“Mine’s going to be all flowers,” says Isabella, cutting into the clay.
Aspen feels her way into the Mess, blindfolded with a long sock. (She’s studying the senses with MaxiMum by doing without one of them at a time.) When she bangs her head on a cupboard, she pulls the sock off. “Hey, I want to do one of them.”
Sumac represses a sigh and cuts her sister a slice from the clay block.
“Why isn’t PopCorn helping us?” Isabella complains.
He usually does, with art, not to mention the fact that Mesopotamia was meant to be his and Sumac’s special Lottafun … but Sumac supposes that’s gone down the tubes. “He’s taking his dad to a Center for Geriatric Neurology,” she grumbles.
“What’s that?” asks Isabella.
“Somewhere old people get tested, like old cars.”
“I bet they diagnose him with terminal crabbypantsitis,” jokes Aspen.
“He keeps talking as if PapaDum’s just arrived from India instead of having been here since he was eleven. And he’s rude about the food. He peered into the salad PapaDum was making this morning like he was looking for worms,” Sumac tells her friend, “and then he said, Not my cup of tea.”
“Is there weird stuff in the salad, though?”
“Well, goat cheese, beets, arugula,” says Sumac, “a bit of freekeh.”
Isabella’s lip curls up. “What the freak is freekeh?”
“A supergrain, nuttyish.”
Isabella pretends to retch. “What I’m curious about is, will his eyebrows ever grow back?”
“I doubt it,” says Sumac with a shrug. “Your cells aren’t as growy when you’re old.”
Aspen’s cut herself a much thicker chunk of clay, and she’s making a cylinder like a can of beans. Her rat looks out from the pocket of her pajamas.
“Slate,” Sumac scolds him, “are you responsible for all those gouges and scratches?”
“That’s my carving,” says Aspen.
“What’s it meant to be?” asks Isabella, leaning so close that her braids almost touch it.
“Just abstract, like Jackson Pollock,” Aspen says smugly.
She always says Jackson Pollock when she can’t be bothered doing proper art, because he’s famous for putting his canvases on the floor and splatting paint all over them. And she gets away with it, because if you use words like proper art at Camelottery, PopCorn says, Proper, plopper, it’s all about the journey.
“Cool idea, though, Sumac, to let him help,” Aspen adds, setting Slate on the table and pressing one of his tiny paws onto the clay.
“Put him away!” Isabella’s stepped back, shuddering.
Aspen gives Sumac a your-pal’s-pathetic look.
Sumac scowls back at her. Isabella may be a bit of a cowardy custard, but at least she doesn’t do armpit farts like that boy Aspen keeps bringing home.
Sumac keeps picking at her banqueting figures, but she’s only making them worse. Art’s not one of her fortes. And grrr, THE LOTTERYS should be in mirror writing to make the words come out right when she uses the seal! She can’t seem to concentrate today. She smears the letters with her knife and starts rewriting them.
Now Wood walks in barefoot and slaps down a wet pike as long as his arm.
“Hola, Wood,” says Isabella, giving him a finger wave.
He barely nods as he takes his pocketknife to the fish and scrapes out its guts.
Isabella’s all agog. “Did you seriously just catch that?”
“Yeah. Cloudy mornings are ideal, because the fish don’t go deep to avoid the sun.”
Sumac suspects her best friend of liking Wood, but she’s never asked, because she doesn’t want to know.
“So hey, I hear you’re being an Environmental Steward this summer, is that as important as it sounds?” asks Isabella.
“It’s mostly mulching plants,” mutters Sumac.
“Mulching is crucial,” says Wood.
Isabella lays her head on the counter, to look the fish in the eye, while Wood stuffs it with apple slices that keep sliding back out. “Ugly bugly!”
“By pike standards, you’re hideous,” he points out.
She lets out an outraged gasp.
“Flat nose, tiny mouth, no spots or shine …”
Isabella flounces off and examines the little plastic bags held to the refrigerator by magnets. “Wood, June 22 … Diamond, July 13 … Wood, July 13 …”
“They’re his tick collection,” explains Aspen, stabbing her thumbnails into the clay.
Wood goes to the refrigerator, and with one fish-bloody finger he points out the tiny brown bug in one bag. “All the ones that have bit me or my dog this summer.”
“Have bitten,” Sumac corrects him.
He ignores that. “I yank them out with a tweezers,” he tells Isabella, “keep them to show the doctor in case I develop symptoms of, like, Lyme disease, encephalitis, that kind of thing.”
“That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard,” Isabella marvels. She starts lining up the finger-puppet magnets in pairs. “Who’s the new girl with the scarf?”