So, maybe when Ivan turned five or six, my brother became terrified of Anne Frank.
I'm not sure how it started but I do know that my sister, Andrea, and I thought this was terrifically funny so she and I sat down with a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank and armed with pencils, pens and erasers set out to do our worst.
On the cover of the book was the popular photograph of Anne Frank--a young girl with screwy teeth, dark circles under her eyes and carefully attended hair. We wanted to "enhance" this portrait, the way children often do, by penciling a moustache, blacking out the teeth or drawing on a giant mono-brow, as if a bat had just flown into the poor girl's face and died--You know the mischief. We started by taking our mean little pencil-top erasers and scrubbing away the image, we whited out the pupils in the eyes, but we weren't careful so we removed some of the face around them to leave the spooky effect of Anne Frank having wide glowing white orbs where her eyes should be. It was a terrifying effect so we stopped right there.
Then the real haunting of The Diary of Anne Frank began. We would take the book from the shelf and put it beneath the pillow on Ivan's bed. Or maybe we would put it in his sock drawer, in his coat pocket or his lunch box--wherever we could think of.
We didn't often see when or how Ivan would discover the book each time, but when he did he would return it to the book shelf, usually shoved behind some books or buried beneath a stack of others. It was fairly easy to find as he would face the spine inward so you could see only the pages of the book--And it was the only book that was turned around on the shelf, facing inwards.
Once I remember putting the book inside the pajama shirt my mom had put on Ivan's bed for after he came out of the bathtub one night. Andrea and I watched as he discovered the book and, rather than scream or show any alarm at all, he quietly put the book to his lips, kissed the portrait on the cover and said "please don't hurt me, Anne." Then he carried the book down the hall and threw it as hard as he could so it landed on top of the bookshelf. We never would have found it again, I'm certain, had we not seen this ourselves.
You'd think we'd leave well enough alone after witnessing such a solemn moment and for the most part I think we did, but we were mean older sisters and had nothing better to do.
We discovered that the heating vents on certain floors of our house were connected to other ones, so, for instance you could speak into the floor vents upstairs and hear it crystal clear from the rooms below.
This prompted a whole series of mischievous plots, one of which was waiting until Ivan was in bed at night and almost asleep and then we would whisper into the heating vents above his room in low, droning, ghost-like voices: "Annnne Fraaaannnnk...Annnnne Fraaaannnk..."
We would do this until Ivan would jump out of bed and run to find our mom--This barely gave us enough time to make it back to our rooms and pretend to be asleep.
I doubt that anyone fell for this and I'm sure we got into a lot of trouble--It's hard to believe one little dead girl could cause so many spankings.
The End.
