“Ready?” I asked, looking up from my phone.
“Almost,” Sunny said, putting a bunch of wires into the box.
“Why does science have to come with so many wires?”
“What?” she asked.
“How did you do this, anyway?” I asked her. “Who set it all up?”
“Remember the envelope stuck to the side of this box?” she asked. “It had all the instructions for setting up my experiment, just in case I wasn’t here to do it myself. I didn’t know exactly how the experiment would happen since you were an unknown variable.”
I actually liked the sound of being an unknown variable even if I wasn’t sure what it meant. “But how did you know someone would do it?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t really. I made an educated guess, called a hypothesis, that in a room full of scientists, someone would be curious enough to follow my instructions. But just in case, last night I also e-mailed all the instructions for setting up the experiment to Mrs. Terry, the head of the science fair.” She threw her head back and laughed that hysterical evil-genius laugh of hers from deep within her skinny little neck. If it weren’t for a group of kids that swarmed us at that very moment, my own educated guess is that I would have strangled her right then and there. The kids had pieces of paper and pens in their hands.
“Really?” I groaned. “Autographs?”
They glanced over at me for a second and then turned their full attention back toward Sunny Sweet. My phone buzzed with a text. Thank goodness. I turned my back on the science rock star and her groupies and checked my phone. I figured it was going to be another smiley face from my mom for the smiling faces I sent her, but instead, it was a text from Junchao. Finally!
Look to your left, it said.
I looked. And there was Junchao waving at me with some sort of space helmet on.
“Junchao!” I shouted, running over to her.
“Ni hao,” she mouthed through the glass of her helmet.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
She took off her helmet. Her cheeks were pink, and her hair stood straight off her head.
“What?” she asked. “I can’t hear a thing inside that helmet.”
“Where were you all day?” I asked.
She winced at the sound of my voice, like it hurt her ears. “I was here at the fair,” she said.
“Why didn’t you pick up your phone?”
“Why are you shouting?” she asked.
“I’m not shouting,” I said, quieting my voice. Maybe I was shouting.
“I’m sorry, Masha,” she said. “I’ve been inside the helmet all day. My science experiment was recreating what space sounds like.”
“What does space sound like?”
She handed me her helmet. I pulled off my hat and put her helmet on my head. And I heard absolutely nothing. No wonder she missed all my calls and texts.
Sunny walked over to us. She looked up at me and started to speak. I couldn’t hear one word she said. This was nice. I watched as Sunny pointed to the helmet and started talking to Junchao, probably about her experiment. Junchao answered. I just stood there enjoying the quiet until we were interrupted by a small woman who looked just like Junchao, except she was a lot older and her hair was a lot shorter. I didn’t want to, but I took off the helmet.
“This is Masha and her little sister, Sunny,” Junchao said to her mom. “Can we give them a ride home?”
“We certainly can,” Mrs. Tao said. “On one condition …”
All three of us looked at Mrs. Tao.
“That Sunny give Junchao her first-place trophy,” she said. And then Mrs. Tao laughed. She had the same exact laugh as Junchao, and it was the best laugh ever. It sounded just like Santa Claus—ho-ho-ho.
Junchao pretended to reach for Sunny’s trophy in my hands. Sunny grabbed it from me and hugged it to her chest. Junchao started laughing along with her mom. The sound of their “ho-ho-hoing” got me laughing too. Mrs. Tao and Junchao were obviously kidding, but Sunny still backed away from the three of us anyway.
When we got in the car, Junchao’s mother told Sunny that she was a chemical engineer. Sunny forgot all about the trophy joke. She started right in with words like “fluid” and “flow” and “pumps” … all of which I didn’t like the sound of. When Sunny got to listing her favorite chemicals—strontium, barium, radium—I asked Junchao to hand me her helmet.
I put it on and was officially in heaven. You could really hear nothing! I loved watching the telephone poles whisk by my eyes. One after another after another they slid past without the usual swooshing sound. We drove by a brown barking dog outside a big house on a corner—his snout snapped open and shut. But all I heard was silence.
The first thing I was going to do when we got home was to text my mom. The next thing I was going to do was to ask Mrs. Song if I could run across the yard to my house and take the longest shower ever in the history of showers. I was going to use the entire bottle of soap, if necessary, to scrub off all the dye and pottery dust and dried mud. And then I was going to eat about fifty-five million of Mrs. Song’s dumplings. But there was one thing that I wasn’t going to do, and that was to tell my mother what happened today. I would let her “ooh” and “aah” over Sunny’s trophy, and I’d tell her that Junchao was there and that Mrs. Tao gave us a ride home, and maybe I’d tell her about this cool helmet—but that was it!
I glanced over at Sunny. Her mouth was like the dog barking … Her jaw was moving and moving and moving, but I heard nothing.
I wondered if Junchao would let me borrow this helmet for a few days. And because Junchao is my friend I’m going to make an educated guess, or to use Sunny’s word, hypothesize that Junchao’s answer is going to be yes.
I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. The car rocked me back and forth in comfortable silence. I was finally going home. My personal conclusion for the day? Science wasn’t all bad.
Sunny Sweet Can So Get Lost
“You smell like a pickle.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
The little kid standing in front of me at the airport was not the first person to notice. It had been two months since Sunny had exploded red dye all over me and I still smelled like vinegar! Actually, I smelled like twenty-two bottles of vinegar because that is what it took to remove my evil little sister’s latest science experiment from my skin.
“I like pickles,” he said, licking his lips.
“I’m not a pickle.”
I pulled my phone closer to my face to block the kid from my sight. My mother had filled our bathtub up with vinegar, and I had soaked in it for four straight hours. So maybe I was a pickle.
The kid didn’t move.
“It’s vinegar you smell,” Sunny said, looking up from her book. “Vinegar is a liquid used in the process of preserving food, like cucumbers, which when preserved in vinegar are called pickles. This is why you think that my sister, Masha, smells like one.”
The kid blinked at Sunny for a half second and then took off—hopping back to his mother along a row of attached chairs.
“Did you know …,” Sunny started.
“No,” I said.
This didn’t stop her. It never did. “ … that the word ‘vinegar’ comes from the French words ‘vin egre,’ which mean sour wine? So what you really smell like is sour wine.”
“Can’t you just let me smell like a pickle?” I asked.
My phone rang and I clicked it on. “Hi, Mom!”
“Hey, Masha. Are you and Sunny in Boston?”
“Yeah, we’re here.”
“Is the unaccompanied minor attendant with you?”
“Yes, Mom, I’m looking right at her and she’s looking right back at me. Her name is Wendi, with an i. And no, you cannot talk to her. Sunny and I are fine.”
“I wasn’t even going to ask.” She laughed. But I knew that she was. My mom was pretty nervous about Sunny and me flying out alone to meet our dad for summer vacation. We had to fly
from Newark Airport in New Jersey up to Boston in Massachusetts. And from there, we’d fly all the way out west to South Dakota. My mom needed to fly to Russia to be with my grandmother for a surgery, so my father surprised Sunny and me with a trip to the Lone Creek Dude Ranch.
Sunny and I hadn’t seen our dad since Christmas. But any butterflies swirling around my belly about not seeing him for so long were pretty much buried alive by the awesometastic news that I was going to get to ride a horse! My father sent us the brochure in the mail. On the cover was a shiny black horse running across a prairie. I made my mom rent Black Beauty that night, and I’d watched it every day since … twice a day on Sundays.
“I’m boarding soon,” Mom said. She was still back in Newark Airport, where we left her that morning. “Let me say a quick hi to your sister.”
I tried to hand Sunny my phone. She wouldn’t take it. Instead, she put both her hands to her throat and pretended she couldn’t speak. I rolled my eyes. “Sorry, Mom, she can’t talk. She’s got laryngitis.”
My mom snorted with laugher. The little genius’s new project these days was to follow my mother around as her mini personal secretary, writing her e-mails and picking up her phone calls. Whenever Sunny answered a call from a telemarketer, she would tell them that my mom had laryngitis and couldn’t talk. My mom thought it was the funniest thing ever, especially when Sunny explained how the larynx and trachea worked to the poor marketing people.
“Well, tell your sister I said I love her. And that I love the group texts you guys are sending to me. They are so cute.”
“Group texts?” I repeated, glancing over at Sunny. Sunny didn’t take her eyes off her book, but I could tell by how she stared at one spot on the page that she heard me.
“That reminds me,” she continued. “I got the strangest e-mail from your father.”
“An e-mail from Dad? What did he say?” I asked. “Was it about my horse?”
Sunny put her book down and swiped at my phone. I batted her off like a fly.
“Masha Sweet,” my mother said, sighing. When my mom calls me this, I know she’s serious. And she had been calling me this a lot in the last few weeks. “Your father is not buying you a horse. I know he said that he had a surprise for you and Sunny, but I’m sure the surprise is not a horse. I wish you would stop hoping because you’re just going to be disappointed.”
“Well what exactly did he say?” I moaned. I wasn’t going to stop hoping for my horse. Hope was all I had. Anyway, what else could the surprise be? He was taking us to a dude ranch, and he had made a big deal of a having a surprise for Sunny and me. I don’t see how my mom could think that I wasn’t getting a horse!
“He said that he knows. And not to worry,” my mother said.
“What?” I asked.
Sunny tried to snatch the phone from me again. I swooped away from her and into the seat on the other side of me. Unfortunately, that seat happened to be occupied by a man reading a newspaper. The man cleared his throat, warning me, I guess, to calm down.
I smiled, thinking about how the man had just treated me like a normal kid, using the normal way that adults do to signal kids to cut it out. And this is because, except for smelling slightly like a garden salad, I was a normal kid. It hadn’t been that long ago that Sunny had glued a million plastic flowers to my head and I had to have my head shaved. Or that I had been covered in red dye when Sunny had exploded a bottle of ketchup all over me so she could win a science fair. But today my hair was looking pretty cute in a bob. And today my skin was splotch-free. In fact, today dinky Dr. Frankenstein had not done one terrible thing to me.
I felt a tiny pinch in my stomach at that last thought. I looked over at Sunny. She was busy with her phone.
“Oh, I’m boarding,” my mom said, breathless. She always got so excited when it was time to get on a plane. A big wave of missing her broke over me. She was getting on a plane and we were getting on a plane, but we weren’t getting on the same plane.
“Kisses and hugs,” she said. “I’ll give Babushka all your love, and you guys have a great time with your father. Tell Sunny the same. Oh, and tell her that I loved finding her travel safety plan in my carry-on.” She gave a tiny shriek of joy. “The organization chart of emergency numbers and addresses was terrific! And the detailed outline of contingency emergency plans for natural disasters and power outages was really above and beyond, even for your little sister.”
Again I looked over at Sunny. She was still playing with her phone. I didn’t like hearing about this stuff … the safety plan and the texts. That pinch in my stomach was growing into an actual ache. Sunny was up to something. I looked around. Everything looked okay. We were at our gate. Wendi with an i was constantly staring over at us from the ticket counter as if we might disappear at any moment. I had my ticket information and ID around my neck. Sunny had hers. I just wish my mom hadn’t said that thing about Sunny, because one thing I knew to be true: nothing was above and beyond my little sister.
“A gazillion kisses right back, Mom. I love you, love you, love you,” I told her.
She smacked me a real kiss through the phone and then she was gone. I took a deep breath filled with wishing that my mother were here with us or that we were there with her. No … wait. I didn’t want to be going to Russia to watch my grandmother’s hip get fixed—I wanted to be going to the Lone Creek Dude Ranch to ride horses!
The sight of Sunny’s skinny little fingers bouncing about on her phone keys caught my attention. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“What?”
“What are you doing?”
I looked closer at her phone. “Are you checking Mom’s e-mails?” My heart fluttered. “Check the one from Dad. See if he said anything about my horse.”
“I hate horses,” she said, not taking her eyes off her screen.
I leaned back in my airport chair and closed my eyes. I love horses.
The vision of my horse shimmered into my head. He was a dark chocolate brown with a long black mane. His eyes were huge and kind. His coat shone from all of my brushing. We walked together, his nose nuzzling my ear. And then I jumped onto to his back and we rode along cliffs overlooking the ocean.
Wendi with an i interrupted my dream.
“We’re going to be boarding soon,” she said, and then I watched as she turned and walked back over to the tiny ticket counter to chat with the other flight attendants at the entrance to the gate. Over the counter in dotted red lit-up letters it said PORTLAND.
“Hey, Sunny, I remember mom saying that the airport we are flying into is like Sioux Falls or something,” I said, pointing at the sign.
Sunny glanced up at the sign. Then she hopped out of her seat. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“You just went.”
“Um,” she said, “I have to go again.”
I didn’t want to go to the bathroom again. I wanted to go back to dreaming my wonderful horse dreams. We weren’t supposed to go anywhere alone, even the bathroom. So if I called Wendi with an i, I would have to go too. I looked up at Wendi with an i. She was bent over the desk writing something. “Just go,” I said. “But hurry up.”
I immediately went back to dreaming about Oscar or Charlie, which both sounded like solid horse names. But I also kind of liked the more horsey-sounding names, like Thunder and Black Cloud. I got my phone back out and went to this website I’d found with a ton of pictures of horses and started scrolling through them—white horses, brown horses, white and brown horses, horses running in groups, horses running through long grass, horses jumping, horses with giant hooves, horses pulling carts, horses, horses, horses …
The quietness poked at me. I looked up to see the last few people at the gate heading onto the plane.
“Sunny?” I looked around me. “Sunny!” I yelped.
I jumped out of my seat. Where was Sunny? Where was Wendi with an i? How long had I been looking at horses? I ran down the wide airport hall and into the bathroom. “Sunny!” I called.
There was no answer, but I did hear something … It was Sunny’s voice in my head. I hate horses.
All of a sudden an avalanche of the things Sunny had been doing and saying lately rolled over the top of me—Sunny asking over and over why we couldn’t just go to our old house in Pennsylvania to see Dad, or Sunny begging to go with my mom to Babushka’s in Saint Petersburg. And then there was all her complaining about the dude ranch and how she didn’t like square dancing and how they would probably only be serving ribs, which she couldn’t eat because my six-year-old sister had now become a vegetarian. Finally, in my head I heard her say, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and I knew … she didn’t really have to go to the bathroom.
Holy frozen ravioli … Sunny Sweet was gone!
I gave a short little howl and ran out of the bathroom and straight into Wendi with an i.
“Oh my gosh!” Wendi with an i cried, almost hugging me. “Where have you been?”
“Uh … uh,” I said.
She locked arms with me and pulled me toward the gate. I stumbled along next to her, searching every face in the airport for Sunny’s.
“My sister,” I huffed, “is los—” I stopped. Sunny Sweet was gone, but she wasn’t lost. Sunny Sweet didn’t get lost. You had to not know where you were to be lost, and wherever Sunny was at this moment, she knew exactly where she was! I thought about what my mother said on the phone, about some sort of group text that Sunny sent. And that safety thing that she put in my mom’s bag. Then I thought about Sunny taking all of my mom’s phone calls and writing all her e-mails for the last couple of months. I didn’t know the reason why she was doing these things, but I did know that there was a reason. She was definitely up to something. And this time I wasn’t going to be a part of it.
“Time to get on that plane,” Wendi with an i said, pointing toward the flight attendant waiting at the gate.
I took one last look around. I bet Sunny is watching me right this minute. I bet she is wondering what I’ll do next. I wasn’t going to let her do this to me again. I thought about Oscar/Charlie/Thunder/Black Cloud. I wanted my horse. That decided it.
Sunny Sweet is So Dead Meat Page 9