Sun & Spoon Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Stomachs have no teeth,” she said as she handed Spoon his mug. And then she said, “Not just anyone can wiggle their ears, you know. It’s something you’re born with.”
    A thunderclap interrupted the meal. The suns on the walls shook. Another thunderclap. Another.
    Spoon jerked awake to find Joanie opening and closing his door.
    â€œIt’s seven o’clock, aren’t you ever getting up?” Joanie said, slamming the door one last time. She stayed in his room, leaning against the door, holding on to the doorknob behind her back.
    Yawning and stretching, Spoon tumbled out of bed. He padded over to Joanie.
    â€œWhat are you going to do today?” she asked, her typical morning question.
    Spoon knotted his hand into a fist and gave his sister a noogie—a gentle one, though, not a serious one that would make her cry. “We’ll think of something,” he said. But he already knew what he had in mind.
    Between the time when the new dream was still fresh and when Spoon was giving Joanie the noogie—just seconds—the idea for the notebook had popped into his head. Complete. As if one of his teachers had assigned it as a project with specific instructions to follow. He wondered if the notebook had been in the dream, too, and he simply couldn’t remember it. Or if Gram was somehow guiding him, telling him what to do.
    â€œMeet me in the kitchen,” Spoon told Joanie. Lightly he brushed her out of his room, dressed, retrieved the deck of cards from under his pillow, put it in his pocket, and sailed downstairs.
    Joanie had eaten earlier, but she had another small breakfast with Spoon. Outside, Scott and Kay moved up and down the garden under large straw hats. They’re thinning the rows and weeding, Spoon guessed. The hats bobbed like boats on a green sea.
    â€œWell . . .” said Spoon, drawing his attention away from his parents and back to his sister. He gulped the leftover milk in his cereal bowl so that it had no taste. “We’re going to make notebooks.”
    Joanie had licked her pinkie and stuck it into the sugar bowl. She sucked the sugar off her finger and replaced the lid. Clink. “Notebooks?”
    â€œYes, notebooks.”
    Joanie smiled, plain and clear, but then her expression changed. She seemed to be considering something, her forehead creased with bewilderment.
    It struck Spoon that usually it was he who was perplexed by Joanie and the things she said, not the other way around.
    â€œWhy?” Joanie asked.
    I may have dreamed it, Spoon nearly replied. “Just because.”
    â€œIs this a trick?”
    â€œNo.” Spoon said it almost like a question. “And they’ll be secret notebooks,” he added, thinking as he spoke. “I won’t tell you what’s in mine, and you don’t have to tell me what’s in yours.” That way, he reasoned, Joanie could feel included, she wouldn’t be a pest, and he could still get something accomplished and keep it private. He was covering all his bases. “Let’s get moving,” Spoon said. “I’m going to say hi to Mom and Dad and then we can begin.”
    â€œWhy are you being so nice to me?” Joanie asked. Wedges of sunlight patterned her face, her hands. “I didn’t even have to try to make you nice to me this morning. Usually it takes awhile. And yesterday you carried my little bones home from Pa’s.”
    Spoon shrugged. He didn’t think he could put it into words. He didn’t bother to try.
    â€œThis one’s for you, and this one’s for me,” Spoon said. He handed Joanie a blue folder and kept the other one, an orange one, for himself. Both folders held a dozen or so pages of lined paper, bound by silver clasps. Spoon had used both of the folders for science projects during the last school year. The blue one had read CLOUDS, and the orange one THE PROPERTIES OF LIGHT, in inch-high block