I spoke to him the very next morning before class. Purvis, that is. His hair was wet and his mouth open. I hung up my raincoat in my own locker and said hello to him. I’d never done that before, but I liked what his upside-down self had said about Freddie and I’d been meaning to be, well, nicer.

“So how’s it going, Purvis?”

“Fine. Yeah, yeah. Fine.” He sniffed.

“Good.” I got out my books and closed my locker. “On your way to class?”

“I can’t yet. Lance told me to wait for him,” he said.

“Lance Levy?”

“Here he comes!”

I didn’t get it. What did Lance care about Purvis? He was rich and an athlete, one of the cool kids. He wore a matching outfit today—black-and-white pants, shirt and knapsack. He used an umbrella like a walking stick and strode down the hall like he owned it, like a, a, like an emperor.

“Morning, Lance!” said Purvis.

Lance stopped, shook the umbrella over Purvis’s shoes and made an after you gesture. Purvis cleared his throat and sang “Happy Birthday” all the way through. Happy birthday dear La-ance, happy birthday to you. When he was done, Lance fist pumped.

“Yesss.”

Purvis grinned. “Can I go to class now?”

Lance waved him away.

“Is it your birthday?” I asked him.

“No—but that retard doesn’t know. Yesterday I told him that today was my birthday and I wanted him to sing me the birthday song. And he remembered. A riot, eh? Guy doesn’t know the two times table, but he remembered my birthday.”

Lance’s hair gleamed. His teeth shone. His chin dimple winked. I wanted to destroy him.

—

The tables and rolling bookshelves had been pushed to the sides of the school library, leaving a big empty space in the middle. That’s where we were sitting. The library was hot. I was between Mike and Velma. Velma’s skirt rode up when she plumped herself down on the hard carpet, and I caught a glimpse of the blue gym shorts she wore underneath.

Standing beside the librarian was a stranger with glasses, a sweater and a smile. Ralph Brody. The author. I recognized him from the picture on the back of his book. We’d read it in class, last term, and now he was coming to talk about it. The book had started off okay, with cave kids trekking across Africa trying to find a lost gemstone, fighting off saber-toothed cats. Then it got dull.

On the whiteboard the librarian had written: WELCOME MR. BRODY. Her name was Miss Cook, and she was old and thin and mean, her voice leaking out of her like battery acid. Ralph Brody was chatting with the kids in the front. He lived in the neighborhood, he said. His daughter had gone to this school. “What am I taking you guys away from?” he asked. “What do you normally have at this time of day?”

“Math,” said Purvis. He was bouncing up and down on his knees in the very front row. “We have math right after announcements,” he said.

Ralph Brody snapped his fingers and said it was too bad that he was taking us away from math class. “Gosh, I’m sorry,” he said. He was kidding, but Purvis took him seriously. Purvis shook his head emphatically and said, no, really, this was better.

Miss Cook introduced Mr. Brody, who had taken time out of his busy schedule to talk to us. She told us to be respectful and to sit on our bottoms and to give Mr. Brody a big John A. welcome. We clapped.

“What are you staring at?” said Velma.

“Nothing,” I said.

—

Ralph Brody did not have a PowerPoint like Jack Stevens, the author who visited us last year. That guy was amazing. He had film of himself playing hockey with NHL stars, wrestling with an alligator, swimming in JDQ’s pool in LA and walking on a tightrope. “Writers are cool,” he told us. “A writer can do anything. Anything at all.”

Ralph Brody took a sip of coffee, smiled pleasantly and started talking about our insides. We all had stories inside of us, he said. “You,” he said—pointing at Purvis. “You have a story inside of you.”

Purvis twisted his head around, thinking that the author had meant someone behind him. Then he pointed to himself.

Me? he mouthed.

“You,” said Ralph Brody.

He told us that before we could tell our story we had to know ourselves. He took an eraser and wiped the MR. BRODY off the whiteboard. Wrote in RALPH.

“That’s who I am,” he said. “I’m Ralph. It’s important for me to know that. I have to know who I am before I can write anything, because I am writing Ralph’s story.”

He pointed into the middle of the room.

“What’s your name?”

“Janessa,” said Janessa. Kind of hesitating.

“Okay. You’re the best one to write Janessa’s story, because you know it best. You,” he pointed to Purvis, “will write the story of…what’s your name?”

“Purvis Stackpole.”

“The story of Purvis. Sounds exciting. And you,” to the librarian, “can write the story of Shirley.”

The class gasped. Miss Cook had a first name?

She closed her mouth in a thin tight line.

“The idea,” said Ralph Brody, “is to know the characters you are writing about. A lot of the time that’ll be you. Know yourself. Tell your story. I don’t mean your daily story—getting up and going to school and having lunch and going home and dorking around online and hanging out with your friends and going to bed. That’s your life, all right—it’s real, and it works for you. But it’s not a story. Stories are about the part of your life that doesn’t work. Stories begin when something goes off course.”

He told us that stories come from pain, things going wrong in our lives. “We’ve all been sad,” he said. “We’ve all been angry and scared. These are the bad places inside us, where stories begin.”

He took a sip of coffee. I stared at our librarian. Shirley. Shirley Cook. Huh. She was the same mean old lady she’d always been. And yet she wasn’t.

Ralph was talking about sad stories. “They’re about loss,” he said. “Someone loses something. But you have to know where to start the story. If your story is going to be called Purvis Loses His Leg…”

We laughed.

“…then we have to know him before he lost it. Stand up, Purvis. There you go. Now, you can’t have Purvis hopping onto the basketball court in the big scene, winning the game with a one-footed jumper. You have to set it up. First he has both his legs. Like now. Then something goes wrong—a buzz-saw accident, say. Sorry, Purvis. Or a case of flesh-eating disease. Creepy, eh? Anyway, Purvis loses one of his legs. Stand on one leg, Purvis. Come on. Hop. There you go. Excellent. And then…”

Purvis fell over. We laughed some more. “Hey, this guy is pretty good,” Mike whispered to me.

“And then,” said Ralph, “he deals with it. Maybe he falls over, hits his head and dies, and the story ends tragically. Maybe he becomes a hopscotch champion. Maybe he learns to work with an artificial leg and runs across Canada and becomes a hero. Remember, a sad story can’t be sad all the time. There are good bits along the way. Funny bits, powerful bits. The idea behind the sad story is that you have something, you lose it and then you deal with it. Who here has a dog? Anyone? I like dogs. Cats, not so much, dogs, yes. You? What’s your name?”

“Fred.”

I didn’t realize I was putting my hand up, but there it was.

“Great. Let’s do a dog story. Stand up, Fred.”

I made my way to the front of the class. Ralph’s face was sharp, animated. He looked like a fox or an elf. He asked me my dog’s name.

“Casey.”

“Good name for a dog. What kind of dog is Casey? A big, woofy, drooly dog? Little, yappy teacup dog?”

“He’s a kind of mutt,” I said.

“Great. My favorite breed of dog. You love Casey, hey, Fred?”

I nodded.

“Course you do. You’d hate to lose him, hey? Be the worst thing that could happen.”

I nodded again.

“Course it would. Now I want you to become Casey for our story, Fred. Does he sometimes put his head on one side, like he’s thinking? Yeah, my dog does that too. Do it now please, Fred. Good. Very good. Now put your paws up, like this—watch me. There you go. Good. And maybe pant a bit? Fantastic. Fantastic.”

Ralph had me under a spell. The idea of being Casey really grabbed hold of me. I had my head on one side and my tongue out. I looked stupid, but so what? I was making Casey more real. He sometimes closed one eye when he panted, so I did that. Ralph said, “Fantastic,” again.

“Now, guys,” he said to the crowd in the gym, “our story is going to be called, Fred Loses His Dog. It’s a sad story—something’s gone wrong—that’s why we’re telling it. No one wants to hear a story about things going well, Fred and Casey playing happily all day long and going home to dinner. That’s not a story. But even though you’re telling this story because it’s sad, even though you’re thinking of Casey’s death before you start the story, that isn’t how the story starts. We have to get to know Casey before we can lose him. The story does NOT begin with Fred watching a traffic accident, a truck running into Casey, crushing him flat, and then—”

A red fog blurred my vision. Time passed in thick, slow seconds. I didn’t know what I was doing. I saw horrified faces, heard shouts from far off. Coffee went everywhere. My hands were far away from my body, clenched into fists, waving, waving.