Chapter 12
ZONKED!
When I hear the knock on the door, I hope it’s Aimee and Michael, but instead I find Brandy and Tressa.
“Hey!” Tressa says. “We thought we’d come by to say hi.”
They smile, but the little voice warns me.
I open the door for them, and Tressa scrunches up her tiny, pale face as she enters. Brandy follows.
Grammy is watching one of our favorite game shows, Let’s Make a Deal, and munching cheese curls.
“Hi, girls.” She smiles, waving with orange fingertips. “You’re just in time for the big deal.” A man dressed as a ketchup bottle is trying to decide between keeping his gold envelope or trading it for curtain number three. I step closer.
Tressa leans forward. “Why is that guy dressed like ketchup?”
Grammy glances at her like she just landed in a spaceship. “Let’s Make a Deal!”
Tressa looks panicked. “A deal on what?”
Grammy laughs, and Tressa’s face darkens.
“Let’s Make a Deal. It’s a game show,” I tell her.
The ketchup-bottle guy on TV gets ZONKED! and then there’s a commercial. Grammy turns to us. “Well, jeepers crow. I told that man to stick with his gold envelope. But it didn’t matter how much I told him, he gave it up anyway. People just never listen.” Then she throws up her hands in disgust but puts on a smile. “Hello there, Brandy darlin’. How have you been?”
“I’m fine, Mrs. McHill. How are you?”
“I’m dandy, honey. Just dandy.” Then she looks at Tressa. “Who’s your new friend?”
“I’m Tressa Bohlen. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you,” Grammy says. “I’ve seen you down at Seaside. Are you staying in one of the cottages?”
“No, my family rented a house on Sea Street.”
Grammy drops another cheese curl in her mouth. Then she holds the bag toward us. “You want a nibble?”
“No thank you,” Tressa says, like she’s caught a whiff of rotten meat.
“Well, you all run along,” Grammy says. “I’m goin’ to watch the final round here and see if this box of tulips can take home any money.” She laughs as she picks up the remote control. “Be a good girl and get me another root beer, will ya, baby?”
Brandy and Tressa follow me into the kitchen. “What’s a ‘box of tulips’?” Tressa asks.
“That means he looks good but he isn’t very smart.”
She laughs but not like she thinks it’s funny.
I lead them to my room. Tressa draws her finger along the wall, leaving an off-white line. Her fingertip is the color of charcoal. She stares at it.
“That’s just the soot from the winter,” I tell her.
“Soot?” Her eyes expand.
“Yeah. Something about the furnace. It comes up with the heat or something.”
Her mouth moves the slightest bit. Like it’s trying to decide what to say.
Tressa wipes the soot from her finger right onto my bedspread.
There is a chirp behind us.
“Birdie!” I call, and run to the cage where my parakeet dances back and forth.
“Hey, Birdie. How have you been?” Brandy asks. She leans in. “Why is his nose black?”
I pause. “I guess it’s the soot.”
Looking at Birdie, it’s the first time I really notice the soot. We all breathe it in, and that can’t be good. Tressa asks what time it is—a polite way of saying she has to leave.
“Brandy? You want to hang out?” I ask.
Her eyes dart to Tressa and back to me. “Naw. I think I’ll go, too.”
Their entire visit lasted less than fifteen minutes.
The tide has shifted. At least Brandy has.
Grammy’s laughter over a big win calls me downstairs, and I plop down on the couch next to her and rest my cheek against her pillowy arm.
She pats my cheek a few times before plunging her hand into her bag of cheese curls. “What’s the matter with my girl?”
I sigh. “Nothing.”
“Oh, if you say nothing, it’s always something. Now spill it for your ole grammy.”
I want to say that I am a rock crab and Tressa is a seagull, but I know Grammy would say I am being dramatic.
“I’m just sad, I guess.”
“Now, don’t let yourself go to the sad place for too long. Folks sometimes plop themselves right in the middle of it and get real comfortable.”
“Well, it’s not like I have a choice.”
“Course you do. You gotta make a deal with yourself to not do that. You’ve got to put your arm around happiness and invite it inside.” Grammy pauses and looks at me. “But I suspect those girls are making it hard to do that, huh?”
I nod.
“Well, you just push those two out of your head. They don’t deserve one more iota of your attention.”
But I desperately want things back to the way they were with Brandy.
“And maybe,” Grammy continues, “just maybe this isn’t as bad as you think. Sometimes people’s way of acting has nothing to do with you. You and Brandy have been friends a long time. Maybe if you show her how much her friendship means to you . . .”
“That could be a disaster.” And I feel sad because I never used to have to wonder what Brandy would think.
“Well,” Grammy says, “you either succeed or you learn. If it doesn’t work out, you can handle it. You’ll be sad, but you can handle it. That Brandy Fiester won’t break my girl.”
I manage a smile, but all I can think about is Tressa. It’s weird—I don’t even like her, but I still wish she liked me.
“Jeepers crow!” Grammy yells, focusing back on the TV. “How’d this boy get on this show, anyway? I’ve known cockroaches that know more than him!”
“Galveston, Texas,” I say, because that was the answer to the last question. Grammy elbows me and giggles.
She looks so proud that I add, “And it wasn’t just a storm—it was a category four hurricane with sustained winds of one hundred and forty-five miles per hour.”
“Delsie, you surely are the smartest thing on two feet. You could even be a game show champion someday.”
“Yeah, me and that bag of cheese curls. I am also packed full of vitamins A and D.”
You’d think the walls would come down with Grammy’s laughing the way she does. I mean, it wasn’t that funny. I guess she’s laughing mostly because she’s my grammy.