Laugh Out Loud

by James Patterson

  But then Grabs brought me crashing back to reality.

  “So, uh, now what do we do? Write more books?”

  “No,” said Hailey. “First, we need to make the company’s books look better.”

  “I could draw cover art,” said Rafe.

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Hailey. “We need to put some money in the Laugh Out Loud bank account.”

  “How?” I asked. “I spent my last unexpected windfall on losing Powerball tickets.”

  “Easy,” said Hailey. She gestured toward the stack of books. “We roll up the garage door and have a book sale!”

  Chapter 42

  Garage/Book Sale

  It was a glorious Sunday afternoon, so we went to work!

  Rafe, with a little help from fellow artist Dad, did some quick GARAGE/BOOK SALE signs. We spread out around the neighborhood and posted them on telephone poles and NO PARKING signposts.

  We arranged the copies of my first books on our patio table, which we hauled out of the backyard. Then Mom brewed a big pot of coffee.

  “You can’t run a proper bookstore without coffee,” she said. “Plus, you can charge for it.”

  “Hey, Jimmy?” said Chris.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m on the staff, right?”

  “Definitely, Grabs.”

  “Cool.”

  Then he whipped up a quick sign on the cardboard backing from one of Mom’s yellow legal pads. He scrawled STAFF PICK in big letters on it and stuck the sign in front of the piles of my titles.

  Our driveway bookshop was open for business.

  Pretty soon, we were racking up the sales.

  And get this, some people wanted me to autograph their books!

  “You’re going to be a famous author someday,” one lady told me. “This will be worth a million dollars!”

  “If it is,” I told her, “could you loan me half a million? I want to open a real book company with a factory that has a water slide and a Ferris wheel.”

  She just sort of grinned and patted me on the head. “Of course you do.”

  We didn’t have a “suggested cover price” like most “real” books do. We just told our customers to suggest a price. Most gave us like twenty or twenty-five dollars. A couple of kids gave us fifty cents. Hey, it was everything they had and they were the ones we were actually writing the books for.

  “You know if you keep doing that you’ll go broke, right?” asked Maxine.

  “Yeah. But I like giving stuff away almost as much as I like making books.”

  “You’re an odd duck, Jimmy. An extremely odd duck.”

  “I know. But the odd ducks are the most interesting ones, don’t you think?”

  Around noon, when the books were almost all gone, Mom added a line of baked goods to her coffee shop: chewy chocolate chip cookies. From a tube.

  “I feel like Starbucks,” she said. “Does anybody want a Grande No Foam Mocha Frappa Whip A Chino Amotiado Tazo Drip?”

  “No, ma’am,” said everybody.

  “Good. Because I have no idea how to make one.”

  At two o’clock, all our books were gone. Plus, Mom had sold a ton of coffee and chocolate chip cookies.

  “How much did we make?” asked Hailey.

  “Four hundred and fifty-three dollars and twenty-five cents,” reported Dad, who’d been manning the money box for us.

  “That’s enough to make more copies of the Middle School book!” said Rafe. “We can run them off at the copy shop and have another garage/book sale next weekend!”

  It was an awesome idea.

  Until Monday afternoon, when, all of a sudden, it wasn’t.

  Chapter 43

  Meeting Uncle Sam

  Two guys in dark suits came knocking on our front door Monday around six o’clock in the evening.

  Remarkably, both Mom and Dad were home.

  In fact, they’d both been home all day. Dad had some ninja warriors he wanted to finish inking in. Mom said she was “this close” to nailing her “Stairway to Heaven” solo—whatever that meant.

  In other words, major plot twist, neither one of them went to work for the first time since I’ve known them, which, of course, is all of my life!

  “You’re our inspiration, Jimmy,” said Dad. “We’ve been ignoring our dreams for so long we almost forgot we had them.”

  “Thank you for this gift, Jimmy,” said Mom. “Without your example, I never would have unleashed my inner Jimi Hendrix.”

  I had absolutely no idea what that meant, either, but I was happy to see them both so happy.

  On the other hand, I wasn’t so happy to see both the guys in the suits smiling, especially when one of them said, “I’m here on behalf of Uncle Sam.”

  (I never realized I had an uncle named Sam.)

  “Now then,” said the Uncle Sam man with a sinister smile, “exactly how much money did you make at your book sale yesterday?”

  I answered before Mom could raise her hand to shush me: “Four hundred and fifty-three dollars and twenty-five cents.”

  “My client refuses to answer any further questions,” said Mom, holding up her hand to silence me.

  “I’m your client?” I say. “Cool!”

  “Ma’am,” said the man, “by refusing to answer, your son here could be in serious violation of the Internal Revenue Service rules and regulations.”

  “The IRS?” snapped Dad. “You guys are with the IRS?”

  “He is,” said the other guy. “I’m with the city of San Jose. To operate a business in our jurisdiction, your son will need a permit.”

  “And you will need to pay taxes on any income your ongoing book sales continue to generate,” said the IRS guy.

  “And the local sales tax,” said the city guy. “Don’t forget the local sales tax.”

  “What you did in your driveway this weekend,” explained the IRS man, “is illegal unless you fill out the proper paperwork.”

  “Fine,” said Mom, shifting into her barracuda lawyer mode. “We will endeavor to adhere to all local, state, and federal ordinances associated with Laugh Out Loud Books, LLC.”

  “I’m an LLC?” I asked.

  “You will be,” said Mom.

  “Awesome. What does it mean?”

  “That to keep your dream alive, you’re going to need to file all sorts of paperwork,” said Dad. “Good thing your mother and I have so much practice filling out forms.”

  “Totally,” said Mom, pumping her fist in the air like the heavy metal rocker she dreamed of becoming.

  “And,” said the city guy, pulling out a photo of Mom and Chris G. pouring coffee into cups, “if you continue to sell hot beverages and cookies at your book sales, you need to contact the California state health inspectors. Have them come by. Check your kitchen and serving areas for violations, such as rodent droppings.”

  Great.

  I just hoped the mouse from Hailey’s garage didn’t decide to move down the street to ours!

  Chapter 44

  Don’t Quit Your Day Job?

  Mom and Dad stayed home from work for another day.

  “We read your books,” Mom said when I came home from school.

  “They’re quite good,” added Dad.

  “Um, how could you read them?” I asked. “We sold out all the copies and now we have to pay all those taxes and fees. So we don’t have enough money to print more copies.”

  “Yes, we do!” said Mom. “Your father and I cashed in our savings account.”

  “What?”

  “We believe in your dream, Jimmy,” said Dad. “We’re just sorry we didn’t believe in it sooner.”

  “So we printed out fresh copies of all three books from your computer,” said Mom.

  “They’re real page-turners, son,” said Dad. “Even though you wrote them for kids, we couldn’t put ’em down!”

  “And,” said Mom, “we’re going to fight all this tax nonsense.”

  “What’s next?” said Dad. “Is th
e government going to start taxing lemonade stands?”

  “How dare they try to crush your entrepreneurial spirit!” said Mom.

  “We’ll clean out all our bank accounts to fight them if we have to!” shouted Dad.

  “The IRS shall feel our wrath!” added Mom.

  With Mom and Dad’s money from the bank, we were able to fill the garage with fresh copies of my first three books.

  My ’rents also totally stopped going to their offices.

  “We have all sorts of vacation days saved up,” said Mom.

  “Because both of us worked so hard, neither one of us even thought about taking a vacation,” added Dad.

  It’s true. My trip to Legoland? I went with Chris Grabbetts and his family.

  Mom and Dad stayed home for the rest of the week and used their paperwork skills to file everything we needed to make Laugh Out Loud an official business. We framed our brand-new license and hung it up in the garage. The state health inspector gave Mom’s coffeemaker an A. I went around the neighborhood and hung up more signs.

  Saturday came. The gang assembled in the garage.

  “Look at all those books!” exclaimed Maxine, marveling at the mountain of newly printed manuscripts stacked up in tidy columns towering ten feet high.

  “My mom and dad basically cashed in their life savings to make more copies,” I explained.

  “You think they might’ve gone a little overboard?” asked Pierce. “There has to be a thousand books in here.”

  “Nine hundred and ninety-nine,” said Dad. “Three hundred and thirty-three copies each of Jimmy’s first three titles.”

  “But,” said Chris, “we’ve been selling two or three at a time. Maybe a couple dozen. Why do we need like a thousand books?”

  “We call it inventory,” said Dad proudly.

  “Go big or stay home,” said Mom. “Right, Jimmy?”

  Oops. She must’ve heard me say that after I heard Hailey say it.

  “Let’s open the doors,” said Dad. “It’s time to sell some books.”

  He busily thumbed a remote. The metal door rumbled up.

  Sheets of rain started blowing sideways into the garage.

  I think San Jose, California, was having its first-ever typhoon!

  Chapter 45

  Rain, Rain, Go Away

  It rained harder.

  The howling wind grew fiercer. We were all getting wetter.

  So were my books!

  It was like Mother Nature had a fire hose trained on our wide-open garage door and wasn’t afraid to spray us with it.

  “Close the door!” I shouted.

  “No way,” said Dad, the guy holding the remote. “If we close our doors, our customers won’t be able to find us.”

  “And,” said Mom, screaming to be heard over the sideways torrent of rainwater pelting her in the face, “if our customers can’t find us, they can’t buy books! It’s Basic Business 101, Jimmy.”

  “Nobody’s going to go book-shopping in a monsoon!” I shouted over the gale-force winds. “Close the door! The books are getting drenched!”

  One important lesson I learned that Saturday? Books don’t sell very well in the rain. Except, of course, in Seattle, which is a great book town because of all the rain. Reading a good book gives you something to do on dark and dreary days. But bookstores in Seattle don’t make customers shop in an open-air bazaar in the middle of a sideways thunderstorm.

  When Dad finally gave in and closed the garage doors, our towering heaps of books looked more like melting snowmen. Wilted pages were glued together. The manuscripts were soggier than soaked sponges. The pages were wrinkled beyond recognition.

  We shouldn’t’ve gone big. We should’ve stayed home.

  When the sun finally came out the next day, we loaded the soaked heaps of worthless paper into recycling bins and pushed them out to the curb.

  “At least we won’t have to pay any taxes this week,” said Dad.

  “And,” said Mom, “the garage will be nice and empty for band practice on Wednesday.”

  That’s when things got even worse.

  Sunday night Mom and Dad both received telephone calls.

  From their bosses.

  “We heard the IRS paid you a visit,” Dad’s boss told him. “We’re certified public accountants. We do people’s taxes. We can’t have employees with children who try to cheat the tax code. If word of your son’s tax-avoidance schemes were to leak, we’d lose all our clients. We cannot take that risk. You’re fired!”

  Mom’s call was basically the same. “You’re a tax attorney!” her boss hollered over the phone. “Your son can’t antagonize the IRS! If he does, the IRS will come after all our clients!”

  She was fired, too.

  “On the bright side,” said Dad, sounding sort of shocked, “now we both have all the time in the world to pursue our dreams.”

  “Rock on,” said Mom, limply pumping her fist halfway up into the air.

  I could tell they were both feeling lost. Everything that was secure in their lives had just been ripped away.

  Things were so sad around our house that night, I considered changing the name of my book company from Laugh Out Loud to Weeping in Agony.

  But then I had a better idea.

  I realized it was time for me to call it quits.

  Chapter 46

  Stick a Fork in Me, I’m Done

  Remember how this whole book company idea was supposed to be fun?

  Well, now, instead of water slides coursing through a fun factory, we had water sliding into the garage, destroying months of work. Instead of a Ferris wheel, we had the wheels on trash barrels filled with water-damaged manuscripts.

  And then there were the taxes and the licenses and the fees and my parents losing their jobs.

  I wondered why I’d ever dreamed this impossible dream (maybe because I named my dog Quixote? After all, that was a guy who did not know when to quit).

  “Worst. Idea. Ever,” I said to myself when I was alone in my room. (Mom and Dad had, more or less, commandeered the family room so they could stare blankly at the TV and mutter, “What have we done?” over and over and over again.)

  I picked up my idea folder. It was six inches thick.

  Which made it kind of hard to stuff into the trash can.

  But stuff it I did.

  Since the idea folder basically took up my entire wastebasket, I marched out to the curb to dump it into the recycling bin.

  “So long, Laugh Out Loud Books,” I said, putting an end to my crazy idea. “Now I understand why all those grown-ups laughed at me and my nutso idea. They were right. It was laughable. I’m laughable.”

  I’d let down all my friends. I’d cost my parents their jobs. I’d missed soccer practice for months. (Yeah. I used to play—before I got too busy thinking about books to even think about doing anything else.)

  And why?

  Because my next-door neighbor Maddie had said, “Give me another book, Jimmy. Please?”

  I still might give her another book. But if I did, it would come from the library, not some pie-in-the-sky book factory.

  On Monday, I headed straight to the library during my flex period.

  Writing is never a sure thing. But reading always is.

  When Ms. Sprenkle saw how down I was, she suggested I read a book called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It’s all about a thirteen-year-old boy named Brian from New York City who crash-lands in a lake when the pilot of the small plane he’s flying in (it’s a tiny prop plane; the kind without a copilot) has a heart attack and dies. Brian, the city kid, is on his own in the wilderness, with nothing but his hatchet. Think Survivor but for real. While hunting on the edge of the lake, Brian senses something is watching him. It’s a wolf, “not as big as a bear but somehow seeming that large.”

  Now, I have to admit something.

  While reading Hatchet, I fell asleep. Not because Mr. Paulsen’s book was boring. No way. It’s still one of the most exciting adventure
tales ever written. I think I was drowsy because I didn’t sleep at all the night before. I’d been too busy thinking about how stupid I’d been.

  Anyway, snoozing there in the library, I had a dream that I was raised in the wilderness by wolves. And the wolves were all big readers. In my dream, the wolves lectured me about the importance of books. They told me that one day I’d start my own book company.

  I told the wolves I had already tried (repeatedly) to make a book company and failed.

  That’s when a wolf that looked a lot like Yoda showed up. He said, “There is no try, only do.”

  I woke up mumbling, “A wolf never quits and a quitter never wolfs.”

  I didn’t know what it meant.

  Until I saw Maddie.

  Chapter 47

  Keep Hope Alive

  Believe it or not, the girl who could never leave her own house walked into the middle school library!

  Her little brother, Sammy, was with her.

  “Hiya, Jimmy!” she said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Our first field trip,” said Sammy.

  “I wanted to see the place with all the books,” said Maddie. “The ones you’ve been bringing me all these years.”

  “She’s been having some really good days lately,” explained Sammy. “Her doctor gave her permission to go outside!”

  “For a couple of hours, anyway,” said Maddie.

  “That’s great!” I said. “What happened to change your doc’s mind?”

  Maddie grinned. “I think I wore him down. I wouldn’t quit bugging him about it. I wouldn’t give up hope. And it was all because of that book you brought me.”

  “Um, which one?”

  She pointed at the table where Hatchet lay open.

  “The exact same one you’re reading. You brought it home to me a couple of months ago.”

  “I did?”