by Andrew Smith
“Well? Aren’t you going to answer it?” Karim said.
“Um.”
I was stuck. I touched the connect button, but I kept walking through the woods toward my house, hoping that Karim might be distracted by the sounds of insects and my footsteps, which I tried to make as loud as possible.
“Hi, James,” I said.
“What took you so long? Are you working at Lily Putt’s?”
“No. I’m walking to my house, with Karim.”
I said “Karim” especially loud, in a code-between-friends kind of way, hoping that James would know this wasn’t the best time to talk about certain things like crushes and flirting, or being attracted to someone. And then I said, “What’s up?”
James sounded so happy and relieved. “Well, I didn’t think I’d make it to the end, but camp is finally finished. Everyone’s leaving tomorrow, and I’ll be back in Blue Creek at your house on Saturday afternoon sometime. It’s still okay for me to stay over for a few days, right? My mom wanted me to make sure before she drives all the way out there. You know, it’s kind of awkward for her because of my dad and football and all.”
My room was sure going to be crowded for the next few days.
“Yeah. It’s totally okay.”
I missed James, and just the thought that we’d get to spend the last few days of summer together lifted my spirits, despite the fact that my dad was a criminal and some kind of ringleader—and one who had a girlfriend named Linda Swineshead when he was only thirteen, and I still had to come to terms with it all.
“Well, I just wanted to tell you thanks for talking me out of quitting the dance program when I wanted to. Sam, it really was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, and I hated it most of the time because of all the work and the pain and stuff, and not having any friends here, not having any freedom, and never getting a chance to relax and just do nothing,” James said.
“Oh. Well, I knew deep down you didn’t really want to quit, James. You’re not like that.”
“And something cool happened. A group of agents came to the school and watched our final today. One of them is going to call my mom and ask her if he can send me on auditions in New York and Los Angeles. Looks like maybe we’re both saying bye-bye to Blue Creek and going far away from Texas, huh?”
Cue the spiders.
“That’s great news, James. I bet you’re excited about that,” I said.
“Well, to be honest, all I want to do for the next week is sit around doing nothing but play video games and watch movies and eat all the food that dancers aren’t supposed to eat.”
“I think I could help with most of that,” I said, and James laughed.
“Dude. You can if you’re not too busy hanging out with your crush,” James said, and I could hear the tease in his voice.
I nearly choked, and Karim was practically close enough to hear what James was saying. Or maybe everything just seemed so incredibly loud at that exact moment. I decided my only chance to get out of the situation would be to intensify the encryption level of friend-code-speak and try to hang up as soon as possible.
“Heh-heh,” I said. “That reminds me of that TIME we were in Miss Van Gelder’s Spanish class and those two girls who sat up front were TALKING ABOUT YOU when we came in, but they DIDN’T KNOW YOU WERE THERE LISTENING, and they were SAYING STUFF that was, like, totally EMBARRASSING.”59
“Huh? I don’t remember that. What are you talking about?”60
“I know! You should have seen HOW RED YOUR FACE WAS, because you were RIGHT THERE ALL THE TIME. Ha ha! That was SO AWKWARD. If only they KNEW THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN TALKING RIGHT THEN.”
There was a little pause, and then James asked, “Sam, are you okay? Why are you screaming at me?”
It was a struggle. But I noticed that Karim was paying more attention to me than to where we were going.
“Yeah, me too, James,” I said. “We’re just about to go inside. I’ll call you back IN A LITTLE WHILE.”
I hung up, and Karim asked, “Why were you yelling at James Jenkins like that?”
And finally tapping into a skill that I thought was exclusive to Karim, I said, “He’s in Massachusetts, and they’re having a really bad nor’easter right now.”
“In summer?”
Karim, who had already impressed me once that day with his use of the word “scofflaw,” apparently also knew more about New England weather than I gave him credit for.
But I was on my A-game.
“Climate change. It’s a terrible thing.”
Karim nodded solemnly.
59. That’s friend-code-speak, if you get it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work.
60. See? I told you.
SON OF A SCOFFLAW
“No one actually still remembers that, do they?” Dad asked.
Dad had come in to tell us good night. He was under the impression that Karim and I had been reading my summer assignments, which, of course, we had not been doing. And Karim instantly waylaid him with the kind of ambush question a seasoned detective would use on a guilty crime boss, which was this: “Mr. Abernathy, will you please tell us the story about the time you got arrested for breaking into the Purdy House?”
Which was when Dad expressed his shock that anyone in Blue Creek still talked about the crime spree in which he was ringleader to Oscar Padilla and Linda Swineshead, whoever that was.61
And I said, “No one has to remember it, Dad. Once something gets printed in the newspapers, it pretty much never goes away.”
“Oh. Um.” Dad seemed to be at a loss for words, which is a place Dad rarely found himself. “Well, it was a long time ago, boys. I was about your age, in fact, and it was just one of those nutty kid-prank kind of things that boys your age—our age—do without carefully thinking them through.”
“Mr. Abernathy?” Karim asked.
And Dad didn’t say anything; he just gave Karim a look like he was bracing for Karim to do what we all expected him to do.
Which is exactly what happened, because Karim added, “I’ve never been arrested, and neither has Sam—at least not as far as I know.”
I was horrified. And Karim just looked at me like he was waiting for some kind of confirmation that the Sam-apple did not fall very close to the Dad-tree.
“I haven’t.” I shook my head.
“So what’s it like? Being arrested, I mean,” Karim said. Then he sat up on his narrow camp cot and put his feet on the floor, which was when I noticed that he was once again wearing a pair of my socks. “But first, what we’d really like to know is, What happened to you once you were all alone inside the Purdy House? How terrifying was that?”
In another era, Karim could have easily been one of those old-time radio announcers on a mystery-horror show.
Dad cleared his throat, glanced over his shoulder, and eased my bedroom door (which was open, as usual) quietly shut. It seemed almost as though he was about to reveal to us some horrible secret that needed to stay trapped inside my room, and I wasn’t certain I wanted to hear it.
That closed-in and trapped feeling started coming over me.
Dad stepped over the spare mattress Mom had already put on the floor for James. Then he sat down on my bed, next to my feet. His expression was exactly like the look you’d see on the face of any kid who was getting ready to go in and get interrogated by the principal.
He took a deep breath and rested a hand on my shin. “I suppose I should have told you about it a long time ago, Sam. But I figured it didn’t matter anymore, and besides, your mother doesn’t know anything about it.”
I wondered how full Dad’s file cabinet of secrets could possibly be.
Dad lowered his voice. “It was a dare—kind of. But when I was in eighth grade, I had a best friend named Oscar, and like the other kids in Blue Creek, we used to hear all the wild legends about the Purdy House. Oscar liked to add his own ideas to the stories, and it was like the things he made up almost took on a life of their own. But Oscar a
nd I actually wanted to see what was inside the Purdy House, because we knew most of the things people believed about the house were just pure fiction. Most of them.”
And I thought, Most of them?
Dad continued, “The summer after we got out of Dick Dowling, Oscar and I decided to try out for the Blue Creek High freshman football team. You know, back in those days every boy in town went out for football when he got into high school. It was what was expected of you. But it took us a while before we could honestly admit to each other that being on the football team over summer vacation was just not fun, not even close to being fun, so we quit, which led to the other boys on the team teasing us and calling us cowards and—ahem—worse things than that. And I don’t know whose idea it was—it could have been Oscar’s, but he always said it was Kenny Jenkins’s—for us to prove we were tough by staying inside the Purdy House, alone, from nine to midnight one night while Kenny and the other boys on the football team waited outside to make sure we wouldn’t chicken out. Or get murdered or something.”
And when Dad said “get murdered,” his eyes narrowed just like Boris’s had when I’d seen him at Lily Putt’s.
“But you didn’t exactly go in there alone,” I said.
“No. Oscar came with me,” Dad said.
And I continued my fishing expedition. “Um. The Yodeler said that you and Oscar weren’t alone either.”
Then I saw Dad’s cheeks turn red. I’d never thought anything in the world could embarrass my kilt-wearing father, but I had just stumbled onto a serious weakness of his: a weakness named Linda Swineshead.
“Oh yeah!” Dad was beaming, obviously overacting surprise. “A girl came with us too! I think her name was something like Linda. Linda Swineshead! Gosh! I haven’t thought about Oscar and Linda in decades! Ha ha!”
Then Karim stepped in with his bad-cop interrogation. “Mr. Abernathy, the newspaper said Linda Swineshead was your girlfriend.”
Dad looked embarrassed.
I checked the door and window—still closed. It was getting harder to breathe.
And let me say this, too: not only is it impossible for a kid who’s just finished eighth grade to imagine his father as an eighth grader, but no one ever wants to think about their dad having long-concealed romantic interests that weren’t also his mom.
Dad cleared his throat. “Oh. Uh. Well, that’s just—Hey! I thought you boys wanted to hear about going inside the Purdy House. It’s a pretty wild story, guys!”
Then Dad got up and switched off the light in my room like he was setting the stage for a scary story around the campfire, except Mom would get really mad if Dad lit a fire on my floor, and my window was also closed, which not only would have caused a campfire to asphyxiate us, but I was already feeling claustrophobic after Dad had shut the door.
“Dad? Would you mind opening the window, please?” I said.
“Oh. Oops. Sorry, Sam.”
Then Dad slid my window open and sat back down at the foot of my bed.
“Well, I’m not going to lie, boys. Like most people who live here, the Purdy House gives me the creeps, and to be honest, I never want to go back inside that place,” Dad said.
Karim fired an I told you so look at me. I hadn’t yet told Dad that I was supposed to go inside that place the next day.
Dad continued, “And we couldn’t get out once we were inside. The basement window we’d come in through was too high to reach.”
“You should have tried other doors,” Karim said.
“We tried every door and window in the place.”
“Even the windows up in the attic?” Karim asked.
Dad nodded. “Even the attic.” Then he lowered his voice and said, “It was like the house knew we were inside it and it wasn’t going to let us go.”
Now I was interested, but also a little scared. I tried to concentrate on what I was going to cook for the Monster People—Boris and Mr. and Mrs. Blank—tomorrow for dinner.
“What was in the attic?” I asked.
“Probably nothing,” Dad said. “It was too dark to see, but Oscar swore he stepped on some bones in there, and that was when we heard this faraway screaming and what sounded like singing coming from down below.”
Then Dad chuckled nervously. “Oscar and I got pretty scared. One of us screamed. I’m pretty sure it was Oscar, I think. Linda told us to calm down, that it was probably just Kenny Jenkins62 and the other boys outside trying to mess with us.”
And Dad went on, “So we followed Linda back downstairs. Oscar and I were so scared, we didn’t have our eyes open. We held hands all the way back to the main floor, where we all tried the front door again, but the knob wouldn’t even turn, like it was welded shut or something. And the howling and music from below seemed to get louder and louder until—”
“Until what?” I asked.
“Until Linda opened the basement door again. Then everything went completely silent. Ha ha! Who knows? Maybe it was just a random coincidence. But when we got back down into the basement, that was when Linda found this little door that had to have been less than two feet tall, and it was also the only door in the whole entire place that we could actually open!”
“But the newspaper article—and you—said that Oscar was the one who found the door,” I said.
“Well, it was Linda. But we all climbed inside, which was probably not the smartest thing I’ve ever done,” Dad said. “Actually, the only reason all three of us went in was because Oscar and I didn’t want to be left behind in that basement all alone.”
“Where did the doorway lead to?” Karim asked.
“It was really spooky. There was a tunnel that had been dug in the dirt—like something you’d see in an old movie about breaking out of jail or something. It gives me claustrophobia just thinking about it.”
It suddenly got really quiet in my room, and then Dad cleared his throat and said, “Er. Sorry, Sam.”
And now I was beginning to feel claustrophobic just because of Dad’s story.
“Oscar got stuck in the tunnel and couldn’t go forward or squeeze his way back out. He was pretty big, but when he got stuck there, Linda and I were trapped inside this creepy room that had a coffin in the middle of the floor, and what looked like a table where someone had been playing cards.”
“Wait. There was an actual coffin? And a card game?” I asked.
“I know. Crazy,” Dad said. “But the main thing is that Linda and I were trapped. I tried pushing Oscar’s face back, but he was jammed tight. I guess I started to panic, and that’s when Linda told me to look out because there was an armadillo in there, and he was running right at me.”
I felt myself getting jealous again, and not only because Dad had had a girlfriend named Linda Swineshead, but that armadillo had to have been Bartleby—the same armadillo who’d looked out for me when I’d been trapped in the well, the same armadillo who’d brought me into that very room where Cecilia Pixler-Purdy had stowed the coffin of her first husband, the bank robber Ethan Pixler, just to keep him quiet and stop Little Charlie from continually digging him up, the same armadillo who’d insisted I had a crush on Bahar (but he was wrong about that) just the other day at the Uniontown Mall when I didn’t have on any pants.
“And that was all it took. Oscar was so terrified of armadillos that he bit my hand and started screaming. But he slithered out of that little tunnel faster than a greased rattlesnake! And I don’t mind saying that Linda and I never looked back one time. When we ran back upstairs—and this is the weirdest part—thousands of bats started coming up from somewhere down below in the basement, and flying out through the chimney. It was the worst thing imaginable. Oscar got so scared, he started to cry. Then we turned around.” And Dad paused here, his eyes as big and round as silver dollar coins as he looked back and forth from me to Karim.
He said, “And that’s when we noticed that the front door was suddenly wide open, like the house had opened itself up just for us! It was the strangest thing ever; like a scen
e out of a horror movie or something, except it was all real and happening to us right there. So we made a dash for the outside, and ended up running straight into Sheriff Glick, who drove Oscar and Linda to their homes, but took me to jail—in handcuffs—because he couldn’t get a hold of anyone at home. And I’m not afraid to say that I’d never go back inside that place. Not ever. So if any of your friends get it into their heads that full moons and foolish dares equal fun and games at the Purdy House, well, it’s probably time for some new friends.”
“Um. Dad? I think there’s something Karim and I need to tell you,” I said.
“Keep me out of it,” Karim said. “And you’d just better hope it’s not a full moon tomorrow night.”
Dad looked at me, his eyebrows pinched together like he was trying to untie an impossible knot with the tip of his nose.
61. I suppose I’d been feeling a little bit jealous on behalf of Mom. What would she think about Dad having a girlfriend named Linda Swineshead when he was just thirteen?
62. Kenny Jenkins had played football? This was something I’d need to find out more about.
MY DAD’S FIRST GIRLFRIEND
Everyone in Blue Creek assumed the Purdy House was still just as vacant—and just as haunted—as it had been for more than a century.
But the Blanks had lived in the old house for nearly a week. They had been seen around town looking for shop space for their dead-stuffed-animal emporium, as well as at Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Complex eating Little Charlie’s Haunted Burgers and getting quadruple bogeys63 on the llama hole, but it was like they might as well have been invisible to anyone in town except for me, Bahar, and Karim.
I didn’t get it.
Maybe they really were some kind of Monster People.
Dad was mad at me for accepting the catering job from them. He told me no son of an Abernathy would ever step foot inside the Purdy House, and said he was going to talk to Mom about it. But I didn’t really believe him since talking to Mom meant that he’d probably have to confront his past, which would most likely involve an explanation about the whole Linda Swineshead thread to his story.
