Umbrella Summer Read online

  “I don’t like obstacle courses anymore,” I said.

  “Sure you do.” He set down the waffle iron and opened up a box of playing cards. “We could make a real good one, half on the grass and half in the lake. And I could show you some good safari ninja tricks for keeping the geese away.”

  “You smell so bad, no geese’d go near you anyway,” I said, grabbing the cards from him and setting them back on the table.

  Doug stuck his tongue out, and I stuck mine out right back.

  Ever since Doug’s best friend Brad moved to Texas a month ago, he’d been trying to hang out with me, but no way that was going to work. Because no matter what Doug Zimmerman thought, we were not friends. We might have been friends in kindergarten, and maybe I used to go over to his house sometimes and help him build obstacle courses in his yard, with tires to leap through and chairs to crawl under and trees to climb up and everything. Which was sort of fun, I guess, if you liked that kind of thing. But then Brad showed up, and Doug stopped being my friend and started being a stupid annoying boy who called me “Annie Bananie” and pinched the underside of my arm in the lunch line. Which was why building an obstacle course with him wasn’t exactly the number-one thing I felt like doing.

  “Anyway,” I told him, “obstacle courses are dangerous because you could fall and break your skull open. Are you gonna buy something or what? This yard sale is only for paying customers.”

  Doug just shrugged and picked up the badger. It was real heavy, so he had to hold it with both hands. “Is this thing real?” he asked, poking it in the left eyeball.

  “Don’t do that!” I yelled, and I grabbed it from him. “You’re going to ruin it and then no one will buy it.”

  “Maybe I want to buy it,” he said.

  “Do not.”

  “Do too. How much is it?”

  I checked the price tag, which said $2.00. “Three dollars,” I told him.

  Doug stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a bunch of one-dollar bills, probably ten of them, so many that I wished I’d told him the stupid stuffed badger cost more. He handed me three and I grabbed them quick before he could change his mind.

  “What are you going to do with it?” I asked him as I stuck the bills into the shoe box. I didn’t like talking to him, but I was kind of wondering what you did with a stuffed dead badger once you bought one.

  “I dunno.” He tugged at the edge of his forehead bandanna. “Maybe I’ll sneak it into Trent’s room when he’s sleeping and stick it right next to his bed. That’d give him the willies for sure. Might even pee his pants.”

  Doug and his brothers were always trying to scare each other silly. Mostly they liked to hide in trees and leap out at each other when the other person wasn’t expecting it, which Doug said was being a stealth safari ninja. But they did other stuff too, like once Aaron and Trent told Doug there were werewolves on the loose and then they snuck outside Doug’s window while he was sleeping and howled all night long. You were supposed to scare the other person so bad he peed his pants, that was the rule. As far as I knew no one had peed them yet, but I didn’t really want to ask.

  “Don’t you think that’d freak him out?” Doug asked me. He sounded real excited about it.

  I rolled my eyes and went back to straightening stuff on the table. I was hoping that if I pretended Doug wasn’t there, he’d go away. But I guess that didn’t work, because he kept talking.

  “Hey, you want to know something?”

  “Nope.” I stacked a ballerina plate on top of a tap dancer one.

  “Yes you do. It’s interesting.”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “How do you know? You haven’t even heard what it is yet.”

  “So tell me already then.”

  “Okay, I will.” Doug took a deep breath like he was going to say the most important thing there was. “Someone bought the old haunted house across the street.”

  “No they didn’t.”

  “Did so.”

  The house across the street from ours had been empty for a while, ever since the Krazinskys moved out a year before. Rebecca was the one who decided it was haunted. She said the reason no one wanted to move in was because it was cursed, and she made me go over there a million times, trying to peek in the windows. Rebecca was wild for spooky stories, and she was dying to find out what the inside of a real haunted house looked like. Only too bad for us all the windows had blinds on them, so we never even saw the edge of a haunted carpet, no matter how hard we tried.

  I wouldn’t ever say it to Rebecca, but I was pretty sure the house wasn’t haunted. For one thing, it didn’t look haunted. It wasn’t old and spooky-looking, and not a single one of the windows was even boarded up. Rebecca said that a house didn’t have to be spooky to be haunted, maybe that was the ghosts’ secret trick to lure people in with their un-boarded-up windows, but I didn’t believe that. Because for another thing, I didn’t think there were really any ghosts. I didn’t know what happened when you died, if there was heaven like Mrs. Harper said, or if it was more like what Mr. L. told me one time, where it was just the end, no sadness, no happiness or anything. But I was pretty sure that after Jared died, he didn’t do stupid stuff like hang out in the Krazinskys’ house howling at dust bunnies. I figured he was smarter than that. But Rebecca believed it for certain, and anyway it was fun trying to peek through the windows.

  I kept on with the plate stacking, but I guess Doug wasn’t through talking about the haunted house. “Someone bought it,” he said. “They’re moving in tomorrow.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “Well, it’s true. Mr. L. told me. Hey! This badger is only two dollars. You said three.”

  “That’s ’cause Mrs. Harper told me the price tag was a mistake. It’s really three.”

  “Liar. Give me my dollar back.” He reached for the shoe box with the money in it, but I squeezed it close to my chest.

  “Can’t give it back,” I said. “There’s a lot of dollars in here and I don’t remember which one’s yours anymore.”

  He growled at me for a while, but I wouldn’t give him that dollar. Thank goodness Mr. Harper finally came over and said he had a collection of shark teeth Doug might be interested in, because I’d heard one time that being around someone you hated could give you allergic reactions, and I was pretty sure Doug was starting to give me hives.

  three

  I stayed at that table the whole rest of the morning, organizing all the stuff so it looked nice and pretty. Mrs. Harper even brought me two cups of lemonade. It wasn’t too bad a job, really, because I got to be in charge of stuff and talk to people. I kept glancing at the not-really-haunted house across the street, wondering who was going to live there. When Rebecca got back from her ballet class later, I could go over and tell her about it. She’d want our new neighbors to be zombies or vampires, I bet. Something spooky. I just hoped they didn’t have a mean dog, like a pit bull or something, because I’d seen on the news one time how pit bulls could attack you when you least expected it.

  Round about eleven I started to notice the sun huge in the sky like a yellow beach ball, and I realized I wasn’t wearing any sunscreen. Which was bad, because you could get a sunburn even in the shade, and sunburns gave you skin cancer, and that could kill you. I learned that from a brochure at the doctor’s office.

  I tucked the shoe box tight up under my armpit and found Mrs. Harper, who was selling pillowcases to a lady I didn’t know. I tried not to be fidgety while Mrs. Harper counted out change, but I swear I could feel the rays from the sun warming up my skin and making cancer molecules right there. I yanked on Mrs. Harper’s elbow.

  She ignored me. “Here’s two dollars back,” she told the lady.

  I yanked again. “Mrs. Harper?”

  When the lady with the pillowcases finally left, Mrs. Harper said, “Yes, dear? How’s it going?”

  “Good,” I said. “I mean, okay. I mean, I might be getting cancer.”

  “Sorr
y?” She tilted her head to the side.

  “Here.” I held out the shoe box for her. “I have to go home before I get sunburned.”

  “Oh,” she said, and she laughed tinkly like a bell. “Well, you know, I have some sunscreen if you’d like to use it. Then you can stay for a while. Only if you want to, of course.”

  I thought about that. I wouldn’t mind helping some more, as long as it didn’t give me cancer. “What SPF is it?” I asked. Ours at home was only fifteen, which according to the brochure was not very high, but Mom said she wasn’t buying more until we used it up.

  “Forty, I think,” Mrs. Harper said.

  “You have anything else?” I asked. “Like SPF a thousand?”

  “I don’t think it goes that high, dear.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s in the cabinet in the bathroom,” she told me. And then she turned to help a woman holding a purple turtleneck sweater.

  I went into the house and I found the sunscreen in the bathroom, right where Mrs. Harper said it would be. I spread it everywhere I had skin showing, my arms and legs and even my earlobes. I was extra careful to get every centimeter of my face, because the skin on your face is supersensitive, that’s what the brochure said. But I made sure not to get any in my eyes.

  When I was walking back outside, I passed the bookshelf in the hallway. Mr. and Mrs. Harper had a million trillion books, all stacked on top of each other and spilling off the bookshelves, and I’d never really looked at any of them before. But just at that moment, I noticed a big green fat one, with a spine as big as my fist, that was poked out just a couple inches farther than the other ones. Trailing down the spine in thick yellow letters were the words: The Everyday Guide to Preventing Illness.

  I yanked it off the shelf.

  I flipped through it and knew right away it was exactly what I needed. The book had everything—smallpox and liver disease and acid reflux and anemia, and what to do to once you got it and how to make sure you never got it in the first place. It was perfect, just perfect.

  I found Mrs. Harper outside lining up baby shoes in a tidy straight row.

  “Mrs. Harper?”

  “Yes, dear?” she said, looking up from the shoes. “What’ve you got there?”

  “A book. I found it in the hallway.”

  She took it from me. “Ah, yes,” she said, after she’d read the title. “It’s one of Mr. Harper’s. From his physician phase.”

  “Can I have it for my freebie?”

  “Your freebie?”

  “Yeah. You said if I helped out, I could pick one thing for free. Anything I wanted.”

  “Oh.” She frowned. “I meant something out here. This book isn’t for sale, honey.”

  “But—”

  “Besides, I just can’t make you work all this time and then send you home with an old medical book. Let’s check out the toy table, shall we? I’m sure we’ll find something nice over there.” And she set the big green book down behind the baby shoes and stuck her fat hand behind my back, leading me over to the toys.

  When we got to the toy table, Mrs. Harper showed me about one million things she thought I might like—LEGOs, an old dump truck, a doll with one eye permanently blinked closed—but there wasn’t anything I wanted as much as that book. Mrs. Harper wouldn’t give it to me, though.

  Finally I picked a red wooden top, even though I hadn’t played with tops since I was two. Mrs. Harper told me I’d made an excellent choice. I just nodded.

  “Would you like to stick around for a little while longer, Annie?” she asked me. “You’ve been a great help.”

  I shook my head. “I think I’m going to see if Rebecca’s back from ballet class. I want to tell her about the haunted house.”

  “The haunted house?”

  “Yeah, you know, the one across the street. Someone’s moving in tomorrow.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Harper said. “I met her when she came to take a look at the house.”

  “Her?” I asked. “Is it a lady with a dog?”

  She shook her head. “I’m afraid she doesn’t have one, dear, sorry. Or any children, either, at least none your age. Mrs. Finch must be in her seventies at least.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, I’m gonna go tell Rebecca then.”

  “Of course. Thanks so much for your help, Annie. I really appreciate it.” She straightened up an old rag doll that was threatening to fall off the table. “And in case I don’t see you before then, don’t forget our Sunbird car wash on Tuesday. Nine a.m. sharp!”

  “Yep. Thank you for the freebie,” I said, because that was polite.

  But what wasn’t polite at all was what I did next, when I passed the table with the baby shoes on my way across the lawn—I picked that big green book right up and tucked it under my T-shirt, and hustled all the way back to my yard. I looked over my shoulder twice to see if Mrs. Harper noticed, but she was so busy sorting through her husband’s harmonica collection that she never even looked my way.

  The closer I got to my front door, the more I started to think that maybe I should turn around and put that book back. It was big and heavy and sweaty against my skin. If I ran back right that second, maybe I could slip it onto the baby shoe table without anyone noticing. I was pretty positive it wouldn’t be stealing if I returned it before I really took it for good.

  But then I looked up at my house and saw Jared’s window, with his blue curtains shut up tight so you couldn’t see inside, just the way it’d been since February.

  There were lots of worse things to worry about than taking an old book, I realized. Because for all I knew, right that very second I could get bitten by a rattlesnake and need to know how to suck out the poison, or I could step on a nail and get tetanus, or I could develop a cough that turned out to be bronchitis. And there were probably millions of more things I didn’t even know about, and the only way to make sure I was always safe and that nothing bad could happen to me was to know exactly what could get me and all the ways to stop it. I had to be prepared, that was all there was to it.

  I took one last look at the Harpers’ yard over the hedge, at the empty spot on the table where the big green book had been. And then, before I had a chance to change my mind, I turned the doorknob to my house and ran up the stairs two at a time to my room. If I was going to read that entire book before anything got me, I figured I better get started right away.

  four

  I read the big green book for almost two hours, lying on my back on the floor with my feet up on my bed. There was some real good stuff in there, all about scarlet fever and lactose intolerance, and how you should check your carbon monoxide detectors every week to make sure they were working. I stuck slips of paper between the pages to mark all the important stuff, which was pretty much everything. But some of the words were too long and confusing for me, and anyway after a while my eyeballs started to get fuzzy. When I looked that up, it turned out it was a sign of diabetes. I figured I should stop reading so they wouldn’t get any fuzzier.

  I decided to go over to Rebecca’s to tell her about the haunted house, like I’d told Mrs. Harper I would. And maybe while I was there, Rebecca’s dad would let me borrow a dictionary so I could understand the book better. We used to have a dictionary at our house, a nice good fat one, but Jared had lost it about a year ago when he’d taken it to school for a language arts project and left it on the bus afterward.

  Rebecca lived only twelve houses away from me, on the other side of the street. If you squinted real hard from my living-room window, you could see Rebecca’s mom when she was watering the lawn. As soon as I got there, I took off all my gear and stacked it next to my bike in the far corner of Rebecca’s driveway, where it wouldn’t be in the way of cars and cause an accident, and then I rang the doorbell. Rebecca’s dad answered.

  “Hi there, Annie!” he said. Dr. Young always sounded happy to see me. “How are you feeling today?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Except I think I might have African sleeping
sickness.”

  His eyebrows squinched close together when I said that, bunched up in the middle confused. “It’s unlikely,” he told me. He put his hand on my forehead. “But I can take your temperature if it’d make you feel better.”

  “Thanks.”

  I walked through the house to the kitchen and sat myself on a stool at the counter.

  “Here we go,” Dr. Young told me, once he’d fished the thermometer out of the drawer. He gave it to me, and I wedged it solid under my tongue.

  You weren’t supposed to chitchat while you were waiting for a thermometer to beep, so while Dr. Young started up a pot of coffee, I checked the word wall to see if there was anything new.

  Even though Rebecca’s dad was a doctor, I always thought he should have been a book writer instead, because he was just crazy for words. He had stacks and stacks of books all over the house, even in the bathroom. And when he found a word he liked—one he said struck his fancy because it sounded silly or had a peculiar meaning—he’d grab a piece of chalk and write the word in big doctor-squiggly letters on the giant chalkboard on the far wall in the kitchen. Sometimes if he couldn’t find any chalk, he’d rip the page right out of his book and circle the words he liked, and then tape it up there. The whole chalkboard was covered in words, every sort of one you could think of—homily, emaciate, herbivore, tonsillectomy, waterfall, egg drop soup, wisp, Francophile, jurisdiction. I had no idea what most of the words meant, and neither did Rebecca, but we liked to stare at the wall and try to figure it out. Dr. Young was always saying how we should play with words, so I never was sure why it made him laugh so hard the time he found us acting out “Goldilocks and the Three Proboscises.”

  My thermometer beeped just as the coffee started hissing into the pot. Dr. Young showed me the temperature. “Ninety-eight point six,” he said. “Perfect.”

  “So I don’t have African sleeping sickness?”

  “Nope.” He shook the thermometer. “Where did you hear about a thing like that, anyway?”