by Andrew Smith
BLUE CREEK’S MIRACLE BOY!
“Oh my gosh! Look how tall you’ve gotten, Jimmy!” Dad practically erupted with hot volcanic glee when he saw James Jenkins taking orders at the counter, dressed in a ketchup-stained white apron and a paper waiter’s hat with a blue stripe along its side.
I kind of shrank back behind Mom and Dad. Spending every day in two classes with James Jenkins—one of them being the cruel gladiatorial contest of Boys’ PE—I saw him entirely too frequently for my comfort.
Also, James Jenkins hated being called Jimmy. If Dad were in eighth grade, or possibly if he had been alone here, I was fairly certain James Jenkins would have punched my dad in the eye for calling him Jimmy.
And James Jenkins, who was clearly wearing a red-and-white engraved plastic name badge that said JAMES, didn’t react. He didn’t blink. He just stared straight ahead like he could see through us, not moving his head in any direction. Like a murderer. He held a pencil, its point pressed at a rigid forty-five-degree angle to the order pad on the counter, as though to tell us, I do not want to say “Welcome to Colonel Jenkins’s Diner. May I take your order, please?” So just tell me what you want and then run for your lives.
“My, my!” Mom said. “It seems like only yesterday when you were just a baby, running around the neighborhood barefoot and in a soggy diaper! You must be in high school now, right, Jimmy?”
I thought for sure James Jenkins wanted to kill us all after that.
I felt like every time Mom or Dad said “Jimmy,” and especially after the comment about the soggy diaper, James Jenkins was compounding the consequences he would eventually inflict on me. Also, Mom and Dad had NO CLUE that James Jenkins had been held back and was now in THE SAME GRADE as me despite the fact that he was practically A GROWN MAN. It was a story the editors of the Hill Country Yodeler must have somehow overlooked.
“I’m in eighth grade, Mrs. Abernathy,” James said. He moved the point of the pencil about one-tenth of an inch, which is something a murderer would probably do. Then he added, “I’m in two of the same classes with him.”
And when James Jenkins said “him,” he moved his eyes (but not his chin) a quarter of an inch in my direction.
Dad lit up like a volcano of happiness on a moonless night. He said, “You’re in some of Sam’s classes? Maybe you boys can schedule a few after-school homework meet-ups sometime!”
(Excuse me.)
I counted—slowly, like James Jenkins would—to fifty-eight during the painful gap of silence that followed Dad’s “after-school homework meet-ups” suggestion. James Jenkins didn’t move; he didn’t blink. Then finally, James Jenkins inhaled (slowly, like a murderer) through his nose and said this: “Maybe.”
Then he moved his eyes a quarter inch again and looked at me.
GIFTED WITH A VISION OF MY FUTURE
It starts during dinner.
For whatever reasons, Dad decided to order Colonel Jenkins’s World Famous Mac and Cheese Dogs and okra fries for everyone.
And for whatever reasons, at some point in his life Kenny Jenkins, who was James Jenkins’s father, had come to the conclusion that putting macaroni and cheese on a hot dog with sweet relish was a clever idea. Maybe it was an old family recipe, handed down from the original Colonel Jenkins, who happened to enjoy prison food.
Dylan and Evie put extra ketchup on theirs.
While we ate, James Jenkins stood motionless at the counter. He may have been watching us, or he may have been in a state of suspended animation; I couldn’t tell. Kenny Jenkins also watched us, from back in the kitchen where he was busily committing crimes against things that people eat. In fact, I thought that would be a real cracker of a line for the sarcastic review of the food at Colonel Jenkins’s Diner I was imagining writing when I got home.
Dad shook his head and grinned. He had some cheese on his cheek.
Dad said (excuse me), “Dang! That Jimmy Jenkins is going to be some quarterback when he gets into the high school program. Just look at him! He must be six-one already. Maybe six-two! In eighth grade!”
And Mom, not paying attention to Dad, said something like, “Oh! This looks like it could be fun!”
Evie said something about not liking the okra fries, and Dylan, who at three didn’t strive to be coherent, said, “Ketchup magnet!”
Dylan also poked an okra up his nose.
I ignored them all. I was too busy writing imaginary mean things about Kenny Jenkins and his (excuse me) dumb food.
Dad went on. “That’s what everyone says around Blue Creek—that Kenny Jenkins has big plans for that boy’s future in football. Makes sense, right?”
Blue Creek, Texas, was like the Promised Land for dads who made unilateral plans for their sons’ lives.
Dad nodded to himself and agreed. “Makes sense.”
I was concentrating on a metaphor that described the cheese sauce as something responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. It wasn’t perfect, but I was working on it.
Dad went on, “Hey, Sammy, since he’s in your class and all, maybe we could invite Jimmy to tag along on our next survival campout!”
I had a hard time imagining anything more terrifying. So I ignored Dad.
And Mom said to Dad, “I think I should try this. Don’t you think, Dave?”
Dad, who thought Mom was involved in his conversation, said, “I’ve said it ever since I first saw that boy. That kid’s a monster.”
Yes, Dad, I thought, he is.
Mom shifted her paper placemat a quarter turn and pointed down at it. She said, “No. I’m talking about this.”
Dylan had completed his mission: There were two okra fries in his nose.
Then Dad and I saw what Mom had been talking about. Our placemats were advertisements for Blue Creek Days, the annual town fair that celebrated everything there was to celebrate about the history of Blue Creek, Texas.
They didn’t really need more than one day for Blue Creek Days.
We always avoided Blue Creek Days, which regularly featured a Little Boy in the Well attraction.
In a corner of the placemat, inside a box with stars for borders, was an announcement for the first-ever Blue Creek Days Colonel Jenkins Macaroni and Cheese Cook-Off Challenge. It encouraged all the citizens of Blue Creek to attempt to take on Kenny Jenkins in a contest to determine who could make the best macaroni and cheese dish in all of Texas.
The bottom lines of the announcement said this:
FIRST PLACE PRIZE: $500
Entries will be judged by Resa O’Hare, celebrity chef and Culinary Arts instructor at Pine Mountain Academy, home of one of America’s leading culinary programs for high school students!
And just like that I had been gifted with a vision of my future while I sat in front of a plastic foam plate full of Texas diner food at Colonel Jenkins’s.
I had to do this.
Dad adjusted his bifocals and read the announcement.
He looked warily at me, then at Mom.
“Well, I bet you could do this, honey!” Dad was gushing again, but this time at Mom, as opposed to James Jenkins. Then he got a wicked look on his face and said, “But wait. Don’t you have to know how to cook to enter this? Ha ha ha ha!” And he jokingly shoved my mom’s shoulder, which almost made her fall out of her plastic chair, but she laughed too. Sort of.
I took a gulp of sweet tea to knock back the knot in my throat and said, “I’d like to enter this, Dad. I bet I could win.”
For just a second Dad looked like I’d just told him the beautiful beer can he’d found had holes in the bottom of it, and then an Oh-I-figured-it-out smile stretched across his cheesy face and he laughed. “Ha ha ha! Good one, Sam!”
He thought I was joking.
Then Mom laughed too.
Dylan ate one of the okras from his nose.
Evie asked why everyone was laughing.
And Dad patted her ketchup-smeared hand and said, “Everyone in Blue Creek knows boys aren’t supposed to cook, Evie. Not un
less it’s a matter of survival. Ha ha!”
And when Dad said “survival,” his eyes got wide and dreamy, like he was revealing one of the deepest, most closely guarded secrets of life.
I caught Kenny Jenkins staring at us from back in the kitchen. Whatever. He was probably thinking about Lamb Burger Boy or Well Boy or maybe Blue Creek’s Miracle Boy.
But before we left, I asked James Jenkins to give me an entry form for the contest. I folded it up and stuck it in my pocket, and when Dad asked what I’d been talking to James Jenkins about, I (excuse me) lied and told him we were talking about homework and football, and survival campouts.
Dad was so happy.
PLASTIC BOTTLES, ABANDONED WELLS, ALIENS, AND WORM FARMS
We start on Wednesday after school, at Science Club.
Science Club was the second-most popular club at Dick Dowling Middle School, just behind “Mathletes”—the competition mathematics club. Everyone (well, kids who liked math, at least) wanted to be a Mathlete because the kids in that club wore special jackets that looked like lettermen’s jackets, only with a π symbol, as opposed to the uppercase double Ds for Dick Dowling.
It was like all the grown-ups in Blue Creek had decided that if their kids weren’t good enough to become Dallas Cowboys, they’d be happy in life as scientists or mathematicians. I figured if those plans didn’t work out, most dads in Blue Creek would be okay with their kids living in the woods and foraging for beer cans and crawdads, or panhandling from hiking college students.
I didn’t even know half the kids in Science Club. Like everything else in my post-four-year-old life, Mom and Dad signed me up for it without asking if I wanted to join. Karim was in the club, just because I was in it. And his cousin Bahar was in it too. But she liked science just about as much as anyone in Blue Creek liked Colonel Jenkins’s World Famous Mac and Cheese Dogs, which, generally speaking, was a lot.
This Wednesday, the club was embroiled in a heated debate over our project display for Blue Creek Days. Karim was lobbying for building a papyrus reed boat from plastic water bottles, and then using it to catch the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico so we could sail across the Atlantic.
“That’s dumb,” Hayley Garcia, who was president of the club, said. “What if we didn’t get the boat back in time to display it for Blue Creek Days?”
I didn’t say anything, but I was actually thinking, What if it sank and we all died?
And: How would we get our water boiled?
And: There is NOTHING I would like to do LESS than to try to cross the Atlantic in a boat made from plastic bottles.
Science Club met in my homeroom—Mr. Mannweiler’s classroom, since Mr. Mannweiler was also the Biology teacher at Dick Dowling Middle School. And although my dad insisted that I excel in Biology in order to get into AP Physics in high school, he didn’t realize that one of the things Mr. Mannweiler made us do in class was to individually recite a memorized list of “The Twenty-Five Biology Terms Eighth-Grade Boys Cannot Say Without Laughing” until none of us laughed.
(Excuse me.)
That ordeal was worse than setting sail in a bunch of bottles from the garbage.
No boy ever wants to say those words in front of a bunch of other boys, much less in front of his homeroom teacher who happens to be a man.
Naturally, James Jenkins resisted being forced to say those words without sounding like a murderer, which made all the other boys laugh, so James Jenkins happened to be in after-school detention in the same room where we were meeting. James Jenkins was definitely not a Science Club–type guy. Not that I was either. And, also naturally, James Jenkins felt compelled to say something that he decided was important to our club.
James Jenkins raised his hand, very slowly, and then he just stared at Hayley Garcia without moving his head for about five minutes until she figured out that he wanted to say something to her, as opposed to asking Mr. Mannweiler if he could go to the (excuse me) restroom or something.
“What? What do you want, James?” Hayley Garcia, who was not the most patient science-loving Mustang at Dick Dowling, said.
“Maybe your display could be all about how it’s possible for a human being to survive inside an abandoned well for three days,” James suggested. “You could dig a hole and everything.”
I sank down in my chair.
Hayley Garcia actually had a look on her face that implied she was thinking about the merits of James Jenkins’s idea.
Karim shook his head and (excuse me) whispered to me, “What a d-word.”
And while Hayley Garcia stared at me as though she were calculating the exact size of the hole the club’s members would have to dig, and as I was beginning to feel sweaty, claustrophobic, and sick, Bahar steered the garbage-bottle ship of Science Club back toward sanity by suggesting she thought Hayley’s original idea—the one involving the detection and interpretation of low-frequency radio broadcasts as possible extraterrestrial communications signals using repurposed computers and shortwave radios from the 1940s—was the best idea proposed.
And Karim immediately seconded Bahar’s endorsement. I found out later that Karim asked Hayley Garcia if she wanted to go steady, and she said yes, which I couldn’t understand on account of Karim being only in sixth grade, but then again, I didn’t understand virtually anything about middle school to begin with.
The approval of Hayley’s low-frequency extraterrestrial idea made one of the club members—a kid named Michael Dolgoff—very disappointed. Michael Dolgoff wanted to build an arena and force black widow spiders to fight against potato bugs and night crawlers, and stuff like that. He wanted to call the display “Ultimate Natural Selection.”
Michael Dolgoff’s father owned a business called Fat Mike’s Worm Farm. Michael Dolgoff’s father sold bait.
(Excuse me.) “Science Club sucks,” Michael Dolgoff said.
I kind of agreed with Michael Dolgoff, but I was tremendously relieved that nobody present was seriously thinking about burying me again. Except for maybe James Jenkins, but he didn’t count since he was not officially in the club. But Hayley Garcia should never have allowed him to make a suggestion in the first place.
To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded watching bugs fight in an arena, though, as long as I didn’t have to touch them.
And I would have given James Jenkins a dirty look, but I was afraid of him. Besides, I had the filled-out entry form for the first-ever Blue Creek Days Colonel Jenkins Macaroni and Cheese Cook-Off Challenge in my pocket, and having James here with us in Mr. Mannweiler’s room gave me an opportunity to hand it to him so I could avoid walking into Colonel Jenkins’s Diner alone, and possibly having to face Kenny Jenkins one-on-one.
So I waited until the meeting wound down and Hayley Garcia listed all these decisions that the group had allegedly come to consensus on regarding our project display for Blue Creek Days. I wasn’t really listening to her, because I was mad about the whole how-long-can-a-boy-survive-in-a-well thing, and I was also scared about giving my entry form to James Jenkins, which would require having to initiate a conversation with him, something I had never done since that Thanksgiving Day when I was four and James Jenkins basically tried to murder me. But the Science Club made some kind of plan involving radio stations, old computers, hostile extraterrestrials, and finding the highest point in Blue Creek.
I figured I’d catch up on it later; or maybe not. I didn’t really care. There was only one thing I wanted to do at Blue Creek Days, and it didn’t have anything to do with outer space.
PROJECT: ENTRY
It starts with me slipping a folded-in-fourths piece of paper across James Jenkins’s detention desk.
James Jenkins didn’t move. He didn’t blink.
“What is this, Well Boy?” James said.
Karim and Bahar were waiting for me by the door. We always walked home together after Science Club. This time, Hayley Garcia, who was suddenly Karim’s newest girlfriend, waited too. I was still unsure if I approved of Hayley Garci
a, now especially because I was certain she actually thought putting me inside an empty well for three days was a good idea.
I glanced over at them.
Karim and Hayley were sending each other text messages on their cell phones and laughing about them, even though they were standing about eighteen inches away from each other.
What would extraterrestrials think of such behavior?
During school, kids got in trouble for having cell phones out. After Science Club, there really were no rules—just like Ultimate Natural Selection.
Bahar looked at her cousin and rolled her eyes at me.
“Um,” I said.
I’ll admit it: I really did not know how anyone like me could ever speak to anyone like James Jenkins.
I swallowed and asked him, “Could you please give that to your father for me, James?”
James Jenkins slowly put just the tip of an index finger on the fold of the paper. Then he moved his eyes about one-tenth of an inch and looked at me.
“Okay,” he said.
Then James Jenkins, without moving his head or eyes, picked up my entry form and slid it into his pocket, very slowly, like a murderer.
TRAPPED INSIDE THE CAVERN OF DOOM
We start off by getting in trouble, and things get worse and worse from that point on.
Coach Bovard had it in for me, just like James Jenkins told me on day one of eighth grade Boys’ PE.
It happened when James Jenkins and I were getting into our (excuse me) stupid Dick Dowling Middle School Mustangs official Boys’ PE uniforms. It was raining hard that day, and the fields and track were sloppy with mud, so Coach Bovard’s instructions—which were always written on a small whiteboard outside the double-door entry to the boys’ locker room—said this:
Dress
Report to Gym
