Sunny Sweet Is So Not Sorry

by Jennifer Ann Mann

  I gawked at my mother and flung my body across the green chair. Sort of? Yeah, right, an accident.

  I reached up and yanked at “the accident.” The wet mass of plastic was totally and completely glued into my hair. And I have some serious hair. It’s dark brown and goes all the way down my back almost to my butt. The flowers were glued into my hair at the very top of my head, close to my roots, so they looked like they grew out of my skull overnight.

  My mother sat down on the edge of the couch, fiddling with the hole in her stocking and waiting—I guess—for someone to find “ungluing plastic flowers from heads” in a medical book. Sunny got up from her place on the floor and sat down directly next to my mother, putting her head on my mother’s shoulder. My mom lifted her arm and put it around Sunny. The urge came over me to use the throw pillow from my chair just as its name suggests.

  “Yes, I’m here,” my mom said into the phone. Kissing the top of Sunny’s blond head, she stood up and wandered over to the front window. “Yes. Uhhuh. A goldfish? That sounds awful. Uh-huh. Yes, I’ve heard of the dime up the nose.”

  WHAT ARE THEY TALKING ABOUT? I shouted—but only in my head so my mother wouldn’t have any trouble hearing when they gave her the secret recipe for getting this stuff off me.

  “Okay, yes,” she said to the nurse into her cell phone, but her eyes were focused right at me in my green chair. “Thanks so much.” She hung up and didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to. There was obviously no secret recipe.

  “Let’s try the freezer,” my mother said.

  “What?” I whined. But I was up and out of the chair and heading to the kitchen.

  “What’s in the freezer?” Sunny asked, stumbling at my heels.

  My mother thought that freezing the glue might make it possible to crack the flowers off my head. It didn’t sound like it was going to work, but I stuck my head in the freezer while my mother changed her stockings and got the pocket-sized Dr. Frankenstein ready for school. The freezer reminded me of Antarctica, and not just because of the lonely coldness of it, but because it was such an alien place. I really hadn’t spent much time in the freezer before. I laid my head on a box of frozen pizza, and after ten minutes of staring at dirty ice cube trays my mother checked back in. First she pulled on a blue one. Then she yanked at a pink one. The daisies did not crack off my head.

  “What about peanut butter?” my mom suggested. “That’s what they use to get chewing gum out of hair.” I just blinked at her. She turned and reached for the jar of super-crunchy Skippy.

  Sunny Sweet is going to be so sorry!

  Crash

  Sunny had to go to school, and my mom had to go to work. She had some huge meeting that she was stressed about. She always had some huge meeting she was stressed about. You could never say this to her, though. If you did, she’d remind you about how she’s got a lot on her plate, blah, blah, blah, and make you feel all guilty—like it was my big idea to divorce my dad and move to another state.

  Luckily Mom agreed that I should stay home. She wiped the last of the peanut butter off my forehead with a wet paper towel and told me to call Mrs. Song next door if I needed anything. Then she promised we’d figure it all out when she got home. Sunny actually begged to stay with me. We go to the same school. And even though it was only three blocks away, my mom always dropped us off in the morning and Sunny and I would meet up after school and walk home together. Sunny hated school. She was in a regular first-grade class with kids her age, but the school pulled her out for a lot of the day and let her work one-on-one with these gifted teachers. Although she still had to be in with the other kids for lunch and recess and stuff. My mother said that it was hard for Sunny to relate to the other kids because she was so advanced and all.

  Yeah, right. Maybe it’s hard for the other kids to relate to pure evil.

  I knew my mom would never let my sister stay home from school. But just in case, I made sure she understood that anyone in the house without plastic flowers glued to her head would be spending the day locked in a closet.

  I stayed by the front door even after I couldn’t see my mom’s car anymore. I couldn’t believe that I was going to miss my science test, but there was no way that I was showing up at my new school like this. I’d been going there for all of fifth grade, but I always thought about it as my “new” school. I wasn’t really great friends with anybody there. The girls had known each other since kindergarten and already had their best friends, and even their second-best friends. The boys were, you know, just boys. They went around whipping scrap paper at each other and laughing at absolutely anything that sounded like a fart. I went to school every day, but mostly I don’t think anybody noticed me except to ask me stuff about homework. And they only did that if Junchao Tao was absent. Junchao was the second-smartest kid in our school, since of course, Sunny Sweet was the smartest. And of course, Junchao sat right behind me because her last name was “Tao” and mine was “Sweet.” It seemed like I always got stuck next to the geniuses. But at least Junchao was a super-quiet brilliant kid, unlike my little sister, who never shut up.

  I turned and stared into the front hall mirror. Well, I bet they would have noticed me today. You don’t exactly blend in when you have a bouquet pasted to the top of your head. Reaching up, I plucked a petal from one of the flowers. “I ace the makeup science test.” I plucked another. “I ace the makeup science test not.” And then another. “I ace the makeup science test …”

  Crash!

  I heard the sound of rattling empty cans and old plastic bottles hopping along the road. It sounded like my neighbor, Mrs. Song, had just backed her car into our garbage cans again. The garbagemen always left the cans sitting right behind her car, and she never remembered to check for them. I opened the front door with a smile on my face because the last petal I had pulled before the crash said I would ace my science test.

  When I looked down the front walk I didn’t see her car, just our garbage cans all knocked over down by the curb, which was weird. Then a spinning bike tire sticking out from behind the cans caught my eye. I ran down the front steps and out to the sidewalk. There was Mrs. Song lying in the garbage! Her eyes were closed and she wasn’t moving.

  I dropped to my knees. “Oh my gosh, Mrs. Song. Mrs. Song, it’s me, Masha. Are you okay?”

  I bent down into her face. She was breathing. I put my hand on her chest and waited for her heartbeat. I felt a steady knock against my palm. “Your heart’s beating, Mrs. Song,” I told her. Then I jumped up and looked around for help. The street was empty.

  “Help!” I croaked in a loudish whisper. All of a sudden I forgot how to shout. “Help!” I tried again, but the yell got stuck deep in my throat.

  I dropped back to my knees. “Mrs. Song, please wake up, wake up. Qing, qing,” I tried begging her in Chinese. It meant “please, please.” But Mrs. Song wasn’t listening. I shook her shoulder a tiny bit, but she still didn’t move. “I’ll call 911,” I told her. “I’ll be right back.” I watched her for one more second, hoping she’d open her eyes. She didn’t.

  I ran into the house and up the stairs, and ripped my cell phone from the charger. Then I practically jumped down the entire staircase and just about smashed right through the screen door. Three hops brought me back to the garbage pile. I slid to my knees through some broken eggshells and other gross, wet garbage, and stared down at Mrs. Song. She hadn’t woken up—or even moved—in the four seconds that it had taken me to get my cell phone.

  All of a sudden the buttons on my phone seemed like tiny dots and my thumb was as thick and wobbly as an uncooked hot dog. Before I could direct my finger to the number 9, the phone rang. I immediately dropped it like it burned me, and it clunked right onto poor Mrs. Song’s forehead. Not that she noticed, but still. I scooped up the phone and stared at the screen. The ten numbers were as familiar to me as the freckles on my nose—Sunny! I never put Sunny in as a contact because I never, ever wanted to contact her, so her telephone number just came up
as numbers. And when you see the same ten digits in a row over and over and over again, they become something together, and this something was a loud groan.

  “Sunny, I can’t talk right now,” I growled into the phone.

  “Hi, Masha. Mommy just dropped me at school. I’m walking past the teachers’ lounge, you know, the one by the nurse’s office.”

  “Sunny …”

  “I just saw Mrs. Harris in the front office.”

  “Sunny, listen to me.”

  “I just know she’s here to substitute for Mr. Fenton today. And that means I’m going to have to spend the whole day with her.”

  “Sunny, I am in an emergency situation.”

  “I don’t think it’s an emergency, Masha,” she said. “Unless the glue is burning you?”

  “The glue can burn?”

  “Mrs. Harris is the one who thinks that pi equals a-p-p-l-e,” she spelled. “How can I spend a whole day with her?”

  I had no idea what Sunny was talking about. I never do.

  “Sunny, I’m hanging up!”

  “But wait! I’m right on the edge of a hexagonal cell. Stay on the phone with me until I get to the second floor so I can watch the control channel change on the grid.”

  “Sunny, Mrs. Song had a bike accident and I need to call the ambulance.” I hung up on her and immediately dialed 9-1-1.

  Calling 911 is so weird. It’s just like on TV. The operator is completely calm, even when your neighbor is lying in front of you all sprawled out in kitchen garbage and maybe dying. He took my name and address and then listened to my story about how I found Mrs. Song and that she was breathing and her heart was beating and stuff. Then he gave me instructions on things I should and shouldn’t do. He was in the middle of explaining how to perform CPR if it became necessary, which was freaking me out, when Mrs. Song’s eyes fluttered open.

  “I gotta go,” I told the operator and hung up. “Mrs. Song, what happened? Why were you on a bike? Did you fall? I was so scared.”

  Mrs. Song blinked a bunch of times and tried to sit up.

  “Don’t move, Mrs. Song,” I told her. At least I remembered one thing the 911 operator told me.

  “Masha,” she said in her thick Mandarin accent, looking at the coffee grinds on her jacket and the bike seat two inches from her nose. She looked back at me and then reached for my face … but then she saw them. “Masha?” she asked, reaching for the flowers as if she thought that once her hand got close, they might disappear.

  “Sunny,” I explained.

  She nodded and dropped her hand to her side. She understood. Just last week, after Mrs. Song complained that we weren’t getting enough rain for her lilacs, Sunny tried to produce rain clouds. And she almost blew up Mrs. Song’s house. Of course my mom blamed the whole thing on the chemical company, who took her credit card number over the phone from Sunny and dropped off a truckload of liquid nitrogen in our driveway. My mom never blames stuff on Sunny. Sonya Sweet can never do anything wrong, even when she’s mixing up hazardous materials in her sand bucket!

  I shoved the garbage away from Mrs. Song’s head and then held her hand.

  “Ni ma ma work now?” she said, asking if my mom had left for work yet.

  “Yeah, she’s gone,” I told her.

  It seemed like forever before we heard the wop, wop, wop of the ambulance from down the street. It pulled up in front of us, and two guys jumped out.

  “What happened?” asked the first one. The second one went directly to the back doors of the ambulance and pulled out a bag.

  I was confused by the question. It looked obvious to me what had happened. “Uh, I think she fell off the bike into the garbage cans,” I told them.

  Mrs. Song shook her head and reached for me. “Masha, no hit garbage cans,” she said.

  Mrs. Song’s English isn’t that good, although she understands everything. Because of this, she always looks like she’s a little angry at you, but once you get to know her you realize it’s just because she can’t get people to understand her. And after a little bit of practice, you really begin to get her. I’ve lived next to Mrs. Song for almost a year now, so I totally get her.

  “What did she say?” asked the first guy, glancing up at my head and then back into my eyes without even a tiny reaction. I guess he sees a lot worse than a kid with plastic flowers stuck to her head. I kind of liked that. He was the “talker.” The second guy was the “worker,” and he was busy pulling stuff out of the bag and taking Mrs. Song’s pulse.

  “She said she didn’t crash into the garbage cans.” I shrugged. That’s what she said, but it didn’t make sense.

  Mrs. Song clung to my arm. “Yes, Masha, yes. Get tired, you know. Then here,” she said, looking around her.

  The talker guy looked at me for the meaning. “She said that she felt tired and then she wound up in the garbage.”

  “Syncopal episode,” said an extremely familiar voice.

  “Sunny,” I moaned, turning to see my little sister standing on the curb.

  “The kid’s right,” said the worker guy. “Syncopal episode.”

  Mrs. Song looked at me for what it meant. Of course I didn’t know.

  “You fainted,” Sunny said.

  “How did you get out of school?” I snapped.

  “I walked,” she said.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Okay, you two,” said the talker guy. “This is still an emergency situation, and that means we need to get going right now.”

  They began moving Mrs. Song onto the stretcher.

  I picked up Mrs. Song’s pocketbook and straw hat out of the garbage and placed them on the stretcher next to her arm. Sunny and I stood side by side as they loaded her up into the ambulance. Before they shut the door, Mrs. Song pulled herself up on the stretcher. “No,” she called. “Don’t leave children.”

  Sunny and I turned and looked at each other.

  If there had been time to think, maybe I would have thought about the fact that I still had on my panda pajamas and there were a bunch of plastic flowers on my head. And that maybe I didn’t want to be jumping into the back of an ambulance for a trip to the hospital with my little sister.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” said the talker guy, rolling his eyes.

  But there wasn’t time to think.

  I grabbed Sunny’s hand and jumped in.

  Masha, Not Marsha

  We told the talker guy our names. His name was Dan, and we gave him all the information we had on Mrs. Song. Sunny even told him that she cooked the best dumplings that anybody ever made. Mrs. Song held on to my hand the entire time, as if at any moment I might disappear from inside the cramped ambulance. It was hard to concentrate on the questions because there was so much to look at. There were a million cabinets jammed full of medical stuff, and radios, and strange equipment with so many straps that I couldn’t figure out what part of the body any of these things could be strapped to.

  Sunny sat next to Dan and watched as he stuck a needle in Mrs. Song’s arm. I couldn’t watch. Instead, I looked around the little cab. It was like a cozy, little, moving home. I started thinking about which cabinet I’d put my socks and underwear in if I lived in here, and I wondered if my sweaters would fit on the shelves in the tiny hallway that led to the driver. But then Dan picked up the radio.

  “This is 501 reporting …”

  His voice broke into the comfort of the cab, making my scalp twitch and reminding me of the flowers. “Dan, we gotta go home.”

  “No!” Sunny said, pumping up the blood pressure cuff to take her own blood pressure for, like, the third time since we got in the ambulance.

  “Shush,” I told her. “Dan …”

  He held up his hand. “One minute, Marsha,” he said.

  “Masha, not Marsha,” I said, but he was busy giving his report over the radio.

  “What is that peanut butter smell?” called the worker guy from the front of the cab as he pulled us to a stop. I still didn’t k
now his name.

  Ugh.

  “Dan, we really gotta go home,” I repeated.

  Neither Sunny nor Dan was listening to me. Sunny had her ears plugged up with Dan’s stethoscope, and Dan was busy packaging up Mrs. Song as if he were going to be sending her through UPS. He tucked in her blanket. He wound up the tubes he had inserted into her arm. He tightened the straps across her chest and legs.

  The back doors flung open. We were at the emergency room. A breeze blew into the truck, rustling the plastic petals in my hair. I was about to enter the outside world looking like spring had just exploded on top of my head. A moan slipped out from between my lips and I glared at my little sister.

  She grinned back at me. “This is great!” she said, like we were about to be dropped off outside the gates of Disney World and not a hospital.

  My stomach cramped up, and my head felt wobbly. Mrs. Song squeezed my hand. She didn’t look so good either, and she didn’t even have anything stuck to her head!

  That’s when I remembered Mrs. Song’s hat. I quickly picked it up and put it on. It was the wide-brimmed straw hat that she always wore. I pulled the thick red ribbons down under my chin and tied them tight. I could feel the flowers poking into the hat, just as they were poking into my scalp, but at least you couldn’t see them. Plus, maybe this would help cut down on the Skippy smell.

  I held Mrs. Song’s hand all the way into the ER—even while they moved her from the stretcher to the bed. Dan let Sunny carry a plastic bag filled with water attached to the tubing in Mrs. Song’s other arm. She held it out in front of her like it was a king’s crown on a pillow.

  There were a ton of people in the emergency room. Half of them were in blue scrubs, with most of the other half looking like they needed an extra-long bubble bath. This one guy in the bed next to Mrs. Song had a full cast on his leg, from above his knee down to his foot. I’ve always wanted a cast. At school, if you have a cast you get an elevator key and everyone wants to carry your books. I was right in the middle of having this great daydream of hobbling into Seward Elementary with a cast on my leg and crutches under my arms when Dan said, “See ya, Sunny, Marsha,” and swooshed the curtains shut.