by Andrew Smith
It starts by me telling the story of my after-school detention over macaroni and cheese with Karim and Bahar.
Another week had ended at Dick Dowling Middle School.
And another weekend arrived when Dad and I would be abandoned somewhere in the Texas wilderness for survival camping—rain or shine, as Dad liked to forebode.
“Supposedly, James Jenkins has read Dune. He said it was ‘awesome,’ ” I said.
And when I said “awesome,” I hooked my fingers into air quotes and made my eyes into big circles, which kind of gave me a feeling of déjà vu, but I had no idea where it came from.
Strange.
Bahar nodded and gave me a suspicious look. Of course, she’d read every Dune book there was, including the ones that weren’t written by Frank Herbert.
Bahar said, “You should have given him the idiot test. You know, ask him what his favorite part of the book was.”
I shook my head. “I thought about doing that. But then I realized that if he really did read it, he might kill me for doubting him; and if he didn’t read it, he might kill me for trying to trap him. Either way it wasn’t going to end well.”
Karim scraped his spoon noisily across his plate. He said, “Giving the benefit of the doubt is a good way to avoid a surprise encounter with natural selection. And this is prize-winning mac and cheese, Sam.”
My clothes tumbled around inside the dryer while we ate. Karim ended up loaning me some pajamas and a robe while I waited for them to finish drying. By the time I’d gotten to Karim’s house, I looked like I was a shipwreck victim, plucked from the middle of the ocean. So did James Jenkins when we got to his house, which was across the clearing in the woods where the now-sealed “Sam’s Well” was located, a good half mile closer to school than my house was.
I didn’t confess to Karim and Bahar that James Jenkins and I actually walked home from school together. It may have been too much for them to take. I didn’t even know if I believed it, because James Jenkins was all of a sudden no longer James Jenkins, and I didn’t know how I felt about that.
On the way, two different cars pulled up alongside us and the drivers asked James if he wanted a ride. James Jenkins was a guaranteed future football hero in Blue Creek, and everyone was counting on that. And James told both of the drivers no thanks, but each one of them also said something along the lines of “Hey! Isn’t that the kid who fell in the well?”
James Jenkins, in his usual murderous style, said nothing, just kept his eyes forward and continued walking next to me—slowly, which made us both much wetter than we would have been if we had walked at a non-murderer-in-a-rainstorm pace, or especially if we had accepted a ride from a creepy football-loving stranger.
In fact, when we got to James Jenkins’s house, he told me that nobody was home—that nobody was ever home, because his father was always at Colonel Jenkins’s Diner. Then James Jenkins asked me if I wanted to come inside and use a towel, or borrow something dry to put on, or have some hot chocolate or something.
I stood there at his front door, dripping. I shook my head and said, “I still have a ways to go anyway, but thanks for offering. Um . . . James.”
Maybe James Jenkins was actually trying to be nice to me, and not merely attempting to lure me inside his HOUSE OF DEATH so he could murder me behind closed doors, where nobody would see—not that any likely witnesses were out and about in this wooded and empty end of Blue Creek, on account of the storm.
“Yeah. Well, no worries, Sam,” James said. It struck me that James Jenkins had never once in the past seven years called me Sam. To him, I had always been Well Boy, just like I had always been to all the other people in Blue Creek.
I stood there for a long, quiet minute, dripping.
It was a very awkward good-bye.
“Well. I’ll . . . uh . . . see you in Mannweiler’s Monday,” I said.
“You want to come over or something this weekend?” James Jenkins said.
I was right—we did break the universe.
“I can’t. I’m going camping with my dad tomorrow,” I said.
“Oh. Lucky,” James said.
“Not the way my dad makes us do it. It’s torture. We eat bugs and trash, and I have to sleep outside, on account of my . . . uh . . . thing.”
“Claustrophobia?”
“Yeah.”
“Even if it rains?”
“Even if it rains,” I affirmed.
“Oh,” James Jenkins said. He stared directly ahead at the little beveled glass windows in his front door.
I slosh-turned to leave.
“Hey, hang on a second,” James said. “I want to show you something.”
Then James Jenkins squeezed his hand inside the soggy front pocket of his jeans and started to pull something out. This was it, I thought. This was the classic moment in all murder movies when the secret and deadly weapon is pulled on the unsuspecting victim.
Surprise!
As I stood there, I braced myself for the impact of the universe coming back together as James Jenkins the kind-of-nice, kind-of-sad guy I got in trouble with and walked home from school with transformed back into James Jenkins the murderer. Then James pulled out his cell phone, which, like everything else in this small part of the torn-asunder universe, was wet. He pulled up his shirttail and wiped the screen of his phone dry on his undershirt, then began entering something into it.
James Jenkins held his phone in front of me so I could see what he’d brought up on the screen.
The screen showed a website for a place called Acceleration, which was obviously a dance school—the one in Austin that James Jenkins had told me about.
There were two noticeable photos of James Jenkins on the school’s home page, like he was the star of the school or something. And I’ll be perfectly honest—I had never really looked at James Jenkins in this way before. How could I? But seeing those pictures of him, the confident expression on his face, how alive his eyes looked, and how much he seemed to fit in with what he was doing, well, if I owned a dance school (which I never would do) and I wanted people to think I ran a good dance school, I would use pictures just like the ones Acceleration posted of James Jenkins to show people what a great place it was.
In one of the pictures James stood beside a white horizontal rail (called a barre, he told me), holding on to it with one hand. In the photo, James Jenkins was wearing gray tights (that were so tight they made him look [excuse me] naked) and a white undershirt with a neckline that opened all the way down his chest. James held up one leg extended behind him, with his toes pointing higher than his head, while he reached out his other arm straight from his shoulder, fingers bent inward slightly, his eyes focused directly on his hand, with an expression on his face that looked so calm and proud and radiant. There was a little sweat around his hairline and on his neck.
Below the picture of James Jenkins at the barre was a link:
BREAKING THE BARRIERS: AUSTIN’S BALLET BOY WONDER.
In the other image James was dressed in baggy jeans, a tank top, and loose Adidas sneakers, and he was upside down, with just one hand on the floor supporting himself like the trunk of an improbable tree, legs toward the sky, knees bent, both feet kicking out in opposite directions, his free hand seeming to casually rest flat on the sole of one of his shoes. And again, the expression on his face projected a kind of attitude that he could do this all day long—and that he loved doing it too.
James Jenkins pointed at the picture of him at the barre. “This one’s taken in contemporary dance class. It’s actually Russian ballet. It’s crazy hard, but it’s my favorite. You have to wear tights, and you pick up your partners sometimes and lift them over your head.”
“Did you ever drop one?” I asked.
James Jenkins laughed. Well, it wasn’t actually a laugh, because it was still James Jenkins, after all (I think). He smiled, which is to say the edges of his mouth twitched about a seventieth of an inch.
He said, “No.”
Then James Jenkin
s pointed at the other photo—the one where he was upside down in the middle of sticking a one-armed handstand. He said, “This one’s hip-hop. It’s fun, because when people see you do it they get excited. Everyone gets hip-hop and break dancing. It’s different from ballet, which is almost like you need a translator to understand what’s going on. That’s what I like most about ballet, though, and how it’s impossibly hard at times.”
“But wait. I saw you at the Back-to-School Dance, and you were just running around. How come you didn’t dance there?” I asked.
James Jenkins kind of shrugged, I think. He said, “Nobody ever knew until now. I always think people will laugh, because everyone says I should do football. And I didn’t want people to make fun of me.”
I looked at the pictures on the phone.
I almost thought about asking this James Jenkins what he did with the other James Jenkins’s body. But then I glanced at James and it was all real. He really was the kid in the pictures, I really did walk home with him, and we really did break the universe that day.
I said, “Wow. That’s pretty amazing. Um . . . James. Do boys do dance at the University of Texas?”
James Jenkins shook his head, which was actually only about a fiftieth of an inch in each direction, and said, “Not if they’re Kenny Jenkins’s kid they don’t.”
I said, “Yeah. I get it.”
But by the time I’d slogged my way through the field behind James Jenkins’s house, I had almost convinced myself that nothing that happened to me that day actually happened. I stopped at the site of the old well—“Sam’s Well.”
Maybe that never happened too. I couldn’t remember those days anyway, so it was almost as if the broken concrete and rebar that had been piled up over the place where the crews had filled in the opening established some kind of testimony to a false memory. And that false memory included an official yellow sign that said DANGER: UNSTABLE GROUND, on which somebody had scrawled a skull and crossbones and this little caption:
Pray for Sam
But I did not tell my friends Karim and Bahar anything about what James Jenkins and I talked about that day. In many ways I believed that James Jenkins really didn’t want people to know about the kid he was not, and the kid he wished he was, and I felt a little strange that, for whatever reasons, after all these years had gone by, James Jenkins had decided to tell me, as though I maybe had some power to help him be okay with things.
It was very confusing.
And when Karim complimented the food I’d made for them, I kind of snapped out of the shock and confusion that had been plaguing me ever since PE class.
So I forced my guilty brain (I had no idea why I felt guilty, but I did) to change subjects. I said, “Speaking of macaroni and cheese, Karim, you’ll never guess what I did.”
And I told Karim and Bahar about Kenny Jenkins’s (excuse me) dumb macaroni and cheese championship at Blue Creek days, and how I’d entered it, but I was afraid to tell Mom and Dad (probably in the same way that James Jenkins had never shown those pictures of himself dancing to his father either, but I didn’t say one word about that to them, because I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do about anything anymore.)
I was not good at figuring things out.
THIS IS NOT A VEGETARIAN CIRCUS; OR, FILL IN THE BLANK
This starts near the end of a brutally long day, over a meal of actual bugs, with a challenge to my father.
Actual bugs—worms, to be exact.
(Excuse me.)
Michael Dolgoff—the Science Club kid who wanted to make a combat arena for black widows and cicadas or whatever—would probably have been envious, whereas I found myself caught somewhere between disgust and a sudden and intense urge to run away from home and join a circus.
A vegetarian circus.
Survival camping with Dad was rarely fun. I’ll be honest: It actually never was fun. And now, after spending the last twenty hours without sleep, in on-and-off rain and constant mud, with absolutely nothing on except for some soggy shorts, huddling beneath a rigged “debris canopy” of woven tree limbs while Dad struggled to get a tinder-starved fire started, this particular trip was as not-fun as being locked inside Coach Bovard’s CAVERN OF DOOM. And after all the rain of the past two days, finding a supply of “resources” (as Dad calls it—I call it trash) had been particularly difficult. At least the weather had not taken a full turn toward the chill of winter yet.
Fortunately, I talked Dad out of making me wear my Clan Abernathy kilt, which he tried to get me to do for this trip. He wore his, though. So there we were: out in the rain and mud, practically naked, and starving—a barefoot, undersized eleven-year-old boy who dreamed of one day being a world-class chef, dressed only in a pair of shorts, and his father, who looked like he had nothing on but a parochial schoolgirl’s skirt.
We might survive the elements and eating garbage, but one of these days some drunk Texan with a gun was going to overreact to the ridiculous image we presented.
It was miserable out there. And it was nearly ten at night by the time Dad finally got a few twigs to smoke and offer up a weak little flame. But we hadn’t been so lucky as to find an old hubcap or used beer can this time. Dad unearthed a wad of old aluminum foil from the ashes of a long-abandoned campfire. He carefully unfolded the foil and shaped it into a shallow pan for cooking things. That took about three hours. The rest of our time was consumed by trying to make his debris canopy against the rain, and then Dad trying to start a fire.
We had left home that day earlier than usual, at two in the morning.
“Ah! There she is!” Dad was extremely proud of the fire he’d achieved after being out in the rain for nearly one entire rotation of the earth. I was so tired, I could barely keep my eyes open, but I knew better than to plead with him that we should give up and go find a way to call Mom, to have her come rescue us.
Dad went on. “See, Sam? We got this. The key is simply to never quit. You tell yourself what the one thing you want most of all is—in this case, fire—and you keep working for that one thing until it’s yours!”
And when Dad said “one thing,” he made air quotes with his fingers.
Weird.
Dad had caught a dozen or so earthworms, which he carried inside a cone he fashioned from a piece of tree bark. He tipped the cone toward the firelight so I could see the things—living, glistening purple spaghetti—and he said, “It’s okay to eat these raw in an emergency, Sam, but as a precaution against swallowing any types of parasites, you should always try to cook them first if you can. They taste better that way, besides!”
Everyone knows parasites taste better when you cook them.
And I watched in horror as Dad dumped the blob of living worms into his little dirty tinfoil pan of boiling water. Then he added some wild herbs and stirred his worm soup with a twig.
Dad explained that it took only about two minutes to cook earthworms.
I told him to take as much time as he wanted.
We ate with chopsticks whittled from tree branches. It was the worst thing I had ever had in my mouth—even worse than the gravy that comes with Colonel Jenkins’s chicken-fried steak on a stick. The worm soup tasted like pureed dirt, and the worms themselves were salty and had the texture of soft-boiled eggs mixed with warm cottage cheese and glue. I gagged when I swallowed them, and when I did manage to get them down, it felt like most of the gluey parts painted the inside of my mouth and throat and would not go away. But I did it for Dad, and because I wanted him to be in a happy and satisfied frame of mind. I was determined to tell Dad the things that had been building up inside me ever since I started attending Dick Dowling Middle School.
To be honest, they’d been building inside me ever since I got out of the well seven years ago.
Growing up (excuse me) sucks.
“We are very lucky men, Sam,” Dad said.
Mrs. Chen, my English teacher, would have been pleased. I could have thought of dozens of adjectives to describe us. Lucky di
d not immediately come to mind. It was past midnight, and the rain began to pick up again.
The worm goo made my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth. I cleared my throat, but it didn’t do much good.
I said, “Dad, I need to talk to you about something.”
Dad leaned forward and placed a few sticks onto his fire. He had a piece of boiled earthworm and some dirt stuck to the whiskers on his upper lip. And he looked absolutely thrilled.
Dad said, “Is this . . . about girls, Sam?”
And when he said “girls,” Dad’s eyes got wide and shiny. It reminded me of someone I knew, but I couldn’t nail down exactly who it was.
Weird.
Dad scooted closer to me, as though he were expecting me to reveal some deep and telling secret about myself, which I was about to do, even if it wasn’t anything at all related to the secret about girls or whatever Dad had dreamed up in his own head about me.
Maybe that’s the key to unlocking everything for kids like me, and for kids like James Jenkins, too: finding some way to erase the limits of the dreams our parents have for our lives. Even if we are just kids, as they see us.
I said, “No, Dad, it is not about girls.”
Dad’s grin deflated.
He said, “Is it about boys?”
His eyes got serious and somber.
My eyes got rolly and upturned.
I almost wished for another mouthful of worms at that point. Why do parents always make it impossible to talk to them?
I took a deep breath. My mouth was still sticky.
I said, “Dad? You remember the other day when we went to Colonel Jenkins’s—when I went up to the counter and talked to James—Jimmy—Jenkins before we left?”
My dad’s eyes became double full moons in the light of our worm bake.
He said, “This is about Jimmy Jenkins?”
I looked at my father. His face showed a hint of astonishment mixed with pride and maybe a little shock. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t seeing me. He was looking into a future that would never be real.
Why are fathers like that? I mean, it was like all Dad ever did was fill in the blanks for me as though my life were some kind of a test. And if this was a test, Dad would get every fill-in wrong. At that point I wasn’t ever about to tell him how James Jenkins and I had spent detention together, and then how we walked home and talked about things, and then how it felt almost as though I could actually become friends with James Jenkins, because I knew things about James Jenkins that nobody else knew, things nobody else would even believe.
