“She does need to write our play,” Marigold said as she passed by the open door in a purple bikini and the sarong their mom had brought back from a trip to Mexico. “I need to get started on my lines.”
“I shan’t keep an artist from her work,” Aunt Sunny said, fiddling with her keys. “The list of phone numbers is on the fridge. You’ve met all the neighbors. Holler if you need something. I’ll have Jean stop by for lunch. Oh, and there’s some leftover blueberry pie in the fridge. Make sure to offer Jean a slice.”
“Okay,” Zinnie said. She lined up her paper and placed an eraser next to her neat pile.
“Benny needs a babysitter,” Lily said, and sat her beloved bunny on the desk. She whispered to Zinnie: “He likes to have peanut butter on crackers after his nap. And don’t let him sleep too long or he’ll never go to bed tonight.”
“No problem,” Zinnie said, patted her little sister on the head, and pushed her out the door.
“The writer must be left in peace, girls,” Aunt Sunny said to Marigold and Lily, and shut the door behind them.
But as soon as she heard Aunt Sunny’s station wagon rumble out of the driveway, Zinnie started to panic. She couldn’t think of a single thing to write. The house was too quiet; the minutes were too long; the piece of paper was too blank. She needed help. She paced around the too-empty house for a good fifteen minutes and then left a desperate message on her father’s voice mail.
When the phone rang, she answered it right away. “Hello?”
“Zinnia, I got your message,” Dad said. “And I’m extremely worried. What’s the emergency?”
“It’s a creative emergency, Dad,” Zinnie said, holding the heavy, old-fashioned phone receiver to her ear. She felt her whole body relax at the sound of Dad’s voice. “I’m writing a play, and I need your help.”
“Jeez,” Dad said, “you nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“Sorry,” Zinnie said. She explained all the latest developments. “The talent show is on. It’s actually happening, and it’s only ten days away. But I can’t think of any good ideas, and I don’t have much time, and Marigold is depending on me. So can you tell me what to write about?”
“Sorry, Zin,” Dad said. “Part of being a writer is figuring out what to write.”
“But you have a zillion ideas, Dad. Can’t you just give me one of them? Or if I give you a list, can you just say yes or no? Like, should I write about horses? Dragons? Dogs?” Zinnie could hear herself whining. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Well, I can tell you that I usually start with something that’s bugging me,” Dad said. “Is there anything on your mind these days?”
“I guess the fact that there are wars and global warming stuff,” she said, though she was really just saying what she thought a responsible girl who was going into the sixth grade at Miss Hadley’s should say. She knitted her brow and twirled the old-fashioned phone cord around her finger.
“Hmm,” Dad said. “Can you think about something more personal? Something in your life? What bugs you on a day-to-day basis?”
“Duh. Marigold,” Zinnie said.
“Why?” Dad asked.
“She thinks she’s so awesome. Like, I had to give up my whole life savings for the talent show prize, but because she’s, you know, Marigold, she didn’t even offer to chip in. But she still expected me to do it. And no one would expect Lily to give up her allowance because she’s so little and cute.”
“That’s pretty rough,” Dad said. “How much savings do you have?”
“A hundred dollars,” Zinnie said.
“That’s a lot. I’ll talk to Mom about that. You shouldn’t have to give up your savings, honey. Together we’ll work something out. But I only have a few minutes here, so tell me, why do you think that happened with Marigold?”
“Because she’s the automatic boss,” Zinnie said. “It’s like Marigold is the queen of the world and Lily is so adorable and I’m just . . . blah. In the middle.”
“For the record, there is nothing blah about you. But there’s your idea,” Dad said. “Write about being in the middle.”
“How?” Zinnie asked.
“I don’t know, Zin,” Dad said. “There’s no one right answer. Just remember that your main character needs a specific problem to solve, and there has to be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Oh, and something needs to happen!”
Zinnie sighed. She’d learned all this in English class. “Can you at least tell me how long it should be?”
“A play is about a page a minute. So if you want it to be about five minutes, write about five pages,” Dad said.
“Five whole pages?” Zinnie asked. With the exception of her report on gray wolves, which had included several pictures, Zinnie hadn’t ever written anything that long.
“I need to go, sweetie. I have to get back to the team. They’re measuring today, and they think we’ve got a winner. The tallest living thing on earth,” Dad said. “Oh, and here’s one last piece of advice: If you get stuck, ask a tree.”
“Ask a tree?” Zinnie pulled on her curls in exasperation.
“I’ve been talking to this tree for weeks, and I’ve never felt so inspired in my life. And besides, we’re from California,” Dad said, and laughed. “We’ve come from a tradition of nature lovers and tree huggers. Try talking to a tree. You might be surprised.”
39. California Wildflowers
A half hour later, after eating a piece and a half of blueberry pie, clipping her toenails, and straightening the pictures on the wall, Zinnie sat back down at the desk. She placed a fresh piece of paper in front of her and decided to just write the first thing that came to her.
“Being in the middle isn’t as easy as it looks,” she wrote. “You might get squished.” But then she had no idea what to put after that. She crumpled the paper and threw it in the trash. She took a deep breath and tried again, this time starting with a character. Zora? No, too fancy sounding. Alejandra? No, too long. How about Justine? Oh, yes. She liked Justine. “Justine: I’m a poor girl and everyone makes fun of my tattered clothes. Tonight I shall run away to join a traveling circus. As a middle girl, will anyone even notice I’m missing?”
Zinnie read it over. She liked the circus part, and Marigold would make a perfect Justine, but would that mean that Lily and she would have to play all the characters at the circus? She crumpled the paper. Maybe she wasn’t any better at writing than at acting. Maybe she wasn’t going to ever be good at anything. Maybe she really was just a . . . blah. A short, frizzy-haired, stuck-in-the-middle blah.
All this thinking had made her tired. She remembered that Mr. Herrera, who was probably the best fifth-grade teacher in the whole world, did yoga every morning before school and said that headstands were good for coming up with ideas because they made all the blood go to your brain. She decided to try a headstand right there in Aunt Sunny’s study. She was desperate. When she was upside down, she found herself face-to-face with Aunt Sunny’s bookshelf. It was packed with books about trees and plants, probably from her days as a science teacher. The bottom shelf, the one she was eye level with, was stacked with books about flowers.
When she saw A Guide to California Wildflowers written on the spine of the biggest book on the shelf, she somersaulted to a sitting position and opened it up. It was filled with photographs and illustrations of wildflowers that grew in California, as well as stories of how they got their names. She flipped to the index to search for zinnia. “Zinnias thrive in rugged terrain and are favored by butterflies.” She smiled at the idea that her flower was the favorite of butterflies. “Zinnias symbolize constancy.” Constancy? She had an idea what it meant but decided to look it up in the dictionary to be safe. “The quality of staying the same: lack of change.” Well, that’s a boring thing to symbolize, she thought, and looked up her sister’s name.
“Marigold” meant “beautiful, golden daisy.” Of course, Zinnie thought, and rolled her eyes. However, she also read that marigolds also sy
mbolized jealousy. Interesting, Zinnie thought, very interesting.
She looked up lily. There were about a million different kinds of lilies. There was the alpine lily, the meadow lily, the swamp lily, the tiger lily, the morning star lily, the trout lily, the snake lily, and, Zinnie’s personal favorite, the liver lily. They symbolized sweetness and youth. That made perfect sense.
Then she read about other wildflowers with crazy names, names that had stories in them: jack-in-the-pulpit, ragged sailor, ghost flower. Some wildflowers sounded like a fairy language: maypop, chicory, trillium. And then there were the ones that read like the ingredients of a witch’s spell: toadflax, soapwort, bloodroot.
Stories. Fairies. Witches. Zinnie felt she was on to something. Even though she couldn’t quite get a grip on an idea, she was filled with energy. Maybe it was time to ask a tree. As she walked into the yard, she thought about how maybe she could use the names of the flowers in her play. What if instead of Night Sprites she wrote about flower fairies? This would make her play close enough to Night Sprites that Mr. Rathbone would think that the sisters would be perfect for the movie, but she wouldn’t be copying.
Zinnie broke into a skip, thinking that her idea might be even better than the Night Sprites. After all, sprites were made-up things, but flowers were real in a way that one could touch and smell and see. What if flowers had secret lives that no one knew about? What if the moment they were cut was the moment their souls had only a few hours left to fulfill a mission from the butterflies? Ideas were coming all at once. How was Zinnie ever going to decide which was the right one?
At the far end of Aunt Sunny’s yard, through the archway, past the pear orchard and the vegetable garden, and beyond the shed, was a big beech tree with a zillion leaves. If there ever was a tree with answers, this was it. Zinnie walked beneath its branches and stared up.
“Hello,” Zinnie said. “Dad said that you could help me write my play. And I finally have a good idea, but where should I start?” Zinnie listened. A breeze blew. Leaves rustled. Maybe she was talking to the wrong side of the tree. She decided to do a little dance around it. “Help me with my play, great tree!” she chanted as she skipped around its trunk.
“Zinnia?” A voice startled Zinnie out of her trance. “You okay?” Zinnie turned around to see Jean, standing at the edge of the driveway with a hand on her hip and an expression of concern. “Whatcha doin’?”
“Um,” Zinnie said. “Just . . . talking . . . to myself.”
“Hmm. Okay, well, I brought over some chicken salad,” Jean said. “How about you wash your hands and join me in the kitchen?”
“Okay, one sec.” She waited for Jean to walk up the driveway, and then she turned back to the tree and pleaded. “Please, I need a main character with a specific problem,” Zinnie whispered. “Oh, and a beginning, middle, and end. Thanks.”
“You coming?” Jean called from the back door.
“Yep,” Zinnie said, and started toward the house. Just then she spotted a cluster of small blue flowers growing near the shed. She’d never noticed them before. But why would she? There wasn’t anything special about them. In fact, they were kind of ordinary looking. She walked past them. But seconds later something inside her made her turn around. She needed to see them up close. She needed to pick them. It was as if they were calling her name.
Zinnie ate her chicken salad sandwich and served Jean a piece of blueberry pie. After Jean left, Zinnie placed the blue flowers in a drinking glass. She filled it with water and carried it into the office, where she set about identifying the flowers with Aunt Sunny’s books. It took only a few minutes to discover that they were forget-me-nots and that they were as common in Massachusetts as they were in California. She wrote “forget-me-not” on a fresh piece of paper and circled it. There was a name with a story in it. The tree had given her an answer! Forget-Me-Not would be her main flower fairy character. Her dad had said that the main character needed a problem to solve, and Forget-Me-Not’s was right there in her name. Zinnie sharpened her pencil and began.
40. Where the Ocean Meets the Sand
Meanwhile, Aunt Sunny, Marigold, and Lily went to the big beach where they’d had the clambake. Aunt Sunny was meeting her friends for what she called a sea chat. A sea chat, Aunt Sunny had explained, was sitting in the water and chitchatting for as long as they pleased. Marigold was going to babysit Lily on the beach while Aunt Sunny talked to her friends in the water.
As soon as Aunt Sunny, Marigold, and Lily climbed over the dune, they saw Peter. He was walking along the beach with his Red Sox cap on and a towel draped over his shoulders, eating a sandwich.
“Hello, Peter,” Aunt Sunny called.
Peter looked up, smiled, and practically ran over to them.
“Hi,” Marigold said, a little breathless from giving Lily yet another piggyback.
“Hey,” Peter said, stuffing the last of his sandwich into his mouth.
Marigold put Lily down and raised her sunglasses to the top of her head, where they held back her hair like a headband. She smiled at Peter and couldn’t help noticing that his cheeks turned pink, like she’d given him an instant sunburn.
“What are you up to this fine day?” Aunt Sunny asked.
“I’m here with my dad,” he said. “He’s surf casting.” He nodded toward a man standing out in the water, holding a long fishing pole. He seemed very far away, and yet the water only came up to his knees.
“What’s he hoping to catch?” Aunt Sunny asked.
“Blues,” Peter said. Aunt Sunny nodded. He turned to Marigold. “I’m about to go ride the current. It’s fast today. Want to come? We can start at the pond, then float right out to the ocean. But you have to be a really good swimmer or it can carry you pretty far out.”
“Sounds fun,” Marigold said.
“Marigold,” Lily said, and tugged on her sister’s sarong, “you said you were going to stay with me, remember?”
“Oh, right,” Marigold said. She looked at Peter. “Lily’s afraid of the ocean. We gotta stay on the sand.”
“You’re welcome to join me for my sea chat, Lily,” Aunt Sunny said, “especially since you’ve done such a terrific job at the YMCA. Why, just yesterday you were floating like a champ all by yourself.”
Lily shook her head. “That’s different. That’s in a pool.”
“It’s okay,” Marigold said to Aunt Sunny. “I’ll stay with Lily.”
“I’m counting on you to keep a close eye on her,” Aunt Sunny said to Marigold. Then she waved to her friends, three ladies in bathing caps standing at the water’s edge.
“Don’t worry, I got it,” Marigold said.
“Yeah,” Peter said to Aunt Sunny. “We got it.”
“Good,” Aunt Sunny said, tucking the ends of her hair into her cap, and went to join her friends.
“I used to be scared of the ocean, too,” Peter said to Lily.
“You were?” Lily asked.
“Sure,” he said, and knelt so that he was eye level with her. “All those big waves. And who knows what’s under the water when you can’t even see the bottom, right?”
“Right,” Lily said.
“Hey, maybe you can help me,” Peter said. “I have a sea glass collection, and I’m looking for a new piece.”
“What’s sea glass?” Lily asked.
“It’s a piece of glass that’s been in the water so long that it’s gotten really smooth and kind of frosty looking. I used to search for pieces when we came to the beach and I didn’t want to go swimming.”
“Cool. What colors do you have?” Marigold asked.
“I have a lot of green, and some blue, and some clear,” Peter said, squinting up at Marigold. Then he turned back to Lily. “But I’ve always wanted a red piece. They’re very rare, but they’re the coolest ones of all. If I found one, my collection would be complete.”
“Let’s find one,” Lily said.
“Okay,” Peter said, “but you’ve got to get your feet wet. The best o
nes are right at the ocean’s edge.”
Lily shook her head.
“We’ll be right next to you,” Marigold said, “the whole time.”
“If a wave comes, I’ll rescue you,” Peter said.
“How strong are you?” Lily asked. Marigold laughed.
“Superman strong,” Peter said, and flexed his muscles. They were small muscles, but still, they were there, and Marigold noticed.
“And how fast can you swim?” Lily asked.
“As fast as a sailfish,” Peter said. “And they’re the fastest. Now let’s see what you’ve got, Lily.” Lily flexed her muscles and puffed up her chest. “Wow,” Peter said. “You could probably beat me up.”
“I would never beat you up,” Lily said.
“What about me?” Marigold asked.
“That depends on your attitude,” Lily said, snapping her fingers and striking a pose.
Peter laughed pretty hard at this.
“Thanks a lot,” Marigold said, but Peter’s laughter was contagious, and soon she was laughing, too. “So what do you think, Lily?” Marigold asked. “Are you ready to put your toes in the water if Peter is holding your hand?”
“Okay,” Lily said, and grabbed Peter’s hand.
“I think she likes you,” Marigold whispered in Peter’s ear. With the exception of Martin Goldblatt, she had never been so close to a boy before. If she’d been any closer, she’d be kissing him. He smelled like laundry detergent. In a good way.
Together the three of them walked toward the water’s edge. Lily was gripping her hand tightly as the cool, frothy water washed over their toes. Marigold and Peter lifted her up. “Upsy daisy!” Marigold said as they swung her between them. Lily laughed as they put her back down. Marigold couldn’t believe it. Lily was up to her ankles in the ocean and laughing!
Then Peter stopped to picked up a rock that was shiny and black with two pinkish stripes that went all the way around it. He rinsed it off in the ocean.
“For you,” he said, and handed it to Lily. “To keep you safe, always.” Lily smiled up at Peter, who in turn smiled up at Marigold.
The Forget-Me-Not Summer Page 13