“Are you sure all that cheese won’t make you puke?”
“Nope.” He took another huge bite and Edie laughed. It was a good sound, a Bayou St. George kind of sound. The night before, he thought he’d never eat pizza again, but hunger had a way of changing his mind. He hoped Pa would understand.
On the way to school, things were almost kind of normal, except that he spent the whole day itching to see Pa. To start, Aunt Jo turned on real music instead of her annoying positive affirmations, and the ride only took ten minutes instead of an hour, because they didn’t have to wind all the way across town like they did on the bus.
Even his meeting with Principal Everett didn’t turn out that bad. All he had to do was sit there in a chair next to Aunt Jo and nod every once in a while and pretend to look sorry. He even felt kind of bad for Joey Dunkirk, the kid who took his stuff, even if he was the biggest blue jay in America. His mom kept shouting in his ear and spit kept flying from her mouth and landing on Joey’s face. Joey didn’t seem to notice, since he was too busy being yelled at, but gross.
Once it was over, he and Joey shook hands and that was that. Joey sped right out of there, probably so he didn’t have to get spit on anymore.
“Hang on, I almost forgot,” Aunt Jo said. She reached into her purse and pulled out a padlock. “For your locker.”
“Thanks.”
The padlock was cold and heavy in his palm. He thought about saying sorry for being such a blue jay the whole past week, but Principal Everett was sitting right there, and besides, he still wasn’t sure he was sorry.
“I guess I’ll see you later,” Sam said.
“Pick you up after school?” Aunt Jo asked.
“Um, yeah, sure.” He didn’t want to lie to Aunt Jo, but what else could he say? No way he could tell her the truth about Pa and the tree.
When he got to class it turned out that Mr. Redding had removed some of the extra desks and now everyone had assigned seats with little paper name plates. Sam’s desk was all the way at the front, right by Mr. Redding.
Great.
At least he was still by the window.
He wasn’t surprised to find that Joey Dunkirk was sitting on the opposite side of the room, back by the pencil sharpener. He found Edie, stuck in the middle, and she waved at him with her name plate. She’d drawn this weird monster in the corner with a diaper and blood shooting from its mouth. It was both creepy and hilarious, two of Sam’s favorite things. He wondered what Mr. Redding would say if he saw it.
They spent most of the morning talking about owls, where they lived and what they ate, and then Mr. Redding brought out a big box filled with owl pellets, which turned out to be these dry, egg-shaped throw-ups that owls barf out when they’re done eating. They each got a pair of tweezers and a piece of black paper, and their job was to pick out all the bones and try to guess what animal they’d come from. It was pretty great.
Everybody got really into it, and they were talking and laughing, and Sam didn’t even care that nobody was talking to him. After a while, he wasn’t even in the classroom anymore, but back on the tiny beach by their house, digging up shells and alligator teeth with Pa. One of Pa’s grand ambitions was to have a photo featured in Bobby Joe’s Catch of the Week, which was this newsletter that Bobby Joe from the tackle shop put out, featuring all the biggest catches and most unusual finds around Bayou St. George.
Sam’s picture had been in there once, that time he’d found an alligator skull the size of his thumb. Sometimes, the smallest stuff got featured too. Pa had been so proud he’d smiled for a week straight, but Sam knew that Pa wanted his picture in there one day too. And not just any picture. He wanted to be the first person in Bayou St. George history to capture a photo of the notorious Colonel. Now that would never happen.
Sam heard a snap. He’d cracked a piece of skull without even realizing it. He opened his tweezers and the fingernail-size fragments dropped to his paper towel. Oh well. It wasn’t like he could make a full skeleton anyway. All these bones seemed to have come from different animals, and they were hiding in a wad of dirty fur and feathers.
He set the tweezers down and looked out the window. It was the kind of bright spring day when the grass looks warm and you want to stay outside forever, basking in the sun. Of course, he was stuck inside. A metallic twinkle caught his eye from inside the nearby clump of bushes. He watched as the bushes shook and shivered and a gray shape emerged from the center, settling itself on the grass.
It was One-Eye.
The cat or the Boy or whatever he was gave Sam the creeps. Clenching his jaw, he forced himself to look away.
He went back to his owl pellet as if nothing had happened, picking out the needle-thin bones. Every time he stole a glance out the window, he saw One-Eye, still staring and twitching his tail, but pretended not to notice.
He forced himself to think about Pa and his stories. He loved the one about the time Pa had discovered a dinosaur bone behind an old gas station, and he’d had to fight off a skunk and three vicious raccoons to claim it. Turns out, the bone belonged to a steer, not a dinosaur, but that didn’t make the battle any less epic.
Pa had fought off about a zillion wild critters in his day, like the escaped warthog he’d wrestled into submission his first week in the bayou and the pet parrot he’d let free, only to get pooped on as a thank-you.
Drifting back into Pa’s stories carried Sam all the way to the lunch bell. As it sounded, an ache sprouted in his stomach at the sudden thought that he might never hear Pa tell them again. That he might never find out for certain which parts were real and which were made up. The truth hadn’t seemed so important when Pa was still alive, but now . . .
He needed to see Pa. Too bad he had to wait till after school.
At lunch he got in line like everybody else, even though he could see the lunch ladies talking about him, probably wondering if he was going to freak out and leave his food like yesterday. He smiled when Edie came to join him in line. More than ever, he needed a distraction.
“There’s nothing like owl barf right before lunch,” she said.
“Yeah. I hope they’re not serving dead rodent.”
“Nope, just meat loaf.”
“Great. I’m not sure which is worse.”
“I am.” Edie made a queasy face and pointed to a huge metal tray of what looked like dog food.
Sam paid for his meat loaf. Aunt Jo had given him lunch money that morning, even after he said he didn’t need it. According to her, lunch was her responsibility now, and he’d decided to keep his mouth shut and not argue.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” Sam said, when Edie left without getting a tray.
“No. Barf pellets, remember?”
“Oh, right.” They went back to their same spot in the courtyard. It was pretty packed, thanks to the perfect weather. “Hey, you didn’t eat yesterday either,” Sam realized as he sat down and balanced the plastic tray on his knees.
“Barf is kind of a theme in our cafeteria.”
Sam stared down at his meat loaf. “You want some?”
Edie made another face, but she took his corn bread after he told her he thought corn bread tasted like butter-coated sawdust, which it did.
While they ate, Edie told him about the science fair coming up at the community center, and she made it sound like it was going to be awesome and not a grape-soda rainstorm like the one at his old school.
“Are you going to enter your glider?”
Some of the excitement drained from Edie’s eyes. “I was, but it costs $50 to enter because they need money to recover from last year’s storms, and Mom doesn’t have it.”
“That stinks.”
“Yeah.”
“What if you offer to pay her back?”
Edie shook her head and stared down at Sam’s barfy meat loaf. “It’s okay. I probably wouldn’t win anyway. But a lot of people from school are entering.”
“What about the money Aunt Jo gave you?”
&nb
sp; Edie took her time wiping the corn-bread crumbs off her tights. “I spent it. They were going to shut off the water in our house, so I paid the bill. It was kind of all I had.”
“Oh, that double stinks.”
“Pretty much.”
Sam swallowed another forkful of meat loaf and then wished he hadn’t. He bit down on a piece of grit the size of a tooth. He spit the whole bite into his napkin.
“Gross.”
“Told you,” Edie said.
“Hey, I know. Why don’t we enter together? As a team.”
“As a team?”
“Yeah, why not?”
Edie thought it over. “But who will pay our entry fee? I told you, I don’t have any money.”
“I will. I have money from helping Pa clean out the shed and collect worms and stuff.”
“I don’t want to waste your worm money.”
She looked serious, but Sam thought he saw the hint of a smile. “It wouldn’t be a waste,” he said. “We’d be a team.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I am.”
Now Edie really did smile, and so Sam spent the next few seconds staring down at his shoelaces.
“This is going to be great,” Edie said after a while, her eyes sparkling behind her purple glasses. “We can build a brand-new glider and paint it just like your plane, and we can add more solar panels so it’ll fly longer. Mr. Redding lets us borrow his panels so we don’t have to buy them or anything. Ooh, let’s work on it after school. Can you ask Miss J if you can stay late tonight?”
“Sure, but I thought you were sleeping at our house?”
“No, I’d better not. In case Mom comes back.”
“Oh, okay.”
“So, what do you say?”
Sam thought it over. He didn’t want to lie to Edie too, but he already had someplace he needed to be after school. Then again, if he told Aunt Jo he was staying late to work with Edie, she wouldn’t have any reason to come looking for him.
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Yes!” Edie attempted a high five, but missed and accidentally touched his meat loaf.
“Barf. I’m going inside to wash this off. See you in class.”
“Sure.”
Once she was gone, he turned around to face the bushes growing all along the edges of the courtyard. “You can come out now.”
One-Eye sidled free from the thicket and sniffed at Sam’s meat loaf, wrinkling his nose. He tried to rub his bony body against Sam’s side, but Sam jerked away.
“Why do you keep following me? Why can’t you just leave me and Pa alone?”
A kid sitting nearby looked over as One-Eye slid back into the shadows. Sam didn’t say anything else, since now that weird kid was staring, but he could feel One-Eye hiding deep inside the tangle of branches, watching him.
Sam went to the office to call Aunt Jo before the end of lunch. She was just as excited about the science fair as Edie and said she’d try to bring the check when she picked them up. Sam didn’t tell her that Edie planned to stay at her own house, or that she didn’t need to pay. Maybe he was being a blue jay, but maybe he still didn’t like the idea of giving away Pa’s money, not when it was one of the only things he had that Pa had actually touched. He definitely didn’t tell her where he’d really be after school, though she’d probably find out soon enough.
The rest of the day went faster than he’d expected. Before he knew it, the bell rang. 3:40 p.m. Edie hurried over to his desk.
“I thought we’d design the wings first. Mr. Redding has this software on his computer that’s super cool and lets you model for wind speed and resistance and everything. Then we can print the parts out on the 3D printer, except that will probably take all night, so we can’t actually see the finished product till the morning.”
She said all that without even taking a breath, and Sam was starting to feel extra bad for ditching her. “Okay, I just have to go to the bathroom first.”
“Oh yeah, good idea. That way we won’t be interrupted.”
Edie rushed off to the girls’ bathroom, and it was just Sam and Mr. Redding.
“You did nice work today,” Mr. Redding said. Sam prepared himself for the big speech about yesterday, but it never came. “Keep it up. You ever use a 3D printer before?”
“No, sir.”
“I think you’ll like it. We might even be able to repair that plane of yours, if you’re willing to put in some extra work.”
“Sure.” He kept his eyes pinned on his shoelaces, in case Mr. Redding could tell he was lying. 3:41, time to go.
“I can show you how the design software works if you’re ready.”
“I just need to stop by the bathroom.”
Mr. Redding studied him for a moment. His eyes kind of reminded Sam of the Colonel’s, the way they seemed to see straight through your skin to the pink stuff hiding underneath.
“I’ll only be a minute.”
Mr. Redding didn’t say anything until Sam was all the way to the door.
“I’ll be waiting.”
Great.
Sam hid inside the bathroom until he was sure that Edie had come and gone. Then he slipped out and headed straight for the back door so he wouldn’t have to go past Mr. Redding’s room. The door had one of those red exit signs above it, and he was afraid some kind of alarm would go off, but nothing happened. He walked out into the sun and let the door slam behind him.
He saw the dragonflies before he saw the tree. Some younger kids were chasing a stream of them across the field behind the school, laughing and trying to jump high enough to touch one. He climbed the hill, blinking at the sea of grass that shivered with thousands of dragonfly wings. There were even more than the day before. As he approached the tree, he saw that the trunk had come to life, rolling in gentle waves of green and blue.
No one had followed him. They probably didn’t even realize he was gone. With a deep breath, he stuck his head slowly into the hollow. Sure enough, the inside opened up into a tunnel, just like the day before. He took one last look at the field, pleased to find no sign of One-Eye, then he threw one leg over the lip of the hollow and inhaled the deep, muggy scent of Bayou St. George. The fall wasn’t as bad today, now that he was ready for it. He dove forward, and it was kind of like hurtling down the world’s strangest slide. Vines and twigs and leaves flitted past. Already he could hear the cicadas humming in the treetops and the bullfrogs rumbling away in their hidden pools, and his heart squeezed in his chest.
A few seconds later, he dropped out on the other side, and the swamp was just the way he’d left it. A giant grasshopper hopped onto his jeans and clung there for a moment before leaping skyward. A cottonmouth with glowing amber eyes and pitch-black scales wrapped around the base of a nearby tupelo. It hissed something that sounded like, “Nice to see you,” and Sam would have laughed if he hadn’t been so scared.
Pa used to tell him this funny story about a talking snake, and now Sam was wondering if maybe Pa had been telling the truth all along. A scratching sound drew his attention. Sam’s heart seized in his chest as he turned to see One-Eye sitting in the crook of a nearby tree, glaring at him.
“I told you to stay away,” Sam said.
One-Eye tilted his head, as if to say try and make me, and then suddenly he wasn’t the cat anymore, but the Boy.
“But I’ve got so much more to show you.” The Boy jumped down from the tree, landing on all fours like a cat. Then he straightened up and reached out his hand. “I’m here to take you on a little trip down memory lane. You’ve been wondering, haven’t you? If all of those stories your pa told were actually true?”
He had been wondering, but why should he trust the Boy to show him?
“Get out of my way.” Sam stalked past, ramming his shoulder into the Boy with satisfying force. But the Boy was quick. He caught Sam by surprise, jabbing him with cold fists, and Sam splatted face-first into a mud puddle. Righting himself, he spun around, cussing, only to find the Boy leanin
g against a tree, flashing his cruel grin.
“First stop’s through here.” He pointed toward a particularly shadowy patch of tupelo trees. “Stay here if you like. Only, I thought you wanted the truth.”
The Boy winked before darting off deeper into the forest. As soon as he was gone, the trees on Sam’s other side exploded. Branches whipping and cracking, like some mighty beast was beating its way toward him through the brush.
9
THE BEAST TURNED OUT TO be Pa, a younger version at least, running half-naked through the woods like his life depended on it.
“Pa, wait!” Sam shot up, waving his arms, trying to make sense of what was happening. Before he’d gone two steps, another shape burst through the trees and knocked him back down again. It looked kind of like a rhino, only smaller and twice as fierce.
No way.
It couldn’t be.
It was!
The warthog used his tusks to rip through vines and thick leaves, tunneling through the trees like the world’s ugliest jackhammer. And he was headed straight for Pa.
“Hey! Leave him alone!” Sam leaped to his feet, splattering mud, and chased after the unlikely duo. Except they weren’t unlikely at all. Sam knew this story. Pa had told him a million times about chasing down a warthog that had escaped from the zoo his first week in Louisiana. Had the Boy been telling the truth? Was he really seeing Pa’s memory brought to life?
Sam surged ahead, determined to catch up. Luckily for him, the warthog had cleared a path, so all he had to do was follow. Unluckily for him, he hadn’t made the swamp any less treacherous. Twice, he nearly sank in deep holes disguised as mud puddles, and once he had to leap over a cottonmouth as it aimed its poisonous fangs at his ankles.
Sam heard a grunt, followed by a scream. “Pa!”
He broke through into a clearing and there was Pa, as a young man, wrestling a giant warthog, just like in his stories. And like in the stories, the warthog jeered and bucked and made sweeping jabs at the air with his jagged tusks. For his part, Pa looked like a mud wrestler, bobbing and weaving, searching for the perfect angle of attack.
The Secret Life of Sam Page 9
