My husband thinks I seem preoccupied. “Usually when you finish a book, you’re excited,” he says. “Are you okay?”
I tell him I’m fine and tamp down the uneasy feeling that the book is done. The last time I see Josh, he is wearing a “MEAN PEOPLE SUCK” T-shirt and multiplying numbers on the napkin in front of him.
He pulls out a wad of papers from his jacket. “Listen to this,” he says. “From Mother Teresa. ‘We can do no great things, only small things with great love … . Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.’” His smile covers his entire face. “I love that.”
He seems happier than anyone I’ve ever known.
Today my son and I walk through the Arboretum. By the time we reach the rhododendrons I know that I’m ready to begin my next book.
As we walk, I hear an airplane overhead and get a weird déjà vu about Larry. Wasn’t there a scene in his story where he heard a plane in the sky? I shield my eyes from the sun and look up.
The plane methodically loops back and forth, leaving a trail of white vapor behind it. My son looks up and points to letters forming in the sky.
“What does it say?” he asks.
I read the words for him. “Larry—Come Back.”
My son sounds out the letters, tries to read the words for himself. “Who’s Larry?”
I tell him Larry was a boy I met once. He did yoga, loved numbers, and wanted more than anything to help change the world.
My son looks up at me and smiles. “You’re making that up.”
I shrug and head down the trail. After a few minutes, we sit under a cluster of pines—is that Larry’s phrase or mine?—and stare up at nature’s blue canvas. My son tries to read the words again, one letter at a time. I take a deep breath and join him, watching the word Larry recede into the blankness of the sky.
Notes
1 Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden and Civil Disobedience. We had to read them for English last semester—very New England—nature is good, materialism is bad. Beth ate it up with a spoon.
2 She would HATE me for saying this with her don’t-objectify-me rant. Protest all you want, Beth—it’s the truth.
3 I also wrote a skit for Monty Python, in case they ever wanted to reunite, then drew sketches for the Gumby art project I was working on. Got to keep busy, I always say.
4 I’d help Beth for as long as possible, providing I could leave the club as soon as it got weird. Too many people at the same time usually sends me heading for the hills.
5 Not too much, of course, but something.
6 I swear to God, this is true—two years old.
7 I don’t know if you know this, but you can lose a lot of friends talking nonstop about peat moss.
8 I don’t care what anyone says—I was not going through her desk.
9 She gave me a skateboard with Humpty written across it in lightning-bolt letters. It frightened me so much, I buried it under a stack of newspapers in the garage, then ended up giving it to the kid next door.
10 Did I just say that? Horrible. Better read Larry’s tolerance sermon again.
11 He and I are both better cooks than Katherine. And besides, she made lasagna every time we came over.
12 If standing at the top of the stairs and coughing is considered nice.
13 Okay, so I strung you along a little—big deal. Had to make sure you were with me first.
14 It hardly dented the sadness.
15 I got the phone from an ad in the back of a magazine and registered it to a post office box.
16 My favorites were Sampson and Delilah. She came with scissors, and his hair could actually be removed.
17 The subject of my stuff needs its own chapter; I’ll do that next.
18 Witness the televangelists if you don’t believe me.
19 This doesn’t mean I don’t covet certain things; I do. There was a leather jacket I thought of for days, lusted over. Thankfully, the feeling passed when I saw the same jacket on Mr. Perrelli, the assistant principal.
20 If his face were any blanker, you could show movies on it.
21 Possession #54—I had to sell my guitar to get it.
22 Like drawing blueprints of the local bank so I could pretend to rob it, that kind of thing.
23 Just the word classified stamped across the pages raised my blood pressure by at least 25 points.
24 Teens spent more than $141 BILLION last year on stuff; did you know that?
25 They still wanted to pay them a few dollars, they just didn’t want people to hate them for it.
26 Three copies were definitely not enough.
27 My favorite was a Tommy Hilfiger ad with several black men at a boathouse. Underneath it someone wrote, “How can we afford to go yachting when there are no jobs here because you make everything overseas?”
28 I’d take all the physical contact I could get.
29 As if we both knew she always belonged more fully to me than to him. (I guess not joining us in the burial plot was his way of releasing us back to the universe without him.)
30 If truth be told, it was a challenge I took to immediately.
31 I’m writing it again because it’s important.
32 Why should the poorest nations have to pay back the richest nations, especially when the loans had been taken out by dictators long gone? It was one of Larry’s “preachier” sermons, but my personal favorite.
33 In one of the last photos I have of her, her hair is almost gone and she’s lying on the couch wearing her Joshua Tree T-shirt. I had been named for the tall, twisted evergreen after my pregnant mother had visited a friend in Arizona. When the U2 album came out four years later, she memorized every song.
34 Using this example, that would be my left.
35 The half-empty school of thought did nothing for me.
36 Including a few teachers, which was weird.
37 My first instinct was to draw attention away from myself by acting like it was no big deal.
38 This led me to a cerebral Möbius strip—suppose these same graphic design skills eventually landed these kids highpaying jobs in the corporations they were now bashing? I swung around in my swing, ruminating on that one for a while.
39 I wondered sometimes what my dad was like, if I looked like him, but it was like studying the gladiators in ancient Rome; it had nothing whatsoever to do with me.
40 Riding the risk buzz—shame on me.
41 Lobster claws, sea glass, scallop shells were all strung on fishing line. It still hung in the window of her bedroom. How had she not gotten the hint?
42 Any excuse.
43 “This is NOT a hardware store,” Beth repeated like a mantra.
44 I was actually nervous; Larry wrote about Nature and Thoreau while I was off in the woods doing the same. The timing was a bit risky, even for me. There were enough Josh/Larry clues for someone like Beth to make the connection, which of course made it all the more exciting.
45 To be honest, I would have preferred to hear “Bad,” my favorite U2 song, one my mother swore was the greatest rock song ever recorded. But even if Bono had sung “I’m a Little Teapot” I would have screamed just as loudly.
46 I HAD to listen; it was too perfect.
47 Of course that didn’t mean a huge part of me didn’t want to do just that.
48 No pun intended.
49 There were way too many “Larry” jokes on that one.
50 I hate cereal.
51 Except for the photographers hiding out back behind the compost heap—most families didn’t have to deal with them. (The temperature had hit 87 degrees; the smell would be horrendous back there. I almost felt bad for them.)
52 Her sister Marie unfortunately was not as principled. Always a tattletale, she spilled her guts to whatever newspaper or television show would listen. I heard that one of the tabloids paid her fifty grand for the story of driving Beth and me to Larryfest. I refused to read the article when it hit the stands, but I heard she turned a side-of-the-road whiz
into an anecdote involving raccoons, police helicopters, and a startled couple from New Hampshire. Marie always had an active imagination.
53 The only thing I remember about this babysitter was that she used to sit on the couch, eat Ho Hos, and do macramé, while I sat on the floor and drew pictures of Gumby and baby Jesus.
54 Very fitting considering I wanted to die.
55 At this point I have to admit that all along I’d daydreamed about Beth finding out I was Larry. In my reverie, she’d always be shocked at first, then would eventually come around to the idea of the guy next door being her biggest idol. We’d sit in my basement. I’d show her how I’d set up the Web site, read the e-mails only Larry could access, plan the strategy for future sermons. In my dreams, she was my partner, my confidante, my Yoko. Once I imagined a day much like this one, the two of us walking in the woods. In my dream, we sat under a maple and kissed. In one scenario, I uncovered the tarp leading to my subterranean room, and we made love on a bed of leaves until the sun faded below the horizon. Needless to say, this scenario repeated itself in my mind often, most notably during the hours of peeking through the living room curtains waiting for the reporters to leave.
56 Which unfortunately for me had always been her finest quality.
57 A shocked pilgrim had e-mailed me betagold’s brochure—$100 to see the toothbrush, $500 to hold it, and $3,000 to actually use it. Scary.
58 It appeared that companies didn’t even NEED my endorsements anymore; they just did what they wanted anyway.
59 Peter’s attorneys had fortunately gotten restraining orders to keep them away from the property.
60 Why do they call it rush hour when the cars are not rushing and it lasts much longer than an hour?
61 School was over, I was starting Princeton in a month, and I was doing Advanced English for fun. What a nerd.
62 This whole plan would be impossible if Mom were still here; she’d empty the ocean with coffee cups if she had to, to make sure I wasn’t still alive.
63 Do you know they’re called “morgues”?
64 I had mixed feelings about this: I didn’t want her to be hurt, yet on the other hand I hoped she would be. Not because I wanted revenge, but because I harbored the hope she still cared.
65 By then I would have grown my hair out back to brown and no one would be the wiser.
66 I got all the relevant information from the newspapers—names of both parents, date of birth. The mother’s maiden name was key.
67 He actually had the nerve to quote Larry: “Such a shame. Such a waste. He was such a lovely boy.”
68 The photograph of the lone shoe eventually made its way across the Internet and onto 16 million T-shirts. The shoe itself ended up in a glass case at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum.
69 She actually said, “Outing him was my gift to the cosmos.” Get a grip.
70 My worst fear: The detectives rule out suicide and the world goes on a crazed Larry hunt. Like poor Elvis, the public would feast on me even in death. It was a recurring nightmare that woke me in a full sweat on many occasions.
71 I had wanted to take mine with me, but it’s hard to travel incognito wearing a shirt that says Josh.
72 Ollie, Ollie, oxen free. Right, betagold?
73 It had been almost a week, after all. I was entitled.
74 Apparently no one seemed to mind that I was eleven at the time.
75 Without a car, no possession gave me away.
Copyright © 2001 by Janet Tashjian
All rights reserved.
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Publishers since 1866
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New York, New York 10010
www.henryholtchildrensbooks.com
Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of
Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
eISBN 9781429956673
First eBook Edition : June 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tashjian, Janet.
The gospel according to Larry / Janet Tashjian.
p. cm.
Summary: Seventeen-year-old Josh, a loner-philosopher who wants to make a difference in the world, tries to maintain his secret identity as the author of a Web site that is receiving national attention.
[1. Web sites—Fiction. 2. Identity—Fiction. 3. Fame—Fiction.
4. Coming of age—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.T211135 Go 2001 [Fic]—dc21 2001024568
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-6378-3 / ISBN-10: 0-8050-6378-1
First Edition—2001
The Gospel According to Larry Page 11
