Sunny Sweet Is So Not Sorry (8 page)

I'd never been so happy to see my little sister in all my life!

Sunny pushed me out the door and away from poor Maria and her mean mother. We headed down a hallway, and then we made a right and headed down another. My neck felt like a rubber band, and every time I blinked I had to pull my eyelids back open again.

“Where are we going?” I mumbled.

“Don't worry,” Sunny said, “no place bad.”

“I wasn't worried until you said
that
!” I said.

A lady with a plastic name tag swinging on a string around her neck walked toward us. She slowed her
high-heeled step as we approached each other. “We're just out for a stroll,” I said, as a tiny bit of drool made its way over my lip and down my chin. And then I yawned so wide and long that my jaw just about cracked in two. When the yawn was finally over, the lady was gone and we were sitting in front of a row of elevators.

Again, the soft notes played over the sound system, followed by the lady's voice.
“Would Marsha Sweet please come to the front desk on the main floor of the Shapiro Building? Marsha Sweet, please come to the front desk on the main floor of the Shapiro Building.”

“Th-they're afterrr usss,” I slurred, closing my eyes and leaning my head back in my wheelchair. I wanted to care that they were after us, but I was just so tired.

“Don't worry. I'm going to fix everything.”

“Nooo!” I shouted, but only in my dreams. Because I was now definitely, mostly, and unfortunately asleee …

* * *

“It pinches,” I said.

“I'm fixing it,” said Sunny as she loosened the strap on my helmet.

“I don't want to go,” I whined.

“Stop complaining,” my mother said. “Just think—you're going to be the very first fifth grader in space! What a special gift your little sister is giving you.”

Sunny strapped me down into her rocket and then lit a fiery torch. “Good-bye,
Marsha
,” she said, smiling.

“Nooo!”

I sat up, sucking in a giant gulp of air like I'd just come up after a really deep dive into a pool. I wasn't in a rocket. I wasn't blasting off from Earth. I wasn't exploding into a million pieces.

It was a dream … just a dream. I laughed out loud—the sound of my laughter bouncing off the walls and coming back at me. I was alone in a dark room lying on a hard bed. Where was I? Maybe this was a dream too.

The door opened, and Sunny peeked in.

“You're awake,” she said.

“Where are we?”

“The basement of the hospital,” she said.

“Huh?” I scooted off the bed, noticing the cast on my arm. And then it all came back to me—Mrs. Song on the bike, the ambulance, Calvin, my arm, the lady on the loudspeaker, and Sunny wheeling me away.

I stared hard at Sunny. She had that look.

“What did you do?”

“Now, don't be mad, Masha,” she said, taking a step backward.

“Sunny … what did you do?” My hands flew to my head. I felt hair. I felt flowers. I felt itchy and damp. I felt nothing different.

“You didn't do anything?”

“I couldn't dissolve the glue,” she said, her skinny little shoulders falling an inch. “I tried, Masha, I really did.” She stepped all the way through the door, holding her hands behind her back.

“What's behind your back?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Sunny,” I growled.

She glanced over her shoulder. “It's just a simple pair of levers hinged at the fulcrum,” she said.

“Sunny,” I demanded, “what is in your hands?”

She pulled out a large pair of scissors.

“Sunny!”

My shout made her drop the scissors. “I was going to try to cut them off. You weren't even going to notice.”

“I would have killed you,” I said. “Let's go.” I grabbed her by the elbow. The sleep had felt good and I was no longer groggy. “We're getting out of here.”

“What about Mrs. Song?”

“We're going to go down and get Mrs. Song and then we're going home. Where's Mrs. Song's hat?”

Sunny handed me the hat from off the counter, and I looked around the room for a mirror. There was none, so I stepped in front of a small, silver paper-towel dispenser pinned to the wall over the sink to see myself and pulled Mrs. Song's hat on. And then I yanked it off with a scream.

“Sunny Sweet! What did you do?”

“I told you not to get mad,” Sunny said.

“Why is my hair green?”

“Well, first I tried acetone, but that didn't work. So I found bleach, thinking that—”

“Stop!” I said. “I don't need to hear about your evil scientific methods.”

I gazed into the towel dispenser. My hair was shamrock-shake green.

I turned to Sunny. “You have to fix this!”

She picked up the scissors.

“Not like that.”

“Masha, let me cut them out and then we can dye your hair back to brown. You'll never be able to tell this even happened.”

I looked back into the paper-towel dispenser. A giant leprechaun looked back. “Okay,” I said, giving up. I slowly climbed back onto the bed that I'd woken up on.

Smiling, Sunny dragged a stool over to the table and switched on a light over my head. Her skinny little arms loomed in front of my face and I could hear her short, excited breaths in my ear. Her fingers
filtered through my hair and I felt her choose a flower. There was a glint of metal from the scissors as they moved toward my head, a moment of silence, and then there was the horrible crunching of scissors meeting, and slicing through, hair. And then there was a tiny sting. “Whoops,” said Sunny.

“Ouch!” My hand flew to my head, forgetting that it had a heavy cast attached to it. The weight of the cast made me lose control of the speed of my arm, and it socked me right in my eye, hard. Silver sparks floated inches from my pupils … or in my pupils, I couldn't tell which, and I slid down onto the bed with a moan.

When I turned my head, I saw a tiny bit of blood on my hand. My blood!

I jumped up, my head spinning, and clomped like Frankenstein's monster over to the paper-towel dispenser. My mouth fell open. “Ahhh,” I howled. I now had a huge bald spot on the top right side of my head, along with a small cut by my scalp, and worst of all, a very fast-forming black eye!

I was a monster. I was Sunny's monster.

“It's a very small avulsion,” Sunny said. “Let me try again. I promise not to cut you this time. Let's call that strike one.”

I didn't answer. I gazed into that silver dispenser at myself in horror.

“That's a sports metaphor,” Sunny said. “Strike one.” Like I cared about sports after what she had just done to me.

“This can't get worse,” I whispered.

“Maybe it can,” said Sunny. “They keep calling you over the loudspeaker. I'm pretty sure security is searching for you.”

I sighed and rolled my head back, looking up at the ceiling.

“Let's just go home, Masha,” she said. “We can take the bus. I can look up the bus number right now. And we can call Mrs. Song and tell her we're going home.”

“You've had your cell phone with you the whole time?”

“I always have my cell phone,” she said.

I leaned against the table and ran my fingers lightly under my throbbing eye, wiping away the tears. I knew that I had only one hope left, and that was my medical barber.

“No, Sunny, we're not going home. We're going to the front desk on the main floor of the Shapiro Building, and I'm going to face the music.”

“Facing the music was what soldiers did when they were being dishonorably discharged from the army,” Sunny said. “They would play drums at the discharge ceremony and make the dishonored soldiers walk past them. Are we discharging ourselves?” she asked, her giant blue eyes blinking up at me.

“No,” I told her. “We're checking in.”

Enough was enough. I had ten different shades of daisies glued to my head, green hair, my arm in an orange cast, and a black eye. I was like some crazy nightmare rainbow.

I put Mrs. Song's hat back over my head and crammed tissues into the side of it to stop the bleeding from where Sunny nicked me. And then I marched us down the hallway, following the signs to the Shapiro Building. We crossed over a little bridge that took us above a street and past a bunch of people. Nobody
stopped us, but some of them followed us with their eyes as we passed.

Once we got to the Shapiro Building, finding the main lobby was easy, but crossing the expanse of brown-tiled floor to the giant desk in the center wasn't. I froze about twenty-five feet out. I swear I could hear those drums that Sunny talked about pounding inside my head.

“What?” asked Sunny, stopping alongside me. “Do you want to run?”

I did want to run. But I knew that I couldn't. My feet started walking toward the desk even as a voice deep in my flowered skull shouted, “No, no, no!”

Sunny grabbed my hand and held me back. “Come on, Masha, the door is right there.”

I looked over to where she was motioning. I could see the blue sky and the trees outside the front of the hospital. It was weird that today was still today. It felt like we'd been running around this hospital for three weeks.

“Let's just leave,” Sunny begged. “The bus stop is right out front—I checked.”

“You can't go around doing whatever you want, Sunny. You have to follow the rules sometimes,” I told her.

“I do follow the rules. I'm following the rules of gravity right now. You don't see me floating around in this lobby, do you?”

I rolled my eyes. I never knew what she was talking about. I started toward the front desk again.

“Wait!” Sunny whispered, holding my arm. “I know I can figure out how to get the glue to dissolve once we get home, Masha.”

I looked down at her. I so wanted to believe her. She got excited. She had me. “All I need is my chem set C3000, and …”

“Forget it, Sunny. I'm not a gerbil. I'm, I'm
Marsha Sweet
,” I said, and I stomped up to the front desk.

There was a small, older lady behind the desk in what looked like a flight attendant dress. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“Hi, I'm Marsha Sweet.”

She looked at me for a second and then picked up
the phone. “Security? Yes, it's Thelma from Shapiro Main. I have Marsha Sweet here with me.”

She listened for a second and then hung up. “Someone will be right down,” she said. Then she noticed Sunny, and she smiled brightly. “Would the little girl like a lollipop? I have eight different flavors.”

Sunny jumped up and down in front of the desk as if she were just a sweet little kid who would love a lollipop. I wanted a lollipop too, but she didn't ask me.

Someone was right down. Before Sunny chose one of the eight flavored lollipops, my medical barber and a security guard came hurrying into the lobby.