The Book of One Hundred Truths (8 page)

I didn’t answer. We were close to the fortune-teller’s booth. Madam Carla was alone in her little kiosk.

“Don’t you wish you could know what’s going to happen to people ahead of time?” Jocelyn asked.

Madam Carla looked up and seemed to lock eyes with us.
KNOW YOUR FUTURE
. With a long and skinny index finger, she pointed above her head at the glittering sign just as we rode by.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I
didn’t really think that Celia was making midnight phone calls to my parents. What would she talk to them about? Would she call to tell them that I did a lousy job on the laundry? Would she ask about the book of truths? I tried not to imagine their conversation, but I couldn’t help it.

Celia:
Oh, so Thea’s a liar. That makes sense. Of course we were wondering.

My mother:
We’ve been trying to train her to stop, but you know it isn’t easy at this age. I bought her a notebook, but she—

Celia:
That’s what she’s been hiding, then. Ellen and I thought she was fairly unusual, even for a Grumman.

My mother:
Do you think she’ll grow out of it?

“I’m going to give my parents a call,” I announced on Saturday morning. “I’ll just check in and see what they’re up to.”

Nenna and Celia were straightening up the living room, Granda was reading (he held a book in his hands but had his eyes closed), and Ellen was hovering around the recycling bin. She had taken a dozen plastic containers from the bottom of the bin, and she was flattening them one by one on the kitchen floor.

I picked up the phone. It was an old-fashioned phone with a very short cord, so you had to stand next to it when you were talking. “I figure since no one else has talked to them, I should call and say hi,” I said. “Just to check in. Is that all right?”

“Of course it’s all right. Go ahead, Thea,” Nenna said.

Celia had her back to me. I dialed.

Usually on Saturday mornings my parents did errands—they went to the dry cleaner or the farmers’ market or the grocery store—so I wasn’t sure anyone would be home. But my father answered on the second ring. “Grummans,” he said, and I immediately pictured him in our kitchen: he was probably in the breakfast nook with the morning paper spread out in front of him, his square black glasses perched on his head.

Truth #33: Sometimes I wonder whether my parents wish they had a better daughter. They probably wanted someone tiny and cute, a girl who would come home and do her homework without being asked and then go off with twenty of her best friends to cheerleading practice.

“Hey, Dad,” I said. I had to turn toward the wall because of a sudden lump in my throat. “It’s me. Thea.”

“Well, hey there yourself,” my father said. I could barely hear him because Ellen was crushing another container, which made a
whooomph
sound when it collapsed beneath her heel.

“Is everything okay?” my father asked. “Are you having fun?”

“Sure,” I said. The wallpaper in the kitchen was printed with blue and green teacups. “I just wanted to see what you were up to.”

“Your mother’s grocery shopping. And I’m getting ready to fix the screen door. It’s pretty exciting here, overall. Is everybody taking good care of you?”

“Yeah.”

Whoooomph.
Ellen crushed an applesauce container.

My father told me a long and involved story about what had happened to the screen door, and how he had already tried to fix it twice, and what the person at the hardware store had told him about the new kind of bracket he should use.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

“I’m here.”

“And everything’s fine in Port Harbor?”

I told him it was.

“Over and out, then.” He asked me to say hello to everyone, and he hung up the phone.

I felt like an idiot. I should have just asked him if he’d talked to Celia. But what if he had? Wasn’t he allowed to talk to his sister?

“Is there any news in Minnesota?” Ellen asked. She had flattened all the plastic within reach and seemed to be looking around the kitchen for something to crush.

“No, not really,” I said. “My mother was out grocery shopping.”

“I think I’m going out myself,” Ellen said. “Celia, didn’t I give you the—” She stopped and made a twisting motion with her hand.

Jocelyn had wandered into the kitchen behind me.

“Oh. That’s right,” Celia said. “I’ll get it.” She started rummaging through her purse. She found something inside it and tossed it to Ellen, but her aim was off. There was a clink, like a single high note on a piano, as something landed by my foot on the floor.

It was a key—a single key on a silver key chain. I picked it up. Jocelyn was at my side in a split second. We looked at the little white tag attached to the key chain. In neat black letters it said 21
BAY
.

Ellen held out her hand. “I’ll take that, Thea. Thank you.”

I gave her the key.

“Where are you going, Aunt Ellen?” Jocelyn asked. “Can I please go with you?”

Ellen tucked the key into her pocket. “Another time.”

Truth #34:

“Why didn’t she let me go with her?” Jocelyn whined.

“I don’t know.” I was back in the bathroom, trying to work on my notebook. I could see Jocelyn’s toes through the narrow crack beneath the door.

“But what do you
think
? Thea, tell me.”

I waggled my pen above the page. I wondered how many lies the average person told in a week. Or even a year. I imagined what it would be like if everyone had their own container of lies and once they filled it they wouldn’t be able to lie anymore. My container was probably overflowing.

“Do you think it was the same key we saw Ellen put in her purse at the boardwalk?” Jocelyn asked.

It had to be,
I thought. And what the heck was 21 Bay?

She rattled the doorknob. “Are you coming out soon?”

“Leave me alone. I need to pee and I can’t do it if you’re standing there waiting.”

There was a pause of about six seconds. “Aunt Phoebe says if you’re smoking cigarettes in there you should definitely stop.”

“Phoebe said what?”

“She said cigarettes are bad for you and they’ll give you cancer and if you burn down Nenna and Granda’s house it’s going to be very hard for her to forgive you.” Jocelyn tapped her finger against the door. “Thea?”

“What?”

“Maybe something bad is happening,” she said.

“Nothing bad is happening.”

“How do you know?”

I wrapped up the notebook and tucked it back in its hiding place. I flushed the toilet (even though I hadn’t used it) and opened the door. “So you told Phoebe that I was smoking cigarettes?”

Jocelyn shrugged. Her shoulder bones were the size of Ping-Pong balls.

I thought about lecturing her for being a tattletale, but since I hadn’t really been smoking, it didn’t seem worth the trouble. Besides, I reminded myself that Nenna thought I was being nice to her.

“Why do you always take so long in the bathroom?” she asked.

“Because the bathroom is great,” I said. “I love the bathroom. It’s so cozy. It’s probably my favorite room in the house.”

“Really? I like Liam and Austin’s room better,” Jocelyn said.

We went downstairs. In the living room, Granda was watching TV (the forecaster was calling for desertlike weather in Phoenix) and Nenna was playing crazy eights with Edmund. “Do you girls want to play with us?” she asked. Jocelyn did. It was hard to resist Nenna when she was playing a game. She could be playing the stupidest game in the world, but she would laugh and exclaim the entire time, as if in all her life she had never dreamed of having so much fun.

I made a big stack of peanut-butter-and-honey-on-cracker sandwiches and went out to the deck with a paperback. I sat in a deck chair, my calves flattened out like two pancakes in front of me, and watched as a couple of girls about my age raced each other across the sand and into the ocean.

Truth #34: I really miss Gwen.

I read a few pages, realized I hadn’t paid any attention to what they said, and then read them again. What were Celia and Ellen doing with that key?

“Hey, ugly. What’s up?”

I shaded my eyes and turned around.

Liam climbed the three wooden steps to the deck and stood beside me, a yellow surfboard creating a puddle of shade at his feet. “Are you planning to sit here all day by yourself?”

“I might. Why?”

“No reason.” He reached for one of my peanut-butter-and-honey-on-cracker sandwiches. “I just thought you might want to learn how to surf.”

Liam and Austin were good surfers. During the summer they surfed almost every day, whether the waves were six feet high or six inches. Ellen said they had salt water in their veins instead of blood. When I was younger, I used to stand at the edge of the water and watch them, a gray coil of ocean rising behind them to graze their shoulders.

“I’m not wearing my bathing suit,” I said.

“You could get up on your hind legs and go into the house and
put
it on.” A dribble of honey fell from his lips and landed on my deck chair.

“Liam, do you think anything strange is going on around here?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Do you mean strange like the regular kind of strange, or something different?”

I accidentally put my arm in the honey. “I mean something that’s happening but nobody’s talking about it,” I said.

“Like what?”

“I’m not sure. It probably doesn’t matter. Never mind.” Why did I care about Jocelyn’s ridiculous schemes, anyway?

Austin was thumping his way down the steps. “Are you ready, loser?” He grabbed his own surfboard.

“In a couple of minutes,” Liam said. “Thea’s coming with us.”

Austin stopped in his tracks, looking as if someone had slapped him.

The ocean was a hundred yards away, shining like a giant bowl of cut glass. “That’s okay,” I said. “You guys go ahead. I’ll watch from here.”

“Are you sure?” Liam licked his fingers.

I told him I was. “I don’t have a bathing suit. I forgot to pack one.”

Austin cocked his head. “You came to the beach—for three weeks—without a bathing suit? What did you bring with you? A down jacket?” He cackled at his own little joke, then reached out a long tan arm and swooped up the rest of my cracker sandwiches. “Man, we don’t have any decent food around here. I couldn’t find any donuts.”

“And there’s no bologna,” Liam said. “Tragic.”

I heard a
click-clack
ing noise behind us: Jocelyn was coming down the outdoor stairs, carrying her purse and wearing her patent leather shoes. She held the handrail (she was still wearing gloves) with every step.

“Ah! The family royalty,” Austin said. “It’s always a privilege.” He put down his surfboard and fell to his knees. His hair was hanging over his face like a dirty blond curtain. “Your Majesty!”

“Be quiet,” Jocelyn told him. “Nenna’s watching you from the window. And she said she wants you both to be careful while you surf.”

“Hey, Nenna!” Austin yelled. “We’re going to catch some big ones!” He stood up and waved. Then he turned to Liam. “Are you ready to go yet? Or are you going to stand here flapping your lips all day?”

Liam bonked me lightly on the head with his surfboard. “Are you sure you don’t want to come? You could swim in your clothes.”

“She can’t,” Jocelyn said. “Thea can’t go into the ocean at all. She’s allergic to jellyfish.”

“She’s what?”

“They don’t even have to sting her,” Jocelyn added. “If she just goes in the water and they’re around, her whole body swells up. She gets enormous.”

There was a silence while Liam and Austin apparently mulled this idea over.

“I might actually pay good money to see that,” Austin finally said. “Does she look like the whale in
Pinocchio
?”

Liam was muttering to himself. “Allergic to
jellyfish
?”

“Just forget it,” I told him. “I don’t want to surf.”

Austin picked up a crab’s claw and sniffed it, then threw it at his brother.

“Hey, Liam,” I said. “You and Austin don’t know anything about twenty-one Bay, do you?”

“I don’t think so.” Liam tightened the string on his bathing suit, a pair of orange trunks that hung below his knees. “What is it, some kind of dorky girl band?”

“No. I don’t know what it is. I just heard the name. I thought you might have heard of it.”

He shrugged. “Nope.”

Daintily, Jocelyn climbed onto the deck chair next to mine. “I don’t think they know anything,” she said, as if Liam and Austin were nowhere around.