Diary One: Dawn, Sunny, Maggie, Amalia, and Ducky

  I looked at Maggie. I didn’t know which question to answer first. So instead I asked Jill a question. “Where is your mom?”

  “She’s here. She’s in bed.”

  “Well, where does she think we are?”

  Jill glanced at Sunny, who had finished puking and had sunk down on the porch steps. “She thinks you’re here too. Asleep. I left a note for her that she found when she came home. It said we were tired and had gone to bed early. I had to lie to her for you.”

  With that, Jill opened the door the rest of the way and silently held it open for us. We slipped inside and she locked it behind us. Then without a word she tiptoed through the dark house and upstairs to her room. We followed her. She was wearing pajamas with feet in them.

  “Don’t you want to know what happened to us?” Maggie asked her.

  “Not really.” Jill turned on her light. It was the big overhead light.

  “Oh. Oh, man. That is so bright,” said Sunny, moaning. She crawled onto the bed and put Jill’s pillow over her head.

  Jill grabbed it off. “You have been barfing!” she cried. “I don’t want your face all over my pillow!”

  Sunny was too miserable to argue. She pulled off her sweatshirt and put that over her head instead.

  “Look, Jill, I know you’re mad—” I started to say.

  “Of course I’m mad!” she cried. “I hate lying, especially to my mom. I don’t know why I bothered anyway. I should have told her the truth. Why did I even cover for you?”

  “We appreciate it,” said Sunny in a small voice from under her sweatshirt. “We really do.”

  That seemed to make a difference to Jill. “You do?” she said.

  “Of course we do,” Maggie and I said together.

  “We really did try to get home on time,” I added, which wasn’t exactly true. “But then things got a little out of control at the party.”

  “Yeah, the older kids started throwing people in the pool,” said Maggie. “So then we were, um, trying to dry off so that we, um, wouldn’t be quite such a mess when your mom came home.”

  “But it was getting later and later,” I went on. “And then, just when we were ready to leave, the police showed up.”

  “The police!” exclaimed Jill, managing to look both amazed and disapproving. “Whoa.”

  “Yeah, we don’t know why,” said Maggie.

  “The party was too noisy,” mumbled Sunny.

  “Well, anyway, we didn’t want to get caught, so we just ran out of the yard—it was an outdoor party,” I said, “and into the woods, but we didn’t know where to go, so we sort of got lost, and even when we finally came to a road, we didn’t know where we were. Luckily, Ducky—Ducky McCrae, he’s a sophomore—drove by then and gave us a ride over here. And that’s why we’re late.”

  “Boy,” said Jill, now looking almost sympathetic.

  “And I lost my wallet,” said Sunny, briefly lifting up the shirt.

  “What?” said Jill.

  “I lost my wallet. At the party. I think. Ducky is—”

  “You lost it at the party?” Jill interrupted her. “Oh, that’s just great. That is wonderful. When the police discover it, they’ll call your house and in two seconds everyone will find out where you all really were tonight, and my mom will know I lied to her.”

  “Jill, this is so not about you,” exclaimed Sunny as loudly as she could. “This is about me. How did you manage to turn the conversation around to you? Huh?”

  “How did I?” Jill repeated. “Because it is too about me. I’m the one you guys ditched tonight. I’m the one who had to cover for you, to tell lies for you. I’m the one—”

  Maggie jumped to her feet. “Okay, okay!” she said. “You know what? Everyone is mad. Everyone is tired. It’s really late. I think we should go to sleep now and talk about this in the morning when we’re feeling better.”

  Tuesday 10/7, in study hall

  Feeling better? Ha. What a joke. When we woke up on Sunday morning, we were all exhausted, even Jill, since she’d been up later than usual the night before. And even Sunny, despite the fact that she had PASSED OUT.

  Yes, she had truly passed out. And it wasn’t until I had cried (softly), “Maggie, she’s passed out!” that Jill finally understood that Sunny had gotten …

  “Drunk? She’s drunk?” squeaked Jill. “That’s why she was throwing up? Because she got drunk? And now she’s passed out? What do you do when someone passes out?” Jill was wringing her hands.

  “You just let them sleep, I guess,” I said.

  “No, no. It’s more dangerous than that,” said Maggie.

  Maggie and Jill and I stared down at Sunny, who was still sprawled on the bed. We had tried calling to her and shaking her, but she wouldn’t move or wake up. She seemed to be breathing all right, though. We didn’t know what else to do, so we decided we would just let her sleep until the morning.

  “Let’s take some of her clothes off, though,” said Maggie. “We’ll never get her into her nightshirt, but let’s take off her shoes and her jeans. She’ll be more comfortable.”

  So that’s what we did. Then we rolled her on her side and put a trash can by the bed in case of nighttime barfing. And then we had another tiff with Jill, who didn’t want Sunny to sleep on her bed at all. But when we tried to move Sunny, we found that we couldn’t do it easily (or quietly), so she got to sleep on the bed after all.

  Then I lay awake worrying about the police. So, it turns out, did Jill and Maggie. And then I had finally fallen asleep when I heard a cheerful voice say, “Time to get up, sleepyheads. I fixed you a big breakfast!”

  It was Jill’s sister, Liz.

  I looked at my watch. Eight o’clock.

  Eight o’clock? On a Sunday morning?

  On this Sunday morning? When I had gotten, like, two and a half hours of sleep?

  Before I could take this in, Mrs. Henderson bustled cheerfully into the room and snapped up the window shades.

  “Rise and shine, girls!” she said. “Sunny, what are you doing sleeping in your clothes?” At that moment the tea kettle whistled shrilly from downstairs, and Mrs. Henderson hurried out of the room, leaving a cloud of perfume behind her.

  “Oh, oh.” Sunny was moaning loudly on the bed. “Oh, my God. The light! The noise! That smell. Oh … ew …”

  Jill’s head snapped up. “Sunny, are you going to barf?”

  “I don’t know. Someone pull the shades down. Make that smell go away.” Luckily, the tea kettle had stopped whistling.

  Jill eyed her through a curtain of tangled hair. “You’re hungover, aren’t you,” she said. “Tsk. Disgusting.”

  That morning was every bit as awful as I could possibly imagine. Maggie and Jill and I weren’t hungover, of course, but we were exhausted. And Jill was still mad at us, and we were still mad at her. Sunny was a different story. Her head was pounding. She said she had the worst headache she’d ever had in her life. Light bothered her. Noise bothered her. And smells made her feel sick to her stomach.

  So Liz’s big breakfast was torture for her. The kitchen was lit by sunshine and large fluorescent lights. Liz banged pots. The kettle whistled again. Timers buzzed and rang. And the air smelled of bacon, frying butter, coffee, and Mrs. Henderson’s gardenia perfume.

  I thought Sunny was going to pass out again right at the table. Somehow she managed not to, and not to barf. But she couldn’t make it through breakfast. She had to tell Mrs. Henderson that she couldn’t eat because she just isn’t a morning person, which certainly looked believable, and then she returned to Jill’s bed.

  The morning passed. Sunny seemed to feel better. By eleven o’clock, she said her headache was going away. Which was good since it was time for Ducky to pick us up and take us back to the scene of the party.

  “I can’t go with you,” said Maggie. “Unfortunately, I have to go to some charity event with Mom and Dad today. One of those huge parties with tons of celebrities at which Dad will probably hustle around maki
ng deals, and Mom will be so wrapped up in what everyone’s wearing she’ll forget what the charity event is for, which always makes me mad.” Maggie sighed. “Oh, well. This party’s outside. Maybe I’ll find a stray cat or something.”

  At that moment, a car honked.

  “There’s Ducky,” I said, and Sunny and I hurried outside before Mrs. Henderson had a chance to see that someone other than Carol was picking us up. “’Bye!” we called. “Thanks!”

  “Hey!” Ducky greeted us as we clambered into his car.

  In the light, his car looked different. Worse, actually. It was the oldest car I’d ever seen that wasn’t an antique. Not that you’d mistake it for one of those nice antique cars. What it looked like was a junk pile.

  “So how’d you guys make out last night?” Ducky asked us. He was wearing clean blue jeans and a T-shirt with a picture of Elvis on the front.

  “Oh … okay,” said Sunny.

  “Hungover?” Ducky asked her.

  “Yeah. But now I’m better.”

  “I try never to get drunk,” said Ducky as he left Jill’s street and turned onto a main road.” In fact, I don’t drink at all. Or smoke. My body is a temple. I put only the purest of things into it. Like Mountain Dew and Pez.”

  I smiled. “Thanks again for driving us home last night. Did you have any trouble when you got home?”

  “Nope. Like I said, my brother was out. He never knew. Besides, he trusts me. So do my parents. Even long distance.”

  Ducky drove along, concentrating on the road, and I took a good look at him now that it was daylight. He was so earnest. And very clean-cut. He looked like someone you could really talk to. I thought of all the girls I’d seen sitting with Ducky in study hall. Did Ducky want to be our friend now? I hoped so. I felt very special. Chosen by him.

  “Okay,” said. Ducky a few minutes later. “Here we are.”

  He had pulled into the driveway of a large house. If the lawn of the house hadn’t been littered with cups and papers and things, and if the pool hadn’t been full of ruined lawn furniture, I would never have guessed that this was where the party had been held. It seemed so different in the daytime. And in the quiet, with no party guests.

  Ducky had said that no one was at home, and it certainly looked that way—a sleepy house, the windows closed, the garage door pulled down. Not a sign of life.

  “Okay,” said Sunny. “I might as well start looking by those bushes.”

  She pointed to the scene of her barf fest.

  Ducky and I spread out in other directions. But I hadn’t gone far when I thought I heard a door open. I whirled around—just in time to see a woman say to Sunny, “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  Sure enough, the woman had come through the front door of the house, the house that looked unoccupied. I froze, twisted around with one arm in front of me and the other at my side.

  The woman was holding an object out toward Sunny. Even at a distance I recognized it as Sunny’s wallet. Her wallet is neon pink plastic, hard not to see. Which was probably why the woman had already found it.

  “Um, yes,” said Sunny in a small voice, reaching for the wallet.

  “Okay. Come here, then. All three of you.”

  I glanced at Ducky, who was crawling out from under a bush.

  Ducky and I approached the woman. I thought she looked familiar.

  I thought she was a teacher at Vista.

  She was. “Hi, Ms. Krueger,” said Ducky sheepishly.

  “Hello, Christopher.”

  “Ms. Krueger, honestly we did not know this was your house,” said Ducky. “Not before the party, and not now. I mean, I guess you know that some of the other kids knew—”

  My mouth dropped open. “What?”

  “—but I didn’t. And Dawn and Sunny certainly didn’t.”

  “Who thought up this prank?” Ms. Krueger asked Ducky.

  “I’m not sure. All I knew was that the party was going to be held at a house where no one was home this weekend.”

  “As if that weren’t bad enough,” said Ms. Krueger.

  Sunny and I were looking from Ducky to Ms. Krueger like we were at a tennis match. I had no idea what they were talking about.

  “What are you talking about?” Sunny blurted out.

  “I’ll explain in the car,” Ducky replied. He paused. Then he shrugged. “Well, we got what we came for. Come on, you guys.”

  “Not so fast,” said Ms. Krueger. “All right. Christopher McCrae and Sunny Winslow, I know you two were here last night.” (Ms. Krueger must have looked in Sunny’s wallet.) She turned to me. “And your name would be?”

  I considered giving her a fake name, but I couldn’t do that to Sunny and Ducky. If they were going to get into trouble, then I would get into trouble with them.

  I sighed. “Dawn Schafer,” I told her.

  “Dawn Schafer,” she repeated. She looked at each of us in turn. “Do your parents know where you were last night?” I decided she had sort of a nice face, especially for someone who was probably in the process of ruining my life. It was narrow, lightly freckled, with gentle brown eyes. Everything about her seemed soft, even when she was asking hard questions.

  “Not technically,” I replied.

  Ms. Krueger looked like she was about to say something else, but before she could, Sunny cried, “Are you going to press charges?”

  “Press … charges?” Ms. Krueger swallowed back a smile. “It doesn’t quite work like that. I’m not sure what I’m going to do. In the meantime, please keep this in mind: My husband and I were away for the weekend on a much-deserved and long-awaited minivacation. We were phoned in the middle of the night by the police saying that our yard had been trashed and we might want to return right away, which we did. Now we get to spend the remainder of our vacation cleaning up this.” She waved her arm around, indicating the sea of mud, litter, and broken furniture.

  “Ms. Krueger, we didn’t know. We really didn’t!” I cried. “We got these invitations and we thought the party was going to be at the house belonging to whoever sent the invitations. We didn’t know no one would be there—or that it was your house.”

  “I know you didn’t. It wasn’t your fault…. You I’m not so sure about,” she said to Ducky.

  A few minutes later, Ms. Krueger let us go. “But this isn’t over yet,” she called after us.

  “I didn’t think so,” muttered Sunny.

  Tuesday afternoon 10/7

  Having survived today (miraculously, it seems), I can finish writing about the weekend more calmly. And so the story continues. …

  The second Sunny and I were settled into Ducky’s car, Sunny looked in her wallet, which wasn’t missing a thing. Then we bombarded Ducky with questions.

  “You knew the party was going to be held at an empty house?” I asked him.

  “It was a prank?” said Sunny.

  “Are you sure you didn’t know this was Ms. Krueger’s house?” I said.

  Ducky answered that last question first. “No. I honestly didn’t know this was Ms. Krueger’s house. I wouldn’t have come over here if I’d known.” When Sunny and I didn’t say anything, Ducky added even more seriously, “The party was a prank thought up by the upperclassmen. It was their way of hazing the eighth-graders. They planned this mysterious party and they decided to hold it at Ms. Krueger’s house because they knew she wouldn’t be home this weekend. They served liquor at the party, and they waited until things got just out of control enough, and then they called the cops. I’m not sure who made the call, but the plan was for the caller to say he was a neighbor and complain about the noise or something. Then all the upperclassmen left. The only kids who got caught were a bunch of eighth-graders. But I didn’t know half of this until I got to the party.”

  Sunny slumped in her seat. “Oh, man.”

  “We got tricked,” I added glumly.

  “Our parents are going to know what we did last night,” said Sunny. “That’s all my mom needs right now.”
>
  Ducky glanced at Sunny in the rearview mirror, but all he said was, “I don’t know. Ms. Krueger’s okay. Let’s just wait and see what happens.”

  “Easy for you to say. If you get in trouble, your parents won’t hear about it for months. And what are they going to do from Ghana, anyway?” muttered Sunny.

  The rest of the ride was pretty quiet. At last Ducky pulled up in front of my house, and Sunny and I climbed out. “See you tomorrow!” called Ducky. “Everything’s going to be okay. Really.”

  “’Bye!” I called back.

  Sunny was halfway across the lawn on her way to her house when suddenly I remembered something. “Hey, Sunny!” I yelled. “Yesterday I promised Jill I’d go back to the mall with her. I better keep the promise. You don’t want to come with us, do you?”

  Sunny shook her head. “Nah. Jill’s kind of driving me crazy right now. Besides, I should go visit my mom.”

  “Okay. See you later.”

  Well, there’s nothing like a bad secret to cause a little resentment. The moment I walked through the front door and saw Carol, I thought about the baby and all the questions I wasn’t allowed to ask anyone. Carol was dressed in tennis whites and eating an ice cream cone. Not exactly the picture of a pregnant woman.

  I answered Carol’s questions about the sleepover with “Yeah” and “Uh-huh” and “Nope” and other things grown-ups hate. Then I called Jill and arranged to meet her at The Bear Necessities in half an hour. And then I made my great escape. I told Carol I’d be back in time for dinner.

  At the mall, Jill moped around The Bear Necessities, poking at stickers, glancing at pencils and erasers and teddy bears and ponies. Finally I said to her, “Come on. Let’s go to Starburst’s. Let’s get a soda or an iced tea or something. You don’t really want to shop. Do you?”

  Jill shook her head. I could see tears in her eyes. She tossed a fuzzy bear pin back into a basket. Then she led the way out of the store.

  At Starburst’s I ordered an iced tea for me and a lemonade for Jill.

  “I’m really sorry about the party,” I said finally.