Zinnia's Zaniness (9 page)

It was a testament to how peaceful it was being surrounded by dolphins who were so gentle they were willing to frolic with us that Petal said this in such an even tone of voice. Why, she hardly sounded scared at all. Perhaps she was just joking.

But when we turned to look at her, we could see she was barely keeping her head above the water.

"Petal!" Annie cried. Then she turned to us. "Quick, we have to get Petal out of here!"

Five of us plus the Petes clasped our arms together under Petal to create a stretcher upon which to carry her out.

"It looks like you've got that under control," Zinnia said from her place among the dolphins. "Does anyone mind if I just stay out here for a few more minutes?"

***

A few more minutes later, Zinnia was still in the water while the rest of us had finished dragging the sodden Petal back and had placed her on a spot under our beach umbrellas.

Well, all of us except for one, and by
one
we don't mean Zinnia...

"How inconsiderate!" Rebecca's head snapped at us. "You all went off to...
frolic,
and you left me here by myself in the sand. You could have dug me out first."'

"You know you could have used your own superhuman strength to dig yourself out of the sand," Georgia countered.

"Huh," Rebecca said. "I hadn't even thought of that."

"Besides," Jackie said, "it's not like it would have been nice for us to stop to dig you out when we thought Zinnia was about to get eaten by a shark."

"What does
nice
have to do with anything?" Rebecca said.

"What's this?" Marcia said.

"What's what?" Rebecca said.

"Behind your head," Marcia said. "There's what looks suspiciously like a note here."

"Well, how could I have seen it if it's
behind
my head?" Rebecca said.

"But didn't you hear anyone come up behind you and leave it there?" Annie said.

We saw the sand around Rebecca ripple and realized she'd just shrugged, exercising her superhuman strength against the weight of the sand. In fact, she'd shrugged so hard, she'd shrugged her shoulders free, and soon she pulled her arms out as well.

"I was too busy watching you all—first running and then freezing and then frolicking and then freezing again and so torth—to notice what was going on behind me," Rebecca said.

"Oh no!" Marcia cried, ignoring Rebecca.

Huh,
we thought. "Oh no!" was usually Petal's line.

"Oh no!" Marcia cried again, and now we could see that she'd opened the note and was reading it. She read it to us:

Dear Zinnia,

Still enjoying your power, I see—good show!

"The note leaver is still acting all kerflooey," Marcia said. "We all know that this isn't Zinnia's power, that this thing with the dolphins is just—I don't know—
something else,
but the note leaver keeps acting like it
is
her power."

We looked from the note to Zinnia frolicking with the dolphins. We knew Marcia was right. Zinnia couldn't communicate with animals. They just liked her. That's all it was.

"Oh, we can't let Zinnia see this," Marcia said.

"But it was addressed to her," Annie said.

"I agree with Marcia," Rebecca said, pulling herself all the way out of the sand. "Zinnia's always been the nuttiest Eight." Rebecca paused to look at Petal, who was on all fours shaking back and forth in her bathrobe like a dog trying to rid itself of water, which she had plenty of right now. "Well, one of the two nuttiest Eights," Rebecca corrected herself. "Always believing she could talk to the cats, then thinking she could talk to that stupid pigeon pet, and now this thing with the dolphins. On top of that, there're these notes that keep coming, talking about her power. If she sees this latest one, right after that thing with the dolphins, we'll never be able to convince her that she
can't
communicate with animals. And if she goes on believing she
can
communicate with animals, eventually she'll be labeled crazy, we'll have to lock her away in a lunatic asylum, and there goes the whole family reputation."

"I think that ship has sailed," Jackie said, "on more than one voyage."

"My, that was a long speech," Georgia said to Rebecca.

"Yes, well," Rebecca said, "a person has a long time to think when she's buried up to her head in sand all alone while everyone else is playing."

"But you didn't know about the note at that time," Georgia said, "so how could you have been thinking this out then?"

"I wasn't," Rebecca said. She shrugged. "I guess it's just the leftover effects from before of having more time on my hands to think. My brain must still be doing that."

"Never mind all that right now," Marcia said, exasperated. "Who cares what Rebecca's brain is doing? The important thing is to get this note away from here before Zinnia comes back and sees it."

"You'd better hurry, then," Georgia said, looking toward the ocean, "because she's coming out now."

We looked up in time to see Zinnia wave to the dolphins before turning in our direction.

"Oh," Petal said, sounding exasperated as she struggled to her feet, "I'll take it."

"
You'll
take it?"

Okay, we all said that, including the Petes. We were that shocked: Petal offering to go off by herself again, Petal volunteering for a mission.

"What's wrong with that?" Petal said. "I did manage to walk by myself yesterday without disaster striking. Well, there was that little problem with the shadow, but since you did all convince me it was just my own..." Petal held her hand out for Marcia to give her the note. "Besides," Petal added, shaking her arms, "the walk will do me good. Maybe I'll finally be able to lose the rest of this water weight."

***

"What have you all been up to?" Zinnia asked, joining us a moment later.

The words Zinnia spoke were innocent enough in and of themselves, and even the way she delivered them sounded perfectly normal.

Still, we couldn't escape the sense of guilt washing over us as we kicked the sand with our feet, hands clasped behind our backs.

"Nothing much," we said, hoping we sounded innocent too.

***

Petal didn't sound at all innocent when she returned to us. She sounded frightened. And angry.

"You were all wrong," she said. "There was somebody following me yesterday. I know that because the same person followed me today."

Oh, Petal.

"It's true," she insisted, reading our Oh-Petal expressions accurately. "I went a ways down the beach to bury"—she paused, cast a look at Zinnia—"you know, something unimportant in the sand. Walking there I didn't notice anything funny, probably because my mind was occupied by my mission." She cast another glance at Zinnia, adding, "My thoroughly unimportant mission. But on my way back, when my mind was no longer occupied, I saw the shadow again."

"We already explained to you yesterday," Annie pointed out with a surprising degree of patience, "that's your own shadow."

"No, it's not," Petal said. "I took my own shadow into account, and this shadow wasn't my shadow. Every time I'd take a step, my shadow and this other shadow would take a step too. Every time I stopped taking steps, my shadow and this other shadow would also stop. Whenever I tried to turn around, though, to catch the person in the act, I couldn't see anybody behind me. Whoever this shadow person is, he or she must be very fast and good at hiding. Anyway, my shadow and this other shadow followed me all the way here."

We all craned our necks to peer around Petal.

"Well," Pete said gently, "if another shadow followed you all the way here, it must have escaped fairly quickly and been invisible in the first place, because you're the only one standing in front of us and there's no second shadow behind you."

"Perhaps," Mrs. Pete suggested, just as gently, "you've spent too much time overdressed in the sun, dear?"

"I know what I saw," Petal said, turning in circles to try to catch this imaginary other shadow, "even if none of you see it now and I don't either. What if it's someone dangerous that's following me in the hopes of worming secrets out of me? What if it's Bill Collector or, worse, what if it's finally the ax murderer? What if—"

"We'll all go for a walk with you this time," Annie suggested. "We'll walk with you and we'll keep count of all our shadows as we walk. If someone is following you—or us—we'll catch that person."

We expected Rebecca to say something snide about Annie humoring the loony, but she didn't. We figured that for once Rebecca had seen the wisdom of Annie's ways and recognized the fact that Annie was right: if we didn't do something to humor the loony, and fast, Petal would never stop going on about this.

***

So we walked.

We walked, and walked, and walked.

"We have ten shadows," Annie had announced heartily when we first started walking. But as the day went on, and the walking continued, the heartiness of those announcements waned to something less enthusiastic, like "Yup, still just ten shadows."

"Can we stop for a snack?" Georgia said.

"Is it tomorrow yet?" Rebecca said. "Perhaps this is all just one big nightmare I'm having."

"I don't like to complain," Zinnia said, "but my feet are getting a bit tired."

"Maybe—" Jackie started to say.

We never did learn what sensible Jackie had to contribute because just then Petal said in an urgent whisper, "There it is! There's the shadow!"

We stopped walking and began counting shadows. We counted again.

Petal was right: there
was
an eleventh shadow!

"It's the same shadow I saw yesterday and today," Petal whispered, still urgently. "And as you can see, it's nothing like my shadow."

It was true. This eleventh shadow had nowhere near the bulk of Petal's bathrobe shadow.

Ten heads swiveled around abruptly. We admit it, we half expected to see no one there, just as Petal said happened every time she tried to catch the person following her. We half expected to learn there was nothing following us but a mysterious shadow, which would have been scary in its own way.

How funny, then, to turn around and see...

"A
boy?
" Annie said.

There was a boy behind us, and no one else in sight. Or at least not in sight behind us. The boy had on a bathing suit and sandals. He had brown hair and brown eyes, kind of like us. If we had to say how tall he was, we'd have said he was closest to Georgia in height. In fact, his hair was most similar to Georgia's as well.

The boy was smiling at us.

"Who are you?" Annie demanded.

"George," the boy said, still smiling.

That seemed odd.
George ... Georgia...

"Have you been following Petal?" Annie said, still using her demanding voice.

"I might have been," the boy named George said, still smiling, "but not for anything bad." Abruptly, he raised his hand, waved. "See you around!"'

And then he turned and raced away from us down the beach, his body becoming smaller and smaller until it was finally invisible as the orange sun disappeared from the sky.

"Huh," Annie said, hands on hips. "What do you think that was all about?"

"Maybe he has a crush on Petal," Durinda suggested.

Rebecca looked at Petal, snorted. "You cannot be serious."

We couldn't help it. We laughed too. The idea of that boy, the ridiculous idea of any boy, having a crush on Petal when she was wearing her Petal beach getup...

It took us a moment to realize one of us wasn't laughing, and by
one of us
we don't mean Petal, who apparently found this as uproarious as the rest of us.

"Whatever that boy George wanted," Zinnia said thoughtfully, "I don't think that was it."

TEN

"No more excuses!" Annie shouted.

"Of course we can come up with more excuses," Rebecca countered. "Just give us time."'

It was the following morning, August 5, and we'd finished breakfast and changed into our beach clothes because we were going to the beach right after breakfast.

Or so we thought.

Turned out, Annie had other plans for us.

And those other plans went by the seemingly innocent two-word phrase
Summer Workbook..

"I don't care what other excuses you might be able to come up with," Annie said now, "because it doesn't matter. Yesterday we were so busy, what with frolicking with dolphins and trying to identify shadows, we never got around to getting our daily quota in. That means we're a full day behind schedule. That means a double dose today if we want to get it all done before school starts."

"But we don't want to get it done," Rebecca said.

"None of us do," Georgia added. "Well, except for you."

"It doesn't matter what you want or don't want," Annie said. "I'm in charge and I say we need to do double. Now then, two times sixteen point seven six six comes to how much?" Annie looked to Marcia.

"Don't tell her!" six Eights shouted at Marcia.