Anyone who’s ever left home to live all alone for the first time in their life knows exactly what it feels like to have thousands of stampeding spiders in their stomach.
And when you’re twelve years old, and small for your age on top of that, the spiders can feel like they’re the size of rabbits.
What if I get scared in the middle of the night and there’s no one to talk to?
What if I have an attack of claustrophobia?4
I didn’t tell anyone in my family about how nervous I was. I didn’t want them to try to talk me out of going away to boarding school. Because talking me out of it would have been easier than getting a dirty look from Kenny Jenkins at Colonel Jenkins’s Diner for ordering a large iced tea without sugar in it. And that was very, very easy to do.
There were exactly seventeen days of summer left before my family (which consisted of Mom; Dad; my brother, Dylan; and my sister, Evie) was going to pack me up and make the drive all the way from Blue Creek, Texas, to Pine Mountain, Oregon, where I was going to enroll in high school (at twelve years old, no less) and move into a dormitory full of grown-up boys, and share a room with some stranger who would probably end up tormenting me the way a cat toys with a mouse before eventually murdering it.
Here came the rabbit-size spiders again.
“I’m kind of anxious about starting ninth grade too, Sam,” Bahar said.
“But you’re fourteen years old. You’ve already done all the in-between grades,” I told her.
In school, I skipped ahead two years—the in-between grades from sixth to eighth. To some people, it was like my life was moving faster. To me, it was like two years of unread pages had been torn from my biography.
Bahar was the cousin of my best friend, Karim. She was one of those rare older kids who was nice to me even when she wasn’t forced to be polite, and she would always stand up to the pressure that other fourteen-year-olds might put on her for being friends with a smallish boy who was only twelve.
I guess that made us friends too, along with all the other things we had in common.
We had the same taste in tea, for one thing. Bahar liked iced tea with no sugar in it, and I did too, which was why Kenny Jenkins had been giving us dirty looks, since he always had to make the drinks up special just for us when we came in.5 One time Kenny Jenkins said to us (in as disgusted a tone as I’d ever heard him use), “You’d think you kids were from California or something, the way you drink that tea the same way West Coast snobs would. Well, I’m telling you right now: I don’t serve kale here.”
Clearly Kenny Jenkins had no idea just how delicious sautéed kale with garlic, vegetable stock, and red wine vinegar really was.
Bahar and I always met at Colonel Jenkins’s for iced tea and dirty looks on Saturday afternoons. Well, not always. This was the seventh time we had; the routine just kind of started one time during the last week of eighth grade when I was walking home from Lily Putt’s. And like being nervous about going away to Pine Mountain Academy, I also didn’t tell my mom and dad (or Karim) about meeting up with Bahar on Saturdays. Because it didn’t really matter, did it?
It wasn’t like I had a crush on Bahar.
I’d never had a crush on anyone in my life.
Bahar was always so sensible and smart, in ways my parents weren’t. And I usually didn’t want to hear sensible or smart things from Mom or Dad, since they always sounded too much like directions I had to follow before taking a test or something. But I could always listen to sensible and smart things from Bahar, and I would listen to them from Karim, too, if he ever thought of anything that was sensible and smart.
I said, “Anyway, why would you feel anxious about starting school? It’s just Blue Creek High, and you’ll be around the same kids we’ve known for pretty much our entire lives.”
It was a dead time of day, two thirty in the afternoon, and we were the only ones in Colonel Jenkins’s. And without even glancing in his direction, I could tell Kenny Jenkins was impatiently glaring at us, just waiting for us to leave so he could wipe down our booth and start concocting the just-add-water or frozen-food horribleness he served up as his “Early Bird Special.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Bahar said. “It’s not going to be the same, you know, with all the pressure to be cool they put on you in high school.”
“I may as well give up now, in that case. I’d never be able to do that anyway,” I said.
Bahar laughed.
“And we always had so much fun doing things around here, Sam. It’s going to be boring without you.”
“It’s Blue Creek,” I said. “It’s boring with me.”
I looked at Bahar, and she was looking at me, so we both looked away really quick and shifted in the tufted vinyl booth, which sounded exactly like a (excuse me)6 fart, and then Kenny Jenkins, who had to be accustomed to the noises that came from his booths by now, said, “Hey you kids! No farting in my diner!”7
And then I felt so embarrassed for so many reasons, half of which I couldn’t even begin to put into words.
But it always made me feel good, how Bahar was so nice to me at times, even though she didn’t have to be.
And there were seventeen days to go until I’d be leaving Blue Creek.
That was two more not-sweet iced tea Saturdays.
The spiders were having a field day.
The spiders were never going to say good-bye to me.
4. I have a very bad case of claustrophobia, on account of my having been trapped in an abandoned well when I was four years old.
5. Nobody else in Blue Creek ever did something as non-Texan as ordering not-sweet tea at Colonel Jenkins’s.
6. I don’t swear unless it can’t be avoided, so excuse me for saying “fart.”
7. Even though he had to have said this at least a million times before, Kenny Jenkins always found it hilarious.