Get in Trouble: Stories Read Online Free PDF

Fran said. “I wish there was a book told you everything that went on. Come on. I’ll show you the room you can sleep in.”
    They went up the stairs. B E BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD . The moss carpet on the second floor was already looking a little worse for wear. “Last week I spent a whole day scrubbing these boards on my hands and knees. So of course next thing they go and pile up a bunch of dirt and stuff. They won’t be the ones have to pitch in and clean it up.”
    “I could help,” Ophelia said. “If you want.”
    “I wasn’t asking for help. But if you offer, I’ll accept. The first door is the washroom,” Fran said. “Nothing queer about thetoilet. I don’t know about the bathtub, though. Never felt the need to sit in it.”
    She opened the second door.
    “Here’s where you sleep.”
    It was a gorgeous room, all shades of orange and rust and gold and pink and tangerine. The walls were finished in leafy shapes and vines cut from all kinds of dresses and T-shirts and what have you. Fran’s ma had spent the better part of a year going through thrift stores, choosing clothes for their patterns and textures and colors. Gold-leaf snakes and fishes swam through the leaf shapes. When the sun came up in the morning, Fran remembered, it was almost blinding.
    There was a crazy quilt on the bed, pink and gold. The bed itself was shaped like a swan. There was a willow chest at the foot of the bed to lay out your clothes on. The mattress was stuffed with the down of crow feathers. Fran had helped her mother shoot the crows and pluck their feathers. She thought they’d killed about a hundred.
    “Wow,” Ophelia said. “I keep saying that. Wow, wow, wow.”
    “I always thought it was like being stuck inside a bottle of orange Nehi,” Fran said. “But in a good way.”
    “I like orange Nehi,” Ophelia said. “But this is like outer space.”
    There was a stack of books on the table beside the bed. Like everything else in the room, all the books had been picked out for the colors on their jackets. Fran’s ma had told her how once the room had been another set of colors. Greens and blues, maybe? Willow and peacock and midnight colors? And who had brought the bits up for the room that time? Fran’s great-grandfather or someone even further along the family tree?Who had first begun to take care of the summer people? Her mother had doled out stories sparingly, and so Fran had only a piecemeal sort of history.
    Hard to figure out what would please Ophelia to hear anyway, and what would trouble her. All of it seemed pleasing and troubling to Fran, in equal measure after so many years.
    “The door you slipped my envelope under,” she said, finally. “You oughtn’t ever go in there.”
    Ophelia looked interested. “Like Bluebeard,” she said.
    Fran said, “It’s how they come and go. Even they don’t open that door very often, I guess.” She’d peeped through the keyhole once and seen a bloody river. She bet if you passed through that door, you weren’t likely to return.
    “Can I ask you another stupid question?” Ophelia said. “Where are they right now?”
    “They’re here,” Fran said. “Or out in the woods chasing nightjars. I told you I don’t see them much.”
    “So how do they tell you what they need you to do?”
    “They get in my head,” Fran said. “It’s hard to explain. They just get in there and poke at me. Like having a really bad itch or something that goes away when I do what they want me to.”
    “Oh, Fran,” Ophelia said. “Maybe I don’t like your summer people as much as I thought I did.”
    Fran said, “It’s not always awful. I guess what it is, is complicated.”
    “I guess I won’t complain the next time my mom tells me I have to help her polish the silver. Should we eat our sandwiches now, or should we save them for when we wake up in the middle of the night?” Ophelia asked. “I have this idea that seeing your heart’s desire probably makes you