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Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York
Text copyright © 1987 by Barbara Park
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eISBN: 978-0-307-79704-9
Reprinted by arrangement with
Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers
v3.1
This one’s for Sibyl
(who could definitely write a book of her own!)
Contents
Cover
Other Yearling Books
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
About the Author
1 “My leg’s hot,” I announced as our car pulled out of our driveway.
It was the day of the “big move.” At least that’s what my parents kept calling it. I hated that. It’s not that I didn’t realize moving from Arizona to Massachusetts was “big.” It’s just that when they said it, they made it seem real exciting and fun. They never made it sound like what it really was—rotten.
My mother turned around and gave me one of her looks. “Please, Howard, don’t start. We haven’t even made it to the street yet.”
I glanced over at my baby brother, Gaylord. He was sitting happily in his car seat, staring at his hands. He had just discovered his hands, and he kept opening and closing them like they were some great new invention.
I reached out and touched his leg.
“Gaylord’s leg isn’t hot,” I reported. “Gaylord’s in the shade. Has anyone ever noticed how Gaylord always gets the shade? I mean, I’m aware that he’s a baby and everything, but I don’t think you should play favorites like this. I think we should flip a coin for the shady side.”
When no one said anything, I leaned toward him. “What’s that, Gaylord?” I asked. “You want what?”
I tapped my father on the shoulder. “Gaylord says he wants to switch places. He says he wants to get some sun on those lily-white legs of his.”
My mother just sighed. She probably would have yelled, but I had been making her yell so much lately, I think she was getting sort of sick of it. Normally, parents really enjoy yelling. But I guess it’s like anything else—too much of a good thing, and it’s not as fun anymore.
What’s weird is, until this move came along, I hardly made my parents yell at all. I don’t mean I am an angel or anything. But I get good grades at school, and I’ve never been arrested. I don’t think parents can ask for much more than that.
I used to actually even like my parents. They had always been pretty understanding, pretty fair. They didn’t go around tickling me in public or embarrassing me the way some parents do. That’s what was so crazy about our “big move.” They hardly even discussed it with me! I’m not kidding. My father just came home all excited one day and told me he’d gotten this big promotion and we’d be moving to Massachusetts. That was it! We didn’t even take a vote!
He made it sound real cheery, of course. Whenever parents announce something you’re going to hate, they try to spice it up and make it sound better than it is. They kept calling the move “a great new adventure.” Then they spent a lot of time telling me how much better off I was going to be because of my father’s new job. They talked about college and my future, stuff I couldn’t care less about right now. So instead of feeling better, mostly I just felt sick to my stomach.
I cried a lot after I found out. I didn’t do it much in front of my parents, though. When you’re ten and a half, you don’t like a lot of people sitting around watching your nose run. That’s why I saved most of it for my room, muffling my blubbering sounds with my pillow. Sometimes it got so soggy, I couldn’t sleep on it.
I was also more scared than I’d ever been before. But it wasn’t the kind of scared you feel when you think there’s a dead guy with a hatchet hiding in your closet at night. It was a new kind of scared. Moving makes you feel all alone inside. You don’t know what the new town is going to look like, or your new house, or your street, or even what kind of people you’ll meet. It may not sound scary. But if you ever have to move, you’ll understand what I mean.
Anyway, besides making me feel sad and scared, the whole idea of moving also made me furious. How could my parents do this to me? How could they just whisk me away from all my friends, and my school, and my soccer team, and then tell me what a “great new adventure” I was going to have? Did they actually expect me to be happy about it? Did they think that I had no feelings? That they could just pick me up like some dumb stuffed animal and set me down any old place, and I’d be fine?
As the car neared the end of my street, I started fidgeting.
“I’m bored and my leg’s hot,” I whined. “Also, I think I might be getting carsick.”
At the wheel, I saw my father shaking his head in disgust. “Come on, Howard. Not today, okay? Why don’t you take some time off from complaining and just relax?”
Relax? I thought to myself. Are you kidding? Complaining is my job now. It’s what I do.
Suddenly my mother reached into a bag in the front seat and tossed me back an orange. She does this sort of thing a lot when we’re traveling. Since I’ve never been what you’d call a good little traveler, my mother buys a bunch of stuff to keep me busy so I won’t gripe. When you think about it, it’s kind of insulting—like feeding a gorilla a bunch of bananas so he won’t bother you.
I was particularly annoyed at my mother lately—especially after what I heard her say to Aunt Emily on the phone. It happened a couple of days before we moved. I was sitting on the back stairs, so she didn’t know I was around.
“Yeah, he’s not too happy about it right now, Em,” she had said. “But you know how kids are. Once you get them there, they always seem to bounce right back.”
Bounce right back! I’m not kidding.
She really said that! She made me sound like a Nerf ball. Like she had a foam rubber son with no emotions at all!
The more I thought about it, the more annoyed I got. I tried to take my mind off things by looking out the window, but my father’s voice distracted me.
“Hmm,” he said, pondering out loud. “I wonder if the van will get to Massachusetts before we do.”
The moving van! Why did he have to bring up that stupid moving van? I hated that van and all the stupid moving men that came with it! The day they packed our stuff had been the worst day of my life.
My parents were upstairs when the knock came at the door. “Answer that, would you, Howard?” called my father. “We’re busy up here.”
“I can’t!” I called back. “I’m in my pajamas!”
My father was standing at the top of the stairs with his hands full. “No one cares what you’re wearing, Howard. Just let the men inside.”
“I care what I’m wearing! Have you seen these things? Would someone please tell Nana that I’m too old for Porky Pig pajamas?”
“Howard!”
My father was using his killing voice. You can push him so far, but when he uses his killing voice, it’s best to do what he says. I went to the door.
“Hi, sonny.”
There were three of them, all lined up in their brown moving-men suits. They came inside. One of them looked at my pajamas and whistled. “Porky Pig, eh?” he asked.
I covered Porky with my hands and ran up to my room. Then I locked the door so no one could come in. Later, when the movers were ready to pack my stuff, my father got a key and opened it.
It still makes me sick when I think about it. The moving man stomped right in and started dumping all my stuff into big boxes. He just heaped it together like it was garbage or something. When the marbles fell out of my Chinese checkers, he dumped them in the box without even putting them back in the game first. It really made me furious. I don’t even like Chinese checkers, but a guy still likes to keep his marbles together.…
I concentrated harder on looking out the car window. As luck would have it, we were just passing Thornsberry’s house. Seeing it gave me this real empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. Barry Thornsberry is one of my best friends. Saying good-bye to him and to my other best friend, Roger Grimsley, had been the hardest thing I’d ever had to do in my whole life. The three of us practically grew up together. I know this sounds mean, but I felt closer to Thornsberry and Roger than I did to my very own baby brother. I mean, we’ve even known each other longer—since preschool. Our teacher, Miss Filbert, introduced us and assigned us to the same work table.
Thornsberry was crying at the time. Of the three of us, he’s the most sensitive. He thought his mother had given him to Miss Filbert for keeps. It took him about a week to figure things out.
I didn’t like Thornsberry at first. It’s hard to get to know a kid who only talks to you from behind a Kleenex. I liked Roger, though. On the first day of school, Miss Filbert asked us to draw a picture of our family. Roger drew a cow.
“Uh, that’s a very nice cow, Roger,” she said. “But are you sure you understood the project? You were supposed to draw a picture of your family.”
Roger just smiled happily and nodded.
Later we learned that cows were the only things Roger could draw. By the end of the year, Miss Filbert had taught him to stand them on two legs and dress them in clothes. Personally, I thought this was a big mistake. In kindergarten, every time Roger drew a picture of his family, it looked like they all had cow heads.
Before the move, I’d talked a lot of my worries over with Thornsberry and Roger. They hated my leaving almost as much as I did, but they tried to make me feel better about it.
“Come on, Howard,” said Thornsberry. “Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think.”
“How could it not be bad?” I asked glumly. “Didn’t you ever study about Massachusetts in history? The Pilgrims moved there, and by the first winter practically all of them were dead.”
Roger made a face. “I hate Pilgrims. I’ve hated them ever since my mother made me be one on Halloween. Remember that? She made me wear that stupid top hat and long black coat. Everyone thought I was Abraham Lincoln carrying a turkey.”
Thornsberry gave me a funny look. “You don’t really think you’re going to die there, do you, Howard?”
“Well, maybe not actually die,” I admitted. “But I’m going to have to go to a stupid new school, and that’s almost like dying.”
Every time I thought about it, my stomach tied itself in knots. “God, I can’t believe it. I’m actually going to have to be a new kid.”
Thornsberry and Roger groaned.
“We got a new kid in our room about a week ago,” Roger said. “No one can remember his name, so we just call him by the color of his shirt. On Thursday he was the kid in the green shirt. On Friday he wore a shirt with his name on it, so we called him the kid in the Kenneth shirt.”
Thornsberry hit Roger on the arm. “We’re supposed to be making him feel better, remember?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied. “It’s not like I don’t know what happens to new kids. I’ve had enough of them in my class to see how hard it is to fit in.”
“Yeah, but you won’t have any trouble, Howard,” said Roger. “It’s not like you’re a geek or anything. At school you’re practically even popular.”
“Sure, Howard,” added Roger. “You won’t have any trouble. You’ll see.”
Thinking about how nice they had tried to be almost made me start to cry. My mother must have heard me sniffle or something, because she turned around.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, raising her eyebrows sympathetically.
“Everything,” I answered dismally. “Everything’s the matter.”
She just sighed and turned back around. A second later she threw over a granola bar.
Instead of saying thank you, I made a noise like a gorilla. She didn’t say anything, but I’m pretty sure she got the message.
We had turned onto the highway by then, so I spent the next couple of hours reading signs, trying to get my mind off the move. It wasn’t easy, though. Every few minutes, we’d pass a billboard with kids painted on it and I’d start wondering about the kids in Massachusetts. What would they be like? Would they dress the same way we did in Arizona? I hoped I would fit in. One time we had a German kid visit our school, and he wore a suit and a bow tie. He looked like a little grandfather or something.
Anyway, all I’ve got to say is that moving really stunk. And even though it’s over now, I still don’t blame myself for the way I acted about it. A lot of mean stuff has been done to me—by my parents, by the moving men, and by my father’s stupid company. And even though sometimes you can control your anger, you can’t control your sadness. And that’s what I mostly was, I guess—sad. Sad about leaving my friends and my school and my room and my soccer team and a million other things.
If you’ve ever been sad, really sad, you know what I’m talking about. Sadness is with you all the time. Even when your friends are trying to make you laugh, sadness seems to be waiting right behind your smile.
2 Thanks to Gaylord’s screaming, the trip to Massachusetts drove us all crazy. I appreciated the job he did on my parents, but unfortunately I had to listen to him too. For the first two days he was pretty good, but by the time we got to Illinois, Gaylord decided he hated his car seat. He screamed from the minute he was strapped in until he cried himself to sleep. Then when he woke up and found he was still in the car seat, he screamed all over again.
At lunch my mother asked the waitress if she wanted to buy a baby. Everyone went “ha ha,” but I really think if the waitress could have come up with the cash, Gaylord would still be on the counter at Denny’s.
Anyway, when it came to my brother’s crying, my dad wasn’t exactly overflowing with patience. Every few minutes he’d turn around and yell, “For heaven’s sake, Gaylord, would you knock it off!”
I’m not kidding. He yelled it about eighty times.
I think we were somewhere outside of Chicago when my father finally cracked. He pulled over to the side of the highway and told Gaylord to get out of the car. For a second my mother and I just sat there looking at my dad like he was nuts. I was pretty relieved when he finally calmed down and started smiling about it.
The only one who didn’t seem to be bothered by Gaylord’s screaming was my basset hound, Bill. He was sleeping in the back of our station wagon and never even woke up. I guess it’s understandable, though. He was on sleeping pills from the vet. Since Bill gets carsick, it was the only way to get him to Massachusetts without making a mess.
Actually the whole thing was pretty interesting. My mother would slip him one of the sleeping pills in the morning and he would start getting groggy right away. First his legs would go limp, and then he would collapse before we could get him into the car. One morning a little kid was watching in the motel parking lot as my father tried to lift Bill into the car. He started running up and down the sidewalk, screaming, “Doggie dead! Doggie dead!”
I’ve always liked Bill. My mother says he stinks to high heaven, but it’s not because he’s dirty. He just has a strong dog odor. Anyone who ever pets him always ends up saying “pew.”
It took us five and a half days to finally get to Massachusetts. The town of Rosemont (our new home) was about an hour from the state line. Since it was probably going to be a couple of days before the movers arrived with our stuff, Dad had reserved a motel room.
Mom carried Gaylord inside and put him down on the bed. Right away he started kicking his feet and making baby noises. I think he was showing us how cute he was so no one would kill him for all the crying.
“Keep an eye on your brother for a few minutes, will you, Howard?” asked Mom. “Dad and I have to run up to the motel office.”
You’d think I would have really minded watching such a brat. But even though Gaylord can get on your nerves sometimes, he’s probably as good as you can get for a baby. He’s all soft and white, of course, but he doesn’t seem to be a sissy baby. His infant seat tilted over backward once, and we found him in the living room, quietly standing on his head and looking at the ceiling.