Chapter 1 1.


On the day I got cursed, I was zooming around the Del Mar Garden Apartments, testing out the new brakes on my bike. The testing was totally unnecessary; Dad’s repairs are top-notch. But you can’t spend a month begging someone to fix something and then shrug it off when they finally do. You need to bring the sunshine. So I was sunshining all over the place.

The Del Mar is shaped like a giant rubber band, with all the units facing a central courtyard. On one end of the courtyard, there’s a lawn lined with trees. On the other end, there’s a lawn with no trees. And in the middle of the courtyard, there’s a little building for doing laundry and picking up mail, and across from that is a little play area. That’s where I was: right between the laundry building and the play area.

Suddenly, the laundry building door flung open, and out stepped Sourpuss Scanlon.

She moved toward me like a tortoise on a mission. On her bent head shone the evil white roots of her evil white hair.

I skidded to a stop (Oh, the brakes worked, all right!). Fast as could be, I jerked my bike around and sped to the parking lot. If Sourpuss Scanlon talks to you, you’re cursed. You can’t say a single word until someone says, “Paprika, paprika, paprika.” And since my best friend, Haley Michaels, stayed at her grandma’s during the day, I could not afford that. Who would “paprika-paprika-paprika” me?

It was a weekday, so the parking lot was quiet. The working-people cars were at work. The old-lady cars were in their spaces. And the car-seated cars were taking a nap because—as Mrs. Garcia says—“When the baby sleeps, the smart mom rests.” But I could hear the traffic on the boulevard, with its three lanes in each direction and its hum of cars racing past the Del Mar’s brown aluminum siding and firm-but-fair NO SOLICITING sign.

It’s against the rules to play in the parking lot because cars could splat your brains out (duh), and that was a rule I did not usually break. So it was with a shiver of excitement that I realized now how smooth the asphalt was. I could turn lazy figure eights with just two fingers on the handlebars.

But as fun as that was, the worry cells in my brain started to blare, Warning! Warning! They knew that the longer I stayed out there, the more likely some mom would see me from her window and squeal to my dad. Then he wouldn’t think I was bringing the sunshine. He’d think I was asking for trouble.

I headed back to the courtyard, crossing my fingers that Sourpuss was gone.

But no. There she was, her keys held straight in front of her, shuffling toward me in her pink bedroom slippers. I braked again, hard, and swerved into a tree. With a fwump, my bottom slid forward onto the top bar of my bike. “Ow, ow, ow!” I yelled. “Right in the fanny!”

“What kind of language is that?”

A chill fell over me.

Sourpuss Scanlon had raised her little turtle head and was glaring right at me. “Why are you abusing that tree? That tree has been here longer than you’ve been alive.”

I stared at Sourpuss Scanlon, frozen, my mouth wide.

“Well?” she said. “Say something.”

But if you speak while you’re cursed by Sourpuss Scanlon, you’ll be dead in twenty-four hours. I’m not making that up. Once, a boy at the Del Mar Garden Apartments spoke after Sourpuss Scanlon said something to him, and the next day, he died. If you wander our complex at night, you might see his ghost. (That’s why, if I ever had to go outside when it was dark, I kept my eyes on the ground.)

“Say something,” she repeated.

My mouth defrosted just enough to snap shut.

Sourpuss Scanlon’s beady eyes were locked onto mine, a deep frown wrinkling her forehead. “I’ll be talking to your father.”

Not every kid would have believed that. The Del Mar has three stories and sixty-four modern and attractive units; Sourpuss Scanlon can’t possibly know which adult every kid belongs to. But she knows that I belong to my dad because my dad is both the manager and handyman. If someone’s toilet gets plugged, or if their ceiling drips, or if their oven breaks, my dad is the person they call. So everybody knows him, and that means everybody knows me.

All I could do now was wait for Sourpuss Scanlon to move on. When she did, I rested my bike on the grass and took a seat on the concrete steps leading up to Haley’s apartment. She wouldn’t be home for hours, not until her parents got off work and picked her up from her grandma’s. But what choice did I have? I needed that “paprika-paprika-paprika” magic.

To make matters worse, Haley and Sourpuss Scanlon both lived between the laundry building and the parking lot. So there was a good chance I’d run into the old turtle-head again before Haley got home. Then what would happen? Would I get double cursed? What would a double curse do?

I was waiting on the steps, trying not to worry too much about getting double cursed, when Mrs. Garcia and AJ walked by. “Well, if it isn’t Sunny Parker,” said Mrs. Garcia. “It’s only the first day of summer vacation! You bored already?”

I shook my head. How could anyone be bored on the first day of summer vacation? I was, at most, maybe only half-bored.

“Want to come for a walk?” Mrs. Garcia asked.

I do love a Garcia walk, and during the school year I’m usually too busy to tag along. But Mrs. Garcia wouldn’t understand why I wasn’t talking, since adults don’t know about the curse. Telling them causes seven years of bad luck. I shook my head again.

A little later, Mrs. Garcia’s daughter, Izzy, walked by in her Yum Burger uniform. She’s sixteen—two years older than AJ—so she’s not technically an adult. But she insists the curse is fake and refuses to say, “Paprika, paprika, paprika.” No use bothering with her.

Finally, my dad found me. He said, “What the heck, Sunny? Mrs. Scanlon told me you rode into a tree. The brakes still not working?” His blue eyes were bright with disbelief. He knew as well as I did that that couldn’t be true.

My mouth pulled downward. It burned me up that Sourpuss Scanlon hadn’t wasted one minute in telling my dad. I wanted to spill everything, but I remembered the curse just in time. So instead I jumped up, grabbed my bike from the lawn, and gave him a smiling thumbs-up.

“Well… just be careful.” He looked up at the sky. It was going to be a scorcher—and it’s one of the great tragedies of the world that the Del Mar Garden Apartments does not have air-conditioning.

“Better yet,” he said, giving my shoulder a friendly pat, “start your chores before it gets too hot.”

I wilted and gave him a less enthusiastic thumbs-up.

My main job at the Del Mar is to take care of the laundry building. I empty the lint traps from the dryers, take out the trash, throw out uncollected catalogs and junk mail, and make sure the tile floor stays dry and clean. I also sweep the concrete in front of the building, since kids are always trudging sand from the play area onto it—and that can be dangerous for the residents. One time, there was a bunch of sand on the concrete and one of the seniors slipped. Dad had to call 9-1-1 and write an incident report for his boss. We were worried the woman would sue the city, the housing authority, the state, the federal government, and anyone else involved in running affordable housing complexes like ours. Luckily, she didn’t.

You know who would sue? Sourpuss Scanlon. You can bet money on that.

The other kids who live here—sometimes even Haley—ask me if I mind helping my dad. And the answer is nope. Dad and I are a team. Besides, I wasn’t named Sunny for no reason. My sunny disposition is what makes me who I am. That’s what Dad says, and I believe him (I guess that’s my sunny disposition in action).

But just because I don’t mind helping doesn’t mean I love my chores either. In fact, what with the curse, and Haley not being home, and Dad not even understanding that the first day of summer break is supposed to be about being half-bored and not about doing chores, I was feeling grouchy as I entered the laundry building and unlocked the maintenance room door. And I was feeling grouchier still as I went outside with the broom and felt the heat already rising from the pavement.

The play area was empty, a real graveyard. And once that word—“graveyard”—popped in my head, I couldn’t help thinking about the ghost boy. I wondered if maybe the ghost boy was nearby. What if he didn’t haunt only at night? What if he haunted all the time? Maybe it was him, not the wind, making one of the swings in the play area creak and sway. My legs turned to jelly at this thought, and I had to stop sweeping for a moment to get ahold of myself.

“What are you doing?”

The sudden voice made goose bumps prickle across my skin. I turned to find Minh. (Hallelujah! Not the ghost boy!) In a flash, I dropped the broom and pointed at my pinched lips.

Minh is nice enough for a nine-year-old. But he wasn’t being nice this time. He took a step back and shifted his weight from one long, skinny leg to the other. “Charades!” he said, pretending this was all a game and not a serious crisis of supernatural origin.

Fire shot out of my eyes as I dropped my hands to my hips.

“Fine. I get it.” He pointed a finger at the sky. “But in exchange for my help”—he looked around for some way to torment me—“you must cross the ring bars with your eyes closed.”

The ring bars hung from the faded climbing structure that—along with the swings—made the play area an actual play area and not just a sandbox. I swooped down and picked up the broom. Pointing the handle at him, I pretend-lunged toward his stomach.

His hands flew in the air. “Okay, okay! Paprika, paprika, paprika.”

Finally! My shoulders moved forward and backward as I loosened my jaw. “Phew. I thought I’d be stuck like that until Haley got home.” I gave him a little bow. “Thank you.”

Minh shrugged. “That’s okay. But I don’t know why you’re afraid of those ring bars. They’re not hard.”

“I’m not afraid,” I said, rolling my eyes. But my worry cells knew the truth. After all, what if I fell? I might break a million bones.

“They’re easy,” Minh said, and he sprinted to the climbing structure.

But just then, we heard the shuit, shuit, shuit of scuffling bedroom slippers. It could have been any of the older residents; they do love their bedroom slippers. But there was something a little scary and a little Scanlon-y about the shuffle of these bedroom slippers.

Whoosh! I ran back to the maintenance closet, leaving poor Minh to face Sourpuss alone. It was survival of the fittest; I had to focus on Sunny Parker. And what I knew about Sunny Parker in that moment was that she would live to see another day at the Del Mar Garden Apartments.