The Book of One Hundred Truths (7 page)

“Shhh.” Nenna stopped and turned toward me. She put her hand on my shoulder. “Theodora Elizabeth,” she said. Half her face was in shadow. “Did you know that your parents were nervous at first about giving you such a long name?”

“No.” I was ashamed of myself, but I wasn’t sure why.

“They were. Eight syllables.” Nenna opened the door to her room, and together we walked in and saw Ralph struggling on his stomach in the cage of his crib. His arms and legs were paddling away, but they weren’t getting him anywhere. He was pale and fleshy in his T-shirt and diaper. I thought he looked like a bug—like a little white grub.

“They worried that they should try to find something shorter,” Nenna said. “Or something easier to pronounce.” She pushed a couple of buttons and lowered one side of the crib. “But finally they realized that they didn’t want to give you a baby’s name, or a little girl’s name; they wanted to give you the name of the person they hoped you would grow up to be. And so that’s what they did. And you’re filling that name, one piece at a time—all eight admirable syllables.”

She leaned over Ralph’s mattress. “Who’s my boy? Where’s Ralph? Where’s my sweetcake?” Nenna’s voice was a song. She scooped Ralph up and settled him against her neck. He was still half-asleep; his bald head bobbled back and forth. “Hold out your arms for him.”

I did what she told me. Ralph squiggled softly against my chest.

“I want you to promise me something,” Nenna said. “When Ralph grows up, I want you to tell him that he should be proud of himself. I want you to tell him that his family loves him. That they will always love him, and they will stand by him no matter what. Can you do that?”

I nodded. Something rose up inside me, some sort of airy little elevator lifting off from my stomach.

“There. See how he trusts you?” Nenna said.

I patted Ralph’s fat little wrist with a finger and his eyes flicked open. They were round and blue, as if he were surprised to wake up and find himself in the world.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I
t wasn’t easy, swallowing paper. I had heard about people doing it, chewing up entire sheets of loose-leaf and forcing the wet gobs of pulp down their throats. But I couldn’t do it. I was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, my mother’s notebook of truths in my lap and a thick and gummy soup on my tongue. I felt like I’d eaten a mouthful of paste—the kind from the jar that we used to use in kindergarten.

“Thea?”

I gagged on a wad of paper and coughed. “What?” Why couldn’t I be left alone for ten minutes?

“I’m back. Did you get my note?” It was Jocelyn. Who else?

I scraped the mess from my tongue with a toothbrush. I wasn’t eating my notebook—not yet. But I was thinking about eating it. I had decided to experiment by trying to eat an envelope first. It was a fairly small envelope, and I figured if I could get it down, I could work my way up to some thicker paper. “Yes, I got your note,” I said through the door. I coughed, then spat in the sink.

“Are you throwing up?” I could tell that Jocelyn was standing about an inch away from the door. Her whispery voice was like a needle.

“No. I’ll be out in a minute.” I looked in the mirror over the sink and saw that my face was red from coughing. Normally I was sort of pale, my skin the color of new cement. My hair was an in-between shade that my mother called auburn. I wiped a splotch of chewed-up paper off my cheek.

“I have to use the bathroom,” Jocelyn said.

“Go use a different one.” I coughed again, then rinsed my mouth out with water.

“Are you still throwing up? Should I go get Nenna?”

“I am
not
throwing up,” I said. “Just use a different bathroom.”

“But—Thea?”

“Go. Away. Jocelyn.” I heard a gentle scraping against the door.

I dried my hands on the back of my shorts and picked up my notebook. To eat it or not to eat it? The paper was thick, with little specks of something running through it. Maybe they were wood chips? Or leaves? What if they were poisonous? I ran my hand over the cushiony blue cover, then fit my index finger into the center of the star on the front.
You’ll feel better if you use this,
my mother had said.

I picked up a pen.

Truth #30: The world record for holding your breath is over eight minutes.

I closed the notebook, using my finger to hold my place. Did I feel any better? On the other side of the bathroom window, seagulls were gliding toward the ocean on an early breeze.

Truth #31: Gwen and I tried to hold our breath by plugging our noses. We timed ourselves by the clock in her kitchen. I only got to forty-three seconds, and I felt like my head was about to explode.

“Thea?” It was Jocelyn again. “The downstairs bathrooms are both full. Somebody’s using them. Nenna’s taking a shower.”

I turned the page and clicked the little plastic button on the top of my pen.

Truth #32:

“I have to go to the bathroom
right now,
” Jocelyn whispered. “I can’t wait.”

“Hold your horses.” Reluctantly, I shut the notebook. Thirty-one truths. Sixty-nine more to go. Maybe when I got to one hundred some kind of door would open in my head and I would never again in my entire life have to think about—

“Thea!”

“Okay, I’m coming.” I ran some water in the sink, then opened the cabinet underneath it to look for a towel. And there it was, as if I’d been searching for it all along: the perfect hiding place for my notebook. Behind the extra rolls of toilet paper and the boxes of tissues and the bars of soap and the stack of hand towels, there was a broken board. The back wall of the cabinet was cracked and loose. I wrapped the notebook in a garbage bag to keep it clean, then slid a piece of the board aside and hid the notebook between the cabinet and the wall. For added security, I plucked two hairs from my head and set them on top of the broken board. I closed the cabinet again. Like magic: no notebook. Then I unlocked the bathroom door and opened it as if inviting an honored guest into my home.

Jocelyn stood on one foot in the hallway. She peered into the bathroom. “What were you doing in there?”

“Just using the bathroom. I thought you were in a hurry.”

“I am. But why were you in there for so long if you aren’t sick?”

“I was smoking cigarettes.” A purple lie—diversion. “I didn’t want anyone to see me.”

“Oh.” Jocelyn hurried past. “Cigarettes aren’t good for you.”

I told her I was trying to quit (“It’s really hard once you get hooked on them,” I said), and she shut the door.

During the next couple of days, we rode our Granda’s trike all over Port Harbor. I pedaled Jocelyn to the harbor lighthouse (it wasn’t open, but we walked around it), to the broken-down fishing pier (also closed), and to the Fairyland miniature golf course, where a life-sized Snow White and the seven dwarfs danced in a circle around the eighteenth hole. At Jocelyn’s insistence, we also spent some time lurking outside the hotel where Celia worked. I didn’t see anything very interesting, but Jocelyn claimed to have spotted Ellen’s car on the street. It might have been Ellen’s; I wasn’t sure.

“Aren’t you getting tired of secrets and spying?” I asked.

“No.” Jocelyn swatted a bug on her shoulder. “Celia was talking to someone on the phone last night,” she said.

“Hmm.” I turned a corner on the trike; we didn’t have enough money for miniature golf, so I was pedaling all the way to the boardwalk again.

“It was the middle of the night. I woke up because I heard her talking.” Jocelyn held on to the sides of the basket when we came to a bump. “And it wasn’t the first time, either. I bet she’s talked to both our parents.”

“Why would Celia call our parents in the middle of the night, Jocelyn?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I heard her.”

“She wouldn’t have talked to my parents without telling me.”

“Yes, she would have.” Jocelyn turned halfway around in her seat. “I think I heard her say the name Fred a couple of times. And that’s your dad’s name.”

“I know what my dad’s name is,” I said. We pushed the trike up the wooden ramp and rode past the haunted house, the spin-paint booth, and the arcades, which, as usual, were full of boys in black T-shirts, all pounding away at a huge assortment of beeping machines.

Jocelyn said her legs were stiff and she wanted to get down. I parked the trike by the metal railing at the edge of the boardwalk and tied it up loosely with the bungee cord. We sat down on a bench. A lot of the benches had metal plaques on them: the plaque on ours read,
IN LOVING MEMORY OF HARRY, WHO LOVED THE SEA
. I wondered if Granda would ever have a plaque. Then I tried to erase that thought from my mind.

Two old women in flowered dresses went into the fudge shop and came out with an enormous cone of blue cotton candy. They tore off pieces of the fluffy sugar with their fingers, then tipped their heads back and laughed.

“That’s where Aunt Ellen and Aunt Celia were when we saw them. Right over there.” Jocelyn pointed. Directly across from us were a paperback bookstore, a bakery, the frozen custard booth, the fortune-teller’s booth, the man who painted people’s names on grains of rice, and an office that said
PORT HARBOR REALTY
. “I wonder what they were doing.”

“Maybe they were buying something to eat,” I said. “They probably both like frozen custard.”

“They wouldn’t come all the way to the boardwalk for frozen custard.” Jocelyn fidgeted beside me on the bench. I could tell that she itched. She had taken to wearing a pair of thin white gloves with little pearl buttons at the wrist. Nenna had bought them for her with the idea that Jocelyn would wear them only at night, so that she wouldn’t scratch herself in her sleep. But Jocelyn seemed to like wearing them. She wore them all day.

“Maybe they were buying something to read,” I said, looking at the bookstore. “Or maybe Aunt Celia’s getting married.” I remembered my dream about Mr. Hanover and the bridesmaid fish. “They sell wedding cakes at the bakery. Maybe she’s secretly engaged to a man named Fred, and that’s who she was talking to last night.”

“Really?” Jocelyn’s eyes were wide. “Do you really think she’s getting married?”

“No,” I said. “I just made that up.”

“Oh. What’s a reality office?” Jocelyn asked.

“Realty,”
I said, looking at the sign between the bookstore and the custard shop. “It’s a place where you go to buy a house. Or maybe to sell one.”

“Are Celia and Ellen selling Nenna and Granda’s house?”

“No,” I said. “They wouldn’t sell it. Anyway, they can’t; it isn’t theirs to sell. It’s Nenna and Granda’s.”

“Probably no one would buy it anyway,” Jocelyn said. “It’s kind of old-fashioned.”

I agreed that it was. I studied the blue and white sign on the office door:
PORT HARBOR REALTY
. “Here’s what I think,” I said. “I think you should stop worrying about other people’s secrets. First of all, they might not exist, and second of all, maybe if you didn’t worry about them so much, your rash would get better.” I leaned back against Harry-who-loved-the-sea. “Besides, when your parents get back, you can just ask your mother if anything unusual is going on, and if there is, she’ll tell you.”

“She
won’t
tell me,” Jocelyn said as a silver ice cream cart rumbled by.

“Maybe your dad will tell you,” I said.

But Jocelyn just tucked her legs under the bench.

“Are you sure you want to be wearing those gloves?” I asked. “Aren’t they uncomfortable?”

No answer.

A little girl walked past us carrying a hermit crab in a cage.

“Maybe Aunt Celia and Aunt Ellen were getting their fortunes told,” Jocelyn said. She nodded toward the fortune-teller’s booth.

I tried to picture my sturdy aunts sitting down beneath the sequined sign to get their palms read.

Jocelyn rebuttoned her glove at the wrist. “Do you think she really knows what will happen to you?”

“Who, the fortune-teller?” Just a few feet outside Madam Carla’s booth, a teenage couple held hands, the boy digging into the pocket of his jeans and coming up with a fistful of money. “I doubt it,” I said. “She’s probably just a regular person wearing a scarf and big earrings.”

“But those people believe in her,” Jocelyn said. “I think she knows things.” The girl pushed the boy forward, her palm between his shoulder blades. “I think she can probably help people.”

“She isn’t a nurse, Jocelyn,” I said.

The teenage couple sat down.

“I just wish she didn’t have to look at your hands to tell your fortune,” Jocelyn said. Her own gloved hands were folded in her lap. Her rash was definitely getting worse. It had spread to the insides of her elbows and the backs of her knees.

We sat on the bench for a little while, then split a lemonade and a giant soft pretzel and walked back to the trike.

“It’s hot.” Jocelyn lifted her bushy hair off the back of her neck. All week the weather had been getting warmer.

“You can go swimming when we get back,” I said. “I could stand near the water and watch you.”

“No, that’s okay.” She fiddled with her bungee cord. “Can we ride past the hotel on the way home? I think it’s a shortcut.”

“Fine with me,” I said. “But I wouldn’t call it a shortcut.”

Truth #32: Three Mile Creek wasn’t a shortcut, either. Walking home by the main road and the gas station probably would have been faster.

Jocelyn and I rode to the end of the boardwalk and then retraced our path, riding past the Ferris wheel and the Skee-Ball and the sign for the world’s best Philly cheesesteak.

“I think it was definitely your dad that Aunt Celia was talking to,” Jocelyn said. “You should try to find out what they were saying. Then you could write it in your secret notebook.”

“Celia wasn’t talking to my dad. And I’m not going to write it in my notebook.”

“Why not?”

I stopped pedaling as we glided toward the bakery and the realty office and the custard stand and the fortune-teller. “Because the notebook is supposed to make me feel better,” I said.

“Why do you feel bad?” Jocelyn asked.