by Andrew Smith
Dodgeball
NO TALKING IN THE LOCKER ROOM!!!
And I was dying to know if he’d given my entry form to his father, but I just couldn’t get myself to speak to James Jenkins. It was Friday, and I had waited two full days for some sign that my entry form had made it into Kenny Jenkins’s crooked hands, but as yet there was no indication of that from James. Maybe he read my mind or something. I always thought that murderers were good at stuff like mind reading, anyway.
James Jenkins said, “By the way, I gave your entry form to my father.”
At first it kind of scared me that James Jenkins said something to me. To be honest, it looked like he was talking to his locker, because as usual James Jenkins did not move his head. He just sat there on the bench as he took off his shirt, very slowly, and stared directly ahead at the smelly PE stuff in his locker.
It also bothered me that James said “By the way.” It was almost as though in his mind he had pressed pause on whatever conversation we may have had in Science Club/Detention two days before.
And it was especially creepy because nobody ever talked at all in the locker room, not since the very first day of dress-out class when I got the entire class punished by telling James Jenkins about (excuse me) stupid camping with my dad. So the locker room always sounded like some kind of automated factory—a soulless machine where no ideas were ever shared openly; just a bunch of clicks and snaps and zippers and locker doors slamming shut and footsteps and (excuse me) flushing toilets and sighs of despair.
That’s what the locker room always sounded like.
Unless someone talked.
Because if anybody ever talked in the locker room, it was like dropping a bomb in a library, and you were bound to get caught by Coach Bovard, who never wasn’t watching us.
So when I told James Jenkins “Thank you,” Coach Bovard exploded into an angry, steaming hot geyser of rage. He screamed so loud, every boy in the locker room could feel the shock waves rippling through the wet concrete floor and vibrating the rivets and hinges of the rows of metal lockers.
All across Texas, birds fell dead from the sky.
“What are you doing? What do you think you are DOING?” Coach Bovard howled.
In English class, Mrs. Chen had taught us about rhetorical devices, which is what I believed Coach Bovard was utilizing in his question, since he quite obviously did not want me or James Jenkins to actually answer him. Because what I was doing and what I thought I was doing were the same thing: I was sitting there, frozen in fear, reaching into my (excuse me) dumb locker for my (excuse me) stupid PE T-shirt.
Like a striking rattlesnake, Coach Bovard snatched me by my left arm and James Jenkins by his right arm and marched us toward the CAVERN OF DOOM, which was the small, windowless coach’s office next to the showers at the far end of the locker room.
No boy had EVER been inside Coach Bovard’s office. We only knew it was there, kind of like you know a volcano is there—a sleeping one that can destroy civilization and everything you ever believed was real at any moment. All any of us knew was this was the door in front of which Coach Bovard would stand and watch us like a guard dog on a prison gang, to make sure there was no “horseplay” in the showers.
Why do horses always get blamed for the kind of playing that is not allowed?
Did I mention Coach Bovard’s office was windowless? Because that was the worst ingredient in the recipe.
At first I was shocked by the clutter and mess inside Coach Bovard’s office. For someone who always seemed so neat and in control of things, Coach Bovard apparently did not enforce standards on his office decor. There were papers and candy wrappers on the floor, the trash can was overflowing, you couldn’t even see where the keyboard for his computer was buried, and there were at least four used plastic water bottles (the kind that Karim wanted to build a papyrus reed boat out of) sitting on his desk, and each one of them was partially filled with tobacco spit (these spit bottles are things that everyone in Texas is familiar with—there are so many of them littering our roadsides, they could be mistaken for the official state bird or something).
There was one chair in front of Coach Bovard’s desk, and a plastic milk crate that had some file folders on top of it. Coach Bovard swiped the folders onto the messy floor and made me sit down on the milk crate. Then he sat James Jenkins down on the chair and told us (definitely the way a murderer would tell you) not to even think about moving, because he was coming back for us in just a minute.
Neither of us had finished dressing. James Jenkins hadn’t even started dressing, to be honest. He was only in his underwear. At least I had gotten into my PE shorts before we were apprehended by Coach Bovard, but we were both barefoot, and neither one of us even had our T-shirt on.
Then Coach Bovard slammed his door shut and left us there, alone in his tiny office.
And from outside, in the dead silence of the locker room, James Jenkins and I heard the jangling of Coach Bovard’s keys, the turning of the dead bolt.
Coach Bovard locked James Jenkins and me inside his office.
The office with no windows and no way out.
Then came absolute quiet, followed by pounding thick pulses of blood that seemed to balloon—louder and louder and louder—inside the veins in my tightening neck.
THE SECOND DAY IN THE HOLE
THE ITSY BITSY FOUR-YEAR-OLD
My second day in the hole starts with staring up at a small blob of blue Texas sky.
In the daylight, the opening above me was shaped like a football, or maybe a soft-shell crab, cut from the morning sky. Thinking about soft-shell crab made me hungry. It felt like I’d never not been out of the (excuse me) stupid well. And it felt like I would never—never—be able to leave it.
The grinding and clanking of machinery tearing through the ground above me shook and rattled everything in the abandoned well, just like how you can feel the weight and power of an arriving train when you’re standing on the platform at a station. I did not like it. It frightened me to think that everything around me could collapse in on itself, and I’d be buried alive.
That feeling, claustrophobia, would keep coming back to me as I got older—over and over—much worse sometimes than at others. It was more troubling than sadness and fear and loneliness all rolled together and multiplied by ten thousand. The fear took my breath away; it made me forget all about things like oxygen and inhaling and being somewhere safe.
And there was nothing I could do to make it go away.
Later on, before I started talking again, and before I could go to school with the other kids, Mom and Dad took me to see a therapist, and I even went to a summer camp too. The camp was just for kids like me who needed to work on retraining their brains so we could find a way to stop thinking about the bad things that had happened to us. But the claustrophobia was something that never entirely left once it had wrapped its arms around me and wouldn’t let me go.
It was terrible.
And Bartleby, who had already used the excuse that he didn’t like being around crowds of noisy people, was gone again. I was alone. I thought maybe Bartleby was still back in Ethan Pixler’s secret hideout, talking to the chorus of bats.
Nothing seemed real—like a dream or something—because I couldn’t honestly tell the difference between times that I may have been asleep and times when I was awake and listening to the sound of what was going on in the real world up above me.
The real world was just a small blob of crab-shaped sky.
Asleep/Awake/Day/Night/Up/Down—none of it made any difference at all here at the bottom of my abandoned well.
This was the true opposite of the world.
“How’s it going, bud?” My dad’s voice crackled through the little speaker on the cable.
“Dad? I’m thirsty, Dad. And hungry,” I said.
Mom tried to say something to me, but her voice was shaky and strangled from crying. It made me feel awful, because all of this was my fault.
I ruined
their lives.
Dad said, “We’re going to try to get something down to you. We’re working on it right now. And do you hear the digging? The digger crew says we’re almost halfway there, Sam! Almost halfway! We’ll have you out before you know it.”
I thought about what my father was telling me. “Before I knew it” was already gone, and “almost halfway there” meant that Bartleby was right—I would have to end up staying in this well for at least another entire day.
“You should see all the people up here rooting for you, Sam,” Dad said.
And he was right. By midmorning of my second day in the well—the day after Thanksgiving—thousands of people had flocked to Blue Creek. Most of them came as spectators, but some were determined to serve as volunteers, hoping to participate in the rescue of the Little Boy in the Well.
By lunchtime (and I still hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink), the crowds outside the opening to the well had become a sort of uniformed army, awash in patriotic red-white-and-blue Lone Star Texas T-shirts that said PRAY FOR SAM across their chests. The well-digging crew had been replaced by a utility-company truck called a rathole digger, which was used to plant telephone poles alongside highways.
There were TV cameras and reporters from newspapers and magazines. Blue Creek had never been so famous, and it was all because of me.
It was terrible.
Someone from Blue Creek began scooping up small plastic bags filled with some of the dirt pulled up by the rathole digger. There were plenty of people all over America—and in other places too—who were willing to pay money for bags of dirt from the Little Boy in the Well.
Someone had put up a makeshift flagpole. The United States and Texas flags flew above me and my hole. Over a public address system, the governor of Texas led all the gathered spectators in prayer.
And throughout the day I waited and watched the blue blob above me as it changed colors in the dusty afternoon, and then went gray with clouds once again. They put the tent back up over the mouth of the well, concerned that the rain would return, and my little blob of sky disappeared.
Mom spoke to me in the afternoon. She asked me to tell her something. I didn’t really know what to say, so I just asked, “Is it going to be much longer, Mom?”
“It won’t be long, honey,” Mom said. “Can you sing something for us? Everyone would love to hear you sing, Sam. How about ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’?”
I didn’t say anything. I just sat there in my mud and stared at the light coming from the end of the cable—the same place where my mom’s voice was coming from. “Itsy Bitsy Spider” had to be the worst possible song Mom could ask me to sing—all that stuff about being tiny, and crawling up a hole and getting washed back down.
It was terrifying to think about now.
What was Mom thinking?
I listened to the grinding and chewing of the dirt beside the well from the twisting point of the rathole digger.
I said, “I don’t really like that song, Mom.”
Mom said, “It’s okay, honey. You don’t have to.”
“Sorry, Mom,” I said.
Then Mom said, “How about ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’?”
It was not a time when I felt like singing—not even Great-Grandma’s song about bloody flowers, or “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” which probably was my favorite song, on account of the clapping and stuff. I started to cry again, but this time I didn’t make any sound at all. Mom couldn’t hear me over the noise of the excavation anyway, but I still didn’t want her to feel bad because of my (excuse me) stupidity.
It was awful what I’d done to Mom and Dad, to everyone in Blue Creek, where I already knew I would never again be able to be just another regular kid.
I was so angry at myself for what I’d done, and how I’d ended up all alone down here.
WHAT ARMADILLOS DO FOR FUN
“I start my day slow,” Bartleby explained.
Bartleby scratched at the curls of whiskers beneath his chin and added, “Besides, in case you didn’t know it, I’m nocturnal.”
And when Bartleby said “nocturnal,” he hooked his dirty claws into air quotes and widened his glossy black eyes. But he was back, and as far as I could tell it was nighttime. The light from the end of the cable was still shining down into the well, and above me the little hole that was shaped like a football or a soft-shell crab was awash in the white-hot glare of spotlights.
The machines continued their digging and digging.
How much longer could it possibly take for all those powerful machines to get as far down as I’d fallen in just about three seconds?
And the day had seemed so long. Above, my rescuers had given up on trying to get food or water down to me. Nothing they tried worked, and they were afraid that they’d block the narrowest parts of the well by attempting to lower food and water containers down there, especially since the camera and light cable had been stuck since the first day. Dad told me that everything would be just fine anyway, and that I’d be out of the well before I really needed anything. Dad’s reassurance only ended up making me feel hungrier and thirstier, to the point where I felt like I was about to give up.
But they didn’t like it when I stopped talking to them. I was so tired. Someone with a very scary-sounding voice from the Blue Creek Fire Department told me it was critical that I attempt to remain alert and awake so I could talk to the people up above me as much as possible, but I just didn’t want to anymore.
And nobody was talking on the outside now anyway. Once again, things had quieted down at night as all the vigilant spectators had gone home or retired into small tents and sleeping bags to wait for any real signs of progress. Everywhere in the field around the mouth of the well, Blue Creek had transformed into a sort of outdoor-festival tent city, but I didn’t feel festive at all. Television crews had trailers to live in and work from. During the daytime, I could smell barbecues and hear the sounds of acoustic guitars being played, and people singing songs. People had been enjoying themselves while they waited for the Little Boy in the Well to be either saved or lost.
But Bartleby talked and talked. And the same as I’d done with the voices that had been transmitting through the rescue cable during the day, I just kind of shut him out without really paying attention to anything he was saying, which frustrated Bartleby, who thrived on audience.
Bartleby sighed in exasperation. He grumbled, “Well, if you’re just going to lie there staring up at nothing, I may as well go. It is Friday night, you know. It’s not like I don’t already have dozens of other things I could be doing. For fun, I mean.”
And when Bartleby said “fun,” he kind of gyrated his slender armadillo shoulders like he was dancing or something.
“Oh. Sure. Right,” I said.
Bartleby never wasn’t lying.
(Excuse me.) “Darn right I’m right,” Bartleby said.
“Okay. So what do armadillos do for fun on Friday nights?” I asked.
Bartleby’s eyes widened. He said, “Show-and-tell.”
“You do show-and-tell? We do that in preschool.”
“No, no, no,” Bartleby said. He waved a claw back and forth in the air between us like he was erasing the misinformation I’d just delivered to him. “I’ll show you what I do, and you can tell me that you think it’s fun.”
“Or not,” I added.
“You. Are. So. NEGATIVE!” Bartleby said.
But I pointed out, “One of the first things you did to me was—excuse me—poop on my foot. That kind of got us off to a bad start, as far as trust is concerned.”
Bartleby laughed. “Ha ha! That was so long ago! You need to get over it, Sam. Move on. Today’s the only day we have, and there’s never been anything wrong with that! So, two big lessons for you: First, you can’t spend your entire life simply trying to avoid disappointing people and not falling into holes. And second, you have to learn to let go of things. Those right there are some pretty big truths, Sam. Now, if you’re ready to go have som
e Friday-night fun, possibly meet the Armadillo of Thanksgiving Future, or both—ha ha!—follow me!”
Then Bartleby turned his armadillo chin downward so his body became a ball, and he flipped around and ducked into his tunnel, calling back to me, “Come on, Sam. It’s Friday night!”
I could imagine Bartleby’s eyes widening and his claws miming a slow-motion fireworks explosion in front of his face when he said “Friday night.”
The first time I’d followed Bartleby (and it seemed like it was months ago), his tunnel split into three branches. Down the first one we had come to Ethan Pixler’s coffin. The second tunnel led us to Ethan Pixler’s secret bank robber’s hiding place, around fifty-seven cents in pennies and nickels, a bunch of buttons, and about ten thousand bats who all said exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.
We were now in the third tunnel, and I was crawling on my knees, following Bartleby as fast as I could through the dark and dirt.
EIGHTH GRADE
THE FIRST ENORMOUS TRUTH
I’m going to start by saying it is NOT my fault that I ended up in after-school detention with James Jenkins.
And allow me to also add a bit here about what it is like to have claustrophobia as bad as I do.
Having claustrophobia feels like this: When it hits you, you are more certain that you are going to die than you would be if you were actually in the process of dying.
My claustrophobia was like a next-door neighbor who never spoke to me—one whose name I never knew but who was always right there, waiting to come over, move in, and make himself at home. It had always been difficult for me to understand, because it wasn’t until I was quite a bit older that I was able to remember anything at all about being inside the well. That entire time span—three days—is like an erased spot in my life, something I was told happened to me, but it was like deep down I didn’t really know whether I believed it or not.
Up until the day that James Jenkins and I got locked inside Coach Bovard’s windowless, escape-proof office, I had never had an attack of claustrophobia at school. For one thing, my elementary school teachers had all been given lengthy lists of instructions for what to do with the Little Boy in the Well if he started showing signs of a panic attack. But then I got to middle school, and within a week I had been moved from grade six to grade eight. And although my new eighth-grade teachers at Dick Dowling Middle School knew all about Sam Abernathy and the abandoned well (because there was not a soul in Blue Creek who didn’t know more about it than I did), I think most of them assumed I was just like any other kid (albeit a very small one, comparatively speaking).
