I might need them someday. You never know! Now, are you ready for a TV dinner? Glazed turkey Lean Cuisine?”
“No thanks. I’m not hungry,” I said.
“We could watch the Shop ’Til You Drop Channel together. They’re featuring hair accessories.” Her eyes sparkled and gleamed as if hair accessories were the best things in the entire universe.
“I think I’ll just unpack and go to sleep.” I slung my backpack onto the girly-girl bed.
“It’s awfully early, but suit yourself. If you need me, I’ll be looking for treasures on my shopping shows. Nighty-night.”
I shut the door and sat on what was once my mom’s bed. I pulled my most prized possessions from my backpack. My drawing book and colored pencils. My good-luck soccer ball that my whole team had signed after I scored the winning goal in the championships. My two favorite framed photos—one of Violet and me in our soccer jerseys, and the other one of my mom and me at the beach, our matching hair blowing in the wind. I set them on the nightstand, beside the ballerina lamp.
At the bottom of my backpack was my mom’s Washington State Ferry jacket. It was the one she’d worn at work, directing cars on and off the ferryboat that went back and forth between our island and downtown Seattle.
I unpacked my suitcase—mostly T-shirts, shorts, and blue jeans. Most of my stuff I’d left at Violet’s house for safekeeping. Maybe I was trying to convince myself that moving in with Florida would only be temporary.
Even though it had just turned dark outside, I curled into a ball on top of the covers and buried myself under my mom’s jacket. It smelled just like her. When my eyes were closed it was almost as if she were beside me. I inhaled the sweetness of cinnamon and butterscotch, waiting for the moon to rise in that same room where my mom had slept when she was a kid. I’m pretty sure she’d be horrified to know it was now baby-pink.
I couldn’t sleep. My head was filled with thoughts I couldn’t switch off. The weirdo lady next door. My best friend, Violet, in perfect Paris. My strange grandmother. My mom dying. Outside a dog howled and a man yelled bad words to make it stop. But loudest of all was the steady blare of the TV as Florida flipped through the channels, searching for something to buy.
My second biggest wish was that the bottomless pit in my heart would go away. My first biggest? That I’d wake up and all of this was really just a super-strange dream.
But the next morning I was still in a cotton-candy-pink bedroom on Grape Street. Living in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, with Florida Brown was my strange new reality.
My mom used to say, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” I was pretty sure that this was the first day of what would be the worst life in all of recorded history.
When I wandered into the living room the next morning it couldn’t have been later than seven-thirty. Florida was already on the phone, buying something called a Belly Buster from the Shop ’Til You Drop Channel. Strap it around your middle and it was guaranteed to melt away your fat.
She cupped her hand over the telephone. “I’ve been on a little shopping spree this morning. Early bird catches the bargains! Now watch this, honey. You’ll be impressed.”
The man on the TV picked up his ringing phone. He looked like he was made out of plastic.
“We have Florida from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, on the line,” he said. “We’ve missed you, Florida, my friend!”
The TV host actually knew my grandmother and was having a conversation with her right on TV!
Florida giggled in her movie star voice. “Alan Stone, how are you?”
She was flirting with him. Gross.
“Alan dear,” she went on. “I really don’t have much of a belly to bust, but it will be fantastic to have this during the holidays when the gals bring over their sweet, high-calorie treats. Oh, and Alan—I have a teeny favor to ask. Could you give a little shout-out to my darling eleven-year-old niece, Madison?”
Niece?!
The TV host looked right into the camera. “Hello there, Madison. This is for you and your Aunt Florida.” Then he blew us a kiss. Right on television. It was freaky. Thank goodness none of my friends back in Washington watched the shopping shows.
“We both send big lovey-dovey kisses back, Alan! Mwah!” Florida said. Then she hung up the phone.
I stared at her as if she was a space alien. “I’m not your niece.”
“Of course you’re not. But we don’t want Alan Stone thinking I’m old enough to be a grandmother, for goodness sake. Don’t worry. It was only an itsy-bitsy teeny-weenie little white lie.”
I didn’t care what color the lie was. A lie was still a lie. Unless you’re trying to spare someone’s feelings. That’s what my mom always said. Saying you’re too young to be a grandmother when you really were one didn’t exactly qualify. That’s what I thought, but I stopped myself from saying so.
I thought I’d spend the rest of the day in my room, so I stood up from the sofa. My grandmother pulled me back down by the hem of my T-shirt.
“Don’t leave yet, honey. Next is a special on designer scarves.”
In five minutes flat she bought seven of them—one in every color of the rainbow. Then she flicked back and forth between a whole bunch of shopping channels.
“So much to buy, so little time …”
As she picked up the phone to order a half-dozen jeweled watches, the doorbell rang. Florida got up to answer the door. “Who could that be?”
Uh-oh. Was it the crazy lady?
A redheaded guy with a scruffy beard stood on the other side of the doorway, holding a clipboard. Behind him was a pimply-faced teenager.
“May I help you boys?” Florida’s voice was all dramatic, like she was the queen of her castle.
“Special delivery, Mrs. Brown,” said the guy with the clipboard. “It’s your brand-new flat-screen TV.”
“I don’t recall ordering a new TV,” Florida said.
“Your name and address are on our delivery slip, Mrs. Brown.” He held up his clipboard as evidence.
“Well, bring it in,” Florida shrugged.
I peered outside to watch them struggle to unload a giant box from the back of a dented old delivery truck. Painted on the side were faded gold curlicue letters that said MIRACLE MOVERS.
As they rolled it up the walkway on a dolly, Florida bounced like a kid on Christmas morning. “Who knows? Maybe I did order it. Well, guess it’s meant to be.”
How could anyone forget ordering a new television set? She must have bought a lot of stuff to have something that massive slip
