by Andrew Smith
And the thing that was even more frustrating to me was that Bahar and I didn’t talk about things the way we always had before. It was as though the pressure of this being my last Saturday in Blue Creek had somehow taken all the air out of the room and left us wordless. There was a lot that I wanted to say, but I didn’t want Bahar to feel bad for me.
The spiders hadn’t stopped running laps in my stomach for days. They weren’t just running laps; now they were also beating drums and setting off fireworks. The truth is, I was afraid of leaving home, even if I didn’t really like Blue Creek and everything it had been to me for my entire life. I had nothing else to compare Blue Creek to. Maybe Oregon would be nothing but endless abandoned wells to fall into.
And maybe James was right that there was something wrong with me, but maybe it wasn’t about Bahar, like he’d told me it was. Maybe it was about Blue Creek.
Maybe it was about facing all those good-byes.
“I guess we both must be exhausted after what happened last night,” Bahar said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well. You’re not saying much,” she said. “I detect the presence of an elephant in the room, Sam.”
“Maybe it walked over here from the Purdy House. Is it taxidermied and robotic?”
Bahar smiled, which momentarily seemed to increase the level of oxygen in the air.
I swirled my straw around in my tea, trying to fish out a lemon seed.
I said, “I’m just trying to get this lemon seed out of my tea.”
Swirl.
Swirl.
Lemon seeds are really hard to catch with a straw.
“You know what’s a great idea?” I said. “Wrapping lemon wedges in cheesecloth. I saw that on a show about a fancy restaurant in Europe one time, how they wrap lemon wedges there in this really nice cheesecloth, so that people never get seeds in the stuff they squeeze fresh lemons on. Anyway, I thought that was a great idea.”
“Oh.”
I kept fishing. “Yeah.”
“Kenny Jenkins would be run out of Blue Creek for doing something like putting cheesecloth on lemons,” Bahar said.
Behind the counter, Kenny Jenkins’s ears perked up. I’m sure he’d caught mention of his name. He glared at me. I looked at my tea, wondering if he even knew that his son was coming back to Blue Creek that day.
Bahar sighed. “Anyway, it’s pretty sad.”
“What is? That A. C. Messer turned out to be a—excuse me—jerk?”
She smiled again. Air.
Bahar said, “Well, yeah. That was pretty sad. But I was talking about you, how you’re leaving Blue Creek. It’ll be different here without you.”
“Yeah. What will Blue Creek be without the Little Boy in the Haunted Well?”
“You must be so excited.”
Now the spiders were running laps, beating drums, setting off fireworks, and playing lawn darts.82
“I… Um…”
“You have to promise to text me as soon as you get settled in at your school, Sam.” My cell phone sat on the table next to my tea. Bahar touched it with an index finger.
I shook my head. “They don’t allow kids to have cell phones there.”
Bahar’s eyes widened like one of Mr. Blank’s babies. She said, “No cell phones? That’s as uncivilized as unsweetened tea in Texas.”
And that made me laugh, but I also felt my eyes getting a little puffy and steamy, too, and what the (excuse me) heck was happening to me?
I said, “I’m going to be lonely. I’m going to… miss you, Bahar.”
I still hadn’t given up on trying to snag that lemon seed with my straw, even though I was failing miserably. Then Bahar did something that instantaneously knocked all the spiders into a collective state of unconsciousness. She reached across the table and grabbed my hand.
We held hands.
And she said, “I’ll miss you, Sam. It won’t be bad, though. And you won’t be lonely, trust me. I know you, Sam Abernathy. Besides, you’ll come home for holidays and stuff, right?”
I couldn’t even talk. All I could think about was Bahar’s hand holding mine, and my hand holding hers back, how weird and magic it felt, and how I no longer cared about that (excuse me) dumb lemon seed swimming around in the iced tea I was having such a hard time tasting. And then I noticed that Kenny Jenkins was staring at us, watching us holding hands, and I felt myself getting hot and turning red.
My phone buzzed and rotated a thin sliver of an arc on the tabletop.
There was a text message from James Jenkins: Just got to Blue Creek. Still looks the same, sadly enough . We’ll be at your house in about 5 minutes. Can’t wait!!!
82. Lawn darts is a very dangerous game where people throw heavy, sharp things really high up in the air and try to get them to stick into the ground in the center of a hoop. It’s kind of like cornhole, except you could die.
MY FRIEND JAMES
Anyone who’d ever met James Jenkins would have marveled at how much he had changed in the few months since I’d last seen him.
He looked older and leaner, almost like he hadn’t been eating enough. His football body had smoothed out into something straighter and taller, and you could sense a kind of confidence and even happiness in him just in seeing the way he stood and how he moved.
James and his mom got to my house before I did.
His mother, Linda Swineshead, was already gone by the time I showed up. It was a relief. I didn’t know if I could face James’s mother after finding out that she had been my dad’s girlfriend at one time. That was one part of the whole Purdy House history and experience I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of.
And I was late because Bahar and I may or may not have walked back from the diner through Lake Marion Park, where we possibly had taken off our shoes and socks and waded in the water for one last time before we might have stopped off so I could hypothetically say a final good-bye to Sam’s Well before walking Bahar to her door, all of which, if in fact it happened, made me just a little bit too late to greet my friend and his mom when they arrived at my house.
Anyway, James just smiled at me with a sneaky expression when he saw me. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I knew he was going to tease me because of the awkward response I’d made to the text message he’d sent when I was at Colonel Jenkins’s Diner. Because I said this: I’ll be right there. I’m just saying good-bye to Bahar.
They should make phones with some kind of vacuum-cleaner feature, so you can suck back texts that you realize tell more than you want to, but then it’s too late because you already hit send and put them out into the universe, and you know your friend is going to tease you because YOU DO NOT HAVE A CRUSH ON BAHAR. Or whoever.
James didn’t have any shoes on his feet. He was eating watermelon in the kitchen with Mom, Dad, Dylan, and Evie when I walked in.
James Jenkins wiped his mouth with the back of a hand and said, “It’s about time you showed up, Sam!”
Then he moved toward me very slowly (James, as I have said in the past, was known for walking extremely slowly), like he was stepping on broken glass.
“Oh my gosh! What’s wrong?” I said.
“Nothing. I just tore my feet up at the academy. I can’t even put regular shoes on,” James said.
Then he kind of grimaced when he took another two steps toward me and then put his arms around me and hugged me hard. It was weird because I had never hugged James Jenkins before, but it felt good and I found myself feeling sad, too, because I was thinking about all those things I’d done growing up in Blue Creek—and all those things I had to say good-bye to. There was a part of my life when I used to be so terrified of James Jenkins too, when I would have believed that he might crush my spine in his monstrous grab. And it was weird because the top of my head barely reached James’s chin (because James Jenkins was giant, and monstrous, but he also loved to dance, which made James as rare and as irreplaceable as anyone I’d ever known). Besides, James kind of s
melled bad, which is exactly what you’d expect of a teenage boy who’d been sitting inside a car, driving through Texas on a hot summer day.
And James said, “You grew about a foot!”
Well, that was nice of James, but Mom and Dad kept tabs. I was exactly three quarters of an inch taller than when school had started last fall. I said, “Yeah. And you’re a giraffe.”
And I couldn’t help but imagine what a stuffed giraffe would look like inside the Purdy House.
* * *
Karim ended up coming back from the library in the evening, when we were all about to sit down for dinner. He and Brenden Saltarello must have patched things up after Brenden discovered the new (artificial) common ground they shared over Princess Snugglewarm.
It worked out for me, because it gave me a chance to talk to James Jenkins alone—so I could clue him in on what NOT to say out loud in front of Karim, which basically meant anything having to do with his cousin Bahar, or the general topics of crushes and such.
“Gosh! Middle school kids are so goofy about stuff,” James said. James Jenkins was going to start tenth grade this year, so he knew almost everything.
We’d been hiding in my room from the rest of my family, playing video games and looking at books.
“I wouldn’t know. I never spent much time there,” I said. “Besides, I may be twelve, but I’m about to start ninth grade, so that automatically puts me ahead of the game.”
And just saying that activated all the spiders and set them into a frenzy like angry bears unpleasantly awakened from hibernation.
James just said, “Hmmf,” which is the way James Jenkins laughed if he thought something was really funny. Then he said, “Anyway, I just needed to say thank you for talking me out of quitting dance when I wanted to.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“You did a lot more than anyone else did. I don’t even have any friends at all because of my dad, and football, and now after leaving Blue Creek. You’re my only real friend. Do you even realize how many friends you have?”
I guess I’d never really thought about it like that.
And James went on, “After leaving Blue Creek and quitting football, it’s like I was erased or something. Like I’m blank.”
Blank.
“That reminds me,” I said. “I’ve got a cool story for you about a haunted house, and a weird family of people who may or may not be monsters, and you know what their name is? Their name is ‘Blank.’ ”
“Hmmf,” James said.
We sat there in my room, just saying nothing, which is what friends do a lot of times. I heard James flipping pages in the book he was looking through. It was Children of Dune. We’d both read it a long time ago. Duh. Who wouldn’t read a book like that?
I had actually moved on to my second summer reading novel. And now I was beginning to think I’d get things done in time for the new school year, and moving away, and all that other stuff.
The light was turning to evening-shade. I could hear Mom in the kitchen. She was probably making something for dinner that would call for some expert help, but I was too busy doing nothing with James.
Finally he said, “Well? Are you going to tell me about the haunted house or what?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. But I just wanted to ask you something first. I don’t know if you can help me or not, but I thought since you’re about to start tenth grade and stuff… Um. It’s about having a crush on someone.”
“Hmmf.”
BYE-BYE, BLUE CREEK
No one likes good-byes.
It took us three days to drive from Blue Creek to Albuquerque, where James’s mom was waiting for him. Dad said there were so many amazing things we needed to see on our way. So we visited the world’s largest fruitcake (which was shaped like Texas and weighed one hundred fifty pounds), the Billy the Kid Museum, and the world’s largest roadrunner83 in Fort Stockton. Before we got to Albuquerque, we also stopped off at the world’s largest pistachio.
There were so many of the world’s largest things in between Blue Creek and New Mexico that you would think North America might sink into the ocean under all that size and weight. Also, the giant pistachio made me want to cook something daring, like lemon-pistachio pasta, only not with a pistachio the size of Dad’s car.
Karim moved back into his house. After all, there was nowhere left for him to go once everything had been packed up and I was finally ready to take all my spiders away with me to school in Oregon. Mom and Dad sent him off with wishes that his parents had fully recovered from the devastation of the nudist-camp sunburns they’d gotten from a vacation in Mexico that had never happened. In true Karim form, he’d said, “Thanks, Mr. and Mrs. Abernathy. They’ll be fine once the doctors wake them up from their medically induced comas. Until then, I have to feed them jarred baby food!”
And Mom had said, “Oh, Karim! That sounds dreadful!”
But Karim had just shrugged and said, “It’s no big deal. It happens every summer.”
I felt a little bit guilty for being an accomplice in fooling Brenden Saltarello into rethinking his relationship with Karim. I gave Karim my Princess Snugglewarm T-shirt and pajamas to keep while I was away at Pine Mountain Academy. I didn’t check, but I was pretty sure the school (or the students, at the very least) wouldn’t approve if I brought them with me. Anyway, Brenden was a good guy. If I ever open a restaurant in Blue Creek, I’ll ask him if he wants a job as maître d’.84
But that last time I walked with Karim back to his house and we each carried a bundle of the things that used to be mine but were now his,85 my heart felt heavier than any giant pistachio or roadrunner that ever stood as false evidence to their size or their truth.
I was unprepared for it.
We both just stood there on his front porch and stared at the door. I could hear the television inside Karim’s house. His parents, who were not in medically induced comas and had never gone to Mexico, were watching a game show, probably enjoying the freedom and peace of summer.
“Oh, well, I guess this is good-bye,” Karim said.
“Um… I could help you carry this stuff inside,” I said.
“You don’t have to. Besides, my parents might not recognize me and then call the police on us.”
That probably wasn’t a lie, I thought.
“Karim… I’ve never not known you for my entire life,” I said. My voice was quivery, and I felt a little embarrassed.
“Well, I know you wouldn’t call the cops on me, Sam.”
But Karim wouldn’t look at me. He turned away and sniffled, and then he put his bundle of clothes down on the wooden swing and wiped an arm across the bottom of his nose. This shouldn’t have been happening. I had never—not once in my life—seen my best friend sad like this, and if he started to cry, I knew I was going to cry too, and then we’d be two dumb86 kids bawling on a porch on a hot summer day in Texas while I was holding on to a bunch of pajamas and stuff. Nobody wants to see that.
“Because you’ll never not be my best friend, Sam,” Karim said.
“Okay.”
“Yeah. So. You’d better go now.”
“I guess.”
I piled my bundle of clothes beside the ones Karim had left on his swing.
Karim said, “No going into haunted houses without me.”
“It’s a deal.”
Then Karim hugged me, and we both got so mad at ourselves because we had to wait out there on his dumb87 porch until we stopped crying. And when he went inside, he said, “If my parents notice anything, I’m going to tell them you slapped me.”
“It’s a deal.”
* * *
Bahar had written a note to me, which she’d folded up and tucked into one of the pockets of my official Pine Mountain Academy duffel bag. She’d asked me not to read it until I got to Oregon, but I opened it before we even saw the giant fruitcake. She had written it on the back of my gooseneck-barnacles home-chef-services flyer from the Teen Zone at the Blue Creek Pu
blic Library.
I guess there was no sense in leaving that up in Blue Creek anymore.
The note said this:
The first Saturday you’re back, let’s have iced tea and make Kenny Jenkins mad!
—Love, B
Look, it’s always okay to sign a note to a friend with “Love.”
It DOES NOT mean you have a crush or anything.
So eventually the Blank family and their excessively unpleasant child, Boris, would turn the Purdy House into a mechanized bedlam of an amusement park, complete with their Little Boy in the Haunted Well attraction, and Dad, taking every advantage of the increase in tourists coming to Blue Creek, would begin putting up hand-painted road signs along the interstate that advertised THE WORLD’S BIGGEST MECHANIZED LLAMA as well as his new side business, which was Blue Creek Kilts.
And once all the floods of sunburned travelers began pouring into Blue Creek, looking for the most haunted house in all of Texas (and the world’s biggest mechanized llama), everything was bound to change, and James Jenkins, Bahar, Karim, and all the rest of Blue Creek and I wouldn’t be the only ones who had to say the world’s biggest good-bye.
83. His name is Paisano Pete, and he isn’t a real roadrunner, and he is also not the world’s largest, but we saw him anyway. Then we saw the actual “world’s largest roadrunner,” which was in New Mexico.
84. Which is a fancy word for “headwaiter,” the equivalent of putting cheesecloth on lemon wedges in Blue Creek.
85. Even though Karim insisted he was only going to do laundry for me—that it was the least he could do for wearing my clothes all summer long.
86. (excuse me)
87. (excuse me)
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