All the Answers (6 page)

The Snoozy Gang—that's what Ava and Sophie called the residents of the back row who nodded off as soon as the concert started—always woke up with a start at the end.

Then there was Grandpa, who scowled under his pulled-down baseball hat and complained about the music, if he said anything at all.

Mom never missed family night, but she never had much to say to Grandpa. They hadn't gotten along since Grandma Marion died. Ava's mom didn't talk about why, but her dad told her once it had to do with Grandpa's lifestyle and choices. Ava didn't ask about it after that. She just went with Mom and everyone else to the nursing home on Wednesdays and ate the cookies.

Family night wasn't negotiable, so Ava and Sophie put their pencil plans on hold and piled into the Andersons' minivan for the drive to Cedar Bay.

“You brought it, right?” Sophie whispered to Ava once they got settled in the community room and the others had gone to check out the snack table.

“Yep.” Ava slipped the pencil and her legal pad out of her backpack.

“I've got my list, but I was thinking,” Sophie whispered. “We should find out if it can answer bigger questions.”

Ava frowned. “Bigger how?”

“Like important world things. Like …” Sophie grabbed a newspaper from one of the folding chairs and scanned the front page. “Ask about the election—not who's going to win, but maybe … you know how the candidates are always looking for rotten things to say about one another? Ask it if Senator Tobino-vitch has ever broken the law.”

“Ha! My dad would love that question. He can't stand that guy.” She wrote:

Has Senator Rodney Tobinovitch (the one running for president) ever broken the law?

Immediately, the voice in her ear said yes.

“It says yes.”

“Ohmygosh!” Sophie's eyes lit up. “Ask what he did and when and everything!”

So Ava wrote:

When, where, and how did Senator Rodney Tobinovitch (the one running for president) break the law?

“He sometimes drives in excess of the speed limit,” the voice said. Ava waited. But the pencil didn't say anything else.

She looked at Sophie. “He drives too fast.”

“That's it? Everybody drives too fast.”

Ava shrugged and looked up just in time to see her family coming back to the chairs. Emma was scowling down at her cookies.

“Cookies look good, Em,” Sophie said, smiling.

“They're
tiny
, but I only got to take two,” she grumped. “And call me by my real name.” She pointed to her HELLO MY NAME IS RAPUNZEL tag.

“Settle down, Rapunzel,” Dad said, ruffling her hair. “Grandpa's coming.”

When the attendant wheeled Grandpa into the community room, Dad said, “Good to see you, Hank. You're looking terrific.”

Grandpa grunted.

Then half a dozen Irish dancers showed up, wearing long-sleeved white shirts and plaid skirts and vests. They were sweating like crazy even before they started hopping and kicking.

The music was so fast Mrs. Raymond could hardly keep up with her head tipping. Mrs. Grabowski's tapping feet looked as if they might carry her right out the door and down the street. But Grandpa never looked up from his hands.

“They're terrific, aren't they, Hank?” Dad said when they finished and everyone was clapping. He leaned over to Grandpa. “Did you like the music?”

“No.”

“No?” Dad smiled and hummed part of the song, doing a little chair dance. “I thought it was pretty lively.”

“Tinny, whiny garbage. That's not music.” Grandpa kept looking down at his fingers, all wrapped together, as if he might find the real music there.

Sophie got a sparkle in her eye and pulled her iPod out of her purse. “Want to hear something better?”

“Tell me you're not about to torture Grandpa with Katina D.” Marcus smirked.

“Why not?”

“Soph, I don't think that's a great idea,” Ava said, but Sophie was already poking her ear buds into Grandpa's hairy ears.

Grandpa swiped them away. “Garbage!” he grouched, and started babbling about some old nightclub in Manhattan where they played
real
music and knew how to make a decent whiskey sour, too. Then the nurse came and said it was time to go back to his room.

Sophie looked at Ava. “I'll put different music on there for next time. Maybe we can find something he likes.”

“We'll see you next week, Hank,” Mom said. She never called Grandpa “Dad.” In the past, Ava had always chalked that up to the way things were, but she found herself wondering about why they didn't get along.

Now, she had a way to find out.

“I'm not sure this was faster than looking it up in the book,” Ava said, as Sophie scribbled down the question for number ten on their worksheet after school the next day.

“Shh!” Sophie held up her finger, tipped her head, listened, and wrote down the answer. “I know. But this was more fun.” She tucked her finished worksheet inside her folder and twirled the pencil in her fingers.

“Ava!” Marcus shouted from down the hall. “Mom says you gotta set the table.”

“It's your turn,” Ava called. “I did it last night.”

Marcus appeared in the doorway. “I have a physics test tomorrow and Mom says that takes priority. Which makes tonight your night, too.” He stuck out his tongue and ducked just in time to avoid being hit by the pillow Ava threw from her chair.

“Why can't he study after dinner?” Sophie asked.

Ava sighed. “He decided his ninety-seven-point-three grade point average isn't good enough, and Mom's totally backing him up.” Marcus had always been a good student, but lately all he ever did was study, as if every point on a test was a matter of life or death.

Ava tucked the pencil in her backpack—the last thing she needed was for Marcus to come by and swipe it—and she and Sophie headed down to the kitchen. Gram was pulling mac and cheese from the oven. Dad was slicing a loaf of Italian bread from the store, and Marcus was on the computer. He took time out from his crucially important homework to smirk at Ava when she opened the cupboard to get plates. Ava's mom was ripping up lettuce for salad and listening to the presidential candidates on the radio.

“I can't believe Governor Tedds expects hardworking people to buy that load of—”

“Alisha … ,” Dad said, raising his eyebrows and glancing at the girls.

“Mom's having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day,” Ava said. “Like Alexander in the story.” She thought their bookquoting game would make her mom smile.

It didn't. She pursed her lips together and tore the lettuce a little more violently.

“Glad I'm not part of that salad,” Dad said, laughing. He leaned in to kiss Mom on the cheek, but she dodged him.

“Just because your candidate has an edge in the Northeast,” she said, shaking her head.

“When you guys get divorced,” Marcus said, “I'm blaming the two-party political system.”

“Sophie's parents are divorced and now she gets to have two houses,” Emma said, dragging her stuffed boa constrictor to the table.

“It's not as cool as you'd think,” Sophie said. “You have to search twice as many places when you lose a library book.”

Emma looked up at Mom. “Are we getting divorced?”

“No, we are not,” Mom kissed the top of Emma's head. “You're stuck in this one house, Miss Emma.”

“I'm Jupiter today,” she said, pointing to her name tag.

“Is she going through all the planets?” Sophie whispered to Ava. She looked alarmed. “Whatever you do, make sure she doesn't go to school with a name tag that says ‘Uranus.' ”

“Sit down and eat before this gets cold, Jupiter,” Gram said, sprinkling more parmesan over the mac and cheese.

Ava's parents had a rule, no politics at the dinner table. So the talk turned to physics homework and Dad's latest idea—world-famous giant cheese puffs.

“I think they could be a hit,” he said.

“Ava, you're not eating much.” Mom raised her eyebrows at Dad. “Were they eating junk food at the store after school again?”

“No,” Ava said. “I'm just not hungry.” The truth was, her parents' arguing had given Ava a stomachache. No matter how many
times her mom said they were just having “thoughtful discourse” as she called it, Ava couldn't help worrying that things might get worse. And she didn't want two houses. Ever.

So Ava kept poking her macaroni around her plate and looked around the table. Gram was doing the same thing, Ava noticed. Maybe she was worried about something, too.

After dinner, Ava and Sophie hurried upstairs. Sophie rummaged through Ava's bag looking for the pencil and pulled out the Adventure Challenge permission slip. “Hey! We were supposed to turn these in.” She sniffed it. “This smells like banana.”

“You can put it back. I'm not going.”

“Ava, you
have
to go! It's the coolest field trip ever!”

Ava flopped onto her bed, and Ruffles the Owl bounced off onto the floor. “If you like plummeting to your death in the woods.”

“It's totally safe, Ava.” Sophie swooped down, picked up Ruffles, and perched him on Ava's pillow. Then she plopped down next to Ava. “My mom read about it on the website before she'd sign mine. You wear a harness, and you're always connected to a safety cable, so there's absolutely no way you can fall and die.”

“Well, that's good.” But Ava knew there was always a way. What if the harness came unclipped? What if the safety cable broke like the rope Dad had used to tie Ethel to the fence that day she got loose and they found her down the street eating the
Morgans' mail? You could totally fall and die then. Any field trip with the word “adventure” in the title had entirely too many what-ifs swirling around it. “I'll think about it,” Ava said. That was usually enough to shut Sophie up.

But not this time. “Come on, Ava. We're even going to practice in gym class. Mr. Avery told us he has some minicourse he's going to set up with low balance beams and stuff. It's going to be
so
fun. Have you seen the videos online?”

Ava shook her head.

Sophie jumped up. “Come check out the website with me, and if it doesn't look awesome, I promise I'll leave you alone, okay?”

She led Ava downstairs to the computer, found the website, and clicked to start a video. “Tell me this doesn't look like fun.”

On the screen, a teenage girl with her hair in pigtails was holding on to ropes, walking across a bridge made of wooden rods that wobbled and swung all over the place. Just watching her was enough to make Ava's knees feel like jelly.

Then there was a kid climbing on a rock wall, putting his feet on tiny ledges that didn't look nearly big enough for feet. Ava watched the video people tightwalk from tree to tree, way above the forest floor. They crossed rickety bridges over rocky streams, clipped themselves onto zip lines, and went flying through the trees. “I feel like Peter Pan!” the pigtail girl squealed.

There was no way Ava would feel like Peter Pan up there. She would feel like a big baby. She reached over and stopped the video.

“So will you go?” Sophie bounced up and down a little.

“Maybe.”

“Just go. If you don't like it, I'm sure you can sit and read or something.” Sophie's cell phone chimed with a text, and she looked down. “Shoot. Mom wants me home. But promise me you'll come, okay? Just
try
.”

Ava sighed. “What if” may have been her least favorite phrase in the English language, but “just try” was a close second. When Ava had just tried to go on the boat ride in third grade (What if it sank? What if the lake was rough?), she'd spent the first hour of the trip throwing up over the railing. When she'd just tried to spend the night at Sophie's sleepover (What if she got sick? What if something happened to her parents while she was gone?), she'd stayed awake all night until Mrs. Chafik found her crying in the kitchen and called her mom to come get her.