The Great American Whatever
Page 19
“Alert the authorities,” she says, fast, and I tilt my head at her and she winks at me and I solve a riddle: I got my humor from her. I am hers.
“You never gave me my birthday gift, Mama,” I say. I wipe my nose across my arm.
“Oh. Oh! It’s being delivered this afternoon.”
“Wait. What’s bein—”
“Your present. I’ve been saving up. I ordered you a replacement air conditioner. A really good one, too. A sturdy one.” She takes a deep breath. “My new goal is to cut up my credit cards and start paying for everything outright.”
“Mom,” I say, “that is amazing.” And it is, but I’m also thinking: I’ve got to call Geoff and tell him to just return the one we bought, and so I go, “Let me make a quick call,” when Mom goes: “Fine, Winny. But first you have to tell me what’s in your hand.”
I look down. I’d forgotten about the whole reason I came downstairs.
“I did it,” I say. And then I clear my throat and I look over at the urn ghost and I don’t flinch this time. “I finished this screenplay thing I’ve been working on. Or, I mean, that I haven’t been working on.”
This is where my sister would ask me to read it for her. Read it to me! she’d say, No caveats!
I hold up the new pages and scan the first lines of dialogue. Garbage.
But still: “I was thinking I could, I don’t know—”
“Read it to me?” Mom says, like a question that isn’t one.
“Yeah. The last couple pages, anyway. I just wrote it, so it’s probably gonna be rough, so—”
“Don’t move,” Mom says. “I’m going to need one of the red fruits. I’m going to need strength for this.”
And so she gets an apple, and she sits back down on the wicker lounger, and she settles in as if I am a movie—no, as if I am her son, who she just wants to be happy—and I clear my throat again and close my eyes, and count backward from ten.
“Exterior: Ordinary suburban house, day,” I begin—and I read fast, because I don’t want to hear Mom not laugh at jokes that she doesn’t realize are supposed to be jokes. That would crush me. When I get to the final, clunky pieces of dialogue in the screenplay, where my little protagonist, Double Digits, comes home from battle and discovers that everything is different—that his heroes are just ordinary mortals, and that his life has turned out both more heartbreaking and more astonishing than anything a movie could ever attempt to pull off—I am so overcome with grief that Annabeth isn’t here, to tell me how to make it better, that I can’t keep going. I actually drop the final page of the screenplay, and my head, too, but then I hear Mom crunching and crunching on that apple. Nothing stops the Roberts family from eating.
And when I look up to smile at that, at my beautiful mom crunching away, I also see, out of the corner of my eye, the pillowcase fall from the urn. It lands quietly on the floor. I leave it there and I pick up the last page, and I finish what I started.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
INT. QUINN’S BEDROOM – NIGHT
It’s late. Quinn gets into bed and covers himself head to toe in a thick blanket.
He switches off his bedside lamp. He takes out his earplugs. And then we hear what he hears -- the pleasant drone of his brand-new air conditioner, humming from the window.
The air conditioner is still wrapped in a big red ribbon, like a car in a TV commercial.
Quinn props himself up, takes off his fake glasses, and drops them into the wastebasket beside his bed.
Then he lies back down and closes his eyes.
And he smiles.
FADE TO BLACK.
Acknowledgments
The Great American Whatever began its life five years ago as a sprawling manuscript intended for a grown-up audience. That unpublished book was called “Quinn, Victorious,” and featured many of the same characters as the book in your hands—except they were all a decade older, as the book was set ten years after the accident that changed Quinn’s life and ended his sister’s.
Lots of people aided me in getting The Great American Whatever published, whether by reading hilariously long drafts of “Quinn, Victorious,” or later—in the case of Cheri Steinkellner, my close confidante and closest prodder—by encouraging me to revisit the book altogether, from page one.
Thank you, then, to the many folks—including the librarians and educators and booksellers and fellow authors who have supported my work since Better Nate Than Ever first debuted—who helped get Quinn out of my bedside drawer and onto bookshelves, especially: Andy Federle; Annie Batz; Betsy Morgan; Brenda Bowen; Brooks Ashmanskas; Christian Trimmer; Christin Landis; Eliot Schrefer; Jason Snow; Karen Katz; Kevin Cahoon; Krista Vossen; Marci Boniferro; Matt Roeser; my parents, Lynne and Mike; Rick Elice; Rob Thomas; Tom Schumacher; Wendi Gu; my many vivid bullies within the Upper St. Clair school district; and the all-star staff at Simon & Schuster—particularly my editor, David Gale, and his assistant, Liz Kossnar.
Special thanks to Ellie Batz. This isn’t her story, per se, but I could never have told it without her.
Lastly, thank you, you, for making it this far. And if you feel like you have a story you have to tell, tell it.
PHOTO COPYRIGHT © 2016 BY BEOWOLF SHEEHAN
TIM FEDERLE is the award-winning author of the autobiographical novel Better Nate Than Ever and its sequel, Five, Six, Seven, Nate!, which were named best books of the year by the New York Times and the American Booksellers Association, respectively, and called “one of the best new middle-grade series” by School Library Journal. The Great American Whatever was inspired by an accident near Tim’s high school in Pittsburgh that changed the community forever. It is his first novel for young adults.
@timfederle
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Also by Tim Federle
Better Nate Than Ever
Five, Six, Seven, Nate!
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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 © 2016 by Tim Federle
Jacket photo composites by Krista Vossen
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Federle, Tim.
The great American whatever / Tim Federle.
pages cm
Summary: “Teenaged Quinn, an aspiring screenwriter, copes with his sister’s death while his best friend forces him back out into the world to face his reality”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4814-0409-9 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-4814-0411-2 (eBook)
[1. Screenwriters—Fiction. 2. Grief—Fiction. 3. Gays—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.F314Gr 2016
[Fic]—dc23
2015015712