The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall by Alender Katie

Author:Alender, Katie [Alender, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2015-08-24T23:00:00+00:00

MY FAVORITE MEMORY OF JANIE

It was almost Halloween, which is one of those holidays that’s extremely important to kids and extremely useless to parents. Mom and Dad had a history of forgetting to get our costumes until the last possible minute. When I was thirteen and Janie was eight, we decided to take matters into our own hands. So one day after school, we raided their closet.

I grabbed an old flannel shirt Mom had never thrown away and put together a nineties grunge look, but we were having a harder time finding something for Janie … until we dug through an overflowing shelf and found a ruffly apron. I remembered seeing it on pictures of my great-grandma. We hauled it out and then unearthed a full skirt and a simple white blouse.

“Voilà,” I said, tying the apron strings into a bow behind her back. “You’re a housewife.”

She wrinkled her nose at herself in the mirror. “It’s not enough.”

“Come on, then,” I said, leading her out to the kitchen and opening the pantry door. “We’ll get you some props.”

I handed her a broom, which she rejected with a sneer, so then I gave her a mop, which, for some reason obvious only in eight-year-old logic, was acceptable.

“What else?” she asked.

“You need a hand free for your candy,” I said.

“I can wear a purse on my arm and put the candy in that,” she said. “But I need more. I still don’t look like anything.”

“I know!” I said. “Wait here.”

I ran back to my room and dug through my jewelry box for a strand of fake pearls. When I got back to the kitchen, Janie was holding the mop in one hand and a teapot in the other.

“Better now,” she said.

I didn’t want to laugh at her, but I couldn’t really stop myself. “You look like you’re hosting the weirdest tea party ever.”

She set down the teapot, then opened a cabinet and pulled out a frying pan, struggling to manage everything with the mop wedged into her armpit.

“Better?” she asked. “Like, for making cookies?”

“What—? Janie. You honestly think cookies are made in frying pans?”

She blinked at me, clueless.

“Here,” I said, picking the teapot up and tucking it in the crook of her elbow. “Now. You’re the perfect housewife.”

For a second, she believed me, and then I busted out laughing so hard that tears exploded down my face. Janie took a few seconds to decide whether to be angry, and then she started laughing, too.

Mom came home a couple of minutes later and stared at us, confused, as we gasped and wheezed for air. “What are you girls doing?”

“What?” I asked. “Don’t you want some of Janie’s fried cookies?”

Janie waved the mop at Mom. “Come to my tea party!” she said, in a demonic, gravelly voice. “Come to my tea party and mop my floors!”

And then we basically lost our minds laughing while our mother, who had never taught us anything about house-wifery and therefore only had herself to blame, stared at us as if we’d turned into aliens.

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