Sunny Sweet Is So Not Sorry

by Jennifer Ann Mann

  We waited until almost everyone was in the building, and then Sunny and I finally got out of the car. I gave my mom a big smile to assure her I was okay. Her face glowed with worry through the windshield.

  “You know that they don’t have to shave your head to test you for a concussion,” Sunny said.

  “Yes, Sunny, I know. You already said that three times at breakfast. Mom just told the school that because it was easier than explaining your flowers.”

  “But what about my bald head?”

  “That’s why she also told them that you wanted to be just like your big sister and get a test on your head too, remember?”

  “But that makes it sound like I think that you need to have your head shaved for a test that you don’t need your head shaved for,” she whined.

  “What?” I asked.

  Sunny went on about cat or dog scans or something, but I had stopped listening. My feet slowed with each step, scraping lightly against the sidewalk, until they finally stopped altogether.

  Sunny stopped too. “Zhu ni hao yun,” she said. “It means ‘good luck’ in Chinese.”

  “I know what it means,” I snapped. But I didn’t.

  “Hey, Masha,” she said, tugging at my arm. “I think it’s cool that you’re learning Mandarin Chinese. Listen, maybe I should learn Cantonese. Cantonese is the language spoken in southern China and Hong Kong. That way, when we go to China one day, you can speak Mandarin and I can speak Cantonese, and we’ll be able to talk to everyone!”

  I wanted to be mad at her. But when I looked down at her little bald head, I just couldn’t. “There are more than 1.3 billion people living in China,” I said, quoting from page three of my Longman Active Study English-Chinese Dictionary. “That’s a whole lot of talking!”

  Sunny giggled. I took her hand, and together we started toward the front doors of school. There were more than 1.3 billion things I’d rather be doing right now other than walking into my school bald, but as far as I could see, there wasn’t one single way out of it.

  The warm, stuffy air inside the building hit me in the face. I said a quick good-bye to my little sister and then, with a hurricane swirling in my stomach, I tiptoed through the deserted hallways until I reached my homeroom.

  The door was open. I hovered across the hall, clutching my absentee note from my mother. A huge urge to run swept over me, and my legs wobbled with the effort not to do it. I reminded myself how soon I’d be with Alice, telling her all about this horrible moment. And then, with nothing left to stop me, I sucked in my breath as hard as I could and walked through the door.

  I can’t remember who saw me first. I just remember the moment when they all saw me. There was silence. And then there were wide-open eyes. And then gasps. And finally, after about five very long seconds, there came a burst of laughter. Mostly everything was a blur, although not the sight of Alex and Nicole looking at each other and laughing. That was pretty clear. My homeroom teacher, Mr. Valentino, put a fast end to it.

  “That’s it, everyone. Settle down.”

  He stopped writing his notes on the whiteboard and hurried over to me. “How’re you doing? I heard about your accident.” I handed him my note. He took it, along with my good arm, and helped me toward my seat, even though I really didn’t need any help. All heads swerved to watch us make our way across the silent classroom.

  “As you can see, Masha had a little accident,” he announced, his voice echoing across the quiet room. Then he turned directly to me. “We’re all so thankful you’re okay.” He pulled out my chair, and I sat down. Then he made his way back to the front of the classroom, but no one’s eyes followed him. They all stayed on me.

  My head felt light and empty. It ached from my bad decision not to wear a hat. We aren’t allowed to wear hats in school, but my mom said she’d ask if they could make an exception for me. I stupidly said no. Sunny had suggested that she wrap my head in gauze so I’d look a little like Michael Capezzi. Again, I said no. But now I was thinking that sporting the mummy look would have been better than this terrible naked feeling.

  The only sound in the room was the soft squeaking of Mr. Valentino’s marker. Then someone’s chair scraped the floor, moving so he or she could get a better view of me. It sounded like thunder. I stared straight ahead into nothing. The beating of my heart was actually hurting my ears, and the air in the room refused to go down my throat and into my lungs. I clung to the side of my desk and tried not to die of embarrassment, which I was very, very close to doing, when I felt a light tap on my back.

  It was so light that I wasn’t sure that it happened until it happened again.

  I turned my head to look behind me.

  “Did it hurt?” asked the second-smartest kid in school.

  It’s the first time I think I ever heard Junchao Tao speak. Her bravery reminded me that I, too, was now brave, and I spoke back to her … in Chinese.

  “You yi dian’er,” I said, holding up my thumb and pointer finger to show her that I meant “a little.”

  Her eyes opened in surprise, and she laughed. Her laugh shocked me. It was huge and deep, like a Santa Claus laugh. And Junchao Tao was about the size of my teddy bear.

  “Mei li de hei yan jing,” she said. I just stared at her. “Nice black eye,” she translated.

  I gave her a wink … Unfortunately I did it with my black eye. “Ouch.”

  “Ho-ho-ho,” she laughed.

  Her jolly chuckle broke the silence, and all at once, everybody wanted to know what happened to my hair, my arm, my eye. Did I get to ride in an ambulance? Yes. Was there a lot of blood? No. How long did I get to wear the cast? That one I just shrugged at. My mom hadn’t decided yet.

  “Mr. Valentino, Mr. Valentino,” Nicole called, swinging her arm in the air. “Doesn’t Masha get an elevator key?”

  “I almost forgot,” he said, walking over to his desk and pulling out a key. “The elevator should make your life a little easier for the next couple of weeks.” He made his way to my desk and handed me the golden key. It wasn’t really golden, but it felt like it was.

  “You should head out for reading group now so you don’t get pushed around in the hallway. And remember to leave reading a few minutes early so you miss the crowds coming back for math.”

  I nodded.

  “Mr. Valentino, Mr. Valentino,” Alex called, swinging her arm in the air. “Doesn’t Masha get to pick someone to carry her books?”

  “Sure she can,” Mr. Valentino said. “Masha?” he asked, waiting for me to choose someone.

  Nicole and Alex sat up straight in their chairs and smiled at me. I had a choice to make … and I couldn’t believe how easy it was.

  “I’d like Junchao to help me,” I said.

  I didn’t look over at Nicole or Alex. Instead, I turned to look at Junchao.

  “Xie xie,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.” I smiled.

  A Changed Person

  “Two more weeks,” I begged.

  “One,” my mother said.

  “One and a half?” I suggested.

  “One more week and that cast comes off, Masha,” my mother said, not taking her eyes from the road.

  We were on our way to the New Jersey State Science Fair for Sunny. The state science fair was regional first, so everyone there today would be from northern New Jersey. Junchao would be there, and maybe a couple more kids from my class at school. You had to be in the fourth through twelfth grade to compete, although they let Sunny in.

  “Anyway,” my mother continued, “you should count yourself lucky that I let you keep that fake cast on for an entire week already!”

  “It’s a real cast, Mom.”

  “You know what I mean,” my mother said with her eyebrows raised in warning. She put on her blinker and pulled off the highway.

  “I wish I’d broken my arm.” Sunny sighed from the back seat.

  “And she’s the genius?” I asked.

  My mother glared at me. “I’m just kidding, Mo
m.” I laughed. And I was just kidding. I mean, if this were last week, I wouldn’t have been kidding, but it’s not. It’s this week. And this week, I am a changed person.

  I turned around and looked at my little sister in the backseat of the car. She’d been awfully quiet the entire ride to the science fair. She was wearing a rain jacket and a rain hat with a wide brim, and she was bent over something in a bottle, which I assumed was a piece of her science project. I also assumed the rain jacket and hat were part of the experiment too, since it happened to be a beautiful day. When Sunny felt me looking at her, she looked up at me and smiled. I smiled back.

  In the end, life as a bald, black-eyed, broken-armed kid had been pretty great. Junchao and I practiced our Chinese in the elevator every day. I aced Mrs. Hull’s makeup science test. And the entire fifth grade signed my cast (including Nicole and Alex, because I didn’t want them to feel left out). I was having such a good time. And now I only had one week left. I rested my bright-orange cast in my lap and petted it like a cat. My favorite spot on it was the spiky letters that read “Michael Capezzi.”

  “Shawna said I had to have it on for six weeks,” I tried.

  “Masha Sweet,” my mother growled.

  “She’s getting mad at you,” Sunny said.

  “You better be quiet or you can go to your stupid science fair by yourself,” I shot back at her before I could remember that I was a changed person.

  “Masha,” my mother gasped, “enough. You’ll take her to the fair and help her set up her experiment, and get home together on the bus, just like I’ve asked you to do. Now, show me the bus and lunch money I gave you. Also, I expect a text at the end of the fair and then a second text when you get home. Mrs. Song said she’d cook you guys dinner tonight since this painting class that I’m taking is going to go pretty late.”

  Mrs. Song was home from the hospital and doing fantastic. She had gotten her medications mixed up and that was why she had fainted. But they did tell her to stay off the bike for a while. I had been stopping by after school to say, “Ni hao,” and see how she was feeling.

  I pulled the twenty-dollar bill that my mother had given me from my pocket and waved it in the air next to her head. And then I noticed my mother doing that kind of half-sigh thing where she seemed to keep the other half stuck inside her. I guess nobody can just change overnight, although she had signed up for this painting class today. My mom stopped painting when we moved, so being in this class was a good thing. Plus she was letting me take Sunny home on the bus after the fair. This was actually the second time this week she let us ride the bus alone. On Wednesday she had let Sunny and I take it to visit Alice after school. Then she picked us up at the hospital after she got done at work, and the three of us went for pizza.

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” I told her. “Just have fun at your class. Sunny and I will be fine. And I won’t forget to text you. Both times.”

  She shot me a smile. “Okay,” she said. And I’m pretty sure that I saw the rest of the sigh slide out.

  My cell phone rang.

  I quickly pulled it out of my pocket, thinking it was Alice. Instead I saw the word “Sunny” light up my screen.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, Masha,” she said.

  “Hi, Sunny.”

  “Did you think it was going to be Alice?” she asked.

  “Yes, I did,” I told her.

  My mother pulled into the parking lot of a gigantic, unfamiliar high school.

  “We’re here,” Sunny said excitedly into my ear. “I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

  “Yes, you will,” I answered.

  And we hung up.

  Sunny Sweet Is So Dead Meat

  Sunny and I waved good-bye to Mom as she pulled out of the parking lot. Then we each picked up a box filled with pieces of Sunny’s science experiment and headed toward the doors of the school. Each year the science fair was held at a different school, so neither of us had ever been here before. There’s always something kind of spooky about a school on a Saturday, and it’s twice as spooky when it’s a school you don’t know.

  “Are we early?” I asked my little sister as I looked around the parking lot. There didn’t seem to be many cars in the lot. Or even any cars at all.

  “I needed to get here first,” she said. “So I told Mommy that the science fair started at ten. It actually starts at eleven.”

  “Really, Sunny?” I groaned. “I already have to waste an entire Saturday doing this with you when I could have been at the hospital hanging out with Alice.” My friend had spina bifida, which meant that her spine didn’t close the right way before she was born. She sometimes had to be in the hospital for a few weeks at a time so they could watch her spinal cord as she grew.

  Sunny’s bony little shoulders drooped, making me feel instantly bad for what I’d said.

  “Anyway,” I told her, bumping her gently with my arm, “maybe we can visit Alice later tonight. They have late visiting hours on Saturday. And hey, I know,” I added, “we can bring the trophy you’re gonna win today to show her.”

  Sunny had won the trophy last year at our old school. In fact, Sunny always won the trophy wherever she went. I guess it was hard not giving the award to a scrawny little six-year-old kid with giant blue eyes and a brain that weighed more than the rest of her body put together.

  “Okay, Masha,” she said, beaming up at me from under the wide brim of her rain hat. The hat was my mother’s, so it was way too big for her and it came down right to the top of her eyelashes. The rain jacket she wore was also my mother’s, and it scraped at the pavement of the parking lot as we walked. Looking at her in this crazy rain outfit on this beautiful cloudless spring day, it hit me that I had no idea what her science experiment was about. Sunny was always working on a million different “projects,” as she called them, and none of them made any sense to me. But her strange outfit was kind of interesting.

  “What’s your experiment about, anyway?” I asked.

  “It’s about people who don’t follow the rules of society.”

  “About what?”

  Sunny stopped walking. “It’s an experiment about being different,” she said slowly. “Like, for example, at school … you know how some kids fit in and some kids don’t?”

  “Um, yeah,” I said, surprised that I really did know. “So you’re wearing a rain hat and raincoat on a beautiful sunshiny day because you’re being different?” I asked.

  “Good question,” she said, putting down her box in the middle of the parking lot.

  I shook my head thoughtfully as if I were completely used to asking good questions. I had lived on this earth for almost double the amount of years that my little sister had, but most days I felt like I’d only managed to develop half of the brain power.

  “We have to do something before we go in. It’s part of my experiment.” Sunny knelt down and started digging in her box. She found what she was searching for and pulled it out. “Here!” she said, jumping to her feet and handing it to me.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s a bottle of Heinz ketchup.”

  “Open it,” she commanded, her eyes glowing under the shade of the ridiculous rain hat.

  I began to open it. “Why can’t we do this in the …”

  There was a loud pop!

  The top of the ketchup bottle exploded off. I stood there wet and stunned. I looked down at Sunny. Her rain gear was covered in ketchup. I looked down at myself. Ketchup was splashed across my T-shirt and jeans in giant blobs, and it streamed down my face and neck in ketchupy gobs.

  “Oh my gosh,” I breathed. “Sunny, are you okay?” I wiped at the ketchup on her coat, but it didn’t smear. In fact, it just stayed there. “Holy mother of peanuts!” I wiped at the ketchup on my arm. It also stayed. “Why isn’t this coming off?” I looked down at my little sister.

  “It’s not going to come off,” she said excitedly. “It’s a special red dye I invented.”

  “What?”

  “Well, it w
ill come off, but just not for a few days. It has to wear off.”

  “WHAT? You mean you did this on purpose?”

  She shook her head, smiling, happy that I had finally gotten it. “Yes, Masha. You see, you are the person not following the rules of society. You will walk around the science fair covered in weird red blotches and I will observe how people react to you. You’re my science experiment!”

  Sunny unsnapped the rain jacket and stuffed it into her box. Her jeans and T-shirt were spotless. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “Let’s go?” I said. I was standing in some random school’s parking lot a million miles from home covered from head to toe in “weird red blotches.” I could feel the anger gurgling up inside me. I guess Sunny could feel it too, because she took a slow step away from me.

  I lunged … but that tiny little twig body of hers was too quick, and she took off toward the front doors of the building.

  “SUNNY SWEET,” I screamed, “YOU ARE SO DEAD MEAT!”

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank …

  My husband, Kevin Mann, for his never-ending support of my wish to write, even through some pretty grim times.

  My children, Jackson Mann and Grace Mann, for putting up with a mother with a dream.

  My agent, Kerry Sparks, for possessing the killer combination of patience and tenacity.

  My editor, Caroline Abbey, who read everything I ever sent her, waiting for this one.