Tennyson opened the flaps of the box, shaking it so the contents fell out into her hand. When she caught what was in the box, she blinked a few times. She rotated the object, taking in every inch, her eyes widening with each second. Then she quickly put it back into the box, closing the flaps emphatically. “Whose is this?”
Melanie’s lip trembled. “I don’t know. What is it? I mean, is it, um, really bad?”
“It’s stuff we’re not supposed to mess with.”
Tennyson knew what it was. Having two older brothers had taught her a lot, and usually she liked knowing things that Melanie didn’t. Her best friend was what Tennyson’s mother liked to call “sheltered.” Melanie didn’t get to listen to rock and roll. Her parents made her listen to Bach and Beethoven. She also had to play the violin, which Melanie hated. Tennyson didn’t think she would mind playing the violin or the piano. Her grandmother had wanted to buy their family a piano so she and Bronte could learn something useful in life, but Tennyson’s mother had said they didn’t have room in the house. Not even for an upright.
“What do I do with it?” Melanie asked, looking at the box like it was a snake, then looking up at Tennyson with eyes that pleaded for help.
Thing was, Tennyson wasn’t sure what to do with the box. She wasn’t going to take it back home with her, that was for sure. There was no privacy at her house. Melanie should probably take it back and put it where she’d found it. Then try to forget about it. Or they could toss the box into the culvert right in front of them. But someone else might find it. And the Brevard’s address was on it. “I don’t know . . . yet. Let me think.”
Melanie set the box away from them.
Usually a Code Hot Pink wasn’t so . . . serious. Once, Melanie had burned off her bangs with Hillary’s curling iron. Another time, Tennyson had stepped on a nail and had to get a tetanus shot. Oh, and then there was the time Shaun Angelo had found the note they’d passed in math class. But this was . . . serious serious.
“You know what? Let’s lie out. I want to get some more sun before we start school. That will give us time to think about what to do with”—Tennyson looked over at the box—“that.”
“I guess so,” Melanie said. They both flipped their T-shirts up and tucked them through their necklines so they looked like Daisy Duke. Then Melanie carefully rolled up her shorts.
They pulled the chairs out into the sun and sweated in the dry heat for ten minutes, neither saying a thing. Finally, Tennyson pulled her shirt from where she’d tucked it between her nonexistent breasts and sat up. “Did I get any sun on my stomach?”
Melanie squinted. “Um, I think so?”
Tennyson frowned down at her red belly poking out over her cutoff jean shorts. She’d probably made the stupid freckles on her cheeks worse. She hated her complexion and had tried all kinds of ways to get rid of what her daddy called her cute “sprinkles,” but nothing worked. Her only chance was God working a miracle, so she whispered a prayer each night along with ten Hail Marys. Her mother had once told her that she had said ten Hail Marys every day when she wanted to have children. It worked, ’cause her mother had had five of them.
Melanie had darker skin because her mother was Japanese and her father had Indian in him. Not the kind from a different country, but the kind that lived here once upon a time in Louisiana. Melanie had straight, brown hair, skin that was smooth and honey brown, and a birthmark on her thigh in the shape of California. Her daddy was a surgeon, and she had her own bedroom with a canopy bed, a bathroom she didn’t have to share, and a housekeeper named Martha, who made them peanut butter–banana sandwiches while she watched As the World Turns on the television in the kitchen. Yeah, the Brevards had a television in their kitchen.
Melanie was lucky she was so rich, but Tennyson’s friend didn’t even seem to care that she had been blessed with a boom box, two pairs of Tretorns, and a membership at the country club. And tennis lessons. God, Tennyson would die to have tennis lessons just so