Yolonda's Genius by Carol Fenner Page B

of falling asleep.
    Gradually voices crept into his sleeping. “Young lady! Your brother is upstairs asleep on his bed.” His mother was hollering at Yolonda. “He’s still wearing his jacket! Is that how you look after your little brother? And what was that sticky stuff I stepped in all over the kitchen floor?”
    He heard Yolonda answering — the grown-up teacher voice — something about “nourishing friends.”
    Andrew drifted off again while he was thinking he would try to get up and take off his jacket.
    He dreamed he was burying his broken harmonica in the backyard under the flowers.
    *   *   *
    Yolonda went to sleep right away despite the bubbles in her stomach from polishing off the rest of the chocolate fudge cookie-cake while she did her homework. She dropped off despite, too, a faint nagging worry that perched like a sleeping mosquito in her mind.
    She woke in a flash in the middle of the night, the mosquito awake and buzzing.
    Andrew! Something had not been right that afternoon, but she had been so relieved to find her little brother all in one piece that she’d been blinded to what her senses were telling her about him. She’d been in a hurry to get back to the fun she’d been having with Shirley, and the cake had been baking — so many things going on, she just hadn’t paid attention.
    He’d been holding his harmonica in such an odd way, and the look on his face — the look was one she remembered. From where? She couldn’t put her finger on it. His eyes had been so big and blank. He had smelled sick, even. Yolonda gasped and sat up. “No!” She’d forgotten to give Andrew a bath.
    He hadn’t eaten anything at dinner. “Look, Andrew,” their momma had urged. “Corn — your favorite — and applesauce. You like applesauce.” Andrew had just sat listlessly at the table. Their momma had felt his forehead. “Feels okay — but you don’t look right.”
    Yolonda couldn’t get Andrew’s face with its dead expression out of her mind. How could she have forgotten the bath?
    He hadn’t carried his harmonica to the table either, and that should have signaled Yolonda that he was not himself. Their momma had noticed. “Where’s your mouth harp?” she had asked. “You haven’t lost it, I hope. Your daddy gave you that. It’s not a toy, Andrew.”
    Andrew had slid out of his chair and headed for the stairs. “Maybe you’d better go on and get into bed, Andrew,” Momma had called to him. “You don’t look right. I’ll be up in a minute.”
    Now Yolonda scrambled out of bed, wiggled her nightgown down, and crept quietly to Andrew’s room. She listened in the open doorway but didn’t hear the sleep sigh of Andrew’s breathing. She slipped quietly to his bed. It was strangely flat. Maybe he’d rolled out on the other side and would be sleeping tangled in his blanket on the floor. But he wasn’t.
    â€œAndrew.” She said his name quietly, then in a loud whisper — an order for him to show himself. “Andrew!” No response. The curtain blew gently at the window. He wasn’t in his room.
    She hurried downstairs and padded quietly through the living room. The house was shadowy and silent. Sometimes Andrew came downstairsearly in the morning and sat at Aunt Tiny’s piano in the bay room off the dining room. He would sound a note or two with his fingers and just listen to it reverberate.
    But now he wasn’t there. Nor on the window seat in the dining room, another favorite spot.
    The kitchen. He was coming in the kitchen door, a rustling shadow. He seemed so small, the light from the oven clock outlining his little-boy shape. Yolonda felt love and relief fill her, mingle together in an overwhelming surge.
    â€œWhere were you?” she demanded. “Where did you go?”
    For what