The Size of the Truth

by Andrew Smith

  Who does that?

  Nobody does that, except murderers.

  And James Jenkins walks slowly. Not the kind of slow that says, I’m holding up traffic. It’s the kind of slow that says, I am not going to be out of breath when I catch up to you and murder you.

  Every boy at Dick Dowling Middle School in Blue Creek, Texas, is afraid of James Jenkins—even his friends.

  Hayley Garcia, who is the president of the Dick Dowling Middle School Science Club (which I did not choose to join, but was forced into), told me that James Jenkins only wants someone to show him kindness and love. Kindness and love never saved the life of a fly trapped in a spider’s web, though.

  There are things I want to point out regarding James Jenkins.

  First, I have scary dreams about him.

  In one of my dreams, I am upstairs at my great-grandmother’s old house in Plano, and I’m alone. It’s the middle of the night, and the electricity goes out.

  When the electricity goes out and you’re alone inside a scary dream involving James Jenkins, you can only hope you will wake up before IT HAPPENS.

  Even though it’s dark, I can see, because that’s how things happen in dreams, especially scary ones. I can see, and I know James Jenkins is there in the house with me. He is staring at me from the corner of the room I’m in, just like a murderer. James Jenkins is staring at me, and he is chewing Goldfish crackers—really slow, chewing and chewing. In the dream, James Jenkins is standing beside the dresser that has my great-grandmother’s Grammy Award for Best Gospel Song. It’s terrifying. Not the Grammy, or the Goldfish crackers—James Jenkins, that’s what’s terrifying. And the song, too—that’s a little terrifying. I need to run away from James Jenkins, but everything seems like it’s stuck in ultraslow motion. But I manage to get out of the room and run (in ultraslow motion) for the stairs.

  And James Jenkins, who walks very slowly anyway, follows after me—ultraslow and not moving his head, chewing and chewing his Goldfish crackers—just like a murderer.

  Then the dream turns into a television commercial for one of those electric-chair things that help people go up and down stairs. It’s called a Climb So Happy®, which, for whatever reasons, has been installed on my great-grandmother’s staircase. So I use it to try to get away from James Jenkins, who walks so slowly, he never gets closer than two stair steps away from me.

  It is the slowest, most terrifying chase scene ever, and it’s dumb, too, because the nightmare power failure apparently only affected the lights.

  Then a voice narrates over the horror of the extremely slow, questionably electrified chase, announcing that if you order a Climb So Happy® by calling their toll-free number in the next fifteen minutes, they will throw in a seat belt and cushion for free.

  So I look down and see that I am not wearing a seat belt because SOMEONE obviously did not order this Climb So Happy® in fifteen minutes so they could get the free seat belt, which makes me even more scared, and also uncomfortable, since they didn’t get the free cushion, either.

  What if I fell off? My mom and dad would get so mad at me.

  Great-grandma, too, I mean if she were alive.

  That was when I woke up: just before James Jenkins could catch up to me and the slowest electric stair-climbing chair without a seat belt or cushion ever invented in history.

  The second thing about James Jenkins is this: He has dark peach fuzz growing out of his face, and on his body, too, and he was held back last year, so he’s fourteen years old, in eighth grade for the second time.

  James Jenkins is in eighth grade and he is practically a man.

  And I am in eighth grade, and I’m an eleven-year-old tadpole who likes to cook and is deeply terrified of two things: being trapped inside small spaces, and a fourteen-year-old man-boy named James Jenkins.

  And James Jenkins is not only in Mr. Mannweiler’s homeroom with me, he also has a locker right next to mine in TWO PLACES: in the main hallway outside the library, and in the boys’ locker room, for PE.

  (Excuse me.)

  AVOIDING THE DANCE, AT ALL COSTS

  We start with heartbreak and wild mushrooms.

  “I’m breaking up with Faye McMahon,” Karim said.

  Faye McMahon was Karim’s second breakup since the start of summer.

  Karim always had girlfriends—going all the way back to third grade, which was the first year he and I were actually in the same class together, due to all I’d gone through following the well disaster and not being able to talk, and the whole Pray for Sam campaign.

  It was the end of my second day in eighth grade. It was Friday afternoon, and I was at Karim’s house, making a snack in his kitchen. The “snack” I was preparing was macaroni and artisanal cheese with a wild-mushroom pesto. I was actually trying to load up on as much food as I could eat before my survival campout trip in the morning with Dad.

  There was almost nothing I wouldn’t rather do than go survival camping, including falling down an abandoned well, or getting murdered by James Jenkins.

  “Why are you breaking up with Faye?” I asked.

  Karim shook his head. “They never told me they were going to have a dance next week. What if Faye was expecting me to go with her? I never want to go to a dance as long as I live.”

  “They never tell us anything about anything,” I said.

  But they were having the Back-to-School Dance at Dick Dowling Middle School next week. There were signs for it hanging up all over the school. Mom and Dad had already been asking me about it, already tried to pressure me into going.

  They bought me new clothes. New, eighth-grade, going-to-a-school-dance clothes.

  “I’ll adjust. I’ll move on,” Karim said. “But I won’t dance.”

  “You’re lucky,” I said. “Nobody forces you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  “They make me clean my room,” Karim argued.

  “Well. Besides that.”

  “And flush the toilet.” And Karim added, “When I think about it, the list goes on and on.”

  I nodded silently. Mom and Dad made me flush the toilet too.

  I guess that makes me a conformist.

  I wondered if there was anything I could do that might get me out of going to the Back-to-School Dance, or maybe out of survival camping with Dad.

  Karim and I saw each other every day after school, and on the weekends, too. But now that he was in sixth grade and I was suddenly in eighth, there was already a lot of middle school social pressure on me to pretend he didn’t exist, to not be seen with him, especially when we were at school. And Karim was two months older than me—and taller, too—but things like that don’t make any difference in middle school.

  Middle school society is strictly ordered by a caste system, and sixth graders are at the bottom.

  They even make sixth graders eat lunch before the older kids at Dick Dowling Middle School do. I imagine that sending sixth graders out into the fields with a bunch of eighth graders would be like marching a few hundred baby ducklings through an alligator ranch at dinnertime.

  In fact, my parents made me do pretty much everything I ever did without asking for my input—like moving ahead to eighth grade at Dick Dowling, or working weekends at my family’s miniature golf course, joining the Science Club, or going on survival campouts with Dad, for example.

  But I got to cook at Karim’s house at least twice a week, always before his parents came home from work. Unlike me, Karim didn’t have any brothers or sisters. We’d always leave meals for his mom and dad, too, without telling them I was the one who’d prepared them.

  Karim’s parents were convinced he was a brilliant chef.

  I don’t think Karim even knew how to make ice.

  My parents always discouraged me from wanting to cook. It’s not that they were cruel or bad, necessarily. They just kept telling me they wanted bigger things for my future—bigger things for the smallest eighth grader Mr. Mannweiler had ever seen.

  Karim spooned a clump
of macaroni and cheese with wild-mushroom pesto into his mouth.

  “You know what I hate?” Karim said.

  “People who talk with food in their mouth?” I guessed.

  That made Karim laugh. He almost spit out his mouthful of food.

  I tried again: “Faye McMahon?”

  Karim shook his head. “No. I don’t hate Faye. I am just not going to be forced to go to a dance with her. What I hate is mushrooms, anytime anyone other than you cooks them.”

  Karim is my best friend, but I know he’d never say things to me just to be nice. He understands me. He and his parents even set up a bathroom in an unused guestroom with an open door and an open window for me if I ever had to use the (excuse me) toilet when I visited. They know how bad my claustrophobia can be at times.

  Karim said, “I’d never be able to cook like this. You better not ever move away. If my mom and dad find out I don’t know anything about cooking, they’ll probably want to adopt a kid who does.”

  I shrugged. “Well, it’s pretty easy. Sometime when your parents are asleep, you should sneak down to the living room and watch the Cooking Channel.”

  That’s what I did at my house, at least.

  Karim took another bite and shook his head. “There’s something terribly wrong with sneaking to watch a food show.”

  My parents were against the whole idea of me becoming a cook.

  OUR P.O.A. IS S.F.W.F. AND H.

  It starts at 2:41 a.m.

  (Excuse me.)

  “Sam? Survivor Sam, let’s wake up! It’s time for us to go,” Dad said.

  Dad sat on the edge of my bed and shook my shoulder. He was a little too happy about waking up on a Saturday morning when it was still basically nighttime: 2:41 a.m. is a time on the clock that is too early to call morning, and you’d probably have to be really grown-up to think of it as late in the evening.

  And I’d been having a really great dream about pasta with sea-urchin roe too.

  Mom was in the kitchen, fixing a post-abandonment picnic breakfast for Dylan and Evie.

  The smell of Mom’s cooking made me kind of mad. Dad’s rules for our survival campouts prohibited either of us from eating regular food at home on the morning of departure, because we were tough—a team—and we would be able to find plenty of sustenance in nature.

  Nature gives you more than you will ever need, Dad explained.

  That’s because Nature provides you with a lot of stuff you want to run away and hide from, if you ask me. And that’s more than anyone needs.

  After all the trips we’d taken since last spring (it seemed like hundreds), our routine had become predictably uniform: They’d load my brother and sister into their safety car seats (Dylan was three, and Evie was a very small seven-year-old), and then Mom would drive Dad and me out to some random and remote place (this time it was Tingle-Heacock State Wilderness Area) and leave us for thirty-six hours with little more than the clothes on our backs.

  We would be abandoned.

  Then Mom would come back for us on Sunday evening.

  If we were still alive, that is.

  And before Mom, Dylan, and Evie drove off with their picnic and left us in the chilly and dark woods of Tingle-Heacock State Wilderness Area, Dad made his predictable joke: “Next time, we’re doing this without anything, Sam! Not even clothes! We could do it! Just like that television program! Maybe for three whole days!”

  Like I said, I’d never want to be on TV, unless it was maybe a cooking show, but even then I would insist on having clothes.

  So I pointed out, “This is Texas, Dad. If we don’t get shot for running around naked in the woods, we’ll get arrested at the very least.”

  Mom laughed—“Ha ha”—as she rolled up her window and waved good-bye.

  I bit my lip, desperately hoping Dad would outgrow his Survival Campout Phase before he carried it too far. Naked is too far by anyone’s standard, I would think.

  But Dad did make us abandon our shoes, socks, and shirts in the car before Mom drove away, so we were barefoot and shirtless, which Dad insisted was good practice. I don’t know what we were practicing for. The end of the clothing industry, probably.

  This was my Dad: preserver of primitive behaviors and meticulous preparer for all things in the future, which included the rest of my life.

  I’d had to endure Dad’s Scottish Heritage Phase.

  (Excuse me.)

  Dad wore the Clan Abernathy tartan kilt for three straight months last year, when I was in fifth grade. He made me wear one too, which was not a good thing for a fifth-grade boy in Blue Creek, Texas, to do. Probably anywhere west of the United Kingdom, for that matter. To top things off, it was the middle of winter, and Dad insisted he and I wear our kilts in the “traditional” manner, which made it extra cold.

  The first day I wore my kilt to school, I was called in to the principal’s office for violating the dress code. Dad got mad, and the school let me keep wearing our Clan Abernathy tartan kilt, which was a great loss for me but a cultural victory for Dad.

  Dad got fired from his job as vice president of the biggest bank in Blue Creek because of the kilt and all. It didn’t matter. Our family does very well from Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course, and it is also a convenient and proper place for Dad to wear his kilt as much as he wants to.

  “Let’s head up over that ridge there and see what we can find,” Dad said.

  It wasn’t yet four in the morning, and it was completely dark.

  “Maybe we can find a flashlight,” I suggested.

  “Ha ha, Sam! There’s nothing more essential to survival than a sense of humor!” Dad said. “We should insert that into our P.O.A.”

  P.O.A. means “plan of action.” Dad’s P.O.A. is S.F.W.F.—Shelter, Fire, Water, Food. And now, I suppose, Humor.

  So I said, “S.F.W.F.H. Oh!”

  “What’s the O for?” Dad asked.

  “I stepped on a thorn.”

  “Ha ha!” Dad said. “There’s our H, Sam!”

  I thought of all the non-humorous things that started with H. For example, Hurts. Being barefoot at three in the morning and stepping on a thorn hurts.

  (Excuse me.)

  I followed the crunch of Dad’s footsteps.

  Dad carried with him the only things we had besides our pants—a Bowie knife and a magnesium-flint fire starter. That was it: nothing else. And our pants were short too, which made them only slightly more protective than wearing traditional Scottish kilts. It would be nearly two hours before the sky would begin to turn light enough that we’d be able to actually see what Dad might have been hoping to find on the other side of the ridge he was pointing us toward, not that I could see any ridge to begin with.

  By the time the sun came up, Dad had found a level clearing in the woods about fifty feet from the bank of Blue Creek, which was low this time of year, but even for a creek was still deep and wide.

  I helped Dad with the first letter of our P.O.A.—S.

  Using his Bowie knife, Dad cut poles from saplings, and we notched together a lean-to against an ash that was about thirty feet tall. When the lean-to was finished, and we were hot and filthy, it was my job to cover the shelter with leaves and branches, and to make a bed inside while Dad prepared a place to make his fire.

  It was always like this, except for the barefoot and no-shirts part.

  If this sounds at all fun, let me stress how extremely not-fun this is.

  We’d done Dad’s survival campouts four times this year, and we only got food and water one time—a 75 percent failure rate, if you ask me. It was almost impossible to find something to boil water in, and Dad was terrible at catching food. One time Dad got so many mosquito bites that he passed out and left me virtually alone—abandoned—for the entire final twenty-four hours of our ordeal. Another time we both got (excuse me) diarrhea from drinking unboiled water.

  I will never do that again.

  In fact, I never wanted to do any of these things, but ar
guing my case was impossible against Mom and Dad.

  It was not fun.

  But while we made our shelter that morning, I did notice a mature Mexican plum tree and a patch of spiderwort, so I knew we’d have food, even if Dad would predictably insist on MEAT—a fish or a squirrel, or maybe a wild pig, none of which I was enthusiastic about killing and butchering out here in the dirt, without a kitchen or hand sanitizer, or even the proper seasonings.

  On top of everything, Dad knew I wouldn’t sleep inside our lean-to. It was too small. Just looking at it made me feel trapped and abandoned. Like all the other times we’d come out, I’d end up sitting out by the fire, alone, all night long.

  Survival is so barbaric.

  IN WHICH WE ARE TAKEN FOR HOBOS

  It starts off on a search mission for things we didn’t know were out there.

  After the shelter and the fire had been achieved, after the filth and sweat, the bug bites and little pokey stickers in my feet, the scrapes on my bare knees and palms, Dad and I hiked down along the creek to see if there was anything salvageable that might be used as a cooking pot to boil water and to cook food—to help us survive.

  This was the thing I had to try to block myself from thinking about—the dirt and germs you’d expose yourself to when using someone else’s garbage as a cooking utensil.

  As I followed Dad through the woods, I composed in my mind a recipe for a light salad of wild Mexican plum and wilted spiderwort, but the thought of preparing it with no seasoning, no balsamic vinegar at the very least, chopping it with Dad’s dirty knife, and eating it with our disgusting fingers from the shell of a discarded bicycle helmet or possibly something worse made me dizzy.

  On one of our previous survival trips, Dad found a rusty hubcap off a Dodge. Luckily for me, that was one of the trips when we couldn’t find any water, or anything to cook in Dad’s hubcap.

  “See how high the creek came this past spring, Sam?”

  Dad held a stick, which he pointed up along the rim of the creek bank above us. The cottonwood saplings there that grew like baleen had trapped nestlike clusters of dried brush, dead branches, and occasional plastic bags and pieces of Styrofoam.