by Andrew Smith
With gratitude and respect, for all librarians everywhere
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I had to say a lot of good-byes to people and places I love while I was writing this book.
Nobody likes good-byes.
But I’m never reticent when it comes to telling my friends that I love them, and to all those who have supported me with their patience and encouragement, well, you kept me going and I am endlessly grateful. You know who you are.
I nearly had to say good-bye to EVERYTHING, and I wasn’t prepared to do that (who ever really is?), so vast heaping piles of thanks and love to my wife, Jocelyn; my son, Trevin; and my daughter, Chiara, who are always there for me. I can’t even begin to express how much you mean to me, and how proud I am to have you in my life.
If I had a chance to start all over again, I would choose not to, because life is hard and I got through all that stuff, so who would ever want to do it again? That would be crazy! But, if I did, like Sam Abernathy, I would probably want to be a chef, or definitely a librarian, to whom I have dedicated this book. Everything we know as humans is story; librarians are the guardians of that. What could be more honorable and important than that?
Probably nothing.
But there is something magnificent in having the skill to perfectly poach an egg.
Sometimes even the most capable chefs could use a little nudge here and there. So I feel a tremendous sense of obligation to leave this with a note of gratitude in honoring the person who worked hardest on this book: my editor, Amanda Ramirez. Amanda took on the monumental tasks of: (1) dealing with me, and (2) filling in for the irreplaceable David Gale after his health required him to step away from publishing. I will never forget David Gale and everything he’s done for me; his cuspidate sense of humor, his brilliance, and his kindness. No easy task to fill in for a giant like that, but then here was Amanda. Thank you, Amanda. I don’t know whom you worked for before David took you on as his assistant, but if anyone can hit the same notes he did, you’re the one. This was not an easy book for me to complete in David’s absence, and I could not have done it without your patience, skill, and support.
PART ONE THE PURDY HOUSE
ON SAYING GOOD-BYE
No one likes good-byes.
Good-byes are like bad haircuts: it takes time to get over the shock and adjust to the “new you,” and it’s never a pleasant process.
The short summer before I went away to Pine Mountain Academy1 seemed to be a long, drawn-out, and awkward good-bye. I had already said good-bye to my friend James Jenkins, who had moved away to Austin during the school year, and now there were all these other things to say good-bye to, lining up like a gauntlet of extended family on a chilly Thanksgiving evening when you’re the first one out the door: my friends Karim and Bahar, Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course,2 Mom and Dad, Dylan and Evie, that awful Colonel Jenkins’s Diner, Blue Creek,3 and everything about Texas that had grown to be a part of me—right down to the color of the dirt and the smell of the air in April. I had to say good-bye to all of it.
And although going to school at Pine Mountain Academy was the one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world, I also didn’t want to leave everything else behind.
It was a real predicament, and I kept telling myself how grown-up all this made me feel, but if this was what being a grown-up was like, you could keep it. Because I didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t want to say good-bye, but I had already gone too far to change my mind.
Besides, I didn’t want people to think I was too anything—too small, too young, too sensitive—to do something as daring as leave for boarding school in Oregon (which I already knew was going to be colder, rainier, greener, and lonelier than Texas), even if I would have agreed with anyone who told me those things.
So there I was: stuck.
Stuck and wondering how to manage all those long good-byes.
1. Pine Mountain Academy is a private boarding school in Oregon. I won a scholarship to go there, which was something I wanted more than anything else in the world—up until a few weeks before I had to leave, that is.
2. My family’s business.
3. The town where I grew up, which is in Texas, which is also far away from Oregon.
ICED TEA NUMBER SEVEN; OR, HERE COME THE SPIDERS AGAIN
Anyone who’s ever left home to live all alone for the first time in their life knows exactly what it feels like to have thousands of stampeding spiders in their stomach.
And when you’re twelve years old, and small for your age on top of that, the spiders can feel like they’re the size of rabbits.
What if I get scared in the middle of the night and there’s no one to talk to?
What if I have an attack of claustrophobia?4
I didn’t tell anyone in my family about how nervous I was. I didn’t want them to try to talk me out of going away to boarding school. Because talking me out of it would have been easier than getting a dirty look from Kenny Jenkins at Colonel Jenkins’s Diner for ordering a large iced tea without sugar in it. And that was very, very easy to do.
There were exactly seventeen days of summer left before my family (which consisted of Mom; Dad; my brother, Dylan; and my sister, Evie) was going to pack me up and make the drive all the way from Blue Creek, Texas, to Pine Mountain, Oregon, where I was going to enroll in high school (at twelve years old, no less) and move into a dormitory full of grown-up boys, and share a room with some stranger who would probably end up tormenting me the way a cat toys with a mouse before eventually murdering it.
Here came the rabbit-size spiders again.
“I’m kind of anxious about starting ninth grade too, Sam,” Bahar said.
“But you’re fourteen years old. You’ve already done all the in-between grades,” I told her.
In school, I skipped ahead two years—the in-between grades from sixth to eighth. To some people, it was like my life was moving faster. To me, it was like two years of unread pages had been torn from my biography.
Bahar was the cousin of my best friend, Karim. She was one of those rare older kids who was nice to me even when she wasn’t forced to be polite, and she would always stand up to the pressure that other fourteen-year-olds might put on her for being friends with a smallish boy who was only twelve.
I guess that made us friends too, along with all the other things we had in common.
We had the same taste in tea, for one thing. Bahar liked iced tea with no sugar in it, and I did too, which was why Kenny Jenkins had been giving us dirty looks, since he always had to make the drinks up special just for us when we came in.5 One time Kenny Jenkins said to us (in as disgusted a tone as I’d ever heard him use), “You’d think you kids were from California or something, the way you drink that tea the same way West Coast snobs would. Well, I’m telling you right now: I don’t serve kale here.”
Clearly Kenny Jenkins had no idea just how delicious sautéed kale with garlic, vegetable stock, and red wine vinegar really was.
Bahar and I always met at Colonel Jenkins’s for iced tea and dirty looks on Saturday afternoons. Well, not always. This was the seventh time we had; the routine just kind of started one time during the last week of eighth grade when I was walking home from Lily Putt’s. And like being nervous about going away to Pine Mountain Academy, I also didn’t tell my mom and dad (or Karim) about meeting up with Bahar on Saturdays. Because it didn’t really matter, did it?
It wasn’t like I had a crush on Bahar.
I’d never had a crush on anyone in my life.
Bahar was always so sensible and smart, in ways my parents weren’t. And I usually didn’t want to hear sensible or smart things from Mom or Dad, since they always sounded too much like direc
tions I had to follow before taking a test or something. But I could always listen to sensible and smart things from Bahar, and I would listen to them from Karim, too, if he ever thought of anything that was sensible and smart.
I said, “Anyway, why would you feel anxious about starting school? It’s just Blue Creek High, and you’ll be around the same kids we’ve known for pretty much our entire lives.”
It was a dead time of day, two thirty in the afternoon, and we were the only ones in Colonel Jenkins’s. And without even glancing in his direction, I could tell Kenny Jenkins was impatiently glaring at us, just waiting for us to leave so he could wipe down our booth and start concocting the just-add-water or frozen-food horribleness he served up as his “Early Bird Special.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Bahar said. “It’s not going to be the same, you know, with all the pressure to be cool they put on you in high school.”
“I may as well give up now, in that case. I’d never be able to do that anyway,” I said.
Bahar laughed.
“And we always had so much fun doing things around here, Sam. It’s going to be boring without you.”
“It’s Blue Creek,” I said. “It’s boring with me.”
I looked at Bahar, and she was looking at me, so we both looked away really quick and shifted in the tufted vinyl booth, which sounded exactly like a (excuse me)6 fart, and then Kenny Jenkins, who had to be accustomed to the noises that came from his booths by now, said, “Hey you kids! No farting in my diner!”7
And then I felt so embarrassed for so many reasons, half of which I couldn’t even begin to put into words.
But it always made me feel good, how Bahar was so nice to me at times, even though she didn’t have to be.
And there were seventeen days to go until I’d be leaving Blue Creek.
That was two more not-sweet iced tea Saturdays.
The spiders were having a field day.
The spiders were never going to say good-bye to me.
4. I have a very bad case of claustrophobia, on account of my having been trapped in an abandoned well when I was four years old.
5. Nobody else in Blue Creek ever did something as non-Texan as ordering not-sweet tea at Colonel Jenkins’s.
6. I don’t swear unless it can’t be avoided, so excuse me for saying “fart.”
7. Even though he had to have said this at least a million times before, Kenny Jenkins always found it hilarious.
ON CRUSHES, LONELINESS, AND KALE
Someone’s got a crush on Bahar. Someone named Sam Abernathy.
James Jenkins’s text message chimed and lit up my phone. I thought the sound might wake up Mom and Dad and get me in trouble. But high school kids do that kind of stuff, right? Ugh. My stomach knotted. It was after eleven o’clock, and I was supposed to be asleep, even though lately I hadn’t been getting the most restful nights’ sleep.
I rubbed my eyes and picked up my phone from the nightstand beside my bed.
I clicked it to silent.
SAM: Not me. I don’t even know what that is. I don’t even know what you’re talking about, James.
JAMES: I’m talking about a crush, Sam. That’s when you just go around in a state where you can’t do anything but wait for the next time you get to see the person you have a crush on. Duh.
I might explain that James Jenkins probably would have been my best friend if he’d still lived in Blue Creek.
Best friend things are always complex, like crushes, I suppose, even though I definitely did not have a crush on Bahar, despite what James was telling me. Or texting me.
James Jenkins had moved away from Blue Creek the previous fall to live with his mother in Austin, leaving his dad behind to run that swill mill of a diner. We had both been in eighth grade together even though at the time I was only eleven and James was fourteen.8 So we were like a pair of balancing opposites—James was bigger than he was supposed to be as an eighth grader, and I was much smaller than I was supposed to be. But James Jenkins hated football, and he quit to do what he loved most of all, which was dance, and also not living in Blue Creek with his father. And now he was at some big-time summer dance academy in Massachusetts, training with some of the best young dancers in America and getting scouted by universities and theater programs and stuff, because that’s how good James Jenkins was.
His mom and my parents had arranged for James to come visit me for a few days next week, just so we could hang out with each other again before I left for Oregon (spiders started rampaging again), and before James had to go back to high school in Austin, where he’d be in tenth grade and not playing football, which was where James Jenkins belonged.
* * *
Anyway. I did not have a crush on Bahar.
SAM: I do not have a crush on Bahar, James.
JAMES: If you say so. I guess maybe there’s something wrong with you then.
SAM: Have YOU ever had a crush on anyone?
JAMES: Miss Van Gelder.
SAM: James Jenkins! Our Spanish teacher???
JAMES: LOL. Yes.
SAM: ¡Increíble!
JAMES: Well she was always so nice and pretty. And she smells like a strawberry fruit roll-up. I wonder if she likes unsweetened iced tea at Colonel Jenkins’s LOL. Anyway, I got over it.
SAM: How’s dance school going?
JAMES: Don’t ask. At least it’s finished next week and I can go back home to Texas.
SAM: Why? What’s wrong?
JAMES: Everything. I don’t think I’m good enough. The other boys here are really good. I mean, they’re really good. My feet are so torn up, they made me go see a doctor this afternoon. My entire body hurts. The doctor told me I should quit dancing. I guess that’s why I texted you so late. So I could talk to someone. Sorry.
SAM: Are you thinking about quitting?
JAMES: I don’t know.
SAM: I don’t think you should quit, James.
JAMES: I just wonder what it would feel like one morning if I could wake up and not hurt so much, and not feel like I’m not good enough to be here, and not have people looking at the food on my plate like I’m a loser for what I eat.
SAM: What DO you eat?
JAMES: I’m not telling you. You’d judge.
SAM:
SAM: You just have one more week. Don’t quit. You can make it. Are you learning new stuff about ballet?
JAMES: Learning that I’m not as good as people think I am. Learning that there’s this kid from Little Rock named Dante and everyone loves him and he’s sixteen and about a hundred times better than me.
SAM: What does Dante eat?
JAMES: Kale, water, and bird food.
SAM:
JAMES:…
SAM: Mmm. Kale.
And at some point between our texts about Dante from Little Rock, how sore James was, and his insistence that I had a crush on Bahar, I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, it was three thirty and my phone was under my face, with the last words James had texted on the screen: Well I guess you must be asleep. Good night. I will try to hang in there and keep taping up my feet and stop worrying so much about everything. Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening, Sam.
8. His father, Kenny Jenkins, had purposely held him back a year so James could be a bigger and better football player than any other boy in Blue Creek.
THE REGULAR PART OF MY BRAIN, AND THE ONLY HAUNTED HOUSE IN BLUE CREEK
“Someone’s moving into the old Purdy place.”
Karim was out of breath from running to my house, and his eyes were as round as Last Chance peaches. He woke me up by knocking on my window, which was open, like it always is no matter what. In most cases, Karim waking me up would have made me mad (this being summer vacation and all), but real people actually moving into the Purdy House, which was Blue Creek’s only legitimately haunted house, was arguably worth the abrupt termination of about two hours’ sleep and a really involved dream about rosewater cardamom pancakes.
What could the
se people possibly be thinking?
Also, it’s normal for a twelve-year-old boy to have dreams about cooking, right?
I’d found myself questioning nearly everything that had been happening to me—including dreams, which aren’t exactly voluntary—ever since Karim and Bahar had assumed the task of teaching me how to not be such a target for the older kids I’d be living with at boarding school starting in just three Saturdays.9
For any kid in Blue Creek, stories about the Purdy House were even more terrifying than any story about going away to some rich-kids school in Oregon.
“Go around to the front and let yourself in. I don’t think my mom and dad are up yet,” I said.
But after the twenty seconds it took Karim to let himself in the front door and make it to my bedroom had passed, Karim’s thoughts had diverted from what was undoubtedly the most haunted house in the state of Texas to the subject of what Sam Abernathy was wearing.10
“Sam. What are you wearing?” Karim asked.
“What do you mean, what am I wearing? Pajamas. I was in bed. Sleeping. Which is a normal thing for twelve-year-old boys to do at six fifteen in the morning when it’s also summer vacation.”
(I did not ask him whether it’s normal to dream about making rosewater cardamom pancakes. Also, I found myself wondering if we had rosewater and cardamom in the pantry, it being breakfast time and all, and me being suddenly hungry because nothing tastes quite like cardamom, you know?)
Karim shook his head dismissively. “Look, they’re Princess Snugglewarm pajamas. Kids in high school would never wear Princess Snugglewarm pajamas, Sam. I don’t think kids in high school even wear pajamas to begin with. Do you want to get beat up or something? Nobody wants to get beat up in Princess Snugglewarm pajamas.”
It was too early for Karim to be assaulting me with all these implications. First—naturally—of course I did not want to get beaten up. And second, I wasn’t going to ask him the obvious question about how if high school kids don’t wear pajamas, then what do they wear when they sleep? Besides, Princess Snugglewarm was edgy enough for high school, I thought. She was this super-heroic but super-polite cartoon unicorn who went around goring her enemies through the heart with her unicorn horn (which she’d named Betsy), sometimes for ridiculous reasons like the enemy had cut in line or copied homework, or littered, and stuff like that.