The Size of the Truth

by Andrew Smith

  “Okay.”

  “Well, I got to get back to my mom.”

  “I saw her. You made her cry,” I said.

  James Jenkins rolled his eyes, which meant they rotated upward about three degrees. He said, “She always cries when I dance.”

  “If you bring your mom over to Lily Putt’s, I’ll make you both some burgers, to say congratulations and stuff. And you can play golf. On the house,” I said.

  James said, “Thanks.”

  “No worries.”

  “You want to come over and hang out later?” James asked.

  I nodded. It was a Texan-in-a-kilt nod, so anyone could see it. I said, “Sure.”

  James Jenkins turned to leave, but I stopped him. I said, “Hey. So what was your favorite part in Dune?”

  James stopped. He turned around very slowly, without moving his chin. He said, “When Paul cried for Jamis.”

  “That part wrecked me too.”

  James Jenkins made his little huh sound and then turned to walk back to where his mother was waiting. I watched him as he cut through the crowd. People stopped him and shook his hand and slapped his shoulder, which is probably not what you’re supposed to do to a ballet danseur. And even from where I was standing, I could see James Jenkins blush and smile—well, sort of smile.

  And then it was almost like I had been trapped inside Blue Creek Days. On my way out of the fair, Karim stopped me as I passed the Science Club booth, shouting at me, “Sam! It worked! It really worked! We got something weird!”

  I had forgotten all about the Science Club project. It probably had a lot to do with the fact that I didn’t care about Science Club. I decided right then I was going to quit the club on Monday.

  Hayley Garcia was making fine adjustments on our tuner. Bahar was rotating the small dish antenna, trying to capture the strongest signal, and Karim was waving his arms at me like a drowning victim caught in a riptide.

  “Come here! Listen to this!” Karim shouted.

  When I got to our table, I heard a crackling sputter like one of those preserved recordings of an early-times radio program, and a man’s voice—twangy, Texan, and high-pitched.

  Bahar said, “It keeps playing the same thing, over and over and over.”

  Hayley Garcia added, “We’ve heard it twelve—no, thirteen—times in a row now.”

  Hayley Garcia had penciled tally marks on an index card.

  I leaned my head in closer to the speaker. It really was a radio program, but it was from way in the past. The man’s voice said, “Happy New Year’s Eve 1972, Fort Worth! We’re wishing every one of you the merriest of celebrations, right here from the Stockyards, playing one of our all-time-favorite gospel songs tonight on the Bartleby Until Midnight show!”

  I knew that voice.

  And, of course, I knew the song, too. It was “I Will Walk with Him in the Garden of Blood,” by Lily Abernathy, my great-grandmother.

  I shook my head. I made James Jenkins’s little huh sound through my nose and said, “That’s really weird.”

  Karim nodded and affirmed, “Really!”

  WITH YOUR LUCK, SAM?

  It starts with conflicting signals.

  “This is kind of a catchy tune,” Karim said.

  I’d heard “I Will Walk with Him in the Garden of Blood” so many countless times in my life that its catchiness had evolved into something more like water torture.

  “We should look up the records to find out if this Bartleby Until Midnight show ever actually did broadcast from Fort Worth in 1972,” Hayley Garcia, ever the scientist, ever the taskmaster of the Science Club, suggested.

  “I’m sure I’ve heard Bartleby before,” I said.

  And as Hayley Garcia added another tally mark to her index card, and Bartleby welcomed in 1972 again, another sound, louder, blared over the loudspeakers that hung from utility poles along the midway.

  It said this: “If anyone sees little Sam Abernathy in the fairgrounds, could you please send him over to the judging tent immediately? Sam Abernathy, please report to the judging tent.”

  (Excuse me.)

  I would never not be “little” to pretty much everyone in Blue Creek, forever.

  But I did not want to go to the judging tent. Why would I? So I could watch Kenny Jenkins win what he came here to win? I wanted to leave Blue Creek Days. I wanted to leave Blue Creek entirely. I realized I’d rather head out on a survival weekend with Dad and eat garbage than go to the judging tent.

  “It’s your mac and cheese!” Bahar said.

  I shook my head. “It can’t be. I didn’t finish it in time this morning. I never got it into the oven.”

  Karim came around the side of our table. He grabbed my shoulder and said, “Maybe you’re in trouble, then. Did you and James Jenkins get caught talking again where you’re not allowed to? Come on, I’ll go with you.”

  Karim walked with me over to the main tent, which had been pitched in the big dirt spillover lot behind the community center.

  “You can’t really get in trouble at Blue Creek Days, can you?” I asked.

  I had gotten in trouble with James Jenkins so many times, I was beginning to develop a guilty conscience. And then I thought, maybe there are strict rules against painting your chest at a ballet demonstration.

  And Karim, answering a question with a question, said, “With your luck, Sam?”

  We went inside.

  The place was dark and crowded. At the back of the tent was a long banquet table covered in white linen. There must have been twenty dishes set out—and all the food looked pretty much the same: yellow and blobby. What would you expect from a mac and cheese contest, anyway?

  Mom, Dad, Evie, and Dylan were standing next to the table. They were talking to someone I recognized from all the times I’d sneak in and watch cooking programs on TV after bedtime—it was the celebrity chef Resa O’Hare, and she looked even more beautiful in real life than she did on television. I thought I’d faint when she looked at me and smiled.

  Resa O’Hare, who clearly realized that Dad and I were probably the only people in the state of Texas wearing matching kilts, and miraculously made the connection, said, “This must be Sam!”

  Then everybody started clapping, which was exactly the opposite of what I was expecting, since I had pretty much convinced myself that I was in trouble for painting my chest and taking off my shirt at a ballet demonstration.

  Somehow, the dish of macaroni and cheese I had made (to be honest, it was orecchiete with Gorgonzola, pears, and prosciutto) had shown up here at the contest. Somehow, my dish had won first prize. I didn’t understand how any of this could have been possible.

  I half expected to find a talking armadillo and dancing otters there with us inside the tent, but there were only people—and an awful lot of them too.

  I was confused, and I was speechless.

  Karim put an arm around my shoulders and shook me. “You did it, Sam! You won! I knew you could do it!”

  I heard someone in the crowd say, “The Little Boy in the Well is a mighty fine chef!”

  And someone else said, “Why’s he dressed like that?”

  (Excuse me.)

  TAKING THE NEXT STEP

  This story ends with a report on the bank robber Ethan Pixler that I did for my Social Studies class. I even wrote a skit, and James Jenkins was allowed to come in and play the part of Ethan Pixler. James wanted to make it a musical, but I can’t dance.

  It ends with my dad, who found the dish I’d prepared (but failed to put in the oven when I ran out of time), which he baked and brought to Blue Creek Days for me.

  And it ends with Karim breaking up with Hayley Garcia because he quit the Science Club on the same day I did.

  Karim already has a new girlfriend.

  It ends with Kenny Jenkins, James Jenkins’s dad and owner of Colonel Jenkins’s Diner, who placed fourth out of twenty-two in the Great Blue Creek Days Macaroni and Cheese Cook-Off Challenge. I added the word Great, by the way. It w
as pretty great, after all, but not for Kenny Jenkins, who everyone had assumed was destined to win.

  And the story ends with me and my dad, talking to each other and listening to each other about things.

  It was an enormous truth for Dad.

  But in the end he’d admitted that if he did exactly with his life what his father had wanted him to do, he would have probably been planting onion seeds in October as opposed to doing what he loved best, which was wearing his kilt, running Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course, and helping his boy get a dish of orecchiete with Gorgonzola, pears, and prosciutto into the oven on time for the big contest.

  It was a big step for my father.

  Dad cried. I’d never seen my father cry. He told me he was sorry, and how it was a tough thing for him to recognize that his son could have ideas of his own—imagine that! Then he told me he loved me and was so proud of me, and I cried too and told Dad that I loved him. We were a bunch of crying messes, in our kilts, survival camping on a cold end-of-October weekend in the Tingle-Heacock State Wilderness Area. It was great. We didn’t get any food or water that weekend, but it was the best time I’d ever had with Dad.

  I would not have to go to Blue Creek Magnet School or get into AP Physics or invent whatever it was that Dad thought I needed to invent after graduating from MIT. Resa O’Hare was so astonished by what a little eleven-year-old eighth grader had done that she invited me to come to the high school where she taught—a private boarding school in Oregon with the nation’s best Culinary Arts program for teens (even if I was only going to be twelve), where nobody would know anything about PRAY FOR SAM or the Little Boy in the Well. It was scary for me to think about leaving Blue Creek by myself, but it was scarier for me to think about staying with all these Blue Creekers who had already filled in every blank they could think of about me.

  The paint on my chest didn’t come off for a week.

  And this story ends with James Jenkins leaving Blue Creek too. A month after he danced for everyone at Blue Creek Days, after he performed in my skit about Ethan Pixler, James Jenkins moved to Austin with his mother and enrolled in high school there, which is where he belonged.

  After all, James Jenkins is one of the smartest kids I know, and he’s a real good example of what it means to be a human being too, in my opinion.

  And this story ends with me, not looking down before I take the next step, not ever again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  On a bright spring morning a few years ago as I was getting ready to leave New York City on a book tour that went back and forth across the country (and up into Canada as well), I had breakfast at a Momofuku place with Elizabeth Kossnar and my editor, David Gale. Can I drop names? Okay, we ran into Alessandra Balzer there, and she was very nice.

  It was at this breakfast that David talked about the possibility of me writing a middle-grade novel, and we talked about doing one just about Sam Abernathy, a character I love very much. But who doesn’t love Sam, right? So I started it, and I stopped; started it again, got pretty far, then stopped. Who knew that writing middle-grade is much more than merely a matter of writing YA with younger kids and no (excuse me) swears?

  It took a while. And then I was back in New York, and David asked me again why I hadn’t done my book about Sam yet. I told him I had but I was going through a weird time where I didn’t really want anything of mine to be out in the daylight. It was like I’d been at the bottom of a well and had gotten quite comfortable there.

  I guess David got me out of my well, and I had cultivated quite a cozy, affectionate Stockholm Syndrome–like connection to my well. And now here we are, up in the light. Thank you, David.

  I’ve dedicated this book to Kelly Milner Halls, a wonderful person I’ve known since I was about fourteen years old. And I really do mean this: that if it is true that Andrew Smith writes friendships pretty well, it’s because of the people in my life like Kelly. Much love and appreciation to you, Kelly.

  And to my other friends who stick by me whether I’m in a well or not—I owe you everything: A. S. King, Z Brewer (and we must return to that place in Denver—you know, the place with the pie), Greg Neri, Gae Polisner, Michael Bourret, Carrie, E, my brothers with whom I share no DNA Matt and Jon, Jenny Paulsen, Michael Grant, and why am I afraid I’m leaving someone out?

  I might be bad at making lists, but like Sam Abernathy, I’m a pretty good cook.

  And all my friends—Ethan Pixler included—are invited down into my well for dinner.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANDREW SMITH is the author of several novels for young adults, including Winger, Stand-Off, 100 Sideways Miles, Rabbit & Robot, and the Michael L. Printz Honor Book Grasshopper Jungle. He lives in a remote area in the mountains of Southern California with his family, two horses, two dogs, and three cats. He doesn’t watch television, and occupies himself by writing, bumping into things outdoors, and taking ten-mile runs on snowy trails.

  Visit us at simonandschuster.com/kids

  Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Andrew-Smith

  Simon & Schuster Book for Young Readers

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  Also by Andrew Smith

  Winger

  Stand-Off

  100 Sideways Miles

  Rabbit & Robot

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Andrew Smith

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2019 by John Hendrix

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  Book design by Lucy Ruth Cummins

  Jacket design by Lucy Ruth Cummins

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2019 by John Hendrix

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Smith, Andrew (Andrew Anselmo), 1959– author.

  Title: The size of the truth / Andrew Smith.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, [2019] | Summary: Eleven-year-old Sam Abernathy, extremely overprotected and a reluctant celebrity since he was trapped in a well at age four, dreams of becoming a chef and starts by entering a local cook-off.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018012122| ISBN 9781534419551 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781534419575 (eBook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Celebrities—Fiction. | Family life—Texas—Fiction. | Middle schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Cooking—Fiction. | Contests—Fiction. | Texas—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.S64257 Siz 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012122

 

 

 
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