by Rebecca Rupp
I didn’t think Pastor Bruno was right about a lot of stuff, but it struck me that he wasn’t a bad person at all. I liked what he’d done for Ronnie and Ronnie’s mother. I bet he’d been like Cathy Ann’s father with the mean boyfriend, but without the baseball bat.
Suddenly I was glad that his name, BrunO, was an O word.
After Pastor Bruno left, I lay down on the bench and looked straight up at the stars.
I thought about my big questions.
Is there a God?
If there is a God, then why do bad things happen to good people?
If there is a God, which religion is the right religion?
Do people have souls or just brains?
What happens to us after we die?
Is there a purpose to life?
With all the thinking I’d done that year, I hadn’t managed to answer a single one. Andrew says that’s how you know your questions really are big questions. Still, it was disappointing.
All I’d figured out so far was that there was a lot I didn’t understand. Just like Henry David Thoreau.
Like Henry said, “The universe is wider than our views of it.”
That’s what I believe.
SO NOW I’M LIVING WITH BOONE. My bedroom isn’t in the closet after all. Instead Boone squeezed his bed in there and put his bureau with all his clothes in it in the studio, since nothing else would fit in the closet once he squeezed in the bed. Since he has the studio, he said, it wasn’t fair for him to have a big bedroom too.
He still spends time on weekends painting his masterpiece, so he hasn’t lost hold of his dreams and aspirations like Henry was so worried about.
I don’t go to the Redeemers anymore, though sometimes I get postcards from Pastor Bruno, and Marjean sent me a tape of her playing guitar in a concert of Christian country-music songs. I thought it sounded pretty good, if you like that sort of thing.
I worried for a while about what everybody would say about us after all of this going on, since, like I said, this is a small town and everybody knows everything about everybody else. But Andrew said not to bother, because pretty soon somebody else’s parents would do something crazy and everybody would forget about me and Ray and Boone, and Mr. Peacock, who spends two afternoons a week hanging out at Pierre’s Barbershop and Café, said that whatever they were saying about us, it wasn’t a patch on what they said about Mabel Butterfield when she started taking those belly-dance lessons at the Grange.
I don’t see Ray very often just now because she’s spending a lot of time traveling. She says it’s important to spread the Word. Henry says “Do what you love” and I guess Ray is. I remember how Boone said “What is a good life?” is the world’s most important question, and when I asked what the answer was, he said it was something you had to work out for yourself. I guess I’m glad Ray found her answer. But I can’t help wishing she’d found something else. Something maybe Boone and I could have shared.
I miss Ray. I miss the way we were before, with Ray heading out every day with her briefcase to her office at Banger & Moss, and Boone in his shed, painting, and me with nothing much to worry about other than my weird name.
“I wish things didn’t have to change,” I said to Mrs. Peacock.
Mrs. Peacock put down her dishcloth and wiped her hands.
“I used to feel just the same,” she said. “It’s no Sunday picnic, changing.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I remember when I was your age, or a little older,” Mrs. Peacock said. “My mama and daddy arranged for me to stay with the Tuttles up in town so I could go to the high school. There weren’t any school buses back then, like they have now, and farm kids like me had to board in town if they wanted to get to school regular in the winter.”
“Did you mind?” I said.
“Mind?” Mrs. Peacock said. “I was mad as fire. They’d done all that behind my back, without so much as a by-your-leave. I didn’t want to go. I fussed and I fumed and I dickered and I said I was fine just where I was and I didn’t want to change. But my mama and daddy wanted me to have a good education.
“My mama said, ‘Clara Jane, new things isn’t easy and everybody gets a little bit scared. But if there wasn’t any change, there wouldn’t be any butterflies.’”
She filled the teakettle with water at the sink, put it on the stove, and turned the burner on under it.
“Neither of my folks got past fourth grade, you see, and I guess my mama didn’t want me to spend my life as a caterpillar if I didn’t have to.”
I wasn’t sure if she meant I was a caterpillar or a butterfly. But I got the idea.
What you believe about life, the universe, and everything is a big question that nobody can answer for you. I think you just have to work it out for yourself and sometimes it takes your whole life.
I still wish I could just peek ahead, like reading the end of the book first, and find it all out. But Mrs. Peacock says you have to take things as they come, and that’s not such a bad thing. “All in good time,” Mrs. Peacock says.
There’s a lot of other stuff to think about too. Like Ms. Hodges said way back last September, it’s important to think about things and make plans because then you have a better chance of getting where you want to go.
I guess the best O words ever are still the ones from The Wonderful O. LOve and hOpe and freedOm and tOmOrrOw.
But I’ve got some more of my own, thanks to Boone and Ray and Andrew and Mr. and Mrs. Peacock and Ms. Hodges and Dr. Cassidy and Pastor Bruno and maybe even all the kids in my Redeemer class.
This is what they are:
GrOwing up
LOOking fOrward
MOving On
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2010 by Rebecca Rupp
Cover photographs: copyright © 2010 by Helena Inkeri/Getty Images (girl with jar); copyright © 2010 by Andrew Johnson/iStockphoto.com (plant)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2012
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Rupp, Rebecca.
Octavia Boone’s big questions about life, the universe, and everything / Rebecca Rupp. — 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Seventh-grader Octavia puzzles over life’s biggest questions when her mother seems to find the answers in a conservative Christian church, while her artist father believes the writings of Henry David Thoreau hold the key.
ISBN 978-0-7636-4491-8 (hardcover)
[1. Religions — Fiction. 2. Family life — Vermont — Fiction. 3. Schools — Fiction. 4. Christian life — Fiction. 5. Vermont — Fiction.]
I. Title.
PZ7.R8886Oct 2010
[Fic] — dc22 2009047408
ISBN 978-0-7636-5984-4 (electronic)
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