Aspen’s eyes roll back in her head. “Sumac Lottery, ultimate nerd. I’m going back to play with the little man.”
“Imagic we has a lion baby,” Brian’s telling Oak, on the floor, pointing up at a carving of someone holding a lion cub. (The other Lotterys have sworn never to tell Brian it’s actually imagine, because imagic sounds so much better.) Brian’s convinced that when she and Oak are grown up they’ll have babies together. Now she’s taking pictures with the tablet: mostly old man statues with hair bands, buns, and braided herringbone beards. Sumac wonders if PopCorn’s dad has a soft white beard like grandfathers in movies.
PapaDum’s hurrying back from the exit, with Oak like an airplane pressed to his hip. “Anyone seen Aspen?”
“She was just here,” says Sumac. Then, remembering: “She said something about playing with a little man.”
“The museum guard?” PapaDum wonders aloud.
“Did he seem particularly short to you?” asks CardaMom, frowning.
Dread grips Sumac’s stomach as she remembers: King Ashurna-what’s-his-name.
She canters back through the exhibition, weaving in between the tourists. She finds Aspen — all alone, whew! — in the room with the three-thousand-year-old statue, making a pretty good attempt at lassoing it with her cat’s cradle string. “Don’t you dare!”
Aspen only giggles.
“You want us to get banned from the Uh-Oh for life?”
“Can’t help it because I’ve got, whatchamacallit.” She clicks her fingers. “Poor impulse control. So nyah!” She lassos her own foot and lifts it over her head.
“Found her” is all Sumac tells the parents when she tows Aspen back to the exit. No point giving them heart failure when it’s all over.
*
“Is that all you’re packing?” asks Isabella. Sprawled across the beanbag in Sumac’s room, her BFF-since-diapers waves her silver-sandaled feet in the air. Isabella always looks as if she’s ready for a party, maybe because she’s an only child; her mami doesn’t let her leave the apartment in just shorts no matter how hot it gets. She wouldn’t have lasted two days at Camp Jagged Falls, where Sumac and her English cousin-she’d-never-met-before Seren Johnson ran around literally caked with mud and loved it.
“We’re only going to be in Yukon for two nights,” Sumac tells Isabella.
“Won’t you freeze?” asks Isabella.
Sumac laughs. “It’s July there too, nutcase.” She rolls a pair of leggings into a neat sausage. “I bet we’ll see moose and bear and elk, and these special sheep they’ve got with curly horns.”
“What if PopCorn takes you somewhere glamorous?” asks Isabella. He’s been Isabella’s favorite of the Lottery parents ever since he threw her a surprise Fancy Nancy tea party for her third birthday.
“This is like a mission of mercy,” Sumac reminds her. “We only have one day to find his burned dad somewhere new to live and cheer him up. I’m the first of the grandkids he’ll ever have met.” It strikes her that this means she’ll probably always be his pet.
“You’re such a tidy packer,” sighs Isabella, dangling her head over Sumac’s sock drawer. “Can I move in and be you while you’re gone?”
Sumac does love her room: the translucent canopy over her bed that makes her feel royal, the high shelf for all the dolls she’s been collecting since Baba — CardaMom’s dad — made her a baby one in a birch bark canoe, the rainbow duvet cover, the alphabetized bookcase where every week she turns one of her favorite jackets face out. (Right now it’s Wonder.) She contemplates the painted sky that goes right across the walls and ceiling, with fluffy clouds that took PopCorn weeks to get right, and the sun coming up on the door. There’s only one window, but it looks out at the catalpa tree that presses huge, heart-shaped leaves against the glass.
“Hey, Topaz,” calls Isabella. The cat pushes through the slightly open door and jumps onto her lap, purring so loudly she vibrates. She’s exactly the same orange as PopCorn’s topaz pinky ring that he found in a plug hole in Argentina. “Where’s your sister?”
“Quartz must be around somewhere,” says Sumac.
“Go on, admit it, is Quartz your imaginary sister?” Isabella asks the cat.
“She’s just shy.” Maybe because of the rock they named her after, Sumac thinks: Quartz can be so colorless and clear, it’s almost invisible.
They hear the clang of the cowbell. Isabella leaps up as if she’s been electrocuted, and the cat springs to the floor.
“Aren’t you staying for lunch?” Sumac asks, deadpan. “I thought you wanted to be me for two days.”
“Yeah, but what if PapaDum’s made his kale salad?”
“It didn’t kill you last time.”