Sunny Sweet Is So Not Sorry

by Jennifer Ann Mann

  To Maria Hykin

  Contents

  Waking Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed

  Jumping In

  Crash

  Masha, Not Marsha

  Just Sit There

  Contracting a Killer Virus

  Contracting a Killer Virus … Not

  Getting a Break

  Dr. Sonya Sweet

  The Fix

  Being Marsha Sweet

  Rolling toward Freakdom

  Embracing Your Freakdom

  Not Blending

  Sunny Sweet Is So Sorry

  Run!

  Sisters

  Ancient Chinese Proverb: What You Cannot Avoid, Welcome; Another Ancient Chinese Proverb: Easier Said than Done

  A Changed Person

  Sunny Sweet Is So Dead Meat

  Acknowledgments

  Waking Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed

  I was sound asleep when my head itched. Somehow my sleeping brain sent the message to my fingers to go scratch it. And they went. But they certainly didn’t expect to find what they did when they got there. I wasn’t sleeping anymore. I sat up. Or at least I tried to, but my head was weirdly heavy. And not because I was still tired, but because my pillow was stuck to it!

  “Huh?”

  You know how you have places for things in your brain? Places like where your favorite breakfast stuff hangs out. Or the place where you keep the memory of building that cool fort out of old wood and cardboard boxes. Or the corner where you just crammed all the information you need for the gigantic test you have in Mrs. Hull’s fifth-grade science class. But nowhere in my brain was there a place for this moment … waking up on a Thursday morning with my pillow pasted to my right ear.

  I ripped the pillow off as if it were a Band-Aid—hard and fast. It’s a lie, by the way, that pulling something off fast doesn’t hurt. It does. But I mostly forgot about my throbbing head when I saw what was stuck to my purple-flannel pillowcase: a big clump of long hair (my hair!) and a giant purple daisy. My hands grabbed my head where that clump of hair had just been, and now my fingers knew exactly what they were feeling … plastic flowers!

  I jumped out of bed and ran to the mirror that hung over my dresser. “Holy moly crocatoly!” My head was some sort of Thanksgiving Day table decoration!

  I heard the soft pattering of six-year-old feet approach my door. Sunny peeked in. I looked down at her, and she looked back at me, and I knew. I just knew. Maybe it was the roundness of her eyes as she blinked at me. Or maybe it was the way she stood so still, like a deer that had just heard a twig snap. Or maybe it was the sound of her voice when she said, “Good morning, Masha,” like she was some proper little English kid.

  And she knew I knew … because she took a slow step back into the hallway.

  I lunged but that tiny little toothpick body of hers was too quick, and she took off down the hall toward our mother’s room.

  “Get back here!” I screamed. “What did you do?”

  * * *

  I busted through the bedroom door to find Sunny cowering behind my mother. “Masha, what’s going on? I’m trying to get ready for …” but then my mom stopped and stared.

  “She did it!” I screeched, pointing at my little sister.

  “Calm down, Masha,” my mother said, but I could see her hiding a smile behind her hand.

  Sunny wasn’t hiding anything. She broke into ear-piercing giggles as she slid backward into my mother’s closet, her tiny body disappearing behind a row of shiny dresses.

  “Mom!”

  “Okay,” my mother said, turning and reaching through a hundred soft sleeves to retrieve my sister. “Sunny, explain yourself.”

  “Explain yourself?” I cut in. “How can you explain this cornucopia of horror stuck to my head?”

  “That isn’t a cornucopia,” Sunny said, pointing at my head. “A cornucopia is a horn-shaped basket filled with fruits and vegetables.”

  My mother got down on one knee. “Do you know where the first cornucopia came from?” she asked.

  “Greek mythology,” my sister answered.

  “WHY ARE WE HAVING SOME SORT OF LEARNING MOMENT WHEN I HAVE PLASTIC FLOWERS STUCK TO MY HEAD?”

  I shouted so loudly that I hurt my own ears, and Sunny scampered out of the room like a squirrel up a tree. Then, all out of steam, I flopped onto my mother’s bed. The plastic flowers immediately got tangled up in her crocheted bedspread, so even this act of frustration—flinging myself onto my mother’s bed—became frustrating. My little sister is the devil!

  I know that lots of kids have annoying little brothers and sisters. I’ve been around; I’ve seen them. Take my cousin Suki: she has my little cousin Bruce to deal with. Bruce is always trying to lick people, and my aunt Lila makes us play air hockey with him for hours when I visit. But Bruce also lets Suki have anything she wants out of his Easter basket, and he never tells his mom when Suki pretends to eat her peas but is really just spitting them one by one into her milk.

  Sunny would tell.

  And Sunny wouldn’t stop with just telling on me; she’d take it a step further and discuss it with my mom—like why she thinks I did what I did, pretending to be some kind of doctor. And you know why? Because she is some kind of doctor! Well, not exactly a doctor, but a genius. She was born brilliant. And normally I would just be like, good for her, you know, go, genius girl, go, but she also happened to be born evil … making her an evil genius. And I know that the day is coming when she’ll invent some poisonous gas that will snuff out the sun and freeze us all into human Popsicles, but until that time, she seems perfectly content to practice her evil schemes on me.

  “Okay, Masha, you’re right.” My mother sighed as she bent over me and started disconnecting my head from her bedspread. But her tone made me feel like she didn’t really believe I was right. I hated when she did that—said something that seemed like she was on my side but actually sounded like she felt the opposite. “Wow,” she whispered as she worked, “these things are really glued in there.”

  I moaned.

  My cell phone began ringing from down the hall. It was probably Sunny. Sunny always called my cell. When it stopped ringing and then started again, I knew it was my little sister. Only Sunny would do that too! Sunny loves her cell phone, and not because she likes talking to people, but because she loves things like radio frequencies and voice channels and duplex connections and other tools of her evil trade. I didn’t get to have my own cell phone until this Christmas, when I turned eleven years old. And two presents after I opened mine, Sunny opened hers—and she’s only six years old! My mother said Sunny’s phone was just for emergencies. Yeah, right, like Sunny is going to dial 911 when she blows up the earth.

  Just as my mother was finishing untangling the last flower from her bedspread, my cell phone rang a third time. “Sunny,” my mom yelled down the hall, “cut it out!”

  Even my mother knew that it was Sunny calling me. We moved from Pennsylvania to New Jersey last year after my mom divorced my dad. I’d been going to my new school for almost eight months, but the only person who called me, ever, was Sunny. And even though this was the truth, it still completely annoyed me that my mom assumed that the only “friend” I’d made since the move was my very own sister.

  “I’m going to bury you in the backyard like a dog bone when Mom’s not looking!” I said to Sunny as she skipped back into the room with her cell phone pressed to her ear.

  My mother pursed her lips and turned to my little sister. “Sunny, what did you do?”

  “SHE GLUED A BUNCH OF PLASTIC FLOWERS TO MY HEAD!” I shouted.

  I shout a lot. I can’t help it. Sunny makes me. She sets things up so that even Martin Luther Ki
ng Jr. would have broken down and popped someone right in the nose.

  “Shush, Masha,” my mother said without turning to look at me. Maybe if she did turn and look at me she’d see the big blooming reason I can’t “shush”! But she doesn’t turn and look. She never does. Her eyes are always too busy focusing on Sonya Sweet.

  That is my sister’s full name, although we never call her Sonya; we just call her Sunny. My dad started it. It was on the day that Sonya first came home from the hospital, you know, before we knew she was Darth Vader. I don’t really remember it because I was just five years old, but I remember the story. And sometimes the retelling of a story over and over again gets it stuck so tightly in your head that it turns into a real event that you actually remember happening.

  My dad said it had rained the entire month before Sonya was born, and then rained all through my mother’s giving birth to her, and then through the two days that she and my mom were in the hospital. It rained so much that there was all this flooding and everyone was nervous about water in their basements and dams breaking. I do remember that we didn’t have school for two days because the roof of the school was leaking. My dad was the principal and he had canceled school so no one would get hurt. I loved it when my dad called off school. It made me a hero on the school bus the next day. All the older kids would give me high-fives and knuckle punches, like I’d saved the world from zombies.

  When the morning came that Sonya and my mom were due to come home from the hospital, the sun burst out so hot and strong that my dad said the whole town sighed a giant sigh all together. He said that Sonya had brought the sun. And after that, “Sunny” just stuck.

  My name is Masha Sweet, and I don’t know what the weather was like on the day that I came home from the hospital. Masha is Russian for “Maria.” My mom was born in Russia and came to the United States back when she was my age.

  “Sunny?” she asked again. “Tell Mommy why you did this to Masha.”

  “I wanted to make her pretty,” Sunny answered, her face lit up by the fakest glow of love you ever saw.

  “Oh.” My mom sighed, like it was so cute—as if what mini-Vader did was to help me!

  “SHE’S NOT EVEN SORRY!” I screamed, and I couldn’t stop myself from leaping at Sunny’s throat.

  My mom’s stockings ripped as she held me back from strangling my little sister.

  Jumping In

  I sat shivering in the green chair in the corner of the living room. My hair was sopping wet and soaking through my favorite panda pajamas, and plastic flowers were still solidly stuck to my head. The green chair is where my mother used to give me time-outs when I was, like, two years old. And yes, I admit that I had been getting a little loud. So would you if you had just spent fifteen minutes with your nose pressed to the drain at the bottom of the kitchen sink while your mother practically scrubbed your scalp off. But still, I am way too old for a time-out.

  Anyway, my mom thought it would be a good idea if I sat and “calmed down.” I told her that I would totally “calm down” as soon as this flower arrangement was off my head! But now I’ve decided to sit quietly because I could see my mom was getting upset. And I hate it when she gets upset.

  Sunny came slithering down the hallway.

  “Go away,” I growled.

  She didn’t listen. She never does. It’s what makes Sunny so evil. She tortures me and then hangs around, not seeming to get the fact that she tortured me.

  She came right up to my chair and leaned over, reaching out to my head.

  “Don’t touch me,” I told her, pulling my flowers away. I stared straight ahead of me, making a point of not looking at her.

  “Remember that Halloween,” she said, “when Daddy took that box and pasted a tablecloth over it and then pasted plastic plates to it? And plastic cups and plastic forks and plastic knives and plastic spoons and napkins, but not plastic napkins, those were paper. And he made bacon and pancakes, and we glued them to the plates. And he got an old hat of his and then we glued lots of flowers to the hat. And then he cut a hole in the top of the box, right in the middle, and I stuck my head through and wore the hat with the flowers glued to it.”

  I remembered, but I was not speaking to her.

  “I was a breakfast table!” she yelled. “Remember? Everybody loved it, especially the dogs. Remember the dogs jumping at me because they really wanted that bacon? I got knocked over by a hundred dogs that night. What were you for Halloween that year? Oh, I remember,” she said. “You were a mime.”

  “I was a bank robber,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, staring at me with her giant blue eyes. “I think you were a mime. Remember, you were all dressed in black and had that black hat on.” The fact that Sunny really seemed to remember me as a mime just made me want to strangle her even more.

  “Mom! I’m going to be late for school and miss my test in science!” I shouted into the kitchen, making Sunny jump.

  My test wasn’t until after lunch, but still, I didn’t want to show up to school late. Just the thought of showing up late made me feel sweaty. And I knew that I wouldn’t get over that sweaty, late feeling by lunchtime. I liked things to happen the way they were supposed to happen. You know, like showing up for school at the time you were supposed to show up for school. Sitting in time-out with a sopping-wet garden glued to the top of my head with Sunny chatting away about Halloween was a pretty solid example of how things were not supposed to happen.

  “I’m trying to think,” my mother called from the kitchen.

  “She’s thinking,” Sunny repeated, like I was deaf as well as stupid.

  “CALL THE DOCTOR!” I shouted.

  “Masha,” my mother yelled back, “Stop shouting!”

  “But anyway, I made the glue myself,” Sunny said, sitting on the arm of my chair. “Move over.”

  I purposely spread out farther, taking up as much pillow space as I could. There is an entire other chair in the room—and a couch. Sunny always wants to sit half on top of me.

  “I bet those two girls at school that you always talk about—what are their names?—anyway, I bet they’ll love your flowers,” Sunny said, reaching out again to try and touch a bloom.

  I snapped my head away from her finger and glared at her. Sunny was talking about Nicole Sims and Alex Ruez. Nicole and Alex were model fifth graders. They didn’t have a single clothing mistake in their entire closets. They got sky-high grades in all their classes. They played sports without doing some silly sliding split when they went to catch a ball. They even did extra things like playing the cello and singing solos in the chorus. Everyone knew Nicole and Alex. And just the thought of the two of them standing in the hallway of Seward Elementary watching me pass by with my head full of plastic flowers made all the air in my lungs vanish … leaving me just enough to yell directly into Sunny’s evil little face, “Go away!”

  She fell backward off the arm of the chair and then jumped up and turned herself around in one motion, taking off down the hallway out of my sight.

  My mother walked into the room with her cell phone pressed to her ear and a “you’d better calm down” look boring into my soul. She spoke politely into the phone, “Yes, good morning. This is Jane Sweet. How are you? Yes, of course I’ll hold.” That’s when I remembered that I had decided to sit quietly so I wouldn’t upset her.

  I pulled my backpack up on my lap so I could open my Longman Active Study English-Chinese Dictionary without taking the book out of my bag. I was learning Mandarin Chinese but didn’t want my mom or Sunny to know. Back at my old school, they had just begun to offer Chinese. It had been my dad’s idea. Since I was a good Spanish student, I had been chosen to begin the new language classes. But then we moved. They didn’t offer Chinese in my new school, so I decided to “borrow” the book and learn it by myself. I kept it a secret because Sunny would have just learned Chinese in a week and spoiled the whole language for me. The only one who knew my secret was my neighbor, Mrs. Song. She was really p
atient, even when it took me a ton of times to say something right.

  Sunny crawled back into the room on her hands and knees, and I shoved my Chinese dictionary into my backpack. She made her way over to my mother. “Who are you calling, Mom?” she asked.

  My mother held her finger to her lips to quiet her. “Yes, hello. Well, I’m not sure,” she said into the phone. “Maybe I should speak with the nurse?”

  “She’s calling the doctor,” Sunny said to me, like I didn’t get it. I zipped up my backpack and let it slide to the floor, ignoring her.

  “Masha?” she said.

  When I didn’t look at her, Sunny repeated herself over and over again, with just a tiny pause between each time, “Masha … Masha … Masha,” until I finally stared over at her.

  “Mom’s calling the doctor,” she said.

  “Shhh,” I hissed with my eyebrows locked together.

  “Hi, Barbara, how are you? It’s Jane Sweet.”

  Silence … followed by my mom’s fake laughter. I’m sure Nurse Barbara just made some “sour” joke. People are always making sweet-and-sour jokes when we say our name. They can’t help themselves. Last summer, when we first moved here, I had to hear so many sweet-and-sour jokes that I stopped even giving people that little smile you’re supposed to give someone telling a bad joke. I’d heard them all … fifty times. People back in Pennsylvania were used to our name because it was my dad’s name and he’d grown up in that town, just like me. Plus, he was in charge of the whole school, Principal Sweet, and everyone loved him, so “Sweet” just fit him naturally and wasn’t funny.

  “Well, Barbara, we’re having a rough morning. It’s Masha …”

  I opened my mouth in horror. It’s not me, it’s her … the scrawny little being that plots world destruction standing right next to you!

  “There was a bit of an accident with some glue and plastic flowers.”

  Silence.

  “Yes, plastic flowers. They sort of … got stuck in Masha’s hair.”