No one likes good-byes.
It took us three days to drive from Blue Creek to Albuquerque, where James’s mom was waiting for him. Dad said there were so many amazing things we needed to see on our way. So we visited the world’s largest fruitcake (which was shaped like Texas and weighed one hundred fifty pounds), the Billy the Kid Museum, and the world’s largest roadrunner83 in Fort Stockton. Before we got to Albuquerque, we also stopped off at the world’s largest pistachio.
There were so many of the world’s largest things in between Blue Creek and New Mexico that you would think North America might sink into the ocean under all that size and weight. Also, the giant pistachio made me want to cook something daring, like lemon-pistachio pasta, only not with a pistachio the size of Dad’s car.
Karim moved back into his house. After all, there was nowhere left for him to go once everything had been packed up and I was finally ready to take all my spiders away with me to school in Oregon. Mom and Dad sent him off with wishes that his parents had fully recovered from the devastation of the nudist-camp sunburns they’d gotten from a vacation in Mexico that had never happened. In true Karim form, he’d said, “Thanks, Mr. and Mrs. Abernathy. They’ll be fine once the doctors wake them up from their medically induced comas. Until then, I have to feed them jarred baby food!”
And Mom had said, “Oh, Karim! That sounds dreadful!”
But Karim had just shrugged and said, “It’s no big deal. It happens every summer.”
I felt a little bit guilty for being an accomplice in fooling Brenden Saltarello into rethinking his relationship with Karim. I gave Karim my Princess Snugglewarm T-shirt and pajamas to keep while I was away at Pine Mountain Academy. I didn’t check, but I was pretty sure the school (or the students, at the very least) wouldn’t approve if I brought them with me. Anyway, Brenden was a good guy. If I ever open a restaurant in Blue Creek, I’ll ask him if he wants a job as maître d’.84
But that last time I walked with Karim back to his house and we each carried a bundle of the things that used to be mine but were now his,85 my heart felt heavier than any giant pistachio or roadrunner that ever stood as false evidence to their size or their truth.
I was unprepared for it.
We both just stood there on his front porch and stared at the door. I could hear the television inside Karim’s house. His parents, who were not in medically induced comas and had never gone to Mexico, were watching a game show, probably enjoying the freedom and peace of summer.
“Oh, well, I guess this is good-bye,” Karim said.
“Um… I could help you carry this stuff inside,” I said.
“You don’t have to. Besides, my parents might not recognize me and then call the police on us.”
That probably wasn’t a lie, I thought.
“Karim… I’ve never not known you for my entire life,” I said. My voice was quivery, and I felt a little embarrassed.
“Well, I know you wouldn’t call the cops on me, Sam.”
But Karim wouldn’t look at me. He turned away and sniffled, and then he put his bundle of clothes down on the wooden swing and wiped an arm across the bottom of his nose. This shouldn’t have been happening. I had never—not once in my life—seen my best friend sad like this, and if he started to cry, I knew I was going to cry too, and then we’d be two dumb86 kids bawling on a porch on a hot summer day in Texas while I was holding on to a bunch of pajamas and stuff. Nobody wants to see that.
“Because you’ll never not be my best friend, Sam,” Karim said.
“Okay.”
“Yeah. So. You’d better go now.”
“I guess.”
I piled my bundle of clothes beside the ones Karim had left on his swing.
Karim said, “No going into haunted houses without me.”
“It’s a deal.”
Then Karim hugged me, and we both got so mad at ourselves because we had to wait out there on his dumb87 porch until we stopped crying. And when he went inside, he said, “If my parents notice anything, I’m going to tell them you slapped me.”
“It’s a deal.”
Bahar had written a note to me, which she’d folded up and tucked into one of the pockets of my official Pine Mountain Academy duffel bag. She’d asked me not to read it until I got to Oregon, but I opened it before we even saw the giant fruitcake. She had written it on the back of my gooseneck-barnacles home-chef-services flyer from the Teen Zone at the Blue Creek Public Library.
I guess there was no sense in leaving that up in Blue Creek anymore.
The note said this:
The first Saturday you’re back, let’s have iced tea and make Kenny Jenkins mad!
—Love, B
Look, it’s always okay to sign a note to a friend with “Love.”
It DOES NOT mean you have a crush or anything.
So eventually the Blank family and their excessively unpleasant child, Boris, would turn the Purdy House into a mechanized bedlam of an amusement park, complete with their Little Boy in the Haunted Well attraction, and Dad, taking every advantage of the increase in tourists coming to Blue Creek, would begin putting up hand-painted road signs along the interstate that advertised THE WORLD’S BIGGEST MECHANIZED LLAMA as well as his new side business, which was Blue Creek Kilts.
And once all the floods of sunburned travelers began pouring into Blue Creek, looking for the most haunted house in all of Texas (and the world’s biggest mechanized llama), everything was bound to change, and James Jenkins, Bahar, Karim, and all the rest of Blue Creek and I wouldn’t be the only ones who had to say the world’s biggest good-bye.
83. His name is Paisano Pete, and he isn’t a real roadrunner, and he is also not the world’s largest, but we saw him anyway. Then we saw the actual “world’s largest roadrunner,” which was in New Mexico.
84. Which is a fancy word for “headwaiter,” the equivalent of putting cheesecloth on lemon wedges in Blue Creek.
85. Even though Karim insisted he was only going to do laundry for me—that it was the least he could do for wearing my clothes all summer long.
86. (excuse me)
87. (excuse me)