Read The Book of One Hundred Truths for Free Online Page B

(Jocelyn insisted that we buy sugarless), and I mailed my postcard on the way back.
Hello, Minneapolis.
It was ten in the morning. I figured I had seven more hours to kill until someone else might be interested in taking charge of my cousin.
    “Aunt Celia said you would take me swimming today,” Jocelyn said. She lifted her hair—it was more like a scarf—off the back of her neck.
    “Aunt Celia must have been confused about that,” I told her.
    We delivered the milk to Nenna and went back outside.
    “If I go down to the water and look for jellyfish and make sure there aren’t any, then will you go swimming?”
    “No,” I said.
    “But Aunt Celia said you would take me. We’re at the
beach.
”
    “I
know
where we are.”
    Jocelyn looked disappointed.
    “All right, listen.” I didn’t want her tattling to Celia and Ellen, in case there was any chance of my getting paid. “If you’ll stop asking me about going swimming, I’ll tell you one thing—
just one
—about my notebook. But then you have to stop nagging me. All right?”
    Jocelyn considered the rash on her arm. She seemed to be thinking. “All right.”
    “Okay, then.” The wind changed direction and the air felt cooler all of a sudden, as if someone had opened a giant window.
    “So what is it?” Jocelyn asked. “What are you going to tell me?”
    What
was
I going to tell her? I took a deep breath. “Well, this isn’t something that I’ve written down, but it’s about the notebook. I’m using it to write down things that are true. True things that matter. So it isn’t a diary. It’s just a bunch of, you know, a bunch of true things.”
    “So it’s a list,” Jocelyn whispered, as if I had revealed to her the secrets of the ancient pharaohs. “What kind of true things are they? How many pages do you have so far?”
    I didn’t appreciate the way her mind worked. “I said
one thing. One.
Now, let’s look around for something to do.”
    Jocelyn skipped behind me, suddenly cheerful, as we went around the outdoor stairs to the storage area, a musty cinder-block garage at the front of the house. It was stacked from cement floor to ceiling with broken beach chairs and rusted umbrellas and a rotting volleyball net and horseshoes and fishing poles. There was a metal shelf full of paint cans and batteries. Celia hated to throw anything out.
    “Okay,” I said, looking at the piles of cobwebbed stuff. “Do you want to play horseshoes?”
    “No. They’re all rusty.”
    “What’s this problem you have with dirt and bugs and rust? Should we play croquet?”
    “No. There isn’t enough grass here,” she pointed out.
    I pushed a toolbox and a stack of apple crates out of the way.
    “I know what you should write about in your notebook,” Jocelyn said. “You should write down everything we find out about Aunt Celia and Aunt Ellen’s secret.”
    “They don’t have a secret, Jocelyn,” I said.
    “Yes, they do. They drive to work together.”
    I stubbed my toe on the toolbox. “So?”
    “They work in opposite directions,” Jocelyn said. “Aunt Ellen doesn’t even work in Port Harbor.”
    I turned around. She was right. Ellen spent the night at her own house, ten miles away, but came to Nenna and Granda’s every morning for breakfast. “She probably just wants to see Liam and Austin,” I explained.
    “Look, there’s an inner tube.” Jocelyn pointed. “We can blow it up with the pump and take it in the—oh.” She looked at me sideways.
    “That tube probably has a hole in it, anyway,” I said. “I know what we can do.” I nudged a path through the wreckage. “Do you know what the great thing about Port Harbor is?”
    “No, what?”
    “It’s small,” I said, “which means you can get anywhere on a bike. And this one—
oof!
—right here should be short enough for you.” I lifted the volleyball net and revealed a pink bike with a banana seat and moldy streamers dangling from the handlebars. “I used to ride this. It’s