“Take baby steps,” CardaMom reads aloud.
“Huh! I’ve walked walls five times higher than this.” Catalpa puts one bare foot on the line and straightens up, as graceful as an acrobat. Then she steps forward … and gets thrown off, landing on her chin in the grass.
Sumac gnaws her lips to keep her laugh inside.
“I go, I go,” shouts Brian.
PopCorn persuades Brian to hold his hand, just for her first turn, so she manages to walk the entire length of the line.
Aspen scampers for about three steps before she boings off, lands askew, and announces in a stoic voice that she’s broken her ankle — which everybody ignores.
Sumac tries what the leaflet recommends, which is standing still on one leg on the slackline, staring at a fixed point ahead of you.
“My go again already,” calls Aspen.
“No it’s not.”
“You’re not even moving.”
“I’m getting my balance,” says Sumac, barely moving her lips.
“Can I walk from the other end, as you’re not using it?”
“No!” Sumac leans a little forward … but the line heaves sideways, and she has to step down onto the grass.
“A score of zero centimeters for Sumac Lottery, a record-breaking fail,” crows Aspen.
“That’s called a controlled dismount,” Sumac tells her.
She wishes Wood had come today so she could talk to him about her secret plan to make Grumps demand to leave Camelottery, but — too cool, at twelve — he says playgrounds are for children. She’s tempted to try Brian, but four-year-olds are horribly honest, so Brian might well blab about it to the parents, or Grumps himself, even.
Instead, Sumac goes to crouch down beside Catalpa and says softly, “Hey. I have an idea for getting —” She stops herself, because getting rid of sounds mean. “For getting Grumps to move out, persuading him to ask to go, you know?” She waits for her sister’s reaction. Then finally realizes that Catalpa has her earbuds in. She taps one black-draped arm.
Catalpa jumps as if Sumac’s stabbed her and pauses her music. “What?” She interrupts before Sumac’s more than half explained it. “Oh, leave the guy alone.”
“You said it was totally not democratic to move him in!”
“That was weeks ago. He’s not doing anyone any harm.”
Easy for Catalpa to say, when she’s out most of the time with her bandmates, and she didn’t have to give up her Turret.
“Get a life,” she says, covering a yawn with one black-nailed hand and turning her music back on.
Not for the first time, Sumac moves Catalpa down the list of family members to Least Favorite. Well, she’s still above Grumps, but he doesn’t count.
Sumac squints at the slackline, where Aspen’s managed four steps in a row. Nobody can teach Aspen anything, but sometimes she teaches herself things in a blink. Whereas Sumac prefers the kind of lesson that doesn’t leave twigs embedded in her shins.
MaxiMum falls heavily and takes a long breath before she gets up and brushes off her shorts. “Fall down seven times,” she quotes, “get up eight.”
Sumac frowns. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she calls. “If you fall down seven times, you only need to get up seven.”
“Zen mind, very mysterious,” says PopCorn. “Sound of one hand clapping. What face you have before father and mother born?”
“What does that even mean?” asks Sumac.
“He has no idea,” MaxiMum tells her.
“What is sound one father blah-blahing, no one listening?” asks Aspen, hurdling over the slackline and back again.
Sumac beckons her sister over for a quiet chat behind a tree.
Aspen is much more appreciative of Sumac’s plan than Catalpa was. “Let’s dress up in sheets and convince him Camelottery’s haunted!”
“Don’t be ridiculous, that’s too Scooby-Doo.”
“I could set off fireworks under his bed….”
“Nothing life-threatening,” Sumac tells her sternly. “And whatever you do, don’t tell the parents till I’ve found a really good home that he’ll want to move into. Not Sic either,” she adds, struck by an uncomfortable feeling that her beloved eldest brother might not understand that Sumac’s doing all this for Grumps’s good.
“Top secret,” says Aspen, zipping her lip ferociously. “Hey, I could go stand right beside Grumps whenever I feel a fart coming. Or maybe I’ll sneak Slate into his room and blow his mind with terror! And we could put apple pie in his bed like in the old books.”
Sumac gets called for her next turn before she has a chance to explain that apple pie beds just had the sheets tucked so you couldn’t straighten your legs; there was no actual pie in them.
She manages one step on the slackline before she’s flung sideways. “Argh! This is a dud line.”
“No, it’s wonderful, we’re learning so much,” says CardaMom, picking a bit of beechnut shell out of her elbow.