All the Answers (15 page)

When Ava opened the kitchen door, there were cookies on
the counter, along with a note that said Gram was taking a nap. Gram never used to take so many naps. What if she was sick like Grandpa and had to go live at Cedar Bay, too?

Ava's stomach gave an awful twist. Even Gram's warm cookies didn't look good.

Ava tried taking her deep counting breaths, but they came out all uneven and shaky and made her wonder if there was something wrong with her, too. Maybe she had one of those respiratory diseases people got on that epidemic episode of
Boston Med
. What if Ava had that disease? If she got sicker and sicker and died, Sophie probably wouldn't even go to her funeral.

Enough with the what-ifs
, Ava thought. But she couldn't make herself stop. She had to fix this. Sophie had to talk to her.

Ava pulled off her stupid-goat-muddy sneakers, headed for the computer, and typed a message to Sophie.

Hey—want to come over? Gram made cookies.

She sent it and stared, waiting and hoping for a fast reply. If everything was okay, Sophie would say yes. Whatever had gone wrong in somebody's day, Gram's cookies made things better, and Sophie totally knew that. Her answer came right away.

Can't. Running errands with Mom.

K, Ava typed, and logged out. But she sat staring at the screen. Normally, Sophie would have invited Ava to come along or at least told her what the errands were. Ava wondered if there even were errands. She'd ask the pencil, the way she'd asked it how Maya and Lucy felt about her. She was probably worried
over nothing. The pencil would probably tell her everything was fine.

Ava went to her room, took out the pencil and wrote:

Does Sophie really have to run errands with her mom right now?

“No,” the voice said. As if that should have been obvious. Ava wrote:

Why did Sophie lie to me?

“Because she's angry about what happened with Jason Marzigliano,” the pencil answered.

That wasn't my fault. It was your fault,
Ava wrote.

The pencil didn't say anything.

“Ava! I didn't hear you come home,” Gram said from the doorway.

Ava put the pencil down and turned to face her. “I saw your nap note, so I was quiet. I haven't been home long.”

Gram came in and kissed her on the head, then stepped back to look at her. “Are you having a tough day? You're blinking a lot.”

Ava tried not to blink. Her eyes burned. “I'm okay.”

Gram squinted at her. “You sure?” Ava nodded, but she knew she was going to be on the list in the Jesus notebook tonight, along with the yahoo running Mom's country and the people of war-torn Sudan. That was fine. Ava would take all the prayers she could get.

“How come you were taking a nap?”

“Eh …” Gram shrugged. “My stomach's a little off this afternoon.”

“Again?” It seemed like Gram's stomach was never “on” anymore. “Did you go to the doctor?”

“Oh, no. I'm fine.” Gram waved at the air. “I'm going to start dinner.” She headed for the stairs.

Ava picked up the pencil.

Is something wrong with Gram?

“Yes,” the voice said. It didn't elaborate. Ava wanted to throw the pencil across the room or break it in half, but she couldn't. She needed it.

Her hands were shaking when she wrote the next question:

Is Gram going to die?

“Yes,” the voice answered, as calmly as if it were telling her the sky was blue. Ava put the pencil down and pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. No, no, no! Gram couldn't die; she couldn't leave Ava and Mom and Dad and Marcus and Emma. They all needed her so much. No!

Ava had to call her parents. Maybe Gram was only going to die if whatever it was got worse. Could a pencil-fact change once the pencil said it was true? Jason Marzigliano sure changed. Maybe the pencil would be wrong again. Maybe if they got Gram to a doctor right away, right now, she wouldn't die. Ava had to call her parents. She had to tell Gram. But what would she say? Gram obviously had no idea how sick she was. She was going to be terrified. Or worse, she wouldn't even believe Ava and she'd just laugh it all off and then head down to the kitchen to make dinner and probably collapse right there.

Ava couldn't slow her breathing. She felt like she might throw up or pass out or maybe both, but she forced herself to slow down. She took a shuddery breath and reached for the pencil. She needed to know how soon it was going to happen. In shaky letters, she wrote:

When is Gram going to die?

The pencil didn't answer. Ava hated it. She choked out a sob and wrote so hard the tip broke off the pencil but she kept going with the blunt point:

Why won't you answer my question? Why won't you tell me when Gram is going to die?

“Because,” the pencil said. “I do not predict the future.”

Ava thought her head might explode.

Then why did you tell me she's going to die??

“She is,” the voice answered calmly. “So are you. Everyone is going to die eventually.”

Ava dropped the pencil, sank back in her chair, and stared at the ceiling. She felt like a balloon that somebody blew too full of air and then let go of so it raced all around the room and ended up a deflated, wrinkled blob.

She couldn't make her heart slow down. She took a deep, shaky breath.

Gram isn't going to die any time soon
, she told herself.

Then why was she feeling so rotten all the time?

Ava took a few more deep breaths. That dumb pencil was going to tell her what she wanted to know, whether it wanted to or not. She thought about how to say it, then wrote:

What is the official medical explanation for why Gram has been feeling sick to her stomach lately?

“Lactose intolerance,” the voice said decisively. Ava scribbled down the words, then wrote:

What does that mean?

Ava realized as soon as she wrote it that she'd just broken the don't-ask-questions-Google-can-answer rule.

“Lactose intolerance,” the voice said, “means that the body cannot easily digest lactose, a type of natural sugar found in milk and dairy products.”

Ava stared at the words. Lactose intolerance. Gram wasn't going to die. She wasn't even sick. Not really. She just had to stop drinking milk. That was all.

Ava felt as if her whole life had been stolen away and then given back to her, only brighter and shinier than before. She could go downstairs now and look up lactose intolerance on the computer and then show Gram. She'd say they talked about it in life science or something and then Gram could go to the doctor and have him tell her for sure and then everything would be back to normal. She stood up and started for the door, then paused and looked at the pencil on the desk.

She was pretty sure the pencil wouldn't respond, but she picked it up and wrote:

Thank you.

Just in case it could hear.

Gram was in the kitchen stirring Alfredo sauce when Ava came downstairs. Perfect. “Okay if I use the computer to look up something we talked about in science class?” She had it all planned out.

“Sure.” Gram nodded and raised a spoonful of steaming cheese sauce from the pot. She blew on it and opened her mouth just as Ava realized,
Dairy product!

“Gram, don't eat that!”

Gram jumped. She dropped the spoon into the pot on the stove. “Good gracious, Ava, you almost gave me a heart attack.” Gram pulled some tongs from the drawer and fished out the spoon. “What on earth is the problem?”

“It's just …” Shoot. She hadn't even had a chance to pull up the website, so now her warning was all kinds of suspicious. “Hold on a second and I'll show you.” She did a quick search and
found a site about lactose intolerance. “Look at this.” She turned the computer monitor toward Gram. “In science today, we were studying … umm …” She skimmed the page for a science-class word. “Enzymes. And then we talked about lactose intolerance and it made me think about you because you have some of these symptoms, right?”

Gram put the cheesy spoon in the sink and came over to look. “Well, I'll be …” She read the page, nodding slowly, then raised her thin eyebrows. “Sounds like you might be onto something, Dr. Ava. I'll lay off the cheese tonight and see how I feel later on.”

“Good idea.” Ava read the rest of the page and started worrying again. It said lactose intolerance was sometimes linked to other diseases like cystic fibrosis, which sounded bad. What if Gram had that? Plus some people with lactose intolerance had trouble getting enough calcium and then they broke bones and stuff. “Gram, this says even if you're pretty sure you have this, you should go to the doctor to make sure nothing else is wrong.”

“Makes sense,” Gram said, pulling the salad out of the fridge.

“What are you talking to the doctor about?” Dad breezed into the kitchen with a new poster under his arm.

“Ava has diagnosed my stomach troubles as lactose intolerance.” Gram sighed at the pot of Alfredo sauce. “No more cheese for me for a while.” She nodded to Dad's poster. “What's the latest?”

Dad turned it around so they could see.

ANDERSON'S GENERAL STORE: HOME OF THE WORLD-FAMOUS PYRAMID ICE CREAM CONE

“It'll be like that world-famous square ice cream cone in Idaho. Only pointier.”

Ava was happy to have something to talk about besides Gram being sick. “How are you going to make it a pyramid?” Dad served up plenty of ice cream cones in the summer, but they were all messy-shaped lumps.

“I'm not sure yet.” Dad rolled up the poster and snapped a rubber band around it. “But I think this may be the one.”

Mom got home with Marcus and Emma-My-Name-Is-Honda then. Mom was stressed because she'd had to leave her office early to pick Emma up from soccer. Marcus was grumpy because Riley Sutton cheated at chess club—“He took his hand off the piece and then moved it again. You can't
do
that.”

And Emma was furious that her new coach refused to allow self-assigned names. “He said Honda's a car, not a girl. And I said why can't it be both, but then he just said no. And there are three Emmas,” she whined, “so I have to be Emma A.”

“There are worse things to be,” Gram said, picking at her salad. She still looked tired to Ava. So after the dinner dishes were washed and dried, Ava went back to her room and picked up the pencil to check on that other disease the website had talked about:

Does Gram have cystic fibrosis?

“No,” the voice said.

Good. One bad thing down. But what if there was something else wrong?

Does Gram have cancer?

“No.”

Does Gram have heart problems?

“No.”

“Ava?” Mom's voice made her jump.

Her mom laughed. “Sorry to startle you. You left this in the front hallway, and I figured you'd want to practice.” She set Ava's saxophone by the desk.

Ava slid her math homework over the pencil questions before her mom had a chance to see. “I'll practice later. I've got homework.”

Mom nodded and headed for the door. “Get started. I don't want you up too late.”

She closed the door behind her, and Ava pushed the math paper aside. She looked down at the list of questions and felt her chest tighten. What if there was something else wrong with Gram—something awful—and she hadn't asked the right question? Or what if there was something wrong with Mom or Dad? What if there was something wrong with
her
and she just didn't know it yet? What if it was one of those awful diseases from
Boston Med
?

Ava looked at the pencil. There wasn't going to be enough lead in the world to ask everything she needed to know to be okay.

The blue pencil was starting to remind Ava of the red shoes in a fairy tale Gram told her once. There was this little girl who was poor and had almost nothing except a pair of tattered red shoes that she'd made for herself, and she loved them. One day, a
wealthy woman took her in and ran a warm bath for her and gave her new clothes. When the girl came out of the bath, all clean, she asked for her shoes, but the woman had thrown them away. She took the girl to the shoemaker to have new black shoes made for church, but the girl saw these shiny bright-red shoes on the shelf and asked for those instead. The old woman's vision was so bad she didn't notice, and the shoemaker winked at the girl and gave her the shoes she wanted.

Ava remembered thinking that was pretty great. But the next part of the story was awful. The girl put on her red shoes and went to church, and you weren't supposed to wear red shoes to church back then for some reason, and everyone stared. And somehow, when she left church, she started dancing. At first it was fine, but then she started dancing faster and faster and couldn't stop, and someone had to run and catch her and carry her home. The old woman put the shoes up on a shelf and told her never to wear them again.