Lost in the Sun

Read Lost in the Sun for Free Online

Book: Read Lost in the Sun for Free Online
Authors: Lisa Graff
be
way
better than the saltshakers. I still have to get Aaron back for the toilet thing. You want to help?”
    I thought about it while the announcer on the radio talked about switching brands of coolant. “What’s the plan?” I asked. I maybe snuck a glance out the door then. Sure enough, Annie Richards was still out there with her arms crossed over her chest. She was glaring at Doug now instead of at me, only a whole lot of good that was doing her, because Doug had no idea he was being glared at. (Doug hardly ever had any idea about anything.)
    â€œOkay,” Doug said, bouncing from foot to foot as he spoke.Doug always bounced when he was really excited about something. “We’re going to set the alarm clocks to go off at all different times.” Bounce on the left foot, bounce on the right. “Like, two in the morning, three in the morning, all different times.” Bounce, bounce, bounce. “Then we’re going to hide them in Aaron’s room while he’s sleeping, so that he keeps waking up all night and going, ‘Gah!’ It’ll drive him crazy.”
    I thought it over. It wasn’t a bad prank, really. But Doug’s problem was that sometimes he got so excited, he forgot to think through all the details. “Don’t you think we should hide the clocks
before
Aaron goes to sleep?” I asked. “If you do it after he’s already in bed, he might wake up, and then he’d be on to you.”
    Doug’s bouncing slowed a little. “That’s pretty smart,” he said. “Plus, then Annie can come over and help. She said she’d do a prank with me soon.”
    She was still out there, I could see her. She’d pulled her bike off the bike rack and was hacking away at the kickstand like
that
was the thing she hated.
    â€œI don’t want to help,” I told Doug, and I went back to clanging at the register. Ignoring the prickling in my chest. Completely ignoring it. “It’s your prank. Do it yourself.”
    â€œBut . . .” Doug was clearly disappointed. I hated when Doug was disappointed. His lip stuck out like a little baby’s.
    â€œYou gotta go now,” I told him. “The game’s coming back on. Sorry.”
    I didn’t watch as Doug grabbed his grocery bag full of alarmclocks and slunk out of the shop, back to his best friend in the whole world, but I’d bet that his lip was sticking out the whole time.
    Big baby. We weren’t supposed to be pulling pranks anymore, anyway. The fire in my chest slowly settled back to a warm simmering, and I went back to listening to the game.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    It was close, but the Dodgers won, 6 to 4. “And you were worried,” Mom teased, grabbing me around the neck and giving me a motherly smooch that I would immediately have to rub off. When games got close, Mom was the one who freaked out, not me. She refused to sit as long as they were behind by more than one run. Given the Dodgers’ record so far this season, I was surprised her feet hadn’t fallen off.
    Ray went to the front to help a customer, and Mom snapped off the radio and got to the business of grilling her middle child.
    â€œSo,” she said, “you excited about middle school on Monday?”
    It sounded like she was asking seriously, which was weird.
    â€œI thought you hated middle school,” I told her.
    She stuck her tongue in her cheek, thinking. “I did?”
    â€œYeah, you said that to Aaron once. You said that you didn’t even know why they
had
middle school, that there ought to be some government program where, as soon as kids graduated elementary school, they got scooped up and sent to a lab where scientists could put them in a deep freeze until they were old enough for high school. For their own sake, that’s what you said. Because middle school sucks so much.”
    Mom laughed. “Well, I probably

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