AN EMPTY PAIR OF SHOES AND THE DESTRUCTION OF PARIS

Anyone in Blue Creek who’d ever posted a résumé on the bulletin board of Trey Hoskins’s Teen Zone in the public library had to know that it was NOT the most popular place for prospective employers to conduct recruitment searches, unless they wanted someone like Michael Dolgoff to wrangle up a can of hellgrammites,³⁹ or to possibly get some yardwork and babysitting or something, but nothing that required any real talent or skill.

I mean, I should know because I’d never been called for any home chef services by anyone who’d been to the library, and my “Help Offered” flyer had been posted in the Teen Zone for almost six months. When I’d put it up, Karim had told me that it wasn’t a good selling point to list that I was well versed in the preparation of gooseneck barnacles,⁴⁰ since the people of Blue Creek were more than satisfied with the chicken-fried steak on a stick at Colonel Jenkins’s Diner. I was beginning to think Karim was probably right about the barnacles. And I realized I probably made things worse by also listing that I knew how to make gnocchi, which, like gooseneck barnacles, nobody in Blue Creek had ever heard of.

However, I had been hired two times from an ad I’d hung at Lily Putt’s—once to make a thirtieth anniversary dinner of beef Wellington (that’s so 1980s!) for Mr. and Mrs. Rubenacker, who owned the movie theater, and another time to prepare merit-badge cookies for Blue Creek Boy Scout Troop 116.

Blue Creek’s most successful teen entrepreneurs always seemed to be the boys who mowed lawns in spring and summer, or those who climbed up on roofs in foul weather to clean out rain gutters in fall and winter. Gnocchi in brown butter sage sauce or gooseneck barnacles in lemon cannot compete with free-flowing rain gutters in Blue Creek, I suppose, no matter what the weather’s like.

“One time, Brenden Saltarello found an entire dead squirrel when he was scooping out the rain gutters on Mrs. Benavidez’s house,” Karim told me. “The squirrel’s head came off in Brenden’s hands when he picked it up.”

“Does he still clean gutters?” I asked.

“Yes, but he’s a vegetarian now,” Karim said.

That explained why all those times I’d seen Brenden playing golf at Lily Putt’s with some of the other guys on the baseball team, he’d never ordered a burger from me at the snack bar.

And ever since she’d turned fourteen, Bahar had picked up a few jobs babysitting around Blue Creek, all from the flyer she’d posted in the Teen Zone. Still, I had to conclude the following:

Gooseneck Barnacles > Unclogging Disgusting Rain Gutters with Dead Squirrels in Them > Babysitting

Because it was just after we read the 1933 feature on Blue Creek history and Bahar had talked (actually, “argued” is a more accurate term) me and Karim into walking back to the library with her so she could photocopy the next article she’d found about the Purdy House, when her parents texted Bahar to tell her that she needed to come home right away because there was a young family of prospective clients that was interested in employing her to babysit their offspring.

So Karim and I were free and off the hook.

Or at least that’s what we thought, as Bahar once again joined the ranks of the employed.

“Maybe you guys can stay here and read it on your own,” Bahar said. “In 1962 it was like one of those old sci-fi movies here in Blue Creek, what with the Cold War going on, and a screwworm infestation and all.”

“Screwworm infestation?” I asked.

“It was a tense time,” Bahar said. “I don’t know where people got their ideas from all those years ago.”

“Everyone smoked cigarettes then, even on TV shows,” Karim said. “The chemicals they put in cigarettes can make you go insane.”

I nodded in agreement. On the other hand, my dad and I had eaten a lot of trash and bugs on our survival campouts, and eating garbage was probably just as bad for your sanity, but I didn’t want to confess that to Karim and Bahar.

So after Bahar left us there in the library, Karim and I took advantage of our freedom and sat down on one of the big red couches in the Teen Zone, slipped our shoes off, put our feet up on one of the ottoman cubes, forgot all about screwworms and what Bahar wanted us to read, and watched everyone who’d come in for Tuesday Teen Gamer Afternoons. There was a tournament going on, and everyone was playing this game called Battle Quest: Take No Prisoners, which was totally confusing to me, but there was a lot of shooting and things blowing up in it, so it probably had to be better for you than cigarettes or eating garbage.

There is something that becomes unavoidable in the lives of Princess Snugglewarm fans. In the same way that I’d been hypnotically drawn to Trey Hoskins’s wall display for A. C. Messer and Princess Snugglewarm versus the Charm School Dropouts when we’d walked into the library on Sunday, my eyes latched on to a familiar shade of pink T-shirt, and a magical unicorn who had a blood-spattered horn named Betsy, which was worn by one of the boys sitting at the consoles where everyone was waging war on everybody else.

Princess Snugglewarm fans are all okay people, as far as I’m concerned.

I bumped my knee into Karim’s so I could get his attention.

“Hey. Brenden Saltarello’s over there playing in the Battle Quest tournament,” I said.

Karim shifted uncomfortably beside me on the couch. He said, “I’m going to go somewhere quieter so I can read that article Bahar gave us.”

That was something I did not think Karim would voluntarily do.

And I’d just been getting comfortable. On the big projector screen, some gamer had blown up the Eiffel Tower. Several of the kids there were mad about it and were dropping giant cucumbers from dirigibles; some high-fived each other. I couldn’t tell which side of the war Brenden was on—if he liked France or not.

I said, “You are?”

“Yeah. The 1962 one, right?” There was a little bit of urgency in Karim’s voice, but judging by his jittery legs, I figured he had to go to the bathroom or something.

“Um.”

And then Karim was gone. He left me there alone on the couch, watching the violence and destruction of Paris from enormous bomb-laden cucumbers on the main screen in the Teen Zone, with only his empty shoes to keep me company.

I waited there on the couch for Karim to come back, but after an hour had gone by and the entire planet had been pretty much destroyed by teenage video gamers and exploding vegetables, the tournament finally settled with a noisy victory from a high school boy, and the Teen Zone quickly began emptying out.

Trey Hoskins, whose hair was magenta that day, found me sitting there alone and asked why I hadn’t been playing in the tournament. I told him the truth—that whatever side I was on would have gotten mad at me because of how horrible I am at video games, especially ones that use vegetables for evil as opposed to good—and then he reminded me about returning the new Princess Snugglewarm graphic novel by Saturday morning, and coming in to see the author, A. C. Messer. I assured him that I would, that I had already finished reading Charm School Dropouts, and it was the best one ever, so I’d probably read it a few more times before I had to bring it back. Trey knuckle-bumped me in approval, and then caught me staring at his hand when he did.

Trey Hoskins’s fingers were totally purple.

He said, “That’s what happens when you do this to your hair and you don’t have gloves.”

Then Brenden Saltarello walked toward us. In my entire life, I’d probably said fewer than a dozen words to Brenden Saltarello, outside of the usual “Hey” or “Thank you for not knocking my face off with your baseball,” and stuff like that. And inevitably, the “Hey” routine would happen again. But I could see why Karim liked him. Everyone liked Brenden Saltarello.

When Brenden passed by, he said, “Thanks for the game, Trey.”

And Trey said, “See you Saturday, Brenden.”

Of course Brenden Saltarello had to be planning on coming in Saturday to see A. C. Messer talk about Princess Snugglewarm. Nobody who wore a shirt like his would ever miss the opportunity to meet the actual creator of the Princess Snugglewarm universe. Just thinking about it made me excited, like it was my birthday coming up or something.

Then Brenden did a chin nod at me and said, “Hey, Sam.”

I did a chin nod back. “Hey, Brenden. That’s a great shirt.”

“Oh. Thanks.” Brenden Saltarello looked down at the carpeted space between the ottoman and sofa, and said, “Why do you have so many shoes?”

I didn’t know what to say. This was a question I had not been expecting. So I said, “Oh! You never know when you might need more shoes.”

Brenden Saltarello just looked at me for a few seconds of awkward silence, like he was thinking I was probably the stupidest kid in the world, which is totally what I felt like. Then he shrugged, glanced back at my “extra shoes” one more time, and left.

Karim did not come back.

I looked down every aisle, in every possible research area, but he was gone, and I was a little bit mad about being abandoned at the library by my best friend.

So I texted him.

SAM: Hey. Where are you???

KARIM: Pike Street. Almost at your house.

SAM: Why?

KARIM: Because you said I could stay over.

SAM: No. Why did you leave?

KARIM:…

SAM: Karim?

KARIM: I wanted to read the article Bahar told us about. It was too noisy in TZ.

SAM: You are walking all the way to my house in your socks.

KARIM: Not really. They’re your socks. I borrowed them when you were at LP yesterday.

SAM:…

KARIM: Sam?

SAM:…

KARIM: Sam?

SAM: I put your shoes in the lost and found.

KARIM:

SAM:…

KARIM: My mom’s going to be mad at you.

SAM: When the poison gas goes away and she gets back from the (excuse me) nudist colony in Mexico with your dad.

KARIM:

SAM:…

KARIM: Did you really leave my shoes in lost and found?

SAM: No. I am carrying them like a dummy. I’m almost on Pike.

KARIM: Thank you. Sorry for ditching you.

SAM: Why did you leave? Never mind. You don’t have to tell me.

KARIM: Yeah. BS.

SAM: Karim! EXCUSE YOU.

KARIM: No. I meant Brenden Saltarello.

SAM: Oh. Oops.

KARIM:

KARIM: I’m at your house now.

SAM: I’ll be there in like ten minutes.

KARIM: Your mom asked me where my shoes are.

SAM: Well? What did you think she would do?

KARIM: I told her that you won them from me in a poker game behind the liquor store with some old men who just got let out of jail.

SAM:…

KARIM: Sam?

SAM:…

KARIM: Sam?

SAM:…

KARIM: Well, she is pretty mad at you for gambling, and she told me she was going to make you give me my shoes back. She’s getting me some ice cream right now, btw.

39. Hellgrammites are really disgusting bug larvae that bite, but people like using them for fishing bait, because apparently fish will eat anything that fits into their mouths. Hellgrammites most closely resemble the worst things you could ever see in a nightmare.

40. I’ll admit it, they look horrible, but not terrifying like hellgrammites.