Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry Read Online Free PDF

there. Purse number eleven. My fingers ran across the top of an envelope, and I pulled it out. Hands shaking, I brought it into the light and stared at it. White. Standard business size. The top of it was a little dusty, so I swept it off with my fingertips. There was one word written on the front of the envelope:
    Oops.
    I tried to breathe, but my throat pinched shut. For a few seconds I could hear the whump-whump of my own heartbeat. My fingers traveled up and down the edges of the envelope, tapping the corners. So, Grandma hadn’t been just talking out of her head. There really was an envelope in one of her purses, and it had my name on it. It felt like it had papers inside and maybe something else, something heavier than paper and all lumpy.
    I walked backward out of the closet and let the door shut. It made enough of a noise that my eyes shifted to the bedroom door, and I imagined my parents coming in again. They’d be here to check on Grandma soon anyway. They probably would not approve of me going through her stuff, least of all to get an envelope she had left for me to read when she was “gone.”
    Assuming they didn’t kill me straight off, Mom would be all, You’re being dramatic again. You’ve gone to this trouble, so just open it, Dani, have a look, and be done with it.
    Dad would be like, She said that’s for when she’s gone . Does your grandmother look gone to you?
    And Mac would say, Open it. Jeez. What are you waiting for?
    And Indri. She’d think about it, and use her relationship talents to divine what my grandmother really meant, and she’d say something like, How about a compromise?Just glance at what’s inside, maybe read a little bit of it, and get an idea what it’s about . That would totally be Indri.
    I liked that idea best of all, but I didn’t like it either, because I just didn’t know what I should do. So, I snuck out of Grandma’s room, still on tiptoes, put the envelope on my bed, covered it with my bedspread, and went and took a shower.
    Ghostology
    By Ruth Beans
    Seriously, that’s all the first page said.
    So much for imaginary-Indri’s compromise. I talked to her after she Skyped with her dad, but we stayed on the subjects of how good her dad was doing, what presents he was sending her, and Worm Dung and her various ideas for getting even with him. I kinda liked the anonymous website involving several embarrassing photos of donkeys, but only in the abstract. I wanted to tell her about Grandma’s envelope, but the words wouldn’t come out.
    Until I couldn’t sleep, and everyone else—even my grandmother—could. The entire city of Oxford seemed to be snoring, and I was awake, and I opened the envelope marked Oops , even though I felt totally, completely guilty.
    The first thing I got out was the lumpy thing, which was a golden key. It had three loops on the end and a long barrel, like old-fashioned door keys, except smaller, and it was toobig to be a diary key. I stared at it for a while and turned it around and around in my palm, wondering what it unlocked. Finally, I tucked it under my pillow, figuring I’d know more about it after I read what Grandma wrote. If I even did read it before, you know, she was actually gone .
    Only—what I found on the first page—who even knew what to make of that?
    Ghostology .
    I sat on my bed in the dark and used my phone to shine light on the first page of the papers inside my grandmother’s secret envelope, and just kept looking at the word. The world hadn’t stopped spinning or exploded when I opened the envelope, but I swear it was like my grandmother was teasing me. If she still had all her wits, she’d probably be laughing her butt off and telling me how much I deserved this confusion and giving me some quote to look up about ethics and conscience, or maybe karma.
    I couldn’t go down to the living room to get the dictionary without