Anyone who’d ever met James Jenkins would have marveled at how much he had changed in the few months since I’d last seen him.
He looked older and leaner, almost like he hadn’t been eating enough. His football body had smoothed out into something straighter and taller, and you could sense a kind of confidence and even happiness in him just in seeing the way he stood and how he moved.
James and his mom got to my house before I did.
His mother, Linda Swineshead, was already gone by the time I showed up. It was a relief. I didn’t know if I could face James’s mother after finding out that she had been my dad’s girlfriend at one time. That was one part of the whole Purdy House history and experience I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of.
And I was late because Bahar and I may or may not have walked back from the diner through Lake Marion Park, where we possibly had taken off our shoes and socks and waded in the water for one last time before we might have stopped off so I could hypothetically say a final good-bye to Sam’s Well before walking Bahar to her door, all of which, if in fact it happened, made me just a little bit too late to greet my friend and his mom when they arrived at my house.
Anyway, James just smiled at me with a sneaky expression when he saw me. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I knew he was going to tease me because of the awkward response I’d made to the text message he’d sent when I was at Colonel Jenkins’s Diner. Because I said this: I’ll be right there. I’m just saying good-bye to Bahar.
They should make phones with some kind of vacuum-cleaner feature, so you can suck back texts that you realize tell more than you want to, but then it’s too late because you already hit send and put them out into the universe, and you know your friend is going to tease you because YOU DO NOT HAVE A CRUSH ON BAHAR. Or whoever.
James didn’t have any shoes on his feet. He was eating watermelon in the kitchen with Mom, Dad, Dylan, and Evie when I walked in.
James Jenkins wiped his mouth with the back of a hand and said, “It’s about time you showed up, Sam!”
Then he moved toward me very slowly (James, as I have said in the past, was known for walking extremely slowly), like he was stepping on broken glass.
“Oh my gosh! What’s wrong?” I said.
“Nothing. I just tore my feet up at the academy. I can’t even put regular shoes on,” James said.
Then he kind of grimaced when he took another two steps toward me and then put his arms around me and hugged me hard. It was weird because I had never hugged James Jenkins before, but it felt good and I found myself feeling sad, too, because I was thinking about all those things I’d done growing up in Blue Creek—and all those things I had to say good-bye to. There was a part of my life when I used to be so terrified of James Jenkins too, when I would have believed that he might crush my spine in his monstrous grab. And it was weird because the top of my head barely reached James’s chin (because James Jenkins was giant, and monstrous, but he also loved to dance, which made James as rare and as irreplaceable as anyone I’d ever known). Besides, James kind of smelled bad, which is exactly what you’d expect of a teenage boy who’d been sitting inside a car, driving through Texas on a hot summer day.
And James said, “You grew about a foot!”
Well, that was nice of James, but Mom and Dad kept tabs. I was exactly three quarters of an inch taller than when school had started last fall. I said, “Yeah. And you’re a giraffe.”
And I couldn’t help but imagine what a stuffed giraffe would look like inside the Purdy House.
Karim ended up coming back from the library in the evening, when we were all about to sit down for dinner. He and Brenden Saltarello must have patched things up after Brenden discovered the new (artificial) common ground they shared over Princess Snugglewarm.
It worked out for me, because it gave me a chance to talk to James Jenkins alone—so I could clue him in on what NOT to say out loud in front of Karim, which basically meant anything having to do with his cousin Bahar, or the general topics of crushes and such.
“Gosh! Middle school kids are so goofy about stuff,” James said. James Jenkins was going to start tenth grade this year, so he knew almost everything.
We’d been hiding in my room from the rest of my family, playing video games and looking at books.
“I wouldn’t know. I never spent much time there,” I said. “Besides, I may be twelve, but I’m about to start ninth grade, so that automatically puts me ahead of the game.”
And just saying that activated all the spiders and set them into a frenzy like angry bears unpleasantly awakened from hibernation.
James just said, “Hmmf,” which is the way James Jenkins laughed if he thought something was really funny. Then he said, “Anyway, I just needed to say thank you for talking me out of quitting dance when I wanted to.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“You did a lot more than anyone else did. I don’t even have any friends at all because of my dad, and football, and now after leaving Blue Creek. You’re my only real friend. Do you even realize how many friends you have?”
I guess I’d never really thought about it like that.
And James went on, “After leaving Blue Creek and quitting football, it’s like I was erased or something. Like I’m blank.”
Blank.
“That reminds me,” I said. “I’ve got a cool story for you about a haunted house, and a weird family of people who may or may not be monsters, and you know what their name is? Their name is ‘Blank.’ ”
“Hmmf,” James said.
We sat there in my room, just saying nothing, which is what friends do a lot of times. I heard James flipping pages in the book he was looking through. It was Children of Dune. We’d both read it a long time ago. Duh. Who wouldn’t read a book like that?
I had actually moved on to my second summer reading novel. And now I was beginning to think I’d get things done in time for the new school year, and moving away, and all that other stuff.
The light was turning to evening-shade. I could hear Mom in the kitchen. She was probably making something for dinner that would call for some expert help, but I was too busy doing nothing with James.
Finally he said, “Well? Are you going to tell me about the haunted house or what?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. But I just wanted to ask you something first. I don’t know if you can help me or not, but I thought since you’re about to start tenth grade and stuff… Um. It’s about having a crush on someone.”
“Hmmf.”