Sincerely Read online

  Haley told us that she wanted to get a tall and skinny pumpkin. “I’ll name him Bill,” she said. “Do you think Bill is a good name for a pumpkin?”

  “Bill is an excellent name for a pumpkin,” Mom said.

  I sat back and listened to Tori singing. I know most of the words to her songs, even though I don’t always understand what they’re about. Sometimes I sing along, but sometimes I like to listen silently so I hear only Tori’s voice. Dad says she sounds like she’s whining when she sings, but Mom says her voice is powerful. I agree with Mom.

  My favorite song is called “Winter.” It started playing, but in the middle of the first verse my mother cursed again. This time she was louder. Haley heard and repeated it from the backseat. I hated that they were interrupting my favorite song. “Mom!” I said angrily. She had promised she wouldn’t curse again, but she doesn’t always keep her promises. Sometimes I feel like my mother is the child and I am the grown-up.

  “Give me a break, Sophie. I don’t know where we are,” Mom said.

  “Give me a break, Sophie,” Haley repeated, and then laughed to herself. I could barely hear the music over her giggles.

  “Shush, Haley,” Mom said. “I need to concentrate.”

  “Are you going to call Daddy?” I asked.

  “I’m going to get off at the next exit,” Mom said. She turned down the music because it was distracting her, so I couldn’t hear it at all. We got off the highway at the next exit, but Mom didn’t call Dad. She pulled into a gas station instead and went into the convenience store to ask for directions.

  Haley kicked the back of my seat. “Stop that,” I told her.

  “What if the pumpkin place closes before we find it?” Haley said.

  “Then Bill will have to spend the night alone,” I said.

  “Oh, poor Bill!”

  Mom came back into the car with a bag of chips for Haley and me to share. “Okay,” she said. “We’re not too far.”

  We hadn’t even finished the chips when Haley called out, “Look!” I turned to look out the window and saw the pumpkin farm up ahead. Just beyond the carved wooden sign that said PUMPKINS, there were thousands of pumpkins on the ground. From the distance it looked like a solid orange blanket that was stretched out for miles. Haley sighed. “I don’t know how I’m going to pick,” she said.

  Mom parked and we got out of the car and walked toward the pumpkins. Up close there were paths between the pumpkins so you could walk around without stepping all over them.

  It’s hard to find pumpkins that don’t have scrapes or marks on them, and sometimes the stems are too long or too prickly. We took our time going through the rows of pumpkins to make sure we found the best ones. Haley picked out Bill, and then she picked up another pumpkin that she said was Bill’s twin brother, Charlie. Charlie was a little plumper than Bill, but Haley explained they were fraternal twins, not identical. Haley was obsessed with twins because there were two sets of twins in her class. Mom agreed that we shouldn’t separate the twin brothers, so Haley got to keep both pumpkins. I picked a small round pumpkin. Haley said its name was Oscar.

  After Mom paid for the pumpkins, we went to a little restaurant called Susie’s Nook that is just down the road from the pumpkin farm. We go there every year. Susie herself takes our order. She wears her hair in a long gray braid hanging down her back, and there are wrinkles all over her face. The wrinkles in her forehead are so deep they look like they were carved that way. I wondered if they hurt. When Susie saw us come in, she said, “How are my favorite customers?” She calls us her favorite customers whenever she sees us, even though we’re there only once a year. I can’t believe she really even remembers us, but she gave us free cupcakes for dessert and she knew to give Haley a vanilla cupcake and me a chocolate one, so maybe she does know who we are.

  On the way home we stopped at a couple of antiques stores because Mom wanted to get a new end table to put next to the couch in the living room. The prices are better outside of Manhattan, but Mom didn’t buy anything because everything she saw was either the wrong color or still too expensive. Haley sang her song about pumpkins as we walked through the store. She had added a few new verses about twin pumpkins.

  We didn’t get lost on the way home but it was still already dark out when we got back into Manhattan. Haley was really excited to introduce Bill and Charlie to Dad. She ran into the apartment as soon as Mom unlocked the door. Dad was stretched out on the couch. He looked like he had just woken up, but he sat up when he saw Haley bounding toward him.

  “Dad!” she called.

  “Hiya, Haley,” he said. “Hey, Thumbelina,” he said to me. It’s a nickname he gave me when I was younger, because I was the tiniest girl in my class. I tell him not to use it, but sometimes he does anyway.

  “Don’t call me that,” I said. “I hate it.”

  “But it’s such a great name,” he said. “You know Thumbelina from the Hans Christian Andersen stories. There’s even a song.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, before he could start singing. “I still hate it.”

  “One day you will love being small and looking young,” Dad told me. My dad is always so sure about what I will think or want when I get older, but usually I don’t think he’s right.

  “I like being small,” Haley said. “You can call me Thumbelina. And look, Dad, I got two pumpkins. They’re twins. This is Bill and this is Charlie. You can tell them apart because Bill is the tall and skinny one.”

  Dad turned to Haley, the pliant daughter. “He’s a very lanky pumpkin,” he said. “And he’s a pilgarlic.”

  Haley tried to say the word, but she couldn’t. “What does that mean, what you just said?”

  “A pilgarlic is a bald man,” Dad told her.

  “He’s not bald,” Haley said, pulling on Bill’s stem. “See his hair.”

  “How could I have missed that?” Dad said.

  “Sophie only got one pumpkin,” Haley said.

  Dad looked over at me. “Poor Thum—Poor Soph,” he said. I wondered if he had messed up on purpose.

  “You could have had two pumpkins if you wanted,” Mom said.

  I told her I didn’t mind. “My pumpkin’s an only child,” I said. “He’s so lucky.”

  “No, my pumpkins are lucky because they’re twins,” Haley said. She leaned back against Dad and sighed. “I wish I had a twin.”

  “One of you is bad enough,” I said.

  “Mom!” Haley whined. “Did you hear Sophie?”

  “I was trying to ignore Sophie,” Mom said, and she turned to me. “Apologize to your sister.”

  “I was just kidding.”

  “It wasn’t funny,” Haley said, and she sniffed so my parents would think she was going to cry.

  “You’re such a drama queen,” I complained.

  “Sophie,” both my parents said at the same time. They always agree when they think I’ve done something wrong.

  “Fine. I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t really mean it. “I’m going to go do my homework now.”

  “Homework on a weekend?” Mom asked.

  “It’s this stupid thing Ms. Brisbin wants us to do,” I said. “We have to write letters to pen pals in different states. I think sixth grade is too old for that.”

  “I agree,” Mom said. I know some mothers would pretend to think it was a good idea just because a teacher was making us do it, but my mom isn’t like that. She said she was sorry I had homework to do and we could carve the pumpkins when I felt like taking a break.

  I started to walk down the hall to my room, and Dad called out from behind me. “Jessie called you a little while ago, by the way.”

  “Really? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What do you mean?” Dad asked. “I’m telling you now.”

  “Never mind,” I said. I went into my room and put Oscar on the windowsill near my side of the room. Then I took off my coat and draped it over the chair beside my desk, even though I’m supposed to hang it in the clo
set.

  I called Jessie back before I wrote to Katie. She said she’d been bored at home all day. “That’s too bad,” I told her, even though I was secretly glad that she hadn’t spent the day with Lindsay, Amy, and Melissa. After all, she’d already seen them on Saturday. She didn’t have to spend all her time with them. “Well, I better go,” I told her. “I still have to write to my pen pal.”

  “Oh, I did that already,” Jessie said. “I sent my pen pal a postcard so I wouldn’t have to write as much. It’s not like Ms. Brisbin has a way to check on how long our letters are anyway.”

  After Jessie and I hung up, I pulled open my desk drawer and took out the light blue stationery Grandma Vivian had bought me for my tenth birthday. It’s custom made and has my full name, Sophie Lauren Turner, written in script across the top of the page. I liked it because it’s very professional-looking, but I hardly ever used it. I had written letters before only to thank Grandma Vivian when she sent me things for my birthday or for Christmas, so I still had almost the whole box left.

  I got a pen and sat at my desk. It was hard to think of what to write to Katie Franklin. “Dear Katie,” I started. “My name is Sophie Turner.” Then I realized that was a dumb thing to write because my name was already across the top of the page. I crumbled up the paper and threw it into the garbage can under my desk. Even though I had a lot of it, I didn’t want to waste my stationery. There’s exactly the same amount of envelopes as there are sheets of paper, and now I would have an extra envelope. But I also didn’t want to sound stupid.

  I remembered Ms. Brisbin telling us to write about what it was like to live in New York, and I started again: “Dear Katie, I am sitting at my desk in my apartment in New York City. The window above my desk looks out toward another building. I can see lights on in other apartments across the way, and people moving around inside. But it’s too far away to see what they look like, so they just look like shadows.” Ms. Brisbin had once told me it was not grammatically correct to start sentences with the word “but,” but I had actually seen a lot of books with sentences that began with “but.” I asked Dad about it, and he said it was one of those rules they teach you in school that are not always applied in real life.

  I was in the middle of the next sentence when I felt sticky hands pressed over my eyes. “Guess who?” a voice said. “It’s time for a break so we can carve the pumpkins!” I was so startled that I jerked my hand and ripped the letter I’d been writing to Katie. Now two sheets were ruined.

  “Haley!” I yelled. “You ruined my letter!”

  Haley stepped back guiltily. “I didn’t do anything,” she said.

  “Yes, you did, and you’re going to be sorry. Mom!” I called. “Mom!”

  Mom came into the room. “I’m going to kill Haley,” I told her. I held up my letter with the rip right down the center. “Look what she did!”

  “I didn’t do it,” Haley said.

  “Oh, shut up,” I told Haley. “Get out of here.”

  “It’s my room too,” Haley said.

  Now I had to start my letter all over again. I never got anything done with Haley around. It made me really hate having a younger sister. “Sometimes I wish you would just disappear,” I told her.

  “That’s a terrible thing to say, Sophie,” Dad said, walking into the room. “Say you’re sorry.”

  But I was sick of apologizing to Haley. All I wanted was to be alone in my room so I could do my homework. Why didn’t anyone understand that? Why did they always automatically take Haley’s side without even hearing what I had to say first? I didn’t feel sorry about anything that I’d said. I felt the tears start behind my eyes. My face felt hot. I bit my lip to try to keep from crying. Dad looked at me. “Sophie, I’m waiting,” he said. Haley went to stand next to Mom. She reached out and took Mom’s hand.

  “Not so fast, Haley,” Mom said. “You apologize to Sophie, too.”

  “But I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “Sophie ripped her own paper.”

  “I can’t even do my homework without her messing me up,” I said. “I really need my own room. It doesn’t have to be your office. We can close off the dining room. We don’t need a kitchen table and a dining room table. I won’t care if it’s a small room as long as it’s my own.”

  “If Sophie gets her own room, then I want a dog,” Haley said.

  “Haley, you’re so stupid. If I get my own room, then you get your own room too.”

  “I don’t want my own room! I want a dog!”

  “That’s enough!” Mom said. “Sophie is not getting her own room, and you’re not getting a dog.”

  “You’re so mean!” Haley said, and I agreed. Haley went up to Dad and hugged his waist. Dad patted the top of her head. He usually took Haley’s side.

  “Go finish your homework in my office,” Mom told me.

  “What about the pumpkins?” Haley asked. Mom told her it was getting too late and that we would have to wait until after school tomorrow to carve them, and Haley started to cry. I stood up and opened my desk drawer to get the box of stationery. Then I closed the drawer with a bang and stomped down the hall. “You didn’t apologize yet,” Haley called after me. Her voice was thick and syrupy from crying, but I ignored her. After all, she hadn’t apologized to me, either. I went into Mom’s office and closed the door behind me. I would have slammed it, but then I would have been yelled at more. My parents have a thing against slamming doors. My mom doesn’t even like me to close my door, although Dad says it’s okay to do when you really need privacy. I definitely needed the privacy just then. Still, it just wasn’t the same as having my own room. Mom’s stuff was everywhere, and her computer took up so much room on the desk that I barely had room to write my letter. I didn’t feel like writing it anyway. I couldn’t think of anything good to say about New York, although I could think of a lot of things to write about younger sisters, particularly what it felt like to be four months away from my twelfth birthday and still be sharing a room with a second grader.

  It wasn’t like my letter would ever be graded. Ms. Brisbin would never even see what I wrote, like Jessie said, so really I could write about whatever I wanted. It didn’t just have to be about New York. It didn’t have to be about New York at all. “Dear Katie,” I wrote. “I have a sister named Haley who is seven years old. I don’t know if you have any brothers or sisters, but sometimes it is very hard for me to be an older sister. My parents tell me that I should set a good example for Haley because she watches everything I do and likes to copy me. But when someone is constantly watching you and copying you, it can be very frustrating.” I told Katie about how Haley tried to hang out with Jessie and me, even when we didn’t want her there. “My parents try to make me include her a lot,” I wrote. “Then they get mad at me when I want privacy. I don’t think Jessie minds as much as I do.”

  I finished my letter and wrote, “Sincerely, Sophie,” in my best script. Then I pulled an envelope out of my stationery box and folded up my letter to put it inside. I wrote “Miss Katie Franklin” across the envelope neatly, and admired my handwriting. I would mail the letter on my way to school in the morning. I hoped Katie had already written to me.

  Four

  HALLOWEEN WAS ON a Saturday, which was great because we didn’t have school. I told Mom we shouldn’t have to go to school on Halloween even when it falls during the week. It would make a much better day off than some of the other boring vacation days, like the presidents’ birthdays.

  Haley put her costume on as soon as she woke up. My parents told her she should save the costume for later, but Haley insisted that Halloween lasted the whole day, and so she wanted to wear her costume from beginning to end.

  Haley was dressed up as a piglet. She wore her pink leotard from ballet class, pink tights, and a rubber pig nose and ears. Mom had tried to find a pig’s tail to pin onto the back of Haley’s leotard, but the costume store didn’t have any, so Haley had made one herself out of a pink pipe cleaner. Every time she sat do
wn, she crushed it. Mom told her that she should at least leave that part off until it actually was time to go trick-or-treating, but Haley wanted to wear the full costume. “Whoever heard of a piglet without a tail?” she said.

  “Maybe you’re a deformed pig,” I offered.

  “You’re not helping, Sophie,” Mom said.

  Dad made pancakes for breakfast. He tried to make Haley’s and my pancakes in the shapes of our initials, but it is hard to make an S or an H in pancake batter. They just looked like blobs. It didn’t matter to me because I still got to flip them, which is my favorite part. I’m pretty good at flipping pancakes. I can’t flip them in the air like they do in restaurants, but I know just when they are done enough to take the spatula and flip them over without the batter oozing out from the sides. The trick is to watch the edges and make sure they are browned enough. When the edges are browned and the middle part starts to bubble, the pancake is ready to be flipped.

  We finished cooking and Dad brought the pancakes out to the table on one big plate. Haley reached across with her fork to spear a pancake.

  “Hold on a minute,” Mom said. She put her hand on Haley’s arm.

  “I can do it myself,” Haley insisted. “I think that one is the H.” Haley shook free from Mom’s grasp and moved toward the plate of pancakes. Her forearm knocked over her glass of orange juice. It spread across the table and dripped off the edge onto Haley’s leotard. “Oh, no!” Haley cried. “Look what you made me do!”

  “I told you that wasn’t a good idea,” Mom said. I don’t know if she was talking about Haley wearing her costume at breakfast or her insistence on serving herself. Haley just cried harder. Mom took a napkin and started to mop up the table.

  “Daddy!” Haley moaned, and Dad got up to help Haley.

  “Oh, Jack, you baby her,” Mom said. But then she reached across the table for my napkin and took it to wipe up Haley’s shirt.