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Nadine said.
    I’d never been to the ocean, so I didn’t know it had a smell all its own.
    “Mine is lilacs,” I said. “And fresh-cut hay.”
    “My favorite
sound
is the ocean, too,” Nadine said.
    “Mine is spring peepers,” I said. “And Canada geese. And cowbells.”
    Hannah heard us one night and said her favorite sound was her grandfather playing the bagpipes. I wished I could have heard that, so that could be
my
favorite sound, too.
    Somehow, I didn’t think the new Nadine would want toplay “What’s your favorite thing?” this summer, and if she did, I had a feeling her answers would be very different.
    When I fed the cat that night, I wondered how she would answer if she could.
    “What’s
your
favorite sound?” I asked her, then answered in a high voice.
    “Mice squeaking,” I said.
    The cat tilted her head to one side, listening.
    “And what’s your favorite smell?” I asked her, answering again in the high voice.
    “Mouse pie!” I said.
    My bark of laughter scared her, and she dashed off.
    “Well, if you didn’t want to play, you could have just said so,” I called after her.
    I didn’t see Nadine again until Friday. With three days of dry weather, Hannah and I worked straight through haying. I didn’t even have time to go swimming, but Friday was raining, so I got to spend that whole day with Nadine. (Rain on the roof was one of my favorite sounds, too. I couldn’t have told you whether it was really the sound or because it meant that we couldn’t hay.)
    She seemed like the old Nadine again (I’d come up with another idea to explain her two personalities—maybe Mr. Tilton was working on a secret government formula, and Nadine accidently drank some, and now she was two people in one, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and I thoughtI’d better enjoy the old Nadine while I could. We played Chinese checkers and Monopoly, Old Maid, and Go Fish, and played every one of her records on the hand-cranked Victrola. Then we were out of things to do.
    “Let’s go up in the attic,” I suggested. I loved snooping through boxes and trunks to see what treasures other people had in their attics.
    Even the old Nadine was scared of attics and cellars (she hated mice, and spiders, and bugs of any kind), but she didn’t like to admit it, and since she couldn’t think of anything better to do, she shrugged and followed me up the stairs.

chapter 8

    It was dark and dusty up there, like most attics, with boxes that mice had chewed into, a chair with a broken armrest, picture frames, and piles of crumbling books. We found an old trunk. Nadine tried to scare me by saying there might be a body in it, just like in
Arsenic and Old Lace
, but all we found was worn-out dresses and hats. They were faded and smelled musty, but we tried them on anyway, laughing at each other, and it felt like old times. At first, we pretended to be the crazy elderly aunts in
Arsenic and Old Lace
, then Nadine threw a feather boa around her neck and strutted across the attic like Bette Davis.
    The lace around my collar was scratchy, and I tugged at it.
    “Boy, I’m glad we don’t have to wear clothes like this anymore,” I said. I liked my frayed shirts and faded overalls.
    Nadine didn’t say anything, but I could tell from theway she twirled the skirts back and forth that she would have loved to wear clothes like that
all
the time.
    We put the clothes back in the trunk and snooped in some of the boxes, but there wasn’t anything interesting in them, just Christmas ornaments and some old dishes wrapped in crumpled-up newspapers (I didn’t tell Nadine that the mice had made nests in them). We played with the spinning wheel, which made me think of a propeller on an airplane.
    “Let’s play we’re paratroopers, dropped behind enemy lines,” I suggested, and I thought Nadine was going to go for it, but when she saw that meant crawling on our bellies across the dirty attic floor, she changed her mind.
    Instead, she picked up