Praise for
Jenny Torres Sanchez’s debut novel
THE DOWNSIDE OF BEING CHARLIE
“A unique and moving story that will connect with teens.”—VOYA
“Peppered with sardonic humor.”—Publisher’s Weekly
“Refreshing to have a book focusing on a young man’s struggle with weight and body issues.”—School Library Journal
“Sanchez has talent for bringing a very serious issue to light in a way that teens can understand.”—Seventeen.com book club
“A strong, well-written book that takes a different perspective on a high school student’s senior year.”—Children’s Literature
“Fans of Chris Crutcher, Sarah Dessen, and John Green will appreciate The Downside of Being Charlie. Highly recommended.”—TeenLibrariansToolbox.com
“Raw, heartfelt, searingly honest. If this is Sanchez’s debut novel, this is an author to watch.”—Catherine Ryan Hyde, New York Times bestselling author of Pay It Forward
“Both heartbreaking and hopeful.”—David Yoo, author of The Detention Club
“Strikes a delicate and heartfelt balance of honesty and wit.”—Jennifer Castle, author of The Beginning of After
Copyright © 2013 by Jenny Torres Sanchez
All rights reserved under the Pan-American and
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013934992
E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-4841-8
987654321
Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing
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TO AVA AND MATEO,
the baby bird that died on our back porch,
& LUNA
There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House,
As lately as Today—
I know it, by the numb look
Such Houses have—alway—
The Neighbors rustle in and out—
The Doctor—drives away—
A Window opens like a Pod—
Abrupt—mechanically—
Somebody flings a Mattress out—
The Children hurry by—
They wonder if it died—on that—
I used to—when a Boy—
The Minister—goes stiffly in—
As if the House were His—
And He owned all the Mourners—now—
And little Boys—besides—
And then the Milliner—and the Man
Of the Appalling Trade—
To take the measure of the House—
There’ll be that Dark Parade—
Of Tassels—and of Coaches—soon—
It’s easy as a Sign—
The Intuition of the News—
In just a Country Town—
EMILY DICKINSON, POEM 389, C. 1862
Contents
Part 1: Because I Could not Stop for Death—
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part 2: Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part 3: The Morning After Woe—
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Acknowledgments
PART 1
BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH—
Chapter 1
The old man across the street is dead. I don’t know who figured it out or how, but I think he’d been dead for days when they found him. School has been out for three weeks. I estimate that would have been the last time I saw him. Alive.
First the police came, and then the county coroner. We watched, Mom and I and our neighbors who never really talked to the old man, as they wheeled his body away in a black body bag atop a gurney. The world stood still as they drove him away. And then, as if someone hit play, it resumed.
People on our block trickled back into their houses, and Mom went back into ours. But I sat on our stoop, thinking about the old man. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him since he was taken away four days ago.
I guess death is funny. Not “haha” funny, but more like screw-with-your-head funny. It makes you think strange things. Like how a person can sort of exist but not at the same time.
I imagine the old man arriving in front of a blinding light, staring at it with his milky eyes and scowling. And still another part of me imagines him safe inside his house, at his kitchen table, drinking coffee maybe. But the logical part of my brain tells me the truth, that he’s either at the funeral home, or being loaded into a hearse, or already in the hearse on his way to the cemetery at the end of our block.
Living here I should be used to death. But every time a procession goes by, I wonder about the person inside the hearse. Did they live happily but die horribly? Or maybe they lived horribly but died happily? Or worse, maybe they lived horribly and died horribly.
I look at the old man’s house and try to decide if it looks numb.
Moments later, his procession passes by slowly. I’m struck with indecision about what to do. If I wore hats, I’d take mine off and bow my head. But I don’t wear hats. Or maybe if I stood up and gave a military salute. But both seem wrong. So I just stare. I stare at the hearse and each and every person in the string of cars that trail behind it. This is my great show of respect. But I can’t help it. I can’t help but wonder how they’re all connected. If any of them feel guilty. If any, even, are to blame.
When the last car passes, I consider following it and joining the throng of mourners dressed in black. But crashing a funeral can never be good. I look down at my black Converse, thinking about the old man who went by Ki
nsky/Keniski/Kenesky or something like that. I wonder why even though I didn’t know him, he makes me want to cry.
“Hey!”
I blink back tears and look over to see my best friend, Joel. His dreads are pulled back so they aren’t hanging in his face the way they usually do. He comes over and puts one heavy black boot on the step I’m sitting on.
“Hey,” I say. “You’re back.” Joel lives with his dad but visits his mom and stepdad in Chicago the first couple of weeks of every summer. He usually calls me while he’s there. Usually we’ve already made plans for what we’re going to do the day he gets back. Usually. But he hadn’t called me the whole time he’d been gone or in the three days he’d been back. So I pretend like I couldn’t care less that he’s here.
“I’m back,” he says and sits down next to me. “Did you miss me?”
“Yeah, I barely got out of bed.” I hope the remark sounds sarcastic enough to cover up the truth of it. I pretty much did nothing but sit around, watch TV, and eat Cap’n Crunch for breakfast, lunch, and dinner the entire time he was gone. I don’t exactly live a glamorous life.
“How was Chicago?” I offer.
He shrugs. “Not bad.” Joel actually hates going to Chicago because he despises his stepdad. That’s why he lives with his dad here, even though his dad is kind of weird and maybe even a little scary.
“Did you scope out some apartments?” I ask him. We had been planning to move to Chicago since our freshman year in high school, and even though I hadn’t been accepted to the art school there, we were still planning to hit Chi-Town until I could reapply.
Joel looks toward the cemetery. “Some. But slim pickings.”
“Oh,” I say, disappointed. I had kind of wished Joel would come back and tell me he found a place so we could get the hell out of here next week. “Well, we better figure it out soon. That’s why I kept calling you. . . .”
He nods. “Yeah, sorry. My mom had all these things she wanted to do, and you know how it is,” he says.
“Right,” I say.
He looks toward the cemetery and says, “So, anybody die while I was gone?”
I point to the house across the street. “The old guy.”
“Oh, damn,” Joel says this the way people do when death hits close but not close enough to hurt. “That sucks,” he says. He takes off his sunglasses, hangs them on the collar of his torn up vintage Ramones T-shirt I gave him last year for his birthday, and stares at the old man’s house. After a while he says, “Let’s go to Harold’s.”
We head down the street in the opposite direction of the cemetery. As we turn onto the main street, I shake my head at the sign I pass every day on the corner leading to the cemetery. Dead End. That’s the kind of humor death can have.
As we walk, Joel takes out two cigarettes and hands me one. He lights it for me and I inhale as he tells me about his trip to Chicago. I try to pay attention, but the heat and stickiness of another Florida summer is making me irritable and the bright sun gives me a headache. I wipe away the sweat beads forming above my lip and on my forehead.
This heat is pretty bad when you’re sitting still, but absolutely unbearable once you do something as crazy as move. I’m convinced the Southern drawl came about because even talking was too strenuous in pre-air-conditioning days. God help them. As the sun beats down on my head I seriously consider shaving off all my jet black hair or maybe even bleaching it so it doesn’t absorb so much of the punishing heat.
I look over at Joel. “I don’t know how you can walk around with that hair. It’s like permanently wearing a dirty wool hat.” I give Joel lots of grief about his dreads, but actually, I love them. And he knows it.
He grins. “Please. They rock and you know it. And what about you? Your hair in your face like that all the time,” he says and gestures to the messy look I usually go for.
“I know, it’s just so freaking hot,” I whine. My legs feel heavier with each step I take and I feel like I’m slowly melting. In the distance, I see actual heat waves, making the street look warped and distorted.
“We should’ve driven there. Why didn’t we drive?” I say.
“It’s only like four or five streets away,” Joel says, taking another drag from his cigarette. “Don’t you care about our environment? Like your carbon footprint or some shit like that.” He flicks his cigarette butt on the ground.
I fan myself with my hand, which blows weak little puffs of hot air on to my face before realizing that moving my hand like this makes me sweat more.
“One or two streets in this humid inferno is more than enough reason to hop into your ride and join the millions who contribute to global warming every day,” I tell Joel.
He shrugs and keeps walking. The heat makes my thoughts drift back to the old man. I wonder if he’s in the ground yet. What happens to a dead body in this kind of heat? I try to count the cracks on the sidewalk and take the last drag of my cigarette. I try to remember what makes heat waves. But my mind is already thinking about a corpse, under all that dirt, in this raging sun.
“God,” I say.
“What’s wrong?” Joel asks.
“Nothing, it’s just so damn hot.”
We get to Harold’s House of Coffee and Tea, which is a little hole-in-the-wall café hidden in a residential neighborhood in downtown Orlando. Most people don’t even know it’s there unless they live around here because it’s a two-story house that was converted into a coffee shop. The café is on the lower level and Harold and his wife live on the upper level—very old school and very cool. Joel opens the door, and a gust of cold, heavenly air swoops out and greets us. It immediately revives me. I love AC.
“If I ever have a kid, I’m going to name it AC,” I tell Joel.
“Right,” he says.
“What? I’m totally serious. AC, or maybe Freon.”
He shakes his head. “French, no offense, but I can’t exactly see you with a kid someday.”
I think about that for a minute. “Okay, you’re right. Maybe I’ll name my dog Freon.”
“You hate dogs.”
“My fish?”
“Sure, your fish,” he says, “who you’ll kill right after you get him.”
I shrug. “Fair enough.”
Joel and I order some iced coffees and then sit down in our usual spot—a big green couch in the corner.
“So,” he says, looking at me the way people do when there’s obviously something that needs to be discussed but nobody wants to say it. I look at him expectantly.
“So,” I say.
“So . . . I’m really sorry I blew you off the last few days. Lily had some stuff planned when I got back. I’ll make it up to you, though.”
“Whatever,” I say, even though it was more than a few days. See, Joel is in serious like with this girl Lily. He met her about four months ago at a local punk show. Now the world basically revolves around her and Joel has little time for anything, or anyone else.
But like I said, whatever.
“No, really,” Joel says. “I know it was kind of crappy of me.”
It was more than kind of crappy. But had I really expected any different?
“Where is Lily anyway?” I ask, because if he’s here, then she must be busy.
“Band practice,” he says. “Which reminds me, Sugar is playing at Zylos tonight. You in?”
Sugar is the name of Lily’s band. Of course, because that’s exactly the kind of name someone like Lily would name it. I take a big gulp of my iced coffee.
“Hold on, let me get this straight. You totally ignore me for the past two weeks and now you want to hang out with me at your girlfriend’s show?”
“Come on,” he begs, “I said I’ll make it up to you. How about a movie? We can go see the one about the orphaned zombie girl. You’ve been dying to see it, right?”
I’m surprised he remembers.
“My treat . . . ,” he says.
“Fine, I’m in,” I tell him, even though I don’t want to be in.
And the idea of getting ready and going to a show just to pretend I like somebody is too much effort. But I am kind of glad he’s back. And maybe the thrill of Lily has died down a little and things can go back to how they used to be.
“Cool,” he says and smiles. The way he smiles reminds me that Joel and I have been close since middle school. There’s not much we wouldn’t do for each other, and so I almost ask him. I almost ask him to ditch Lily tonight so we can hang out. So we can go to the movies tonight instead of some other night and talk about the cool parts afterward as we eat really bad food at some crappy all-night diner. And maybe that will help me stop thinking about dead people.
But you always think about dead people, Joel says in the imaginary conversation we’re having in my head.
I know, but now I can’t stop.
And a zombie flick is going to help this? he asks.
Maybe not, I agree, but maybe it would at least make me feel like things were normal again.
Okay, he says.
Great, I say.
And I watch us leave.
But that’s not the conversation we have. I tune back to our real convo, which not surprisingly, is much more one-sided than the imagined one in my head.
“I Skyped with Lily so that made it not so bad,” he says.
I sigh. “That’s cool.”
“And I bought her a Wrigley Field keychain because she’s never been to a baseball game in her whole life. Can you believe that? How can someone go their whole life without going to at least one baseball game?” Joel says.
“It happens,” I say.
I’m tired of hearing about Lily and try to think of something new to talk about. “So, I saw them wheel out the old man,” I say.
“Really?” He pauses for a minute, then says, “That sucks.”
I nod. It did in fact suck. But worse, what I just said brings forth the image of another body, on another block, being wheeled out of his house in another bag. And now I can’t say anything more. And the conversation turns back to Lily.
I mutter the obligatory “that’s cool” at appropriate times before tuning him out again. I picture myself at home, on the couch, with a bowl of cereal while I watch crappy daytime TV.
Death, Dickinson, and the Demented Life of Frenchie Garcia Page 1