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  ZONDERVAN

  Sophie’s Stormy Summer

  Copyright © 2005, 2009 by Nancy Rue

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are products of author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

  ePub Edition September 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-56877-3

  Requests for information should be addressed to:

  Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rue, Nancy N.

  Sophie’s stormy summer / Nancy Rue.

  p. cm. — (Faithgirlz)

  Summary: The Corn Flakes Summary: The Corn Flakes are devastated to learn that Kitty has cancer, but when summer vacations separate them and put their new film on hold, Sophie determines to do anything God calls her to do to make Kitty feel better — even give up her beautiful hair.

  ISBN: 978 –0–310–70761–5 (softcover)

  [1. Cancer — Fiction. 2. Diseases —Fiction. 3. Sick —Fiction. 4. Friendship —Fiction. 5. Christian life —Fiction. 6. Imagination —Fiction.] I. Title. II. Series.

  PZ7.R88515Sn 2005

  [Fic] – dc22 2004030899

  * * *

  All Scripture quotations unless otherwise noted are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

  Any Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers printed in this book are offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by Zondervan, nor does Zondervan vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920. www.alivecommunucations.com

  Zonderkidz is a trademark of Zondervan.

  Interior art direction and design: Sarah Molegraaf

  Cover illustrator: Steve James

  Interior design and composition: Carlos Estrada and Sherri L. Hoffman

  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen,

  but on what is unseen.

  For what is seen is temporary,

  but what is unseen is eternal.

  — 2 CORINTHIANS 4:18

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Share Your Thoughts

  One

  No way would I ever want to be a lifeguard here,” Maggie said.

  Sophie tilted her head back to look from under her floppy hat at her getting-tanner-by-the-minute friends.

  Sophie’s best-best friend, Fiona, didn’t look up from the miniature hut they were building with dried seaweed sticks in the sand. Instead, she kept poking them in the sand with one hand while she brushed the usual strand of hair out of one eye with the other. “Why not, Mags?” she said.

  Kitty wrinkled her made-like-china nose, now spattered with freckles. “I wouldn’t want to be a lifeguard, but I might want to be saved by one.” Her dark ponytail bounced as she giggled — which she did at the end of almost every sentence.

  “Of course you would,” Darbie said with her lilting Irish accent. “If it was a boy lifeguard.”

  “Gross,” Fiona said.

  Sophie looked at Maggie, whose dark eyes were going from one of the Corn Flakes to another.

  “So why wouldn’t you want to be a lifeguard here, Mags?” she said.

  All the Corn Flakes sat back on their heels and squinted through the sun at Maggie.

  “Because your little brother and sister are always screaming like there’s a shark attack twenty four-seven,” Maggie said. Her words seemed to make soft thuds in the sand. But Sophie thought being at the beach even made Maggie’s matter-of-fact voice sound lighter. “How does the lifeguard know when to save somebody and when not to?”

  She nodded toward Fiona’s little brother, Rory, and her even littler sister, Isabella, who hadn’t stopped shouting and squealing the whole five days they had been at Virginia Beach.

  “Izzy and Rory have to make all those sounds at the seashore because they’re little,” Sophie said. She had also felt like holding her arms out to the ocean and squealing several times since she and the Corn Flakes had been there, and she was TWELVE. It was as if the waves themselves, tumbling over one another like puppies, were setting her free. Well, that and the fact that she was here with the four people in the whole world with whom she could be herself.

  Sure, we’re flakes, Sophie thought happily. And we do corny stuff — but we are who we are.

  “At least they’re making happy noises for a change,” Darbie said, nodding toward Izzy and Rory. “Usually they’re shrieking like terrorists.” She clapped a sunblock-shiny hand over her mouth and looked quickly at Fiona’s mother. “No offense, Dr. Bunting,” she said through her fingers. “They’re perfectly charming.”

  Dr. Bunting pulled off her sunglasses and turned to Darbie. “You were right the first time. They are little terrorists.”

  “What I can’t get,” Fiona said, “is why they always have to be throwing something — buckets, sand, food — on each OTHER.” She sighed out loud. “It’s heinous.”

  Dr. Bunting blinked her gray-like-Fiona’s eyes and put her sunglasses back on. “If tossing a few Cheetos is the worst those two do before we leave here, it’s because Miss Genevieve is the nanny from heaven.”

  “I thought we were supposed to call her the au pair,” Maggie said.

  “Just call me Genevieve.” The blonde, creamy-skin
ned woman who was on her knees making castle towers pointed a graceful finger at Rory. “Get more of that sand you just gave me,” she said to him. “With it just wet enough, we can build anything.”

  Rory trotted obediently toward the water with his bucket and shovel and Dr. Bunting looked out from under the brim of her white visor. “See what I mean?” she said.

  Sophie tried to imagine Fiona’s last nanny playing at the beach with Rory and Izzy doing things like dumping seashells over each other’s heads. Miss Odetta Clide had handed out demerits if they spilled their milk. True, she had turned out to be less like a steel rod than they’d thought at first, but she NEVER would have gotten on her hands and knees in the sand.

  The Corn Flakes — including their newest member, Willoughby — had all been worried about who would take Miss Odetta Clide’s place when she married Fiona’s grandfather Boppa, and they went off to Europe on their honeymoon for the summer. With Fiona’s parents taking all of the girls — except Willoughby, who was on vacation with her family — to Virginia Beach for ten whole days, the choice of a nanny would determine the amount of fun they could have.

  Sophie watched Genevieve drip wet sand through her hand to create a castle tower that looked the way soft ice cream piled on top of a cone. The au pair’s thick braid hung over her shoulder like a silk rope, and her blue eyes seemed to hug Isabella as the curly-headed four-year-old tried to dribble sand through her tiny fingers. I want to be like Genevieve when I grow up, Sophie thought.

  Not that she WANTED to — at least not right now. Here — building a little beach hut out of dried seaweed with her best friends, she didn’t have to think about anything scary, like starting middle school in two months …

  “Okay,” Sophie said out loud. “Everybody tell their favorite part about being at the beach so far.”

  Fiona pushed a stubborn strand of golden-brown hair behind one ear as she poked the sticks into the adobe-colored sand as if she was doing math. “I liked it when we dug those giant bowls in the sand and climbed in there, all of us together.”

  “We KILLED ourselves laughing over things that are funny only to us,” Darbie said.

  “Was that your favorite too?” Sophie said to her.

  Darbie kept weaving seaweed into the roof of their masterpiece. Her reddish hair and her snapping eyes were as dark as her flesh was white. She was the one most likely to burn like a marshmallow. Sophie liked to think of Darbie running on the beaches of Northern Ireland where she had lived until last year, shouting things like “blackguards” — which Darbie pronounced as “blaggards” and meant people who did evil things.

  “My favorite,” Darbie said finally, “was when we used those long sticks to write our names on the beach — and the shells were our periods and commas.” She grinned her crooked-toothed smile. “At least, the shells we’re not taking home by the bucketful to Poquoson.”

  “I liked pelican-watching,” Maggie said. She was just returning to the job site with a bucket full of dried seaweed, her face Maggie-solemn, as if she were doing serious business. “I liked watching them fish.”

  “I DIDN’T like that part,” Kitty said. “We only did that when Genevieve made us wait thirty minutes after we ate before we could go back in the water.”

  Maggie cocked her head at Kitty, so that her blunt-cut shiny hair splashed against her face just below her ears. “You have to do that,” she said. “Or you’ll get a cramp and drown.”

  Sophie squinted her brown eyes through her glasses at Kitty. “So what WAS your favorite?”

  “It’s too hard to pick,” Kitty said. Her curly ponytail bounced on the breeze, and at that moment, Sophie thought, I want her, I want ALL of us, to stay just like we are. And I want everything we ever do together to be as perfect as it is right now.

  “While you’re thinking about it, Kitty,” Fiona said, “we need more seashells for furniture.”

  “Why do I have to get them?” Kitty went straight into whining mode. To a certain degree, as Fiona always said, that was just Kitty’s usual voice, just like Maggie’s dropped out in matter-of-fact blocks, and Sophie’s was as high-pitched and squeaky as a caught mouse. But right now Kitty suddenly had an I’m-about-to-cry edge to her voice.

  “You don’t have to get them,” Fiona said, her own voice cheery. “You can just stand there and watch while we do all the work.”

  “Don’t yell at me, Fiona,” Kitty said.

  “Who’s yelling?” Fiona looked blankly at Sophie. “Was I yelling?”

  “All right, I’ll get more seashells, Kitty,” Darbie said. “And you keep making the entrance.”

  “What entrance?”

  “Right here,” Maggie said.

  She pointed to the sticks, like soft bamboo, that Sophie had laid crosswise between two rows of those stuck upright into the sand. No offense, Kitty, Sophie thought, but we’ve been making it since lunch. Hello?

  Genevieve hadn’t let them go back into the water after they’d eaten their sandwiches because she’d spotted jags of lightning so far away that Fiona said the rest of them would need the Hubble Telescope to see them. But when Genevieve had shown them how to make exotic-looking buildings, their claims that they were going to “go mental” if they couldn’t go swimming had faded.

  “It isn’t rocket science,” Fiona said to Kitty. “Just put them in there.”

  “I’m not stupid, Fiona!” Kitty said. “You always make me feel stupid!”

  Sophie could hear the Kitty-tears getting closer, and she crawled over to Kitty and put her arm around her. Kitty usually put her head on Sophie’s shoulder when she did that, but Sophie could feel her cringing.

  “What’s wrong?” Sophie said.

  “Is it a sand issue?” Darbie said. “I hate when it gets in my bathing suit — especially right where it’s sunburned at the edges.”

  “No!” Kitty said. “It’s everybody being mean to me!”

  Dr. Bunting toyed with a gold hoop earring as she studied Kitty. “Define ‘mean,’ ” she said.

  “I can’t!” Kitty said — and she pulled her sandy hands over her eyes and burst into tears.

  Dr. Bunting looked at Genevieve. “Oh, those preadolescent hormones,” she said.

  Genevieve lifted her chin — chiseled out of pure marble, Sophie was sure — as if she were listening to something.

  “Thunder,” she said. “Time to move indoors.”

  “No!” Rory said.

  “Yes,” Genevieve said.

  “Okay,” Rory said.

  “If you can do that, you can stop a storm, Genevieve,” Dr. Bunting said.

  “What storm?” Fiona said.

  Sophie looked up. The sky was like a moving watercolor picture, all in grays, and the wind was delivering karate chops to the water.

  “I felt a raindrop,” Maggie said.

  “Wasn’t that just spray from the ocean?” Darbie said. “Isn’t that what it was, Fiona?”

  “No,” Maggie said. “It’s rain.”

  “Thanks, Mags,” Fiona said, grinning. “You’re tons of help.”

  “Everyone pack up what you carried down and let’s head to the house,” Genevieve said.

  “Can somebody else do mine?” Kitty said. “I’m too tired — I can’t.”

  “I will,” Sophie said — before Fiona could set her sobbing again.

  “You’re barely big enough to carry your own stuff, Little Bit,” Fiona’s mom said to Sophie. “What’s the deal, Kitty?”

  Kitty dropped onto a cooler and put her face in her hands again. By then, the wind was scattering the beach hut and kicking sand over Kitty’s beach tote.

  “I’ll get that,” Darbie said.

  Maggie didn’t say anything. She just knelt down with her back to Kitty, and Kitty climbed on. Plodding through the sand, Maggie headed up the beach.

  “You go ahead with her,” Genevieve said to the rest of them.

  Genevieve rolled Izzy into a towel like a burrito, handed her to Dr. Bunting, and then put
Rory up on her shoulders. Darbie, Sophie, and Fiona hoisted their own burdens on themselves like pack mules and started for the big wooden house. Its wide windows looked sightlessly down at them as the rain began to slash against the glass.

  Sophie had to take off her hat so it wouldn’t get blown away, and her hair whipped across her face. A pair of windshield wipers for her glasses would have been nice. But there was something about the sudden storm that prickled her skin with excitement.

  “Let’s pretend we’ve been shipwrecked!” she shouted to the girls.

  “And that house is our only refuge!” Darbie shouted back.

  “The only problem,” Fiona cried over the wind-howl, “is that the place is full of pirates!”

  Sophie raised a fist above her head. “We have no other choice! We must survive!”

  “Help, Kitty!” Maggie cried out. “Help her!”

  Kitty’s finally getting into it, Sophie thought. Kitty was sprawled out in the sand, and Maggie threw herself down beside her.

  “Now is NOT a good time to start acting it out!” Darbie called to Maggie.

  “I’m not acting! There’s something wrong with her!”

  Sophie only stared for a second before she dumped her tote and the basket of chip bags and churned her feet in the sand to get to Kitty. She fell on her knees next to her and let her breath go with the wind.

  Kitty lay on her back, face gray like ashes. Sophie put her hand on her arm and Kitty winced and her face twisted into a knot, but she didn’t pull away.

  It was as if she couldn’t.

  “Please don’t touch me,” Kitty said. “It hurts. It hurts.”

  Two

  Fiona was suddenly holding her rolled-up little sister, and Dr. Bunting was on the sand beside Kitty, her white beach top whipping around her body like a flag. Sophie felt Darbie leaning against her, their swimsuits plastered together in the rain as they watched Dr. Bunting run her expert hands over Kitty.

  But Maggie didn’t move from Kitty’s side. The wind flapped her hair against the side of her face, and yet she stayed still as a stone.