Summer of the Gypsy Moths by Sara Pennypacker

beordered around all summer and have to follow all your stupid rules.”
    â€œWhat rules? I do not have rules!”
    â€œAre you serious ?” Angel cried. “Do you ever listen to yourself? ‘Never put daffodils in a vase with other flowers—they’ll kill them.’ ‘Never swim in an outgoing tide.’ Actually, you must have a hundred rules about swimming. ‘Always store a marshmallow in with the brown sugar so it won’t harden up.’ Want me to go on?”
    â€œThose aren’t rules, they’re hints. Helpful hints.”
    â€œOh, and ‘No burying bodies at four in the afternoon!’ is just a helpful hint?” She swung her backpack off the chair and shouldered it.
    â€œOkay, okay! You’re right. From now on, we decide everything together. Okay?”
    There was silence then. For a long time. Angel’s fingers clenched and unclenched around the backpack straps.
    â€œHow about this,” I tried. “We dig now. If anyone sees us, I guess it will just look like we’re working in the garden. But we don’t…you know…until it’s dark.”
    â€œFine,” Angel growled after a minute. She stomped over to the door and I followed. Both of us just stood silenced then, looking out. While we had been arguing, it had begun to rain. The weather was on my side. I bit my cheek so my relief wouldn’t show, but Angel scowled at me anyway.
    â€œFine,” she growled again. “We’ll do it tomorrow.” She stomped upstairs and stomped back down, pajamas and earphones trailing out of her backpack. She lifted the master key off the hook at the front door. “But I am not spending another night with a dead body.”
    I dashed through the rain after her, over the yard and into Plover. When she marched into the bedroom with the twin beds, I thought, Good, we can talk a little and I can apologize. She was right—sometimes I did get kind of bossy. Before I could follow her into the room, though, she slammed the door.
    Well, fine. Wherever that girl was, I wasn’t.
    The smell inside was a little musty, even with the lingering bleachy scent of our cleaning, so I raised the windows a little. Not enough to let the rain in, but enough to smell the fresh wet pines outside. As I knelt on the couch, I noticed something: Most of the pillows had tears, raggedly sewn back up. I remembered what George had said about kids on vacation, and wondered how many pillow fights they’d been through. I got up and wandered around then, and everywhere, I saw what he’d been talking about. It was kind of fun to make up the stories behind what was broken. The cookie jar was missing an ear—a hit-and-run cookie thief. The spaghetti pot lid was dented—probably used in battle with the chipped ladle. Two blades of the fan were freshnew wood—I couldn’t even imagine what had happened to the old ones.
    I went into the open bedroom and lifted the mattress. The slats were half-inch-thick boards—you’d have to jump pretty hard to crack one of those. The thought made me smile. I got into the clean blue sheets we’d put on this morning and thought, I like it in here.

CHAPTER 7
    â€œ J esus querido!” Angel dropped the shovel.
    I clutched at my heart.
    â€œSorry, didn’t mean to startle you. Back to mow and finish up what we didn’t get to yesterday.” George climbed over the wire fencing and picked the shovel up, handed it back. He bent the fencing down a little and Treb sailed over it, then dropped to give himself a dirt back rub. He scrambled to his feet and gave us a big dog smile, as if to say, Wasn’t I entertaining? Angel and I were still having heart attacks, though, and we ignored him. Treb flopped down and sighed as if he was exhausted from trying to get our attention.
    â€œNow, what she got you planting? A rowboat?” George laughed at his own joke, but we sure didn’t.