running next to me. I could hear her breathing heavily so I slowed down a little. Then something caught my eye.

  I leaped to the opposite side of Poplar Avenue, pulling Sunny with me. We ducked behind a gravestone.

  “What?” she asked.

  I looked all around us. “It wasn’t anything, I guess.”

  Somewhere behind us a leaf blower started and we grabbed each other in a hug.

  “How far is Walnut Avenue from here?” I whispered.

  Sunny pulled out the map. “I’m not sure,” she said.

  “Why are you sure about everything always until we get stuck in the middle of a graveyard?” I asked. “Never mind.” I took her hand and we got back on the path and started running again. We passed Laurel Mountain Road and then Fern Place. I was completely out of breath by the time we got to Walnut Avenue.

  “I’m tired,” Sunny said, stopping in the middle of the little intersection of Poplar and Walnut.

  “We have to keep going.”

  “I don’t want to run anymore. My legs hurt. And it’s hard to run with just one boot.”

  “Well, maybe if you put down that stupid bucket it might be easier.”

  She hugged the can of fly eggs to her chest protectively.

  I rolled my eyes. “Sunny Sweet, we can get you more fly eggs another day.”

  “But I’ve been carrying them all day. They’re like my babies.”

  “Hey!” cried a voice. It was the gardener.

  Sunny tossed her fly babies onto the grass, kicked off her rain boot, and we took off.

  We didn’t hesitate when we saw Spruce Avenue. We turned down the path, running at full speed for the tall, dark gate at the end of it. I ached to look back, but I was running too fast. We ran straight out the gate, across The Mug’s parking lot, and into the door of the coffee shop without stopping.