Gary Paulsen Read online

  ALSO BY GARY PAULSEN

  Alida’s Song

  The Amazing Life of Birds

  The Beet Fields

  The Boy Who Owned the School

  The Brian Books: The River, Brian’s Winter, Brian’s Return, and Brian’s Hunt

  Canyons

  Caught by the Sea: My Life on Boats

  The Cookcamp

  The Crossing

  Danger on Midnight River

  Dogsong

  Father Water, Mother Woods

  The Glass Café

  Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books

  Harris and Me

  Hatchet

  The Haymeadow

  How Angel Peterson Got His Name

  The Island

  Lawn Boy

  The Legend of Bass Reeves

  Molly McGinty Has a Really Good Day

  The Monument

  Mudshark

  My Life in Dog Years

  Nightjohn

  The Night the White Deer Died

  Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers

  The Quilt

  The Rifle

  Sarny: A Life Remembered

  The Schernoff Discoveries

  Soldier’s Heart

  The Time Hackers

  The Transall Saga

  Tucket’s Travels (the Tucket’s West series, Books One through Five)

  The Voyage of the Frog

  The White Fox Chronicles

  The Winter Room

  Picture books, illustrated by Ruth Wright Paulsen:

  Canoe Days and Dogteam

  This book is dedicated with all respect and hope

  to everyone who has ever faced cancer.

  To every thing there is a season,

  a time for every purpose under the sun.

  A time to be born,

  and a time to die.

  A time to plant,

  and a time to reap.

  A time to weep,

  and a time to laugh.

  A time to mourn,

  and a time to dance.

  a cognizant original v5 release october 21 2010

  1

  Sometimes having company is not all it’s cracked up to be.

  I was sitting on the front steps of my house with Matthew and Dylan. Matthew was listening to his ear buds, eyes closed, half-humming, half-singing the good parts of the song like he always does, and Dylan was asleep on the ground, snoring and twitching. Matthew’s into his music and Dylan’s a dog so I didn’t pay much attention to either of them. I was trying to read.

  Matthew’s the only true friend I’ve got.

  He’s not my best friend. That’s Carl, because we’ve always got a lot of the same classes and spend the most time together in school. Matthew’s not even my oldest friend. That’s Jamie, because I’ve known her since we went to nursery school together. He’s definitely not my most fun friend—that would have to be Christopher, who goes to a school for the gifted and always has some crazy story to tell about the supersmart people he knows.

  Matthew lives right across the street and is always over at my house. That summer, he was actually living with us, because his parents were in the middle of a divorce. Their house was for sale and they’d each recently moved into nearby apartments. But Matthew had said he wasn’t going to learn how to do the shared custody thing on his summer vacation. Then he’d said he’d just stay with us until everything got settled. I was impressed that Matthew called the shots that way, but not surprised that his folks and my dad agreed; Matthew has a way of always making sense so people go along with him.

  But that’s not what makes him my true friend. It’s because he’s the only person I know who doesn’t make me feel like he’s drifted off in his head when I’m talking. Anyone who listens to everything you have to say, even the bad stuff and the boring things that don’t interest them, is a true friend. Matthew’s always been the only person who’s easy for me to talk to. He’s a lot like Dylan when you think about it.

  Matthew and I aren’t anything alike. I know, for instance, that it’s got to be easier to be Matthew than it is to be me. There’s something so … easy about the way he does everything. He gets better grades than me, even though he hardly ever studies. He’s on about a million teams at school, and whatever he does in football, baseball, basketball, tennis or track, he looks confident in a way that I never do.

  He has friends in every group at school: the brainy people, who, even in middle school, are starting to worry about the “com app” (that’s the universal college application form, but I only know that because I Googled the word after I heard them talking about it so much); the jocks, who carpool to their orthopedic doctor appointments together and brag about torn cartilage and bad sprains; the theater and band and orchestra members, who call themselves the arty geeks and then laugh, like it’s some big joke on everyone else; and, of course, the losers.

  Like me.

  Matthew would never call me a loser, not to my face and not behind my back, either, but we both know that I don’t fit in and that I’m just biding my time in middle school, waiting for high school and then college, after which I hope I can get a job where I’ll be able to work by myself.

  It’s not that I don’t like people, but they make me uncomfortable. I feel like an alien dropped onto a strange planet and that I always have to be on the lookout for clues and cues on how to act and what to say. It’s exhausting to always feel like you don’t belong anywhere and then worry that you’re going to say the wrong thing all the time.

  Real people seem so … mysterious and, I don’t know, high-maintenance to me. People in books, though, I like them just fine. I read a lot, partly because when I was little and my dad couldn’t afford sitters, he’d drag me to the library for his study groups. He was in night school and he’s been there ever since. He’d sit me at a table near him and his classmates and give me a pile of books, a bag of pretzels and some juice boxes.

  “I wish I had a dollar for every hour I’ve spent in the library,” he always says. I have to agree—we’d probably never have to worry about money again.

  So now I don’t feel normal unless I’ve got a book in my hands, and I feel the most normal when I’m lost in a story and can ignore the complicated situations around me that never seem to work out as neatly as they do in books.

  So, on that day, Matthew and Dylan and I were sitting in front of my house. It was a week after school let out for the summer.

  A completely bald woman drove up, parked in front of the house next door and jumped out of her car.

  I knew she’d moved in a couple of weeks ago to house-sit for our neighbors, professors on sabbatical. I’d seen her a few times from my kitchen window, but I hadn’t spoken to her. I hadn’t noticed she was bald, either, and that kind of detail didn’t seem like one I’d miss.

  She was probably in her early twenties. She was wearing faded jeans that looked way too big for her and purple cowboy boots. She carried a leather backpack and had one of those bumpy fisherman sweaters draped over her shoulders even though it was hot.

  She saw me, waved and headed in our direction.

  Dylan sat up as she got closer and looked at her with that teeth-baring border collie grin that scares people who don’t know that dogs can smile. I kicked Matthew. He opened his eyes and, when he saw that we had company, took his ear buds out. I sat up straight and sucked in my gut, trying to look tall and thin. A guy can dream.

  The woman made a beeline for Dylan and shook his paw. “Hello, dog.” Only then did she speak to us, one hand on Dylan, who leaned against her thigh. “In this world, you either like dogs or you don’t, and I don’t under stand the ones who don’t, so I’m glad to finally meet the three of you.”

>   I felt guilty the way she said “finally.” Maybe I should have gone over and introduced myself. Do good neighbors bring cookies or something when new people move in? I wouldn’t know, everyone seems to have lived on my block forever, like prehistoric flies stuck in amber.

  “Well, no … uh … we haven’t met, but I’ve … uh … seen you before … at least I think it was you,” I mumbled, trying not to glance at her head.

  “Oh, right.” She dug in her backpack, pulled out a wad of red hair, shook it and smoothed it down. “I usually wear my wig, but I took it off in the car to feel the fresh air on my head.”

  “Have you always been bald?” Matthew asked like it was a perfectly normal question.

  I would never have said anything about her being bald. One time Jamie cried for three straight hours when a “trim” turned out to be something she called “a five-inch hack” so I figure hair is a tricky subject with girls and not one you bring up if you can avoid it. My father says it’s good manners to avoid discussing sex, religion, politics and money in social situations. I think you should add hair to that list.

  Actually, it’s a good idea to avoid discussing anything in social situations. A better idea is to avoid social situations in general.

  “Oh, no,” she said to Matthew. “I lost my hair during chemo.”

  We must have flinched. She said, more gently, “My name is Johanna Jackson and I’m a breast cancer survivor.” Up close I could see that she had green eyes and freckles all over her face. She never stopped smiling as she looked from me to Matthew to Dylan, who was now lying on his back, paws in the air, begging her to scratch his chest.

  “I’m Matthew, this is Finn and that’s Dylan. How long have you been cured?” Matthew didn’t miss a beat.

  “Well, I don’t know that you’re ever cured.” She found the tickle spot on Dylan’s ribs that makes his back legs start pedaling with that doggy bliss thing that always makes me wonder what it would feel like. Just to lie there while somebody rubs your belly, with a back leg twitching …

  “Then how can you call yourself a survivor?” All of a sudden, Matthew was an unlimited source of awkward questions.

  “In my book, if you live one split second after hearing news like that, you’re a survivor.” Johanna finally looked away from Dylan and back up at us.

  “Is your hair going to come back?” I couldn’t believe I was the one who asked that.

  “The doctors say yes, and maybe even different than it was before. I’m hoping for straight blond hair the next time around. You know, give the California beach babe look a whirl.”

  Right now Johanna was the skinniest, palest thing I’d ever seen. I didn’t think “babe” was a look she was going to pull off.

  “I don’t know.” Matthew studied her carefully. “Why go back to all that washing and combing? Besides, you have a nice skull.”

  Johanna laughed. “Now, there’s something you don’t hear every day. Dylan as in Dylan Thomas or Dylan as in Bob Dylan?” She turned to me and changed the subject smoothly. I wished I could do that.

  “The songwriter. My dad thinks Bob Dylan is”—and here I repeated the words I’d heard him say a million times—“a cultural icon, and that the socio political meaning and impact of the music is more than worthy subject matter for his master’s thesis.” I paused, saw her nod and then went for it. “Johanna—as in ‘Visions of Johanna’?”

  She beamed at me. “Dog people and Dylan fans. I’ve come to the right place.”

  I shrugged, trying not to look pleased. She got it!

  “Would you both sign my book?” Johanna pulled a tattered notebook from her backpack and handed it to Matthew. He scrawled his name and handed it to me.

  “Okay,” I said, “but … um … why?”

  “Because every day in my journal I write down the best thing that’s happened to me. Today it’s you.”

  When Johanna said that, I felt light, warm in that spot just above my stomach where it usually feels clenched and tight.

  2

  Before Johanna, I had never been the highlight of anyone’s day.

  The morning after meeting her I was back on the front steps of our house, eating breakfast. My dad had left for work and Matthew had headed out with some guys from school, so I was alone. Except for Dylan, of course.

  Dad works as a bookkeeper for a neighborhood clinic, and he’s been in school part-time for as long as I can remember. First he went back to get his bachelor’s degree and now he’s working on his master’s. He’s hardly ever home. And when he is, he looks a little surprised when I speak to him, as if he hadn’t realized I was in the room. We get along fine, but I’ve never once gotten the feeling that I’m the best part of his day.

  My mother “pulled up stakes” when I was a baby. That’s how my father always says it, like she went looking for a better place to camp rather than abandoning a husband and son. She left us to go back to school in another state and we haven’t heard from her since she left. “As if,” I overheard my dad telling my grandpa once, “raising a son and pursuing higher education were mutually exclusive.”

  There’s a lot of going back to school in my family. Even my grandpa takes classes at the retirement community where he lives—bridge, computer programming, and now he’s starting to paint.

  Dylan probably thought I was the greatest thing ever. I don’t think it takes too much to make his day, though.

  My father found him on the street, brought him home and named him. But I feed him and de-poop the yard. I brush the tangles and dead hair from his coat and check him for fleas and ticks. I make him scrambled eggs and buttered toast when I’m sad because you always feel better when you do something nice for someone you love.

  So that makes him mine.

  He protects me. I haven’t gone to the bathroom alone since he came to live with us. I don’t know what kind of Evil Potty Monster he envisions, but he sits by me when I pee to keep me safe from it. He sleeps on my bed and growls soft and deep in his throat when anyone walks down the sidewalk in front of our house.

  That makes me his.

  The only bad thing about him is that he throws up if you feed him frozen waffles. But a little barf is a small price to pay for having such a great friend.

  He’s like a person to me except that he can’t talk or read. But that morning, I wasn’t so sure about that anymore.

  I pulled the note from my pocket and read it again. You’re not as ugly as you think.

  That was the note I’d gotten from the dog a few minutes earlier.

  As I had come out of the house to eat my toast on the front steps, Dylan had been standing there with the note in his mouth. He pushed at my hand with his nose to get me to take the piece of paper from him and wiggled his whole body in excitement, as if he knew what the words said.

  Dylan’s a border collie, so the whole note thing is not as out-of-the-realm-of-possibility as it first sounds. I’d read about a border collie in Germany who could understand a couple hundred words and knew how to figure out the name of something he’d never seen before by the process of elimination. “It’s just a matter of time, my boy,” Grandpa had said when I told him, “before that dog of yours has his own e-mail address, if that’s the kind of bloodline he comes from.”

  My dad is not the note-writing kind. And who else could have left it for Dylan to find and give to me? Carl was off on his “custodial summer” with his divorced dad. Jamie was away at camp, and Christopher’s school runs year-round. Matthew would just come out and tell me something, he wouldn’t bother writing it down.

  As I reread the piece of paper, Dylan nudged my hand with his nose. I looked at him, thinking.

  “Did you”—I paused, looked around and then whispered—“did you mean it, Dyl?”

  “Woof.”

  Sounded like a yes to me.

  Dylan kissed my nose. Another yes. Then he leapt off the stairs after a rabbit that hightailed it around the corner of the house into the backyard.

  It
made sense that Dylan would try to cheer me up about how I looked. He’d been with me when I freaked out after I’d seen my yearbook picture on the last day of school.

  Matthew, ever helpful, had said, “You’re not completely repulsive, Finn. But I wouldn’t worry about the girls beating a path to your door, either.”

  I looked up from the note. Nope. No girls headed my way. I read the note again and wished I could ask someone if I was really ugly, if I’d ever get any better-looking and, most important, if someday a girl would like me no matter what I looked like.

  “Mind if we join you?”

  I jumped at Johanna’s voice and turned to see Dylan leading her toward me from the back of the house. She was wearing her wig. She sat next to me on the step, bumping my hip as she settled herself. Closer than I would have expected.

  “Oh … hi …,” I said. “Dylan’s supposed to stay on our side of the bushes. Did he go into your yard?”

  “Not much of a yard.” Johanna snorted. “I’m only house-sitting for the summer while the Albrechts are in Europe and I can’t change anything about their property, of course, but oh, what I’d like to do with that space.” She looked at the Albrechts’ place and sighed.

  “You garden?” I couldn’t think of a more boring thing to do.

  “Nope. Never so much as planted a single flower. But I can’t stop thinking about having my very own garden these days.”