by Susan Vaught
For Craig Patric Perry II (1978–1993), who has an amazing sister; for the real Jesse-with-an-e, who is even more awesome than my Jesse; and for every hero who has ever needed a Sam-Sam in their lives.
Everybody has their wars, Jesse,
and everybody fights
their wars in different ways.
MASTER SERGEANT CAMILA BROADVIEW
(That’s my mom.)
(Looks important when I write it like that, doesn’t it?)
Prologue
When the apocalypse came to Avery, Kentucky, I thought Great-Aunt Gustine was out getting a pedicure at Nails, Nails, Nails, that salon with a big pink foot on the door. Dad was teaching English on the senior high side of Avery Junior/Senior High School—AJS for short, and Mom was working with her bomb-sniffing dog near a place called Mosul in Iraq. The person who stole $2,103.15 from my father’s desk was pretending nothing bad had happened, and our principal, Ms. Jorgensen, was someplace she had no business being. Again.
As for Sam-Sam, my poor Pomeranian, his sweet fuzzy self was locked in his luxury puppy crate in my bedroom, probably dreaming about becoming a champion bomb-sniffer, since I kept asking him to be good at finding buried treats. People always laughed at Sam because he was so little, but he thought he was massive. I didn’t laugh, because people and dogs can be way more than their fur and skin and bones.
I could see the big inside of my Sam-Sam. I had been training him for two hundred fifty-two days with mini-tennis balls and pieces of bacon, just to prove to Dad and Mom and Aunt Gus and the whole world that a tiny, fluffy dog could do big things if he wanted to.
Okay, so Sam still couldn’t find the containers I hid for him, but he was trying. Hard. Sam might have had trouble sniffing out those buried tennis balls, but he never had any doubts about himself.
I think my little dog always knew he could be a hero.
I just wonder if he knew about me.
1
Monday, Right Before the Train Came
You gonna shoot that ball or kiss it, Messy?” Ryker Morton leaned toward me on the foul line, grinning so big I could see his ugly pink gums. Chris Sedon snickered, and it kinda sounded like a Madagascar cockroach hiss since his nose had a bandage on it. Trisha Parks roach-hissed, too, even though she didn’t have any bandages on her nose. Acting like a nasty insect was just natural to her, I guess.
They hung together like that when they hassled me, Jerkface and his pet cockroaches, a matched set in their green gym shorts and shirts. You’d think after everything that had happened, they’d give this a rest, but noooooo. Same-old same-old.
I didn’t think Coach Gray heard them bothering me over all the noise from the skirmish group playing half-court behind us. Plus, she was busy hollering for YOU KIDS to KEEP IT DOWN since Coach Sedon, Chris’s dad, was out getting surgery on his hand and she had to do EVERYTHING FOR EVERYBODY SO SHOW A LITTLE RESPECT!
Four nicer kids from our class stood around the goal—Krista Edmonds, Selena Ruiz, Mark Gopal, and Jake Siddiqi. Nobody but Selena looked at me, and when she did, Chris pointed at her. “What do you want, fly-face?” He put his fingers around his eyes, pretending he had thick glasses like hers. “You think Messy here won’t knock you in the nose if you tick her off?”
Selena made a rude gesture at him, and Mark pushed her hand down before Coach Gray saw it. I rubbed the sides of the basketball with both hands and looked at Selena, but she looked away.
A little bit of sad squeezed tight in my throat. I tried to be nice like Krista and Selena and Mark and Jake, at least when people didn’t make my brain itch. I mean, I hadn’t even smacked anybody in this year’s class, unlike Jerkface.
Jake glanced in our direction and said, “Y’all are just a bunch of turkeys.”
Great.
Did he mean Jerkface and the cockroaches, or me—or all of us?
“Messy Jesse’s a grody pig, not a turkey.” Ryker pointed at my tangly hair as Chris and Trisha laughed. “You’re never gonna get any better at taking a shower, are you?”
Selena made another rude gesture, sort of at Ryker but maybe sort of at me, too, and she walked off with Krista and Jake and Mark following along behind. Coach Gray tweeted her whistle since they hadn’t taken their shots on goal, but they acted like they didn’t hear her.
I positioned the ball and tried not to watch them leave. Jerkface and the cockroaches made some more noise, but I ignored them because Dad said ignoring cockroaches and keeping all the lights on was the best way to make them scurry away.
“See, Jesse-with-an-e?” Jerkface mocked in my voice. “Jesse-with-an-e, like boys spell it. Nobody likes you, Jesse-with-an-e.”
Did ignoring bugs ever really make them crawl off and bother somebody else? Because it had never worked for me. Breaking Ryker’s nose with the basketball so it would match Chris’s, now that would work for me, but when I turned in his direction, Coach Gray gave me a warning blast with her silver whistle.
As if God agreed with her, it thundered outside.
Coach gave me the look and shook her head.
Not fair.
Jerkfaces shouldn’t be able to run their mouths if non-jerkfaces couldn’t defend their tired ears. What was the problem with violence, anyway? It was effective. Bugs made such a satisfying crunch when you stomped on them.
I glanced at the clock. I still had to put up with Jerkface and the cockroaches for seventeen minutes and thirty seconds. That wasn’t much. Then again, it seemed like a lot. Tick-tock. I hadn’t ever heard a clock make tick-tock noises. The clocks at AJS just made clicking sounds. Seventeen minutes. 1,020 more clicks. 1,019, 1,018, 1,017. . .
I got a second blast from the whistle and Coach glared like she’d come over to our group and make sure we regretted making her get up off her bottom-bleacher throne, so I forced myself to face the goal. Then I dug my purple fingernails into the sides of the basketball, squared my shoulders, lifted the ball to my chest, and powered it into the air.
The ball fired off to the left like a broken rocket, almost beheaded Coach Gray, and smacked a bleacher step so hard it sounded like an explosion.
Oops.
As everybody ducked and covered, I fake-stumbled and ground my heel into Jerkface’s toes.
“Ow!” he hollered, grabbing for his foot, but his cockroaches didn’t hear him over the whoops of the skirmish group and the sudden hard rain on the gym roof.
Ryker snarled and reached for me, but I dodged out of his way. Coach got up, caught the runaway basketball, and bounced it toward Ryker for his turn, all the while making her whistle screech at the top of its teeny metal lungs.
Nine hundred clicks to go until I was Jerkface-and-cockroach-free for the day—but at least I felt better enough to stop counting clicks.
The cockroaches seemed to grasp that they had missed something as Ryker limped to his place at the foul line. They tried to jog toward him, but he waved them off and got ready to make his shot. Jerkface stood a lot straighter than I bothered to do, plus he was taller. His mom had played basketball in college and then gone pro and now she was on the city council, so Ryker thought he was something special every time he touched that ball. Really, all three of the cockroach crew thought they were something special, because everybody knew their parents. Plus, they had muscles and nice clothes and straight teeth and no zits and, of course, the newest phones.
Ryker drew in a breath and managed to side-eye me in the process. I smiled at him, as fake-sweet as I could manage. His cheeks flushed crimson.
Coach’s whistle stabbed into my brain over and over again.
Then a strange sound cut under the gym noises, and I thought somebody might be hurt and hollering. I
made sure Ryker really was shooting that basketball and not coming after me, then checked the gym to see who had busted a knee.
Everyone was standing or running except Springer Regal, the new kid who had been my new actual friend and fellow detective for a week. Springer hated all things athletic, and he had a note to sit out because he had gotten stomach flu last month, and he told me he planned to ride it for all it was worth. He was tucked in at the very top of the bleachers, resting against the wall with a book as thick as Dad’s Shakespeare compendium, but he wasn’t yelling or anything.
The sound came again, a distant howl, like a pack of dogs or—wait.
Sirens?
Everybody stopped running and yelling.
Springer lifted his head, gazed in the direction of the noise, then looked at me, dread obvious in his wide brown eyes. He stood slowly, holding tight to his heavy book as another round of sirens wailed in the distance. The hairs along my arms and the back of my neck lifted, and despite the gym sweat dripping down the sides of my face, I shivered.
Coach Gray’s whistle punched deep into my mind, followed by her voice, higher-pitched than I’d ever heard it before.
“Hallway!” she shrieked. “Everyone! Hallway now! Go, go, go!”
2
Monday, Seven Days Earlier, Afternoon
I knelt by the metal fire pit in our backyard, careful not to let gravel cut my knees because if I bled on the carpet when I went back inside, Aunt Gus would probably feed me to her bulldog, Charlie. As I finished dropping in dry sticks for kindling, my dog, Sam, who was white and fuzzy instead of bulldog-fat and slobbery, danced around me with his tiny tennis ball. He dropped the ball and arfed, leaning on his front paws and wiggling his fluffy hindquarters.
“Shhh.” I snatched up the ball and tossed it, careful to pitch away from the thick trees that bordered the back of our yard. The last thing I needed was Sam getting lost in the Pond River Forest a few hours before sunset. The forest spread around and behind most of Avery, like a comet’s tail, reaching between our little town and London, Kentucky, where the Daniel Boone National Forest started. Everybody knew about that bunch of trees. Nobody much knew about ours, except for the people in Avery. Our forest was a lot smaller, but a little dog could still get lost or eaten in there, or maybe go swimming in the muddy pond that was more like a lake and never be seen again.
Sam yapped and shot across the grass, chasing after his ball. While he was busy, I dumped a load of fabric onto the kindling, then checked to be sure Aunt Gus wasn’t sneaking up on me.
No sign of her.
Keeping one eye on the back door, I slid the matches out of my pocket—the ones I’d snatched out of Aunt Gus’s house shoe in the back corner of her closet. That was where she kept her whole Dad-can’t-see-it stash—her cigarillos, some wads of money, and a salt shaker.
Sam reappeared with his ball, dropped it on my knee, and panted happily.
I ruffled his fur. “Go on, now, Sam-Sam. I can’t do this and throw a ball for you, too.”
Sam kept panting until I threw the ball again. While he was gone, I struck a match, dropped it on the kindling, then scooched around on my butt and glanced at the house, imagining Aunt Gus in the kitchen, watching talk shows while she boiled pasta for dinner. Pasta was supposed to be good for her, except I knew she’d sneak into her room and salt it when Dad wasn’t looking.
“Stay inside,” I muttered to her. “Please.”
Thankfully, it was still early enough in the afternoon that none of my neighbors were outside to see me lighting fires and talking to my house. The brick walls had no opinion, and Aunt Gus couldn’t hear me, and my arm was getting tired from pitching Sam’s tennis ball over and over, and soon people would start coming home from work—like, Dad—so I figured I’d best get on with it.
As I turned back to the pit, the kindling smoked. I waved my hands over it.
More smoke. Nothing but smoke.
I pitched Sam’s ball again, then quickly lit a second match and dropped it on the fabric. Right after that, the kindling blazed. I leaned away from the pit as the whole mess started to smoke and smell like gaggy melting plastic.
Sam ran back to me with the ball, noticed the flames licking across the pit, dropped the ball like it was on fire, and alarm-barked.
“No,” I whispered at him. “Shhhhh. Be quiet! Shhhhhh!”
Sam ignored me and barked louder, then started running circles around me and the fire pit. I sighed and used the pit’s metal poker to stir the pile and keep any sparks from going rogue. Inside the house, Charlie the bulldog heard Sam’s noise and kicked in with his bass woof-snort-woof concerto.
“What?” Aunt Gus hollered from somewhere.
I glared at my dog. “Thanks a lot. You’re gonna get me murdered.”
Sam grabbed his ball, then ran faster circles. A few seconds later, Aunt Gus steamrolled out the back door, heading straight toward the fire pit. She had on yellow-striped Bermuda shorts and a white blouse and yellow sandals. With her braided fake-yellow hair, her strands of big yellow-and-white beads, and her big yellow sunglasses, she looked like a fashion ad for people over the age of seventy. All she needed was a beach or a cruise ship in the background instead of Charlie, the house, and the big puff of black smoke floating over our patio.
“Hush,” she said to Charlie, then came at me with “What on earth are you—” until screeching tires cut her off.
Sam yapped and danced and Charlie woofed and wuffled and I groaned as Dad came bailing out of his car and ran toward us. In that moment between when I saw him and when he would likely kill me, I had time to think that he really did look a lot like Aunt Gus, only without the glasses and wrinkles—and Dad had a little less hair. I mean, you couldn’t braid his, at least not well. He kept it in a ponytail because of the same older-kid dress code that made him wear khaki slacks and blue golf shirts almost every day of his life. Two years ago, the school board passed a “graduated uniform plan” for local public schools that Dad disagreed with, so he insisted on wearing what his students had to wear, “In solidarity, ’cause that’s important.”
I rubbed my hand over my T-shirt. The dress code wouldn’t hit the middle schools for another two years, at the same time I’d have to go to senior high. One way or another, I was gonna get morphed into a khaki-bot if Dad didn’t kill me right here, right now.
“Jesse!” Dad sounded panicked. “I saw smoke—I thought the house—are you okay?” He slowed as he reached us, then stopped and gaped at the fire pit.
I got to my feet and picked up my dancing Sam and held him close. Sam sneezed all over my neck, then licked his dog snot off my skin. “It’s all in the pit,” I said. “There’s no problem.”
“You lit that fire?” Dad sounded stunned. “What did you burn?”
“Demonic things that have no place in my world,” I told him.
Dad stared.
Aunt Gus studied the fire pit and said, “I think it’s clothes.”
Dad glanced from her to the pit and back to Aunt Gus. She turned around and seemed to be struggling not to—I don’t know. Explode, or something? Finally, she managed to squeeze out, “It’s the tank tops. The ones you made her wear even though she said they were itchy.”
She snorted and coughed, but Dad still looked confused. Then Aunt Gus burst out laughing so loud it made Charlie wheeze and woof and pee on the patio.
What with all the bulldog grunts and Aunt Gus cackling like a Disney witch, it took Dad a few seconds to work up to red-faced mad and ask me, “Did you really just light your shirts on fire, Jesse?”
I clung to my squirmy dog and stepped left to stay upwind of the smoke clouding up from white cotton ash and flame-retardant polyester lumps. “They needed to die.”
“Shirts aren’t alive!” Dad waved his hand at the smoke. “They can’t die! They—oh, never mind. Look, we talked about you needing to get used to new clothes.”
My face got warm, probably from the fire. “You talked. I just got to lis
ten.”
Aunt Gus must have strained something laughing, because she bent over and put her hands on her knees, and Charlie started licking her face. Big wads of bulldog drool hit the patio beneath them.
“You!” Dad pointed at Aunt Gus’s yellow-striped behind. “Not helpful. And how did she get matches, anyway? Where did you hide them? Did she find your cigarettes, too?”
“Aunt Gus smokes cigarillos,” I said. “Those little cigar things. They’re cheaper, which I know because I asked the store clerk.”
“Always the bad example!” Dad bellowed at his mother’s sister. “Keep it up and I’ll put you in Happy Acres!”
“Grandma would haunt you,” I said. “And Happy Acres is across town, and Aunt Gus couldn’t take me to school and pick me up so you can work your own schedule while Mom’s deployed, and you’d have to pay somebody unless they change release times between grades, which they won’t, because the news said our district budget is over fifteen thousand in the red, and they have to keep the bus schedule staggered.”
“Fifteen thousand, huh?” Aunt Gus didn’t stop laughing when she talked, but she managed to stand up and keep it to snorts and snickers that Dad might mistake for Charlie’s snuffling.
“That’s what the news said,” I told her. “Fifteen thousand is a big number. Lots of zeros.”
Sam-Sam yapped and strained toward Aunt Gus, then Dad, trying to lick the hand Dad put over his own face. After Dad rubbed his eyes, he said, “Jesse, you have to deal with the fact that new clothes can’t be perfect, and the world won’t change to suit you.”
I wanted to kick over the fire pit, but I counted to twenty and imagined puppies doing tricks because I didn’t want to set the house or the yard or the forest on fire. “The world doesn’t have to change, and my new clothes don’t have to be perfect. Just not itchy.”
Aunt Gus literally hooted and had to bend over again. Dad put his hand back over his face, and this time, he didn’t move it.
