A Conversation with Walter Dean Myers, Author, and Phoebe Yeh, Publisher
Hello, readers!
On its inaugural list, Crown Books for Young Readers is proud to publish On a Clear Day, a new teen novel by Walter Dean Myers. Welcome to our proverbial chat room for an intimate conversation with this esteemed author.
Phoebe Yeh: Walter, why did you give your novel a global setting?
Walter Dean Myers: I really believe the world is shrinking every day! What happens in any part of the world affects us all, and multinational corporations are using this to their advantage in their drive for profits. In On a Clear Day, some of the smartest kids in the world realize their future is at stake, stand up, and do something about it.
PY: Where did you get the idea for the book?
WDM: I saw a line of teenagers, nearly a half block long, waiting outside of a store to buy the latest athletic shoes. I had an image of exhausted workers in Asian sweatshops making shoes to ship halfway around the world to American markets. Making their workers happy clearly wasn’t on the agenda of the “good guys” who owned the factories.
PY: Why did you decide to write about a heroine?
WDM: I saw part of the Occupy Movement in London. I thought the movement needed more than the slogans they were spouting or the raised fists. Dahlia was my answer. She started out as a minor character who has crazy mad math skills, but as I looked at her picture on the wall of characters behind my computer, Dahlia began to grow on me. I realized that I didn’t just want to say that corporations were heartless. I wanted to create a sympathetic character who had empathy for others and could channel her behavior and others’ in a mathematical way.
PY: You have also given Dahlia companions, among them an ex-rocker, an ex-con, and a chess prodigy. How did you decide on a mix of personalities?
WDM: In a Q&A session in a juvenile prison, one young inmate who had art skills asked me how he could break into book illustration. Another inmate answered the question by asking the budding artist if he had a portfolio, and the two began to exchange ideas. I realized how great it would have been if the two young men could have combined their skills and knowledge before they got into trouble. So for this book, I created characters with diverse skills who appreciate and trust each other’s abilities.
PY: And we have Sayeed, a teen terrorist.
WDM: What happens when a person is clever, charismatic, and dedicated to making a difference in his life and the lives of his people, but doesn’t have the sophistication or resources to do so peacefully? Often he becomes a terrorist, using the weapons at hand, with a studied disregard for personal sacrifices. Ultimately the compromises Sayeed makes in resorting to violence and the gun culture also bring about his destruction.
PY: Is this novel a call to action for teens?
WDM: George Orwell’s excellent novel 1984 was published only thirty-five years before the title date. But some of the remarkable events of the novel were already taking shape. Today, many giant corporations already control large segments of our lives and threaten to become even more intrusive and manipulative if we allow them. Our teens will either be coconspirators by ignoring the global intentions of these companies (think teenagers lining up to buy athletic shoes made by exploited workers in another country) or become part of the much-needed solutions to counter corporate power. It’s never too soon for young people to bring their awareness and energy to the world’s problems.
PY: From 2012 to 2013, you served as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Your platform was “Reading is not optional.” What did you learn from your travels?
WDM: The skills needed to survive are changing. Today’s young people need excellent reading skills to move ahead with their lives. Just getting by doesn’t get you by anymore. When I was traveling around the country, I saw great schools and great students. But too many young people seem to be alienated from both school and society. The teens in On a Clear Day want to make a difference.
On a Clear Day
Also by Walter Dean Myers
145th Street: Short Stories
Hoops (with John Ballard)
Darnell Rock Reporting
Me, Mop, and the Moondance Kid
The Outside Shot
What They Found
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2014 by Walter Dean Myers
Cover art copyright © 2014 by Ian Keltie
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
Crown and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Myers, Walter Dean 1937-
On a clear day / Walter Dean Myers.—First edition.
pages cm
Summary: In 2035, Dahlia Grillo, a sixteen-year-old math whiz, joins with six other American teens traveling to England to meet with groups from around the world in hopes of stopping C8, the companies that control nearly everything for their own benefit.
ISBN 978-0-385-38753-8 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-385-38754-5 (library binding)—ISBN 978-0-385-38755-2 (ebook) [1. Social action—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. England—Fiction. 4. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M992On 2014
[Fic]—dc23
2013046708
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
On a Clear Day
Contents
Cover
eBook Information
A Conversation with Walter Dean Myers, Author, and Phoebe Yeh, Publisher
Half Title Page
By Walter Dean Myers
Title Page
Copyright Page
Half Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
About the Author
Back Cover and Spine
1
“She just stopped singing.” Ernesto, María’s husband, was a thin, yellowish man with a wisp of a mustache. He wiped at his face as we sat in the back of his old Ford. “That’s what she liked to do best,” he went on, talking to himself as much as to the rest of us, “singing and sometimes dancing even when there wasn’t any music.”
María Esteban was only thirty-eight when she died. When she stopped singing. She was my cousin and had taken care of me after my mother died. Once we had been close. She let me do her hair sometimes and laughed when I messed it up. Then we had grown apart, or maybe had both began to withdraw into ourselves, the way poor people seemed to do more and more. I remembered her singing as we walked down Fox Street to our little house. I didn’t remember her stopping her songs.
The pickup truck and the th
ree cars that made up the small funeral procession moved slowly down Mosholu Parkway toward Van Cortlandt Park.
“She always used to sing. I should have known,” Ernesto said, more to himself than to anyone else. “I should have known.”
It was getting harder to tell when people were going to die. There weren’t many warning signs. Sometimes a slight cough into a handkerchief, perhaps a distant look in the eyes, but mostly it was just a turning inward. They had simply given up on life. They had forgotten their songs. When I saw someone giving up, I wondered if, one day, I would give up, too.
The casket was on the back of the pickup truck. It looked like metal, but I knew it was corrugated cardboard. Around it were a few sad flowers, pictures cut out from religious calendars and framed, and candles. Yes, and signs printed out in Magic Marker that read “Rest in Peace,” or “We Love You, María.”
Old people said that Van Cortlandt Park had been a happy place once. There had been picnics and children playing and families everywhere. I couldn’t imagine it. Now it was just a dreary place, a place where we went to dispose of the dead.
Our little convoy stopped and two men—I thought they were probably from St. Athanasius, María’s church—took the casket from the truck and placed it on the concrete platform in front of the old band shell. Even before the priest got to the front of it, the two men had begun to pour water into the openings at the foot and the head of the casket. Biocremation took only twenty minutes if everything went right. Oxygen-infused potassium hydroxide lined the casket, the water was poured in, and in seconds, the body would begin to decompose. We wanted to honor María Esteban, but no one wanted to be away from our neighborhood for too long. It wasn’t safe.
I had read historical accounts of bodies cremated by burning. It would have been better, I thought. We could have seen the flames rising to the heavens. We could have pretended the body was going to someplace called Heaven.
A priest was praying in Spanish for María’s soul while another man—short, square, baggy pants—held a shotgun as he nervously looked around for any favelos, roaming gangs who might be in the area.
Then the priest’s prayer was over, and the dead woman’s neighbors were getting into their cars. The city would send their crews to clean up the final remains of my cousin. I watched as tiny birds made black silhouettes against the steel-gray sky.
“Dahlia, it’s time to go.” Alfredo, the owner of the bodega on my corner, spoke softly.
“I’m not going back,” I said impulsively.
“You don’t have any other place to go,” Alfredo answered. He smelled of garlic and tobacco. He put his hand on my shoulder, and I turned away. “Try not to stay out too late. In any case, we’ll wait up for you.”
As the cars rolled away, I saw their faces against the glass windows. I knew they would understand how I felt. They would think about me and María as they drove the six miles back to our own little section of el barrio. And I knew they would save my place.
María had been a cousin and a friend. She knew how to touch me, and when to put her arm around my waist and smile at me even when her own life was not going well. More than that. More than that, she knew how not to dig too deep for the truth when the truth wasn’t worth a damn, which was most of the time.
Years ago I had read Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth. Good shit, mostly. We, me, María, everybody in the Bronx, we were the wretched of the earth, wandering through our lives like sheep in a storm, struggling to make sense of what was not sensible. I was feeling sorry for myself.
Good. I liked feeling sorry for myself.
I began to walk without any thought to where I was going. Through my tears, the late-summer light broke up into shards of color that made everything seem unreal. It was almost beautiful. Almost as if that was the way to look at life in 2035.
I felt sorry for María, and for myself. For a wild moment I imagined myself in my own corrugated casket, engulfed in flames. Then I stopped and got mad at myself for going there. I got mad at María, too. She needed to be stronger. She knew that.
I was cold and pulled my sweater tighter across my chest. Looking around, I began to feel fear. Back in my own community, I was frustrated and lonely. Away from those crumbling tenements, I was open to attack. What would I do if I encountered a group of favelos wandering through the park? Or Sturmers?
The Sturmers, as they called themselves, were mercenaries who sold themselves to the highest bidder. They dressed and acted like Nazi storm troopers and even used Sturmer, a German term for some of their troops. They managed to hate everything and everybody, but they were cruel enough to negotiate through the screwed-up world that the C-8 companies had created.
I turned and headed out of the park, the way the cars from the funeral had gone. I walked quickly. I was cold. It began to rain.
It was dark when I reached Fox Street. The streets were shiny from the rain, and the neon lights reflecting off the black pavement were almost festive. The guards at the gate waved me through. I knew I didn’t have anything at home to eat except wild rice, but all I needed was tea. I walked up the two flights in semidarkness, opened my door, went in quickly, and locked the door behind me.
Hello, yellow walls. Hello, green curtains flapping against the window. Hello, roaches.
I touched my computer screen, navigated to a puzzle, memorized it quickly, and then put the water on for tea. Chai and ginger. It would chase away the cold.
And then I was crying again, and being mad at myself for crying, and glad for the relief it brought me. There was nothing else to do and be sane. I lay across the narrow bed and closed my eyes, waiting for the sound of the kettle to comfort me.
I was so friggin’ down. My narrow bed seemed even smaller than usual, and there was no position that felt comfortable. The streets outside were quiet except for an occasional truck that rumbled past. I started counting again. I hated the counting, but I did it almost every night. One bed, one dresser, one built-in closet, one chair, one lamp, a table where my computer sat, winking at me, one basin, one sink, one small microwave oven. In the tiny bathroom there was another sink, a john, a medicine cabinet where I kept my toothbrush, baking soda, soap, and flash drives.
Think of something else. I closed my eyes and imagined that I was in the back of the pickup truck. It was slowing, and soon they were lifting me onto the concrete slab where I would be disintegrated. I was glad to have it over with, to move to some other plane. I was glad, but in the stillness of my room, I was crying.
One bed, one dresser, one built-in closet, one chair, one lamp, a table where my computer sat, one basin, one sink, one small microwave oven. In the tiny bathroom there was another sink, a john, a medicine cabinet where I kept my toothbrush, baking soda, soap, and flash …
The window was open slightly, and the coolness of the night air felt delicious as it made the tiny hairs on my ankle stand up. Delicious because it was a feeling. It told me that I was still alive. Barely.
My name is Dahlia Grillo. I am sixteen. There was a time when I looked forward to being seventeen. My mother had me at seventeen, and I thought I would go past that age and become something great even though I didn’t know what something great could be. Perhaps a math teacher. I liked to imagine myself teaching little kids geometry and watching them discover things about triangles and the relationships between angles. When I was thirteen, and fourteen, and just getting comfortable with my period, I knew I had to be serious about life. But being serious about your life meant getting real with your dreams. Some of my friends wanted to be singers, or actresses, and I didn’t say much about that but I knew it wasn’t going anywhere.
All that changed in a friggin’ heartbeat. It was like there was a plan to have a surprise party for everybody—how weird does that sound?—and then, at the last minute, they decided to kick the crap out of everybody instead.
We had all known about the Central Eight companies. C-8 controlled everything, and some people were worried about just how much
influence they had, but it was the way they screwed with your head that got to me. Like when one of the companies claimed that they could end world hunger within ten years and announced a quadrillion-dollar investment. The Internet was all over that saying that it would bring an end to war and an end to dictators and an end to everything bad except dandruff. The company brought out a whole new range of seeds that could grow anywhere and bugs couldn’t mess with them. But then they got a patent on the seeds, and before anyone knew it, they controlled all the food production in the world. And people were starving everywhere.
It was bad, but it wasn’t so bad if it didn’t reach you personally.
“The sun is always warm if your belly is full!” my mother used to say. Poor mama. After my father died, she worked so hard to find a better life. When things began to fall apart, when people started noticing which category they fell into, she even worked harder to keep us out of the lowest rank. That’s how we got to Fox Street in the Bronx.
The lowest rank were the favelos, poor people who lived by either stealing or begging. Nobody knew how many of them there were. Some people said that, in America, it was half the population.
The next step up were the Gaters, people who lived in gated communities. At first they just built communities with their own shopping malls and restaurants away from the inner cities, places you needed a car to get to. Then they started issuing special credit cards if you wanted to buy anything in their communities. And finally they put up gates and armed guards. My neighborhood, mi barrio loco, had gates even though no one had much money and the dried-up old men guarding them were mostly useless. Still, they wanted to keep the favelos out because they’d steal whatever little we had.
Mama worked two jobs to buy an apartment just for the two of us. I knew she was working herself to death. When she died, my family bought our apartment and gave me the little place I have now rent-free.
So there are the favelos, then the Gaters, then those invisible people who seem to have everything. The New Yorker magazine always has articles about how unfair it is for some tiny percentage of the population to own everything. But just knowing something doesn’t help you to do anything about it when you’re too busy trying to cover your own butt. You saw what was going on, and then after a while—maybe your mind closed down or something, I don’t know—you stopped seeing it.