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Word Nerd

Page 16

by Susin Nielsen


  ‘Then have I got some knock-knock jokes for you. Knock, knock.’

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘Orange.’

  ‘Orange who?’

  ‘Orange you glad you’re my friend?’

  When I’m through telling her my top ten lamest knock-knock jokes, I turn around in my seat and look out the rear window. Cosmo and Amanda are in his Camaro behind us. They’re going to play in the tournament too, then head straight back to Vancouver because they both have to work.

  I wave at Cosmo for the millionth time that day. And for the millionth time that day, he waves back.

  EEHDNT

  then, dent, hen, net, thee, teen, heed, ten

  THE END

  SOYLSGAR

  glossy, grassy, gross, royal, yoga, glassy, gory, gassy

  GLOSSARY

  (Not all of these words are found in traditional dictionaries, but they are all found in the Official Scrabble Tournament and Club Word List.)

  Aa – rough, cindery lava

  Anthem – song of praise

  Culti – a cult

  Exanthem – a skin eruption

  Jive – type of jazz or swing music

  Legume – a plant of the pea family

  Mementos – things that serve as a reminder of the past

  Miaous – meows

  Opossum – an arboreal mammal

  Orach – a plant with edible spinach-like leaves

  Pithy – concise

  Potash – a potassium compound

  Qi – ‘breath’ in Chinese

  Qwertys – a standard typewriter keyboard

  Sh – used to urge silence

  Taxon – a unit of scientific classification

  Urethane – a crystalline compound

  Whimsy – an impulsive or fanciful idea

  Yegg – a burglar

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Special thanks to Val Gallant and all the members of the Vancouver Scrabble Club for letting me be a fly on the wall at their regular meetings and at the Vancouver Scrabble Tournament. Unlike my fictional characters, I never had the courage to play a game against any of them. Thanks must also go to Stefan Fatsis, author of Word Freak, a rollicking good read about the world of competitive Scrabble.

  I also owe undying gratitude to

  Susan Juby, whose generosity knows no bounds;

  Hilary McMahon, both for taking me on and for her day-to-day passion and dedication;

  Kathy Lowinger and Sue Tate, for seeing the potential, and for their excellent notes that helped make the story stronger and better;

  Luther Wright, my ‘longest’ friend, who kindly let me use his lyrics for ‘Darlin’’;

  My husband, Goran, who read an early draft of the manuscript and told me I wasn’t crazy;

  And last but not least, my son, Oskar, who let me read the manuscript aloud to him – not once but twice – and who, after giving me some perceptive dialogue notes, told me it was his favorite book, both times.

  Also by

  SUSIN NIELSEN

  From

  I have always wanted a sister.

  A brother, not so much. I like symmetry, and I always felt that a sister would create the perfect quadrangle or ‘family square’, with the X chromosomes forming two sides and the Ys forming the rest.

  When I bugged my parents, they would say, ‘Stewart, we already have the perfect child! How could we do any better than you?’ It was hard to argue with their logic.

  Then one day, when I had just turned ten, I overheard a private conversation between them. I was in my room building my birthday present, an enormous Lego spaceship, without using instructions, because I have very good spatial abilities. My mom and dad were downstairs, but I could hear their voices clearly through the heating vent.

  ‘Leonard,’ I heard my mom say, ‘Stewart might finally get his wish.’ I put down my Lego pieces and moved closer to the vent. ‘I haven’t had my period in two months. I’m chubbing up round the middle. I’m tired all the time …’

  ‘You think you’re pregnant?’ I heard my dad say.

  ‘I do.’

  I couldn’t help myself. ‘FINALLY!’ I yelled through the vent. ‘BEST BIRTHDAY PRESENT EVER!’

  The next day, Mom made an appointment with her doctor.

  But it wasn’t a baby growing inside her. It was cancer. It had started in her ovaries, and by the time they caught it, it had spread.

  She died a year and three months later.

  Now I’m thirteen, and I still miss her like crazy, because she was a quality human being. When I was seven, my dad and I bought her a mug for her birthday that read WORLD’S BEST MOM, and I actually believed there was only one mug like it on the planet, and that it had been made just for her.

  I don’t like to talk a lot about the year she was sick. Or the year after she died. My dad is also quality and he did his best, and I like to think that I am quality and so I did my best, too. But it was really hard because we were missing one-third of our family.

  We had been like an equilateral triangle.

  Mom was the base that held up the whole structure. When we lost her, the other two sides just collapsed in on each other.

  We were very, very sad. My therapist, Dr Elizabeth Moscovich, told me early on in our sessions that a part of us will always be sad, and that we will have to learn to live with it. At first I thought she wasn’t a very good therapist, because if she was good she should be able to cure me. But after a while I realised that the opposite was true: she’s an excellent therapist, because she tells it like it is.

  Dr Elizabeth Moscovich also says that just because you feel sad sometimes, it doesn’t mean you can’t also be happy, which at first might sound like a serious contradiction. But it’s true. For instance, I can still be happy when Dad and I see a ball game at Nat Bailey Stadium. I can still be happy when I am kicking my best friend Alistair’s butt at Stratego. And when Dad and I adopted Schrödinger the cat from the SPCA last year, I wasn’t just happy; I was over the moon.

  Of course, Schrödinger’s not even close to a replacement for my mom. He can’t have good conversations; he can’t cook my favourite from-scratch chicken fingers; he can’t give me back tickles or kiss my forehead at night. But he needs me, and I need him. He needs me to feed him and cuddle him and scoop his poops. I need him to talk to, even though he never talks back. And I need him to sleep by my head at night, because then I don’t feel alone.

  So when Dad started to date Caroline Anderson a year after Mom died, I mostly understood. Caroline is Dad’s Schrödinger. He needs her and she needs him. It doesn’t mean he isn’t still sad sometimes, because he is. But it means he can put the sad on hold for bigger periods of time, and this is a good thing. For a long time he was Sad Dad twenty-four-seven, and I was Sad Stewart twenty-four-seven, and together we were Sad Squared, and it was just a big black hole of sadness.

  Caroline and my dad have worked together in the newsroom for almost ten years. They’d always got along, but it wasn’t until they were both single that they started to notice each other in that way. Caroline’s husband left around the time my mom died. She is a divorcée. I’d met her a few times when Mom was still alive, at Dad’s work parties. And of course I see her on TV all the time. I like her, and she likes me. Even better, she liked my mom, and I know the feeling was mutual.

  But most important of all, she loves my dad. I can see it in the way she looks at him all googly-eyed, and he looks at her the same way. Sometimes it makes my stomach hurt when I think about my mom, and how, if things had been different, she would be getting Dad’s googly-eyes, but as Dr Elizabeth Moscovich has pointed out, I can’t live in the past. Caroline makes my dad happy, and this is a good thing.

  Best of all, she has a daughter. Her name is Ashley, and she is one year older than me. I have only met Ashley a few times. She is very pretty, but I think she is also possibly hard of hearing, because when I try to talk to her, she either walks away or turns up the volume on the TV re
ally loud.

  Maybe she’s just shy.

  And now we are moving in with them. Dad and Caroline broke the news last month. Dad and I and Schrödinger are leaving our house in North Vancouver and moving into Caroline and Ashley’s house in Vancouver, on Twenty-Second between Cambie and Main. They told Ashley and me separately, so I don’t know her reaction, but I am 89.9 per cent happy with the news.

  ‘Eighty-nine point nine?’ Dr Elizabeth Moscovich asked me at our final session last week. ‘What about the other ten point one per cent?’

  I confessed to her that that part is made up of less positive emotions. We made a list, and on the list were words like anxiety and guilt. Dr Elizabeth Moscovich told me this was perfectly normal. After all, we’re leaving the house I spent my entire life in, the one Mom and Dad bought together a year before I was born. Now Dad has sold the house to a young couple with a baby, which means there is no turning back. We’re bringing a lot of stuff with us, but we can’t bring the mosaic stepping-stones my mom made that line the path in the back yard, or the flowers she planted, or her molecules, which I know still float through the air, because why else can I feel her presence all the time? It is what less scientifically minded people would call a ‘vibe’, and our house, even this long after her death, is still full to bursting with Mom’s vibe.

  I worry a little bit about that. Where will her vibe go when we are gone? Will it find its way to our new home, like those animals that walked hundreds of miles to find their owners in The Incredible Journey? Or will it get lost on the way?

  And also I am anxious because I don’t know how Ashley feels about this merger of our family and hers. I don’t expect her to be 89.9 per cent excited. I just hope she’s at least 65 per cent excited. I can work with 65 per cent.

  This is not how I wanted my wish to come true. This is not how I would have chosen to become a quadrangle. I would far, far rather still be a triangle if it meant that my mom was alive. But since that is a scientific impossibility, I am trying to look on the bright side.

  I have always wanted a sister.

  And I’m about to get one.

  Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal

  Stewart is geeky, gifted but socially clueless. His mom has died and he misses her every day. Ashley is popular, cool but her grades stink. Her dad has come out and moved out – but not far enough.

  Their worlds are about to collide: Stewart and his dad are moving in with Ashley and her mom. Stewart is 89.9% happy about it even as he struggles to fit in at his new school. But Ashley is 110% horrified and can’t get used to her totally awkward home. And things are about to get a whole lot more mixed up when they attract the wrong kind of attention…

  ‘Snappy and witty. A really fine YA novel’ Telegraph

  ‘I defy you not to fall in love with this book’ Phil Earle

  9781783443765 £7.99

  Thirteen-year-old wrestling fanatic Henry used to have a normal life. But one day, 7½ months ago, everything changed.

  Now he’s moved with his dad to a new city, where nobody knows their name. Living off a diet of takeaway pizza, hiding from the nosy neighbours, Henry just wants to stay under the radar and keep his family’s secret.

  Then he meets Farley and Alberta, fellow social misfits who just will not leave him alone. And little by little, the past begins to come out.

  ‘Both disarming and endearing’ Kirkus

  ‘Nielsen’s balance of humour and pathos is finely honed’ Booklist

  9781783443666 £7.99

 

 

 


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