Sunny Sweet Is So Not Scary (7 page)

“Oh no,” Junchao cried. “I'm filled with love!”

“You are filled with love,” Alice said, patting Junchao on the arm. “But I think Trudy haunts people who are
in
love.”

“Well then, our ghost isn't Trudy because no one here is in love,” I said.

“You like that boy Michael,” Junchao pointed out.

“But I don't love him,” I grumbled.

“Are you sure?” Sunny asked.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “How can our ghost be here because of my negative energy
and
because I think Michael Capezzi is kind of cute?”

“Maybe both things brought Trudy,” Sunny said.

“I thought you didn't believe in ghosts. And I thought you didn't believe in soul mates. And now you believe in both?” I snapped.

“You're being negative,” Junchao whispered.

I looked over at Alice for help. She squinted her eyes and gave me a little shrug.

I let my head fall back on my neck. Trudy was haunting me for just liking a boy? I'd never even held his hand! It didn't seem very fair.

 

Ridding Your House of Unwanted Spirits: Dress for It

How do we save Masha?” Junchao moaned.

I wished that I could just crawl under the bed and forget about this whole night . . . except that now I knew there were little men under there that wanted to eat me.

Alice hugged me. “It's okay, Masha. We're going to fix this.”

“How?” I asked.

“We have to get the ghost out, that's all,” Alice said. “We'll make her go. The first thing we should
do is light lots and lots of candles. My grandmother says that candles keep ghosts out of your house.”

“We aren't allowed to light candles,” I said.

“Also,” added Sunny. “Trudy is already in the house.” She looked at me and gave me a little smile that said:
because of you
.

“Don't call her that.” I scowled. It was so hard not to be negative with dinky Dr. Evil reminding me how this whole thing was my fault.

“What about garlic? We can string garlic all around like Christmas lights,” said Alice.

“Isn't that to keep vampires away?” I asked.

“Vampires,” Junchao whispered as she chewed on a long strand of her hair and searched the room with her eyes.

Sunny gave a little sigh and then jumped off the bed and headed to her closet.

“Sunny!”

I know that I often wanted to kill my little sister, but I didn't want her to
be
killed.

“The ghost isn't in here anymore,” she said. “The thermometer on the iPad shows that the temperature has increased in the room. That means she's gone.”

I shivered.
She was in here?

Sunny opened up her closet, fished around a bunch in the dark, and then pulled out new batteries.

“You're a genius,” Alice said.

I coughed.

Junchao and Alice looked over at me.

“My throat's a little dry,” I said.

Sunny put batteries into the flashlight and turned it on. Light filled the room. We all took a big breath and relaxed . . . a little.

Then Sunny turned back to her closet and started pulling down hangers and taking off the clothes. “If we're going after Trudy, we need to protect ourselves,” she said.

“Really, stop calling her that,” I said.

Sunny handed us each a wire hanger. “We need to put these on our heads. UnwantedGhost dot com said that ghosts don't like metal. Now, I know what you're
thinking—that these hangers are made out of steel, which is technically not a metal. But steel is an alloy of iron, and iron is a metal.”

Something a ghost didn't
technically
like was good enough for us. Alice, Junchao, and I quickly twisted our hangers into a shape that would stay on our heads.

“Also, we need to attach these to the hangers,” Sunny said, handing us pencils. “The pencils are yellow. And the color yellow is used in the ancient Chinese system called
feng shui
to help create positive energy.”

Alice and I looked at Junchao to see if it was true.

“Why are you staring at me?” Junchao frowned. “Just because I'm part Chinese doesn't mean I know a thousand years' worth of Chinese history.”

“It's closer to four thousand years,” Sunny said. “The first written history in China is recorded at around 1700 BC.” She went on about some sort of dynasty as she got the tape from her desk, but we weren't listening. We were busy taping as many pencils to the hangers as we could. When I was done with mine, I
made a hanger hat for Sunny while she gathered up a bunch of equipment from her desk drawers.

“Look at mine,” Junchao said, smiling and holding out her hanger hat. She had staggered her pencils so that there was a short one, and a long one, and then a short one, all the way around it.

“It looks like the crown of a king.” Alice laughed. “Do you like mine?” Alice held hers up. She had taped all her pencils to the hanger only in the back.

“Yours looks like an American Indian headdress,” I said. Alice smiled a giant curvy smile.

Then they both looked at the hats I'd made. The pencils weren't even at all or in any kind of pattern, but were sticking out everywhere. And there was so much tape that it looked like the pencils had gotten into a big fight with the tape, and the tape had won.

When Junchao and Alice didn't have anything to say about my hats, I started to giggle.

And then my friends started to giggle.

CLOMP. CLOMP. CLOMP.

No more giggling.

“We need to get to the bathroom,” Sunny said.

“What about the ghost?” asked Junchao. “Maybe she's in the bathroom.”

“I don't think ghosts like to hang out in bathrooms,” Sunny said.

Wooo. Wooo. Wooooo.

The four of us quickly put on our hanger hats.

“Now we're protected.” Sunny pointed at her hanger hat.

Junchao did not look convinced. But the four of us—hangers on our head and with a backpack full of Sunny's science stuff—lined up at the door. The bathroom was right across the hall from Sunny's bedroom, so we only had to make it across about three feet of rug.

I put my hand on the door handle.

“Ready?” I whispered.

Sunny might be in charge of information, but I was in charge of everything else. The three of them stood behind me, surrounding Alice on her crutches, their faces yellow in the glow of the flashlight.

They nodded their heads.

I opened the door.

My heart was quietly thumping as I stuck my head a tiny, tiny bit through the door and peeked up and down the hall.

Nothing.

I listened hard.

All I could hear was the ticking of the rain still coming down outside. I motioned that we were good to go, and then I swung open the door and jumped the three feet across the hall and into the bathroom. My bare feet hit the tile, and then Junchao, Alice, and Sunny all hit me. Alice's crutches were so light that they flew over my head and hit the toilet with a clang.

I scrambled out from under them and shut the bathroom door behind us.

“Shh!”

We were so loud that we were going to end up waking Mrs. Song for sure, and then Sunny and I would be left with a ghost and Alice would be on her way home.

I looked in the mirror to fix my hanger hat, and that's when I noticed the shower curtain behind us. It was pulled across the bathtub.

Anything could be in there.

I turned to face the curtain. Everyone looked at me looking at it. And then they all turned to face the shower curtain.

“Do it,” Alice whispered.

I squinted my eyes and reached up and grabbed the shower curtain, pulling it open with a
CHHHHHHH
.

Junchao screamed.

I grabbed her mouth with both my hands and Alice grabbed me.

Sunny shined the flashlight into the bathtub.

It was empty.

We slumped onto the bathroom floor, panting.

“Why are we in here?” I asked. I should have probably asked this before we traveled across the hall.

“It says that the first step in any ghost hunt is to use the bathroom,” Sunny said.

“Sunny!” I grumbled. Alice and Junchao shot me a warning with their eyes—I was being negative. “Great idea,” I quickly added, trying to save myself.

“Also,” Sunny said, “I read that ghosts like it if you look like them a little bit. So I thought we could use
Mommy's baby powder to make ourselves look more like the ghost.”

“That is a good idea,” said Alice. “My grandmother says that ghosts are really vain.”

“What does vain mean?” I asked.

“It means conceited or stuck-up,” Sunny said.

“A stuck-up ghost?” I said. “You would think that you'd get over yourself by the time you're dead. But I say let's do it.”

I took the flashlight from Sunny and found my mom's baby powder in the bathroom cabinet and then dumped some over my head and all over my pajamas. Alice, Junchao, and Sunny did the same. We stood in the bathroom in a giant cloud of powder, coughing. Each of us was wearing our hanger hat filled with pencils and we were now covered in baby powder. Everything about us was white: our pajamas, our arms, our feet, our hair . . . The only thing not white, weirdly, were our eyes.

“Now what?” I asked.

“It says,” Sunny read, “‘that if your ghost persists to stick around that it may have a reason to stay. The ghost might be trying to communicate with you.'”

“You mean, tell us something?” I asked. “But we already communicated when I tried to ask her, I mean it, to leave.”

“That was us telling it something. Not the ghost telling us something,” Alice pointed out.

“Exactly,” said Sunny. “But it warns that ‘you should never try to communicate with the ghost. It says that an inexperienced person might make an error that could open up a portal and cause the ghost to haunt the house forever.'”

“Forever,” Junchao moaned, covering her white face with her white hands.

“That's a really long time,” Alice said, looking over at me.

“It can't live here forever because we already live here, and . . . truthfully . . . I kind of like it here.”

Sunny's eyes opened in surprise. I'd never said this before. Or at least not when my mom didn't ask me.

Sunny and I always told our mom that we liked it here, but we only told her that because we knew she needed us to be okay with the divorce and the move and my dad having a girlfriend and all, and so we said we were. When really, both Sunny and I were secretly hoping that my mom would tell us that this whole divorce thing was off and that we were moving home—to be with my dad and to live in our actual home.

But was I hoping that anymore? I kind of thought that I might not be. I looked around the bathroom. This place was home.

“I like it here too,” Sunny said. “Did you know that New Jersey is the largest chemical-producing state in the whole country? And I love chemicals.” She smiled at me, and I knew that she wasn't really talking about chemicals.

“I like it here too, since I was born here and it's the only place I've ever lived,” said Junchao.

“I like it here too, because you guys are here,” Alice said.

“That's the best reason to like it,” I told her. “
Gui mi
group hug!”

We all hugged—including Sunny. Our hanger hats clanked together and when we separated, I think Alice's hat had a few of my pencils stuck to it.

 

Ridding Your House of Unwanted Spirits: Show It the Way

Okay, let's get to work,” I said.

The four of us sat down on the pink bathroom rug. Sunny read from my mom's iPad: “‘The first thing you have to do is to cover up all the mirrors in the house with towels and open up all the windows at least an inch.'”

“Cover the mirrors and open the windows?” Junchao asked.

“It says that when you perform the ghost-removal ceremony, you don't want the ghost going into the mirror by accident because then it will be stuck in your
house. You want it to go out the window. That's why you open every one of them, to make it easy for the ghost to leave.”

“That makes sense,” said Alice.

I stood up and opened up the bathroom closet and took out all of our bath towels. “Let's go room by room.”

“Can I just stay in this room?” asked Junchao.

“But you'll be alone,” I said. “Because we're leaving it.”

“Never mind,” she said, getting up.

Alice moved over to the bathroom window. She opened it up about two inches. I climbed up on the sink and threw a bath towel over the bathroom mirror. “One room done!” I announced. We all smiled at each other.

Sunny pulled something from her backpack.

“What is that?” I asked.

“It's an electromagnetic field meter,” she said. “It measures electromagnetic fields, which are physical fields produced by electrically charged objects.”

“Do ghosts not like electricity?” I asked hopefully.

“No, they use electricity,” she said. “It should begin to beep if the ghost comes near us.”

The thought of that little machine beeping made all the hairs on my arms stand straight up. I picked up my mom's baby powder and gave myself another dose of it. Alice and Junchao did the same.

“Hey,” I said. “Why didn't you pull that thing out in the bedroom?”

“It said the first step was to use the bathroom. And I wanted to follow the steps,” she said.

I couldn't stop myself. I picked up the baby powder and dumped the whole thing on Sunny.

Junchao gasped.

Alice grabbed the powder from my hands.

Sunny sneezed, causing a pencil to fall from her hat and hit the tile floor with a
plunk
.

“Quick,” Junchao said. “Say you're sorry.”