Dreamer, Wisher, Liar Read online

  Dedication

  For my mother and daughter—

  I wish we could be twelve together.

  Just for a day.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Joy

  Chapter Two: April 17

  Chapter Three: Truth

  Chapter Four: My Stupids

  Chapter Five: Escape

  Chapter Six: Wish Jar

  Chapter Seven: Dream

  Chapter Eight: Reflection

  Chapter Nine: Pancakes and Old People

  Chapter Ten: Thriftiness

  Chapter Eleven: Gray

  Chapter Twelve: Somewhere

  Chapter Thirteen: Somewhere Else

  Chapter Fourteen: Puzzle

  Chapter Fifteen: Gone

  Chapter Sixteen: Party

  Chapter Seventeen: Caught

  Chapter Eighteen: Patience

  Chapter Nineteen: Old-Fashioned

  Chapter Twenty: Cheat

  Chapter Twenty-one: Aloha

  Chapter Twenty-two: Fishy

  Chapter Twenty-three: Face

  Chapter Twenty-four: Love

  Chapter Twenty-five: Discovery

  Chapter Twenty-six: Bounce

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Like

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Gift

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Surprise

  Chapter Thirty: Lucky

  Chapter Thirty-one: Missing

  Chapter Thirty-two: Because

  Chapter Thirty-three: Remember

  Chapter Thirty-four: Old

  Chapter Thirty-five: Find

  Chapter Thirty-six: Mess

  Chapter Thirty-seven: Magic

  Chapter Thirty-eight: Sale and Serendipity

  Chapter Thirty-nine: Good-bye

  Chapter Forty: Going

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  chapter one

  Joy

  I’m not great with dates, but April 16 isn’t hard for me to remember. It was the last perfectly happy day of my life. When your world is suddenly upside down, it’s easy to remember the last day you were standing right side up.

  The sixteenth was a school day, and pretty much a regular one, except for when Mr. Lester, our teacher, got the phone call for an emergency meeting. I don’t know what kind of emergency meeting needs an English teacher, but Mr. Lester seemed excited about it. He had his stuff packed and was gone in seconds. A few kids were sure we’d get to go home early, but of course that didn’t happen. Instead, Ms. Wooten, the school psychologist, came down to substitute. She was surprisingly organized; she introduced herself and then said, “I’m looking forward to this, so let’s get started! I want you all to make a list of the joys of your life.” Everyone groaned, but there was no choice.

  It took her a while to explain what she wanted us to do, and mostly I wasn’t paying attention, but I was glad I heard her say, “Use nice handwriting, because we are going to be hanging these up in the hall.” I don’t know if she was warning us on purpose or not, but a list that hangs on the wall is very different from a list that lives in your binder.

  THE JOYS THAT I PUT ON THE HALLWAY LIST

  • Friends

  • Reading

  • Pizza at Fannucci’s

  • Riding my bike

  • The internet

  • Good TV

  • Pie

  THE JOYS THAT I DID NOT WRITE DOWN ON THE HALLWAY LIST

  • Lucy, my best friend in the whole world

  • Eating cereal without milk

  • PJ Walker books

  • Eating and thinking about food

  chapter two

  April 17

  How do you tell someone the worst news of her life?

  If you are Lucy’s mom, you take the someone to her favorite restaurant, Fannucci’s, wait until dessert, and then, when the someone’s mouth is full of apple pie and ice cream, you say, “Ash, Lucy doesn’t know how to tell you this, but at the end of the summer we’re going to be moving to Oregon.”

  At first I felt really bad about spitting pie into Lucy’s mom’s cappuccino, but later, the more I thought about it, the more I decided she deserved it.

  Her one sentence ruined a lot of stuff for me—my friendship with Lucy, Fannucci’s, summer, the state of Oregon, and now even just thinking of apple pie kind of makes me gag.

  April 17 was two months ago.

  It was the last time I was filled with joy.

  chapter three

  Truth

  I didn’t know this before, but sadness can be perfect. Today Lucy left for summer camp.

  If things were perfect, there would have been thunder and lightning, tree limbs crashing to the ground, a freezing cold wind, and sirens howling in the distance. Instead it was partly cloudy, T-shirt weather, and there was an ice cream truck across the street chiming out an annoyingly cheerful song. It was decidedly not perfect. The world’s outsides and my insides did not match up.

  Lucy and I were in the school parking lot, not saying much, mostly shuffling our feet in the gravel. The little stones around us were bunched into piles, and my new white Converse sneakers were dirty and gray. But I didn’t care. It felt right, my shoes matching my mood—grimy and dark.

  The camp bus was parked off to the side. It was the exact same bus we rode to school every day, except for the piece of cardboard in the front window saying CAMP RED OAK. This first good-bye was only for a month; the next one would be forever. I tried not to think of this as a practice run for the real thing, but it was hard to ignore.

  Three weeks from now I was going to join Lucy at camp. That would be our last month together before Lucy moved to Portland. FOREVER. It was like two stepping-stones into an abyss—lonely, happy, and then nothing.

  Lucy’s parents were waiting with us, but off to the side—invisible if I twisted my head to the left. I didn’t want to see them. I hated them. This was new, but it was their fault—I didn’t feel guilty. If they changed their minds and let Lucy stay, I could love them again. It was that simple. But it wasn’t going to happen.

  I wanted it to be just Lucy and me. I didn’t want them standing there watching us. Even though they were silent, I could read their thoughts, and it was distracting.

  Lucy’s mom was thinking, Oh, how cute, the two girls are saying good-bye. Lucy’s dad was the opposite. He looked at his phone, sighed loudly, and shifted Lucy’s bag from one hand to the other. I knew what he was thinking too. He wanted out of there. He caught my eye and smiled. I could read his mind: What’s the big deal? You’ll see each other in a few weeks. I scowled and ignored him.

  They were both wrong! This wasn’t cute, and it wasn’t temporary! This was earthquake-rumbling-tornado-swirling-tsunami-coming serious! At least for me; I didn’t know about Lucy. Sure, she’d miss me, but still, she was probably excited, too. Why not? Camp, even without a best friend, was going to be fun.

  “Ash, let’s promise to write every day,” said Lucy. “I want to know everything I’m missing.”

  She was being nice, trying to make me feel better, but I was staying here. Nothing fun was going to happen to me. She wouldn’t miss a thing. Instead of going to camp, I was babysitting for the first month she was gone. Mom had made me one of her deals. Her deals were always the same: “You listen, and I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen.” There was no give-and-take. So now I was babysitting some seven-year-old kid who I’d never even heard of before. It was completely unfair! For me there’d be no zip line rides, no water skiing, no rock climbing, no sleeping under the stars, no anything! What was I going to write about? Playing hopscotch with a seven-year-old?


  “Maybe every second day,” I said. “And we should do postcards. You’re going to be way too busy to write whole letters.”

  Lucy looked at me like I had just said something mean, but I wasn’t being mean; it was the truth. I’d looked through the camp guide. Camp was a busy place. Okay, maybe I was being a little mean, but I couldn’t help it.

  “All right,” said Lucy. She sighed. “Postcards, but I wish we could email. Stupid camp!”

  “Yeah, STUPID CAMP!” I said it too, but mine was louder and meaner—I meant the “stupid” part a lot more than she did.

  Lucy’s “stupid” was because Camp Red Oak didn’t let campers bring computers, cell phones, or anything electronic with them to camp. Going to Camp Red Oak was like being zapped back in time—not all the way to the dinosaurs, but more like 1985 or something, which was a lot less interesting. The camp motto was “Trees Over Technology,” and they were serious about it. Campers were only allowed to write letters—no exceptions, not even to parents. Someone hadn’t thought this through very well, because a lot of trees were being killed just so everyone could send home paper mail. Lucy said she was going to bring that up at some point. Maybe organize a protest—save a few trees and get to use email. Anyway, this dumb letter rule was Lucy’s reason for the “stupid.” It was a good one, but it wasn’t mine. Mine was longer—I had a list.

  Before the bus left, we hugged, we cried a little, and I tried not to think too much about what was happening. Lucy got on the bus. She waved, I waved, and then she was gone. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it. I cried—a lot. It’s good I knew the way home, because it’s really hard to see where you’re going when your eyes are like Niagara Falls. And it’s even harder when your hair’s hanging down to hide it.

  By the time I got home and walked up the back steps, I was done—all dried up. I still felt bad, but the crying part had stopped, and now I was hungry. That was a surprise. I wasn’t expecting that. I looked in the fridge for a snack. I liked yogurt and applesauce, but today they seemed wrong. I needed something hard and crunchy. I picked out a granola bar, and with each bite I thought about my stupids. The crunching made it easier to get through them. Yogurt wouldn’t have been the same. With yogurt I’d have been stuck at the top, wallowing in loneliness.

  chapter four

  My Stupids

  HERE ARE MY STUPIDS

  • Lucy leaving

  • Mom making me babysit her friend’s kid for three weeks

  • Having face blindness and not being able to recognize people

  • Being lonely and alone

  The last two kind of went together, like peanut butter and jelly.

  Weird problem + alone = unhappy forever

  It was a sad sandwich.

  Prosopagnosia—that was the peanut butter, and it was stuck with me forever. It was invisible, it was stupid, and I could hardly even pronounce it. Plus it was something no one had ever heard of. Whenever I tried to explain it, I could tell that people thought I was making it up. And I couldn’t blame them. If someone told me, If I see you tomorrow and act like I don’t know you, it’s only because my brain doesn’t work right and I won’t recognize you, I’d think they were crazy too.

  Finally I was done eating and feeling sorry for myself. I picked at the last few crumbs and rolled the wrapper into a tube. I looked through it, pretending I could see Lucy. What was she doing? I imagined her on the bus, heading to camp, all alone. How did that feel? I crumpled up the tube. I didn’t want to know, but it was too late; I was already thinking about it, and now I felt guilty.

  I’d started my good-bye to Lucy three weeks ago. It was my plan. Each day I made myself see less and less of her, so that now, on the day she was really leaving, it wouldn’t be as bad. It was like giving up sugar—you start slow and build it up—only I wasn’t quitting food. I was quitting Lucy. But it had been a mistake, because now that today was here, I still felt terrible. The good-bye hadn’t been easier at all. Today was the worst day ever.

  And there was more; those five times she had called last week, I had lied on purpose. I wasn’t too busy to talk. I was just grumpy.

  Angry and grumpy.

  Jealous and grumpy.

  Selfish and grumpy.

  Worried and grumpy.

  Sad and grumpy.

  Grumpy is like ketchup—it goes with a lot of things.

  This was a lot to make up for, and too much to write on a postcard. Plus, it wasn’t fair. It might make me feel better, but it wouldn’t help Lucy. And she was probably already sad anyway.

  She wasn’t a camp kind of person, but there she was on the bus, heading off into the woods. Lucy’s parents were going to Oregon for the summer to fix up the new house, so the choice had been go with them to Oregon or go to camp. Lucy had picked camp, because of me. We were going to spend the last month of summer at Red Oak together. It was something I should have been looking forward to, but it was hard to be really excited about it. It seemed more like a final countdown to total unhappiness—the last thirty days until I lost her forever. How can you look forward to that?

  I had to find something else to do—a distraction. I needed to feel better before I wrote to her, so it could be a happy, positive letter; she deserved that.

  chapter five

  Escape

  Our house is small. Normally I didn’t care about that, but today I did. Every time I moved, Mom and Dad were there, close by. And every time I passed Mom, she smiled and gave me the look.

  I hate the look!

  THE LOOK MEANS:

  • Do you want to talk?

  • I feel bad for you.

  • I know how you feel.

  • Can I help?

  The look is uncomfortable. And no, she can’t possibly know how I feel.

  Normally I wouldn’t go hang out in the basement—mostly because it’s dirty and filled with junk—but today I made an exception. It was an escape from the look, and from a potential Mom-talk, and I was definitely not wanting one of those. There was an armchair down there; I could just sit in it and listen to music or something. Mom might follow me upstairs to my room, but she’d never come down to the basement. The basement was safe because it was filled with too many unfinished projects she wanted to ignore.

  Mom’s a Freecycle addict—which really just means junk addict. Freecycle is this organization that works like a garage sale, only it’s on the internet, and everything is free. Mom’s a subscriber, which means she gets hundreds of emails from strangers describing junk they want to get rid of. Things like “I have a set of blue dishes with painted llamas on them—anyone want them?” If Mom decides she needs the llama dishes, she emails the person back, and they put the llama plates on the curb for Mom to come and pick up. I don’t like thinking of Mom as one of those garbage-picker-type people, but the truth is, she loves junk. The more stuff she has, the happier she is. At the beginning she tried to get me excited about it, but I only went once; it’s not my thing.

  Mom’s favorite part of the whole thing is sorting everything out; she says it’s like treasure hunting. That’s not how I look at it, but I just nod and agree with her—it’s easier that way. She puts her favorite stuff into the basement, and everything else goes into the garage. So the garage is a disaster; it’s hard to even move in there, but Dad doesn’t care—he just parks on the street. He says it’s nice for Mom to have a hobby, but mostly I think he’s supportive because it’s a lot cheaper than if she went shopping.

  Once in a while Mom gets inspired and gives something a makeover—that’s how I got my zebra-patterned nightstand; it’s supercool and I love it—but that doesn’t happen very often. Mostly stuff just sits in piles waiting to be noticed.

  I grabbed my headphones and disappeared downstairs. I was right about the chair; it was in front of the workbench—not a normal place to keep an armchair—but it was clean and junk free, so I was happy. I turned on the light, pulled out my headphones, and was just about to sit down, but then I change
d my mind. There were nails and a piece of wood on the workbench, and just seeing them started a thought in my head. A second later, that thought turned into a project. I could spell Lucy’s name on the wood with the nails.

  I’m not afraid of hammers, and pounding the nails was fun, especially when I made a direct hit and the nail pushed deep into the wood. After about ten minutes I had spelled out the L, the U, the C, and half the Y of Lucy’s name. I held the wood out and studied it. It looked pretty good.

  Four more nails and I’d be finished. I searched the workbench, but there weren’t any left; I’d used them all. I knew Mom had more. A long time ago I’d seen it—a jar of nails and screws. I scanned the basement. Finding that jar was not going to be easy. There were boxes stacked everywhere, and in between the boxes was random junk—chairs, pipes, clothes, wood, really anything you could imagine. It was chaos and in no way organized. I walked over to the sink and found some rubber gloves. If I was going to dig around, I definitely wanted hand protection.

  THE JUNK I FOUND

  • Old plastic cups and lots of forks—probably hundreds! Why so many forks, I have no idea.

  • A box filled with wire, string, and plastic farm animals. Weird.

  • A glass jar with the word WISHES written on a pretty label. Pretty dirty—I was glad to have the gloves on.

  • A small box filled with screws. Almost right, but not quite.

  • A large jar filled with nails. Exactly what I needed.

  It was amazing that I found the nails so fast. They weren’t a perfect match, but once I hammered them in, you could hardly tell they were smaller than the other ones.

  I put the wood on the edge of the workbench and sat down and studied it. What would I think if I were seeing it for the first time?

  Would I like it? Was it cheesy?

  Yes. No.

  Was it fun?

  Yes.

  Would Lucy like it?

  I knew the answer to that. She’d love it. I could send it as a surprise, instead of a postcard. Maybe she’d hang it up in her cabin, near her bed or something. I smiled. These were happy thoughts, but they didn’t last.