Free The Secret Cookie Club by Martha Freeman

muzzle and his eyes are cloudy. When he smells bad, my parents and I ignore it; Ben makes faces and blames me. Ike’s dog bed is in the kitchen. Now he circled once and lay down.
    I started loading the dishwasher, and Mom came in. “This weekend we’ll work on GG’s book. I promise,” she said. “I just have to put in a few of hours at legal services in the morning.”
    Legal services is a place where people without a lot of money can go to get help from a lawyer. My mom volunteers there.
    I bumped the dishwasher closed with my toe. “ And Hanukkah starts on Sunday,” I said, “ and you have to take Ben to hockey.”
    Mom pushed her fingers through her hair—a gesture she makes when she’s exasperated. “I know, Emma. Tomorrow night for sure. Meanwhile, you can maybe draw some ideas of how the photos will go on the pages.”
    â€œUh-huh,” I said vaguely because there was a tiny problem my mom didn’t know about. I had lost the photos. Well, not really lost . More like I didn’t happen to know their precise location at that moment.
    *  *  *
    When the dishes were done, I went up the back stairs to my bedroom. Our house is in a suburb of Philadelphia calledGladwyne, which is nice—winding quiet streets with trees on both sides, comfortable houses and big lawns. Sometimes when I tell someone I live here, they say, “Oh-h-h-h,” then look me up and down in a particular way.
    It took me a long time to figure out what they’re thinking: You must be rich.
    My parents would like you to know that we’re not rich. We are like everyone else. Only because they both work superhard, our family has some nice things. They say we should always remember that we are lucky, and we should be generous to people who aren’t.
    Our house is made of stone and plaster and wood in a style called Tudor. It has a semicircular driveway in front and more rooms than we even use. When I get to the second floor, I turn right and pass Benjamin’s room, then a guest room and another room across the hall.
    That’s the one that belonged to my brother who died.
    His name was Nathan. He was five when he got a scrape on his leg that got infected, and then he got a fever. When they saw how sick he was, my parents tookhim to the hospital, but the medicines didn’t work against his infection, and his heart stopped.
    All this happened before I was born, so I never even met him. Eventually, my parents took the bed out of Nathan’s room and changed the pictures on the wall. They put in chairs and a sofa and decided it was now a sitting room. But they left one thing of my brother’s, his bookcase with all his books in it— Where the Wild Things Are , Goodnight, Moon , Now We Are Six , and lots more.
    When Benjamin and I were little, my parents would read Nathan’s books to us and say, “This was your brother’s book, one of his favorites,” or, “This was your brother’s book, and he thought it was kind of boring, which is what made it good for bedtime.”
    Because of that, I have always known that my parents loved Nathan and that he is part of my family.

CHAPTER 22

    Emma
    In my bedroom, I considered my options: (1) read The Sign of the Twisted Candles , which was the Nancy Drew mystery I had checked out of the school library; or (2) reply to Grace’s e-mail; or (3) find the envelope full of pictures.
    If I did the first one first, I would feel guilty that I hadn’t done the other two. And I wasn’t ready to face looking for the pictures because that seemed like work —and hadn’t Ialready worked a whole day at school? Not to mention I tutored Kayden?
    So I sat down at my desk, opened my laptop, opened my in-box, reread Grace’s note, and hit reply:
    Hello, Grace—Getting your e-mail was like getting a blast of hot Arizona sunshine. (That is a simile. We are learning about them in school.