The Underdogs by Sara Hammel

what, and don’t break the chain. Stay connected to one another until I toss the tissue. Now,” he said, closing his eyes and hanging his head, “let us be quiet and think of Annabel.”
    Evie stood between Lucky and me, and my mom was on my other side. This was the only funeral for Annabel we’d ever get, and the floodgates opened. Evie, then my mom, then I began crying audibly, while Celia and Serene were flat-out bawling. I sneaked a look at Goran, who was contorting his face every which way so as not to cry, but failed in the end.
    After exactly five minutes, Gene wiped his eyes one last time, held up his tissue, and tossed it in the middle of the circle. A few blew their noses one last time and threw theirs as well. Some tissues caught the wind and didn’t make it to the center, but that was okay. When everyone had let go of their grief in the form of soaked tissues that dotted the lawn with white blobs that looked like doves in the dusk, Gene broke the circle and put one arm around my mom, and the other around Lisa, and hugged them both tight.
    Then, silent but for some sniffling, we all filed back across the lawn and out of the pool area while Gene and Harmony stayed to retrieve the snotty tissues. I have to say, the Love Circle did its job that day. We got to say goodbye to Annabel, and we were together, which was the most important thing. I looked back on my way out, and as Gene bent down to pick up a tissue, a gust of wind picked it up and it flew away, taking our Annabel with it.

 
    Before
    First thing on the Monday morning after the disastrous pool party, Evie and I were sitting on the stoop outside the club’s main entrance, killing time until tennis camp started so we could avoid navigating the packed lobby. Lucky finished up a cell phone call at the back end of the parking lot and bounded toward us.
    â€œDad, you’re late for your staff meeting,” Evie said. Lucky waved his hands at us as if to say Hey, isn’t life great? and smiled.
    â€œYou girls be good today,” he said. “Keep out of trouble, okay?”
    He gave us one last wave, and off he went into the club without a look back at his daughter, or a thought as to how a twelve-year-old girl would spend her day without structure, activities, or adult supervision. As Evie watched Lucky go, I watched her, and I wasn’t sure how this family dynamic with just her and Lucky was going to work in the long run. Without her mom, I mean. That morning was kind of depressing. It was a harbinger of things to come, as it turned out, because Evie’s melancholy got worse after that.
    In the following days, she refused to hang outdoors with me. I dutifully spent time with her in the back room, and I found myself in her dingy bolt-hole behind Court 5 on another beautiful day in late June that happened to be Cookie Wednesday—the one day each week when, instead of orange slices and fruit salad, the camp snack was, you guessed it, fresh-baked cookies. I watched Evie unwrap her second packet of Twinkies of the day. She peeled one of the long sponge cakes out of its wrapper, the moist brown part of the cake sticking to the plastic. Snack time was in an hour, but I suspected she wasn’t going to show her face anywhere near the cookie platters.
    She broke off a piece of Twinkie for me. As I chewed, I was thinking of ways I could coax her out of there. She ate her third Twinkie in three bites. She laid the fourth one, still in the wrapper, on the crate next to her. Then she went back to her book. I took a gander at the cover. Man, this was dire: the girl was reading The House With a Clock in Its Walls, a book supposedly for kids but with a dark, superspooky cover that gave me the creeps. I looked around the place. The camp lunch ladies must have gone on a shopping spree at Big Bob’s Warehouse, because boxes full of chips and grape juice towered over us. The industrial refrigerator was buzzing annoyingly, and