The Book of One Hundred Truths (10 page)

A sinking feeling came over me, as if my bones had been filled with cold water.

“Didn’t you like the way it looked?” Phoebe asked. “You should have told us.”

Jocelyn shrugged.

Ellen was holding an ear of corn in her fist like a weapon.

“Mom? Are you going to eat that?” Liam asked.

Nenna reached across the table, unfolded Jocelyn’s napkin, and handed it to her. “I think short hair is very practical,” she said. “Especially at the beach. I’ve kept my hair short for forty years.”

“Mom,” Celia said. “I think this is different.”

“
And
I think Jocelyn’s hair will look very nice after someone at a beauty shop touches it up. Maybe tomorrow,” Nenna went on. “Maybe Thea wouldn’t mind taking her.”

I nodded.

“Wonderful,” Nenna said. “It’s all settled, then. We don’t have to discuss it.”

“May I be excused now?” I asked.

Austin reached over and took the roll from my plate. “She ate almost everything,” he said.

I went out on the beach. I found out later that Celia had seated us according to number of freckles: Liam had the most and Ralph, his face as smooth and white as a bowl of cream, had none at all.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“O
kay, so I guess I’m curious,” Liam said. He had followed me out to the beach after dinner. “Did you dare her to shave her head or something?”

“No. I just told her—oh, forget it.” I sat down on the ruins of a sand castle. “You and Austin go to work every day. I have to babysit. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“I helped babysit you once,” Liam said. He did a handstand. “You were in a playpen or something, and I gave you a bottle.”

“You gave me a bottle?”

“Yup.” He lost his balance and tipped over. “And I remember I was jealous, because Austin got to push you around the block in a stroller. I was mad because he was allowed to and I wasn’t.”

“
Austin
babysat me?”

Liam brushed some sand off his forehead. “I think you were right,” he said, “the other day on the deck. I think something’s happening.”

“What’s happening?”

“I don’t know. I just…My mom told me you were acting weird because you were homesick. But you’ve come here every summer.”

“Ellen said I was homesick?”

“And Austin and I thought we’d be going home sometimes on the weekends, but my mom doesn’t want to. And now you’ve got Jocelyn shaving her head.”

“She didn’t
shave
it,” I pointed out.

“Do you know how you can tell when a tidal wave’s coming?” Liam sat down next to me, facing the water. “Tidal waves give you a warning. The water pulls back—it pulls away from your feet and from the shore. And all the stuff that was hidden on the bottom is right there in front of you. All the weird rocks and pieces of drift-wood and even fish.” He picked up a fistful of sand, then opened his fingers and let it go. “I get that feeling sometimes. Like something’s coming.”

We looked out at the water.

“Do you have that feeling now?” I asked.

“Kind of.” He shrugged. “Uh-oh. Heads up.”

I turned around. Edmund was running toward us, hopping a little with every other step. He was wearing a long-sleeved button-up shirt that was much too big for him, because Jocelyn had told him he didn’t want to get X-rayed by the sun. Now the sun was going down and the sky was pink, but Edmund was still dressed as if it were noon in the Sahara desert. “I came outside to play with you,” he announced, as if he were doing us a favor.

Liam reared up and tackled him, grabbing his legs and rolling him over in the sand. “You’d better say
uncle,
or you’re a goner.”

“Uncle!” said Edmund.

“Wrong!” Liam sat on him. “I’m not your uncle; I’m your cousin. Ha ha!”

Edmund grinned. “I want to find sand crabs,” he said. “But someone has to watch me.”

Liam helped him up, and both of us followed him to the darker sand at the water’s edge. It was the closest I had been to the ocean all year.

Edmund plunged his fingers into the sand, but they came up empty. “I can’t find any crabs. Thea, help me.” He bounced up and down.

I dug around in the wet sand until I found a tiny dust-colored creature about half an inch long. I handed it to Edmund, but he jumped and dropped it. “It’s not going to hurt you,” I said. I found the crab again and made Edmund hold it with his palm open. He watched it scuttle across his wrist as if crossing a bridge.

Liam found a slipper shell and a mermaid’s purse. “I was trying to remember the number you asked me about out on the deck,” he said.

“Do you mean twenty-one Bay?”

“Yeah.” He dug a trench with his foot. “It’s—I think I might have seen something.”

“I need another crab,” Edmund said.

“Hang on a second.” I grabbed Liam’s elbow. “What do you mean, you think you saw something?”

“I’m not sure if I remember it right,” Liam said.

I thought of telling him about seeing Celia and Ellen at the boardwalk, and about the key. But Edmund was jumping up and down between us, clamoring for attention. I tried to find him another crab but couldn’t; maybe they had all moved on to a better part of the beach in some kind of great sand crab migration.

“Liam, where are you going?” Edmund asked. “I want to play a game with you.”

I turned around. Liam was headed back to the house.

“I’ll be back,” he said, waving to Edmund. “You can play a game with Thea. She likes really long games best. Things that take about a hundred hours. Ask her to teach you how to play Monopoly.”

“I don’t play Monopoly,” I said.

“You used to play, before someone lost all the pieces.”

“No, I didn’t. I never played.” A blue lie—I clenched my teeth.

“Whatever.” Liam turned and walked away, his T-shirt flapping in the breeze behind him.

Edmund and I found two or three more crabs, but they were small and sickly. I took him back to the house and Nenna told him he needed to get ready for bed. And she asked me to go upstairs to check on Jocelyn.

“I’m sure she’s okay, Nenna,” I said. But because it was Nenna who had done the asking, I went to check on Jocelyn anyway.

At the top of the steps, I heard water running. “Jocelyn?” She was in the bathroom. I knocked. “What are you doing in there?”

The water went off, then on. “I’m brushing my teeth.”

“Can I come in?”

“No. You never let me come in.”

“That’s different,” I said.

“No, it isn’t.” She opened the door. She wore a white nightgown with a ruffle at her knobby knees, and she held a toothbrush in her hand, but it didn’t look wet. It was a shock all over again to see her hair. It was flat in some places and pointy in others. She looked like Bozo the Clown’s younger sister.

“Go ahead, tell me,” I said. “Why did you do it?” I watched her squeeze a perfect stripe of toothpaste onto her brush.

“Because.” She put the toothbrush into her mouth, then took it out again. “You said they’d recognize me.”

I looked at the black and white tile floor beneath our feet. Some of the black tiles were missing, which always drove me crazy; the zigzag pattern was all thrown off. “You’re talking about Celia and Ellen,” I said.

Jocelyn brushed, then spat daintily into the sink. She nodded.

“But both of them saw you.” I was speaking patiently and slowly. “They just saw you at dinner. So both of them know that you cut your hair. How in the world are they not going to recognize you?” I wanted to strangle her. But first I wanted to strangle myself.

Jocelyn set her toothbrush down on the counter. “A woman’s hair is what makes her beautiful,” she said.

“Who told you that?”

“I don’t remember.”

I studied our reflections in the bathroom mirror. Jocelyn looked forlorn and lonesome, like a sheep that had been badly clipped and sent away from the herd. “It might not look bad after someone fixes it,” I said. I patted a tuft of her hair and a few wiry strands came away in my fingers. “Does it feel strange?”

“Kind of.” She took the hair from my hand and threw it into the basket beneath the sink. We turned off the light and made our way to the attic. Jocelyn wiped off the bottoms of her feet and got into bed. I tucked her in, making her covers as tight as the skin on a drum.

“I wonder what souvenirs your parents are buying you,” I said, trying to cheer her up.

She didn’t answer.

“Maybe it’s something to wear. Maybe clothes from Italy.”

“They’re probably just regular clothes,” Jocelyn said.

“I bet they’re not. They wouldn’t have told you they were bringing you something if it wasn’t going to be good. Maybe they’ll bring you a new purse and new shoes.”

“I don’t want anything new,” Jocelyn said. “I like the things I already have.”

“Thea?”

Truth #40: When I got back from Three Mile Creek that afternoon, I went in the back door and ran up the steps and made sure my parents didn’t see me.

“Thea!”

Someone was clutching my shoulder. I was still trying to run up the steps. There were so many steps.

“You have to wake up. Someone’s out on the porch,” Jocelyn hissed.

Truth #41: I was so cold, it was hard to move. But I quickly got changed and put my clothes into a plastic bag in the back of my closet.

“Thea!”
Jocelyn was kneeling on my bed, pinning me to the sheets.

The attic was dark.

I sat up with a jolt, sweaty and out of breath. “It’s probably just birds, Jocelyn,” I said.

“It isn’t birds. I can hear people talking. They were throwing something at our window.”

I tried to push my hair out of my face, but my arm was asleep. It felt like a dead thing fastened to my body. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, pulling my dead hand out from under me. “It’s probably just—”

Something hit the window screen and bounced off. I could hear someone laughing on the porch below.

“Move,” I said. I pushed Jocelyn out of the way and threw off the covers. We tiptoed across the attic to the window.

“Do you think it’s Nenna?” Jocelyn whispered.

Something hit the screen just in front of us. I heard a rocking chair being dragged across the floor. I tried to look straight down at the porch, but all I saw was a dark rectangular shadow.

“You’d better get out of here,” I said to the shadow, trying to make my voice low. “We’ve already called the police.”

“No, you haven’t. You don’t have a phone up there.” It was Liam. “Just open the screen.”

Carefully I loosened the latch on the screen and pushed it open. Jocelyn and I poked our heads through the gap and saw Liam and Austin on the porch below. “It’s the middle of the night,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“It isn’t the middle of the night; it’s eleven-forty-five,” Austin said. “I just looked at my watch.”

“We want to show you something,” Liam said. “Austin found it. We didn’t want to tramp through Nenna’s bedroom.” The only ways to get in and out of Liam and Austin’s room were by walking through Nenna and Granda’s, and by taking the outdoor stairs from the porch. Liam and Austin probably snuck in and out of the house that way all the time.

“Can’t you show it to us tomorrow?” Jocelyn asked.

“Nope. Surfing competition tomorrow,” Austin said. “We’re getting up early.” He took a step back, out of the shadows, and I saw his face and a slice of his T-shirt in the moonlight. I tried to imagine him babysitting for me, buckling me carefully into a stroller. “Are you ready?” he asked. “Move your big head out of the way.”

I held the screen up and ducked. Something hit the clapboard.

“Where’d you learn to throw like that?” Liam asked. “Why don’t you let an athlete try it?”

“Give me two out of three,” Austin said.

A light went on in Celia’s bedroom.

“Hurry up,” I said.

A few seconds later, something about the size of a walnut sailed through the window and past my head. Liam and Austin, underneath us, seemed to disappear.

I latched the screen while Jocelyn crawled under her bed to retrieve what they’d thrown: a wad of paper with a stone inside it. She smoothed the paper with her hands.

“What is it?” I whispered. Celia was probably prowling through the hall downstairs; we had to read by the light of the moon.

It seemed to be an article from the daily paper:
Miss Port Harbor Princess Wins College Scholarship.