Sunny Sweet Is So Not Scary

by Jennifer Ann Mann

  “Can we stay under the blanket and all go together?” Junchao asked.

  “That won’t work,” Alice said, pointing at her legs. Alice didn’t really walk that well.

  “We’ll carry you,” Junchao said.

  “No, thanks,” said Alice.

  Sweat tickled my neck as it ran down into my pajamas. “Okay.” I gulped. “I’ll go out and turn them on.”

  “Do you want me to go with you?” Junchao asked. I could tell that she was totally hoping I’d say no.

  “I can go faster if I’m alone,” I told her, which was probably true, but who cares how fast you can go when all you’re doing is running right into the clutches of a ghost.

  Junchao smiled with relief.

  “Tigers do everything alone,” Sunny said. “Spiders do too. They’re called solitary animals. This way they have more space to live in and they don’t have to share their food.”

  “And why are you telling us this right now?” I asked.

  “I’m giving you examples of the kinds of animals that do things alone, like you’re about to do.”

  “But Masha isn’t about to hunt antelope or spin a web to catch a fly,” Alice said.

  “Yeah, she’s more likely to be the antelope or the fly,” Junchao added.

  My stomach gurgled.

  “Junchao!” Alice cried. “She is not the antelope or the fly.”

  “Of course I didn’t mean that,” Junchao said. “I’m sorry, Masha. I meant you’re the tiger . . . the giant, stalking, roaring, fierce tiger.”

  “Thanks, Junchao.”

  “And we’ll be right here watching,” Alice said.

  She squeezed my hand. I squeezed hers back.

  Then we slowly brought our heads out from under the cover. The cool air made my eyes sting with tears. All four of us searched the darkness . . . for a flapping white sheet, or a floating skeleton, or worst of all, a howling face with black eyes.

  “Does anyone see anything?” I whispered.

  No one did.

  “Hey,” I said, having a thought that sent a wave of happiness through me so big that it felt like Christmas morning and all the presents under the tree had my name on them. “Maybe the lights in the entire town are out and this whole thing is just a big electrical problem!”

  “Yeah,” said Junchao. “It’s probably just a power outage. Good thinking, Masha. ”

  It was good thinking. But why hadn’t Sunny thought of it? Then again, it’s not like she’s the only one who had good thoughts in this house. I had good thoughts too. Now I needed to think of a way to find out if it was a power outage.

  “Stand up on the couch and look out the window. If the streetlight is off, then the town is out. If the streetlight is on, then it’s just us,” Sunny said.

  Okay, so she had a few more good thoughts than I did.

  I threw off the blanket and stood up on the couch.

  The streetlight was on. Shoot—Christmas was over.

  I dropped down and pulled the blanket back up over my shoulders.

  “Anyone have any last-minute advice before I go for the lights?” I asked.

  Junchao moaned.

  “When you get off the couch, don’t put your feet right by it,” Alice said.

  “Why?”

  “The tiny men.” She pointed down by the bottom of the couch.

  “The what?” I asked.

  “Tiny men. They live under things like couches and beds. My grandmother says that if you put your feet on the floor next to the bed in the night, they will pull you under and . . .”

  “Stop! Don’t tell me what they do,” I said.

  “Have you ever seen them?” asked Junchao.

  “My grandmother bought me a ship captain’s bed that has drawers under it, so the little men can’t live under my bed. So I’ve never seen them.”

  I looked over the side of the couch. The moonlight coming through the window made a shadow fall on the floor, so I couldn’t see whether or not there were any tiny guys hiding below.

  “Put your foot down and test it,” Sunny suggested, her stinky breath hot on my neck. “It’s what a scientist would do.”

  “You put your foot down and test it. You’re the scientist,” I snapped.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of a guinea pig?” Sunny asked.

  I ignored her. For some reason I was feeling like this ghost stuff was all Sunny’s fault, which of course I knew that it wasn’t. Anyway, just the thought of my bare foot dangling over the side of the couch made me shiver.

  I looked over at the light switch by the kitchen door and wondered if I could jump from the couch all the way over to it. But that’s when I had another good thought. “Wait,” I said. “I don’t have to run across the room. I can just turn on the lamp.”

  “Good idea,” Junchao whispered.

  I reached out my hand about three inches toward the lamp. I tried not to picture something grabbing me. My fingers wiggled about in the air. The lamp was still pretty far away. I needed to lean out of the blanket more.

  Now my shoulder and a big chunk of my body were completely available to the ghost. But I was almost there. I felt up along the stem of the lamp in the dark to the silver key-looking thing that turned it on. I snapped it around. The light did not come on.

  “Turn it again,” Junchao squeaked.

  I snapped it again.

  Nothing.

  Snap.

  Nothing.

  Snap.

  Nothingsnapnothingsnapnothing . . . that is, until Junchao screamed!

  All four of us met back under the blanket.

  “We can’t keep doing this,” I huffed. “We’re going to suffocate in here.”

  “Why is the light not working?” Alice whined.

  “The ghost did it,” cried Junchao.

  We all crowded in closer together. None of us wanted our arms or legs out where a cold, ghostly claw could wrap around them.

  “I’m sure the lightbulb just burned out,” I said.

  “An LED, or ‘light-emitting diode,’ lightbulb can last up to fifty thousand hours,” said Sunny.

  “That’s over a year!” Junchao moaned.

  “Actually it’s almost six years,” Sunny said.

  “Well, we must have brought this lightbulb from Pennsylvania when we moved,” I grumbled. “Because it just burned out.” I tried to scratch my nose under the blanket and ended up elbowing Junchao in the stomach by accident. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” Junchao said. “But Alice, get off my leg.”

  “You’re on my leg,” said Alice.

  “I think that’s me,” I admitted. “Listen, I need to get to the light by the kitchen.”

  No one said anything.

  “I’m going now,” I said very bravely, but my stomach was shaking.

  “Xing Yun San You forever,” Alice whispered.

  Junchao nodded, her hair sticking to the top of the blanket in a wild black mess. “Come back to us, Masha. Because two isn’t a very lucky number.”

  “We’d actually be three again.” Sunny shrugged, pointing at Alice, Junchao, and herself.

  I growled at my little sister.

  “But four is a good number too,” she added. “It’s the natural number that follows three and precedes five. It’s also the only number that has the same number of characters as its value in the English language. You know, the word four has four letters. And let’s not forget that it’s also a highly composite number. And everybody knows that the number four is the only even number—”

  “Sunny,” I hissed. Maybe getting snatched away forever by a ghost wouldn’t be that bad.

  I peeked out from the blanket and looked all around the room one more time. There were about a billion places for a ghost to hide along the path to the light switch:

  Crouched behind the green chair . . .

  Under the piano bench . . .

  Behind the drapes like Sunny . . .

  So what I had to do was jump over the coffee
table, run past the green chair and the piano bench, flip on the switch, and then run back before the ghost could get me. Sunny, Junchao, and Alice stuck their heads out from under the blanket to watch.

  “Here goes,” I whispered.

  I stood up on the couch . . . and then I leaped over the coffee table, ran across the living room as far away from the green chair as I could, and dove by the piano bench while reaching for the switch.

  I turned it on.

  No light.

  Junchao gave a squeaky yelp.

  From the hall came the clomp, clomp, clomp of footsteps.

  It was like all the electricity that had been sucked out of our lights was zinging through my body and making every single hair on my head stand straight up.

  I couldn’t think.

  I couldn’t move.

  All I could do was flip that dumb switch up and down and up and down until . . .

  Wooo. Wooo. Wooooo.

  I flew back across the room and onto the couch, knocking into Sunny, Alice, and Junchao like a bowling ball into bowling pins.

  There really was a ghost!

  Team Smasha

  We wrestled the blanket back over our heads and wrapped ourselves into a four-person ball underneath it.

  “I have to get Mrs. Song,” I panted.

  “No!” Alice shouted right into my ear.

  “I want to go home,” Junchao whimpered.

  “You can’t,” said Sunny.

  “Why not?” asked Junchao.

  Sunny was quiet for a second. And then she said, “Because you’d have to go out there to get home, and the ghost might get you.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you said there was no such thing as ghosts.”

  “Well, I’m not always right, Masha.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “You’re not.”

  Although somehow this was making her right and making ghosts real.

  “Aren’t you at least going to try to use science to explain this?” I asked. I couldn’t believe that I was actually begging Sunny to be her pain-in-the-butt self.

  “With average use, an LED lightbulb should last as long as twenty years, and therefore, it’s improbable that it should burn out,” she said. “But all the LED lightbulbs in the house burning out at exactly the same time? I would say that is impossible.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means there’s a ghost!” Junchao cried. “You have to wake up Mrs. Song.”

  “No, you can’t!” Alice yelled.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Let’s just think. We can deal with this, can’t we?”

  “Deal with a ghost?” asked Junchao.

  “Yes,” I said. “We just need a plan to get rid of him.”

  “How do you know it’s a him?” asked Sunny.

  Somehow, the idea of a lady ghost seemed scarier than a man ghost. I pictured her floating over the coffee table a few feet away, grinning down at the four of us clumped under our blanket, and all I wanted to do was shrink to the size of a cornbread crumb.

  “Come on now, guys, think. What do we do? How do we get the ghost to go away?” I said.

  “We need to exercise him,” said Alice.

  “You mean exorcise,” said Sunny.

  “That sounds too scary,” said Junchao.

  I didn’t say anything, but I thought so too.

  “Sunny, where does Mom keep the flashlight?”

  “In the kitchen cabinet next to the stove,” she said.

  The three of us groaned. The kitchen.

  “If we can grab my braces and crutches,” Alice said, “we can all go together to the kitchen. My dad put them by the front door.”

  It was a good idea to get them, not just so that we could all get to the kitchen, but in case we needed to run away from a ghost. Can you even run away from a ghost? That question made my heart flutter in my chest. I didn’t know, but I did know that we needed Alice with us. “Yes, let’s get your stuff,” I said.

  Once again, we slowly took the blanket off our heads. Before anything else strange or scary could happen, I quickly rolled up the blanket in a ball and threw it out into the middle of the room.

  “What did you do that for?” Junchao said.

  “We can’t keep hiding under the blanket all night. We need to get rid of this ghost.” I was sounding pretty brave for someone who felt like throwing her arms up in the air and running out of the house screaming like a freak.

  “How are we going to do that?” asked Junchao.

  “How about we get to my room,” Sunny said. “I have some science equipment that might help us. And I have Mommy’s iPad. We can look up ghost removal,” Sunny said.

  “You’re brilliant, Sunny!” Junchao said.

  “Oh yes,” I said. “Let’s say that again because I don’t think that Sunny gets to hear that enough.”

  “You’re brilliant—”

  “So this is the plan,” I said, cutting Junchao off. That girl does not understand sarcasm at all, and I didn’t have time to teach it to her. “Junchao and I are going to get Alice’s walking equipment by the front door, and then all four of us will head to the kitchen for the flashlight, and then we’ll go to Sunny’s room.”

  “But the front door is scary,” Junchao whined.

  We all looked over at it.

  She was right.

  It was scary.

  Long, stretchy shadows of tree branches flooded the floor through the front door window. On either side of the door were deep, dark corners, and anything could be hiding there. And then there was the front hall closet.

  The front hall closet was scary even on a bright, sunny day. It was filled with old coats that no one ever wore, had boxes of mysterious stuff stacked on its floor, and its top shelf held my mother’s collection of matryoshka dolls, which were these creepy wooden dolls with giant staring eyes and no arms or legs. Inside each doll were more dolls. Lots more. I always hated this idea, that all those other little dolls with staring eyes were sitting in the dark inside each other. And now they were all sitting in the closet . . . with the ghost.

  “Where do you think ghosts live?” I asked, hoping bucketfuls of hope that no one would say closets.

  “The attic,” said Alice.

  I sighed a giant sigh of relief.

  “My grandmother once told us that my brother and I had an older sister named Elizabeth who lived in the attic. And she only came down at night. My grandmother said that Elizabeth would brush our hair and sing to us while we were asleep. But anyway, Elizabeth wasn’t a ghost, so maybe that doesn’t count.”

  “I don’t ever want to meet your grandmother,” I said.

  I glanced back over at the door. Ghosts live in the attic . . . with Elizabeth, I told myself. They don’t live in closets. But it’s not like we have to open it. The walking stuff was sitting by the door, and not inside that closet . . . with all the creepy, staring dolls.

  “We can do this, Junchao.” I looked into her eyes. “Remember the bugs at summer camp? Remember how scared you were of them? But by the end of camp, you knew everything about them and were practically BFFs with anything that crept or crawled, even spiders!”

  “I don’t want to make friends with this ghost,” she said.

  “We don’t have to make friends with it. We just have to get Alice’s stuff so that we can get to Sunny’s room and learn how to get rid of it.”

  “Okay, Masha,” she said. “I’m with you.”

  But she wasn’t.

  As soon as we stepped off the couch onto the coffee table (to avoid the tiny men), Junchao turned around and jumped right back onto the couch with Alice and Sunny. I was right behind her.

  “Why’d you do that?” I huffed, trying to catch my breath. Without the blanket, we were totally exposed.

  “I thought I smelled something!” she said.

  The four of us sniffed.

  “Like a cinnamon bun?” asked Sunny.

  “You smell cinnamon buns?” I asked.<
br />
  “No,” she said. “I’m just hungry.”

  “How can you be hungry when we might be ghost food at any second?” I whispered at her. Then I turned to Junchao. “What did you think you smelled?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.” She hung her little head and all her black hair slid over her face.

  I looked over at the front door. I knew that I had to go and get Alice’s stuff, even if it meant going to the front door alone. I didn’t smell anything, but I did hear something. It sounded like boom, boom, boom. It was my heart . . . beating away in my chest. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  “You know that’s what they all say in the movies when they go off alone . . . that they’ll be right back,” Alice said. “And they never come back.”

  She was right. But Junchao wouldn’t go and Alice couldn’t go. I looked over at Sunny.

  “I’ll go,” she said.

  I looked into her big eyes. She didn’t look afraid. “Okay,” I said. “Ready?”

  Sunny answered by crawling to the edge of the couch. I followed her.

  “We’re a team,” she whispered hotly into my ear.

  “Shh,” I said. But then, because it was awfully nice that she volunteered to come with me, I added, “We’re Munny.”

  Sunny giggled. “Or Smasha.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from giggling too.

  Sunny grabbed my hand, and we left the safety of the group. We stepped silently onto the top of the coffee table, and then off the other side. We stared out across the living room and then back at each other, and then we headed out into the abyss. We moved slowly, tripping over each other’s feet as we made our way toward the brown chair that sat between the big picture window and the front door. Once at the brown chair, we stopped for a rest.

  “You okay?” I whispered.

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling up at me.

  Just as we were about to take another step toward the front door, we heard them . . . the clomp, clomp, clomp of the footsteps.

  We grabbed onto each other and dropped to the ground. The footsteps stopped. We could hear Junchao and Alice breathing from the couch. Or at least I hoped that it was Junchao and Alice.

  Then came that terrible howl.

  Wooo. Wooo. Wooooo.

  “Sunny!” I whispered. “Let’s get those braces and crutches.”