Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe

by Preston Norton

Genres: YA Coming of Age

Synopsis

Perfect for fans of John Green and Becky Albertalli, Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe is a "sneakily thought-provoking" and "utterly unforgettable" must-read for every fan of contemporary YA. Cliff Hubbard is a huge loser. Literally. His nickname at Happy Valley High School is Neanderthal because he's so enormous-6'6" and 250 pounds to be exact. He has nobody at school, and life in his trailer-park home has gone from bad to worse ever since his older brother's suicide. There's no one Cliff hates more than the nauseatingly cool quarterback Aaron Zimmerman. Then Aaron returns to school after a near-death experience with a bizarre claim: while he was unconscious he saw God, who gave him a list of things to do to make Happy Valley High suck less. And God said there's only one person who can help: Neanderthal. To his own surprise, Cliff says he's in. As he and Aaron make their way through the List, which involves a vindictive English teacher, a mysterious computer hacker, a decidedly unchristian cult of Jesus Teens, the local drug dealers, and the meanest bully at HVHS, Cliff feels like he's part of something for the first time since losing his brother. But fixing a broken school isn't as simple as it seems, and just when Cliff thinks they've completed the List, he realizes their mission hits closer to home than he ever imagined. Razor sharp, moving, and outrageously funny, Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe is an unforgettable story of finding your place in an imperfect world.

Release date: April 16, 2019

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 416

Sample

There are three rules to high school irrevocably inscribed within the interstellar fabric of the universe.

Rule number one: It’s all bullshit.

Now before you go thinking I’m some angsty little teenage shit, you should know that I’m not little. In fact, I’m a behemoth. Sixteen years old and somehow miraculously shattering the 250-pound barrier. Holy crap, you say. Get the hell out of town, you say. You think that’s nuts? Let me rephrase it for you:

I’m a quarter of a thousand pounds.

Sometimes not sucking at math is a curse all its own.

It’s not that I was completely fat; I was just big in general. Six foot six, to be exact. I was like this semi-evolved humanoid porpoise standing as a solemn warning of Darwinism gone wrong. I was like the immaculately conceived Force child of Jabba the Hutt and Chewbacca. Someone like me didn’t need to look for the bullshit; it found me like a lard-seeking homing missile. Here were just a few shining examples:

“Hey, Cliff!” said Kyle Dunston on September 17 of last year, after I dropped my pencil in Mr. Gunther’s Algebra 2 class. “Did you know that when you bend over, your butt crack is big enough to put the Grand Canyon out of business?”

“Easy, Neanderthal,” said Lacey Hildebrandt on December 2, while I was making my way to the lunch line. “I’m pretty sure the cafeteria is all out of Twinkies and small children.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Hubbard,” said the aforementioned Mr. Gunther last month after school—March 23—while he was looking over my make-up assignment on polynomials. “Could you try not to sound like a jetliner when you breathe? I can’t hear myself think.”

That was me, Clifford Hubbard—the Grand Canyon–assed, Twinkie-and-small-children-eating jetliner-breather. Known more commonly by the Happy Valley High School population as Neanderthal.

This was all very pertinent to the second rule of high school:

People suck.

And not just the students, as Mr. Gunther so abundantly demonstrated. Everyone. Such as:

1. Vice Principal Swagley, who always eyed me like I was an escaped convict masquerading as a minor. Surely I just hid my orange jumpsuit in the woods, close to where I buried all the bodies.

2. My guidance counselor, Mr. Gubler, who suggested the possibility of a career in sanitary engineering. Now, stereotypes aside (sanitary engineer = garbageman), sanitary engineering is actually a respectable engineering field, a career with a decent salary and a crucial emphasis on environmental safety not to be scoffed at. Unfortunately, my dad was an actual garbageman—before his career in professional unemployment, anyway—and Mr. Gubler knew it. Which therefore made him the Grand Vizier of Douchebags.

3. The lunch lady, Miss Prudy, who glared at me like she was wondering what I was doing in her lunch line and not that other one at the local Satanist compound that served Twinkies and small children.

The list went on and on. And that brought me to Aaron Zimmerman.

The Aaron Zimmerman.

It wasn’t that he was more or less douchey than anyone else. Really, his level of douchebaggery was rather average. He was simply the most popular douchebag at Happy Valley.

I mean, let’s face it. He was cool.

How cool? Imagine that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was based on the real-life story of Aaron Zimmerman—this human being whose will the universe miraculously obeyed. Except instead of Matthew Broderick, Aaron would be played by this genetically engineered teenage clone hybrid of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Quarterback? Check. Four-point-oh GPA? Check. I hadn’t seen the guy’s ding-dong, but I imagine it was the size of a small nuclear warhead. I mean, why not? Everything else in the world was conclusively in his favor.

But before the List happened—more on the List later—I’d only had one real encounter with Aaron Zimmerman. Why would anyone as popular as him have had any reason to even acknowledge my existence?

Why, if my head intercepted his football, of course.

April 12 (12:50 p.m., if you wanna get specific).

I was wearing my “lucky hoodie”—plain black with a four-leaf clover printed on the front—which was really more of an ironic name because bad things always happened to me while I was wearing it. My older brother, Shane, gave it to me for my birthday, although I was pretty sure he bought it from some kind of witch doctor, because it was definitely jinxed as fuck. There was a hole in the inner fabric of the front pocket that I liked to stick my right thumb in—ripping it just a little bit bigger each time. I couldn’t help myself. A nervous tic, I suppose, when you’re essentially wearing a kismet time bomb.

Meanwhile, Aaron was chucking said football across the crowded hall to his crony, Kyle Dunston—yes, of “Grand Canyon–assed” fame—the trajectory of which was well over everyone else’s heads.

Unfortunately, my head was also well over everyone else’s heads. The football connected with my face. Two hundred and fifty pounds or not, that football nearly sent me flying into last Tuesday. But instead of shattering the space-time continuum, I merely collided into the nearest locker, leaving a perfect, Neanderthal-shaped fossil imprint. For about five discombobulating seconds, I had no idea what happened. My mental processing was going something like this:

Guh…

Uggghhhhh…

Blleeeaaaarrrrrgggghhh…

I was still prying myself out of the locker crater when Aaron Mosesed his way through the crowded hall like it was the Red Sea. He extended a helping hand. I took it.

“Whoa, are you okay?” he said, half laughing, half sounding like something resembling genuineness. “You really did a number on that locker.”

I was still struggling to operate the English language, so I just kept blinking, failing to grasp that ever-elusive thing we call reality. Aaron was smiling as he eyed the crushed locker, and in my befuddled state, it could have passed as a real smile.

“Man, what do you eat for breakfast? Twinkies and small children?”

I know I was big, and in the world we lived in, big usually equaled stupid. But I wasn’t stupid. I had three realizations instantaneously:

1. That line was a Lacey Hildebrandt original.

2. Aaron Zimmerman had dated Lacey Hildebrandt. (This might have seemed like a grand coincidence, but really, it wasn’t. Aaron was like James Bond—always got the girl; never the STD. Or maybe he had all the STDs! Who knew?)

3. During that brief relationship, the two of them had obviously had a great big laugh at Neanderthal, the Twinkie-and-small-children eater.

And that brings me to High School Rule Number Three: Fists speak louder than words.



My fist was a wrecking ball, and it was swinging to excavate Aaron’s genetically engineered Brad Cruise clone-ass face.

That’s when I learned that I had made a dire miscalculation. He wasn’t just a Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise clone. There was also Bruce Lee in there somewhere because he limboed backward, narrowly missing my blow. And then he popped right back up like a jack-in-the-box, guided by his fist, which nailed me right in the jaw.

Now I was obviously a big guy, bordering on Brobdingnagian…

…but damn!

I staggered backward, nearly into my Cliff-shaped crater, but caught myself with my hands. Aaron held his ground. His good friend, Kyle Kiss-Ass Dunston, however, was under the impression that Aaron was the president of the United States, and he was a member of the Secret Service, and this was suddenly a matter of national security. Kyle flew in, limbs flailing, with all the killer moves of an inebriated octopus.

I was smiling on the inside. I’d been waiting for this since September 17 of last year.

Grand Canyon, my ass.

My fist was a battering ram, straight and true, right into the word-spouting orifice of Kyle’s face. You know that scene in The Matrix Revolutions when Neo punches Agent Smith in the head, and his whole face just kind of ripples?

Yeah. I was pretty sure that just happened.

Kyle went all Raggedy Ann across the hall—right into the circle of human vultures flapping in to feed on the action.

I lurched, veering my heavy momentum toward my remaining opponent. Aaron took off like a jet toward me. We crashed into each other—two raging, stormy tides of human fury. I may have had the body mass of a baby whale, but Aaron’s reflexes were lightning. His left uppercut caught me on the other side of my jaw—THWACK!

At least my face would be proportionately fucked.

Fortunately for me, gravity was a cruel mistress. I was already on top of him, only slightly derailed by his blow. We rolled across the hall like some swollen, lopsided ball, roughly the size of a Prius. I had my hands around his throat, but Aaron decided to play prison rules and grabbed me by the nipples. Not that they were hard to find. I reckon I was a solid B cup, preparing to enter the solid realm of C if those Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts didn’t stop being so damn delicious.

Aaron was gurgling, and I was screaming. We let go simultaneously. At this point, I just wanted to curl into the fetal position and cry.

We both staggered upright, groaning and drunk on pain like a pair of zombies straight out of a Romero film.

“Son of…a bitch,” said Aaron between breaths. He sounded as exhausted as I felt. “You fight pretty good…for a beached whale.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You too…for a narcissistic…pantywaist…little ass-taxi.”

Aaron actually laughed at this. “Wow…the Neanderthal knows…words and shit.”

“Please…the English language…is my bitch…you gaping cockmuppet.”

And that’s when my spidey-sense activated, and I sensed a terrible disturbance in the Force. Or maybe it was just the droves of students scattering like trouble was swiftly approaching.

“CLIFFORD HUBBARD!”

Shit.

This exclamation came from the only woman at HVHS wearing a power suit. Her hands were on her hips, never a good sign. Ever. Her hair fell in straightened curtains of black over her face, contorted into the Scowl of Death.

Principal McCaffrey was pissed.



Note that McCaffrey didn’t yell Aaron’s name. Just mine. Do you know why that was?

Remember High School Rule Number One? Remember Rule Number Two?

Still, that didn’t exclude Aaron from being escorted with me to McCaffrey’s interrogation chamber. Kyle would have joined us, too, if his borderline-comatose ass wasn’t being examined in the nurse’s office.

“Take a seat, you two,” said McCaffrey.

Aaron sat politely. I sort of collapsed into this flimsy plastic piece of shit masquerading as a sitting apparatus. It released a long, drawn-out squeal. I imagined it desperately reciting the Lord’s Prayer before it died under my ass.

To the untrained eye, Principal McCaffrey’s office glowed of cheerful professionalism. But I wasn’t fooled by the wall of award plaques or the bookshelves lined with inspirational bullshit titles like CHILDREN ARE THE FUTURE or LEARNING WITH LOVE. And don’t even get me started on the mug:

WORLD’S GREATEST PRINCIPAL.

I had been waiting years for McCaffrey to take her hawk-eyes off me for one goddamn second so I could puke in that thing.

McCaffrey sat down behind her desk and pretzeled her arms and legs together into a fierce knot.

“What happened?” she said.

The words were already springboarding out of Aaron’s mouth. “Well, you see, Principal McCaffrey, Kyle and I were just joking around, and I guess something we said must have offended Cliff ’cause he—”

McCaffrey was already shaking her head, eyes closed, one hand on her temple so as to prevent her Bullshit-O-Meter from sending her migraine into nuclear-meltdown mode. The other hand rose, slicing off Aaron’s words.

“Okay, stop,” said McCaffrey. When her eyes opened, they were firing on me. “Cliff, I want you to tell me what happened.”

All the muscles in Aaron’s face seemed to atrophy instantly. I wanted to take a picture and save it as the background screen on my iPhone. Except I didn’t have an iPhone. Or any variation of smartphone. Or even a stupid phone for that matter. My family was the special sort of poor that couldn’t afford a phone for their kid if the dude at T-Mobile gave us a brick with buttons for free because, according to my dad, talking to people costs money, too.

But back to Aaron’s face…

Ah, screw it. The fact of the matter was that I didn’t want to talk to McCaffrey, I wouldn’t, I refused to, and she couldn’t make me, and that was that.

But boy, could I stare.

McCaffrey and I glared laser beams at each other for a solid minute. Her stare demanded subservience. My gaze was like, Oh yeah, woman? I can fall asleep with my eyes open. For all you know, I’m already unconscious.

Aaron’s eyeballs ping-ponged between the two of us, unsure what to make of the spectacle.

“Aaron, could you excuse us for a moment?” said McCaffrey.

“Uh…” said Aaron. “Sure. Should I just wait outside in the…?”

McCaffrey’s brow scrunched impatiently.

“Yeah, I’ll just wait outside,” said Aaron. He stood up all-too-eagerly and started for the door.

But not before flipping me off.

His arm and erect middle finger were tucked close to his chest—completely out of McCaffrey’s view, the sneaky bastard. He walked slowly and held it for a long, tense moment until he opened the door and exited.

Before he closed the door, he winked.

Something ignited inside of me. It flashed and burned and billowed—filling me up—and suddenly, I had a purpose.

The next time I saw Aaron Zimmerman, I was going to beat the figurative and literal shit out of him. I was going to kill him with my bare hands.

But that was later. Right now there was only McCaffrey, me, and the metaphorical elephant.

“You know,” said McCaffrey, shattering the silence like a sheet of glass, “I’m really sick and tired of this shit. You not talking to me? What’s that supposed to accomplish? Just who the hell do you think you’re helping by giving me the silent treatment? Because it’s not you, that’s for damn sure.”

I actually kind of liked it when McCaffrey swore at me. At least I knew she was being real. None of that “Children Are the Future/Learning with Love” nonsense. No, deep down beneath the plaques and WORLD’S GREATEST PRINCIPAL mugs, Joan McCaffrey was a hard-ass chick who liked coffee and weekends and speaking her mind, and she hated kids like me. I could respect that. If I was her, I’d hate me, too.

Hell, I was me, and I still hated myself.

“Is this about Shane?” said McCaffrey.

My desire to be a part of this conversation plummeted from zero to negative eleventeen gazillion.

“I know it’s been hard on you, Cliff,” said McCaffrey. “But it’s been almost a year. I think your brother would want you to move on. Do you think this—?” She pointed at me. “Whatever the hell this is—do you think that’s the person he wanted you to be?”

Shane probably spent more school hours in McCaffrey’s office than outside of it. She knew Shane Hubbard—the pot-smoking, hell-raising juvenile delinquent.

But she didn’t know shit about the only real friend I ever had.

I leaned forward in my chair, and the words clawed out of my teeth. “Go. To. Hell.”



I was suspended from school for a week. This might have been a big deal if I gave a shit about anything. But I didn’t. Not one single shit. If it was possible for me to give negative shits, I’d distribute those like a six-year-old flower girl at a wedding.

Negative shits! Negative shits for everyone!

No, there were only two things I gave a shit about right now:

1. kicking Aaron’s ass, and

2. Shane.

I would always give a shit about Shane.

I left school, but I didn’t go home. I had a very important detour to make.

The Shannondale Cemetery wasn’t the prettiest thing on God’s green earth. I mean, it wasn’t even really green, and it certainly didn’t look like God had any part in its making. It was this brown-patchy, weed-ridden field of trailer-trash blah, because apparently people like my family had to bury their dead somewhere, too. Tombstones stuck out of the rain-drenched earth every which way like a mouthful of broken, crooked teeth.

Shane’s headstone was a tooth that hadn’t grown in yet; a tooth that would never grow in. It was a horizontal slab of cheap marble with the fewest words possible chiseled into its empty surface, because words apparently cost money, too:

SHANE LEVI HUBBARDIN GOD’S CARE

Beneath this were tiny, almost invisible dates that were way too close together. Sixteen years and one month.

Today—April 12—was his birthday.

He should have been seventeen today. But he wasn’t. He never would be. He was frozen—a permanent, chronological fixture in the annals of time.

I was now older than Shane by weeks.

There was something deeply unsettling about becoming older than your older brother. Like you were disturbing the natural order of things.

It had stopped raining a while ago, but I could feel the storm inside of me. Not a raging thunderstorm or anything like that. Just this endless downpour. Filling me up. Drowning me.

“Hey, bro,” I said.

Shane didn’t respond. Because he was dead, obviously.

Shane had always had the answer to everything. Even when he didn’t really know. It was the confidence behind the answer. I would have followed that confidence to the end of the world.

Unfortunately, the end of the world was sooner for Shane, and here I was, left with nothing but this gaping hole. Nothing but rain and drowning and slowly dying, but never death, because that would just be too damn easy.

“So I don’t know if you’re in heaven or hell or some sort of weird purgatory-limbo-thingy,” I said, “but it sure as hell has to be better than here.”

Shane didn’t say anything.

“Is there anything there? I mean, I know this stupid rock says ‘In God’s Care,’ but headstones are supposed to say shit like that to make people feel better. But, like…is he there?”

Nothing.

“Even if there isn’t a God or a heaven or anything,” I said, “if you could just, like, haunt me or do some of that freaky ghost shit and scare the crap out of me every once in a while, I’d totally be okay with that.”

Shane gave the obvious response.

“Think it over,” I said. “Maybe I’ll steal a Ouija board.”

I left Shane in the crooked, broken mouth of the Shannondale Cemetery. Somehow, I felt a little less alive leaving this home for the dead.



I lived in Arcadia Park, which was, in fact, not a park at all. It was a trailer park. The funny thing about trailer parks is that all the stereotypes—that trailer parks are low-class, trashy, cockroach-infested little shithole excuses for homes…

They’re all true.

I walked in the door—this sad, rectangular thing barely hanging by its hinges. The first thing people usually noticed was the cat-piss smell, which, fortunately, I’d gotten used to years ago. We didn’t have any cats. The second thing people usually noticed was the nicotine stains on the walls—this ghastly yellow splotchiness that looked like cat piss. None of us smoked. My dad quit smoking ten years ago, but I had a theory that it was only so he could afford his drinking problem.

And boy, did he drink.

He was the third thing people usually noticed—sitting in the recliner wearing a mustache, a camouflage trucker hat, and a bottle of Bud Light in his hand, hooked to the football game on TV like it was his iron lung. It was his way of vicariously reliving his own football glory days that ended after his own stint at HVHS. He wasn’t as big as me, but what he lacked in size, he more than made up for in dangerous levels of drunk-ass mean.

The bad news beat me home. Principal McCaffrey called about my suspension.

Normally, my mom picked up the phone. God gave my dad two hands—one for the TV remote and one for his Bud Light. He didn’t have a third pick-up-the-phone hand. And even if he did, there was still the issue of getting his lethargic ass off the recliner.

Every time my mom got the bad news, she scolded me in private. She never told my dad, because she preferred me alive rather than dead. I listened, mostly because I cared about her, and I told her I’d never do it again, even though I had no such intention. I didn’t want to break her heart, but at the same time, remember High School Rule Number One? Remember Number Two?

Remember High School Rule Number Three? Something has to speak louder than words. Words didn’t do shit.

But all this was aside from the point. The point was that my mom wasn’t home. And naturally, my dad didn’t pick up the phone. But Principal McCaffrey did leave a message on the answering machine—this ancient, telephonic mechanism used by poor people to record messages and dodge calls from debt collectors.

My dad heard that, all right. And he’d had plenty of time to get copiously drunk and stew over it.

“You know what pisses me off the most?” he said.

This wasn’t a rhetorical question. My dad didn’t ask rhetorical questions. And if you waited long enough to figure that out on your own, it’d probably be through an ancient Chinese martial art known as zui quan, or “drunken fist.”

Okay, not really.

But really.

“What pisses you off the most?” I asked. My tone was flat—undisturbed—but there was a cloud of dread wafting beneath the surface.

“No,” said my dad. He raised a dangerous finger, pointed it at me. “I want you to tell me what pisses me off the most. You’re a smart kid, Cliff,” he said. “You inherited my vast intellect, after all. Tell me: What pisses me off the most?”

He didn’t ask rhetorical questions, but he sure as hell liked to play mind games.

“Having to see my ugly face every morning for the next week?” I said. (Sometimes, self-deprecating humor worked in my favor.)

“Hey, hey, hey!” he snapped. “You inherited half that face from me, you ungrateful shit. If you’ve got a problem with your face, take it up with your mom.”

Despite appearances, my dad was actually a razor-tongued smart-ass. I suppose I inherited that from him. However, most smart-asses use sarcasm as a weapon because it’s universally understood that the alternative—violence—is morally wrong.

For my dad, it was merely foreshadowing.

“I called your principal back,” he said. “Asked how the Zimmerman kid looked. You know what she said? She said not to worry, he doesn’t have a scratch on him.”

Shit.

“A scratch! How the hell does a kid your size get suspended for a week, and not even lay a scratch on the other guy?”

“I dunno. He’s a quarterback on the football team.”

In retrospect, this was one of the dumber things I could say. It brought up a centuries-old argument that I was not ready to have again.

My dad stood up, which meant shit was real.

Even though he was smaller than me, it was scary when he stood up. There was something in the way his entire body tensed—like his veins might pop and he’d literally explode. More important, his hands were fast. If ass beatings were playing cards, he was a Vegas dealer.

“You see, that’s the problem,” he said. “If you’d stop watching all those goddamn sci-fi movies and join the football team like I’ve told you a hundred thousand times, you wouldn’t fight like a little queer.”

“I don’t fight like a queer,” I said—a little too defensively. “There were two of them. I punched Kyle Dunston’s face inside out.”

“Man, I don’t give a shit about the Dunston kid. He’s a skinny-ass bitch. He was collateral damage. The fact of the matter is that you picked a fight with the Zimmerman kid, and he walked away completely unscathed—which wouldn’t have happened if you’d join the fucking football team.”

My dad stepped away from his recliner. He was straight up, tense, and ready to deal.

“What do you have to say for yourself?”

I’d been in this situation before. He was giving me an ultimatum: either join the football team or get my ass kicked. He did the same thing to Shane, and Shane’s answer was always the same. I felt Shane’s words in the back of my throat.

“Football’s dumb,” I said.

My dad stopped. He stopped the way the world stops and the air goes silent before the sound waves catch up with the atomic mushroom cloud exploding in the distance.

“What did you say?”

He knew what I said. There was no going back. But I didn’t want to go back. Not today.

This was when the true Clifford Hubbard came out. Not the Neanderthal. Not the juvenile delinquent. This was the person who was nothing but emptiness. He was only this eggshell. Hollow. Cracked.

“You heard me,” I said.

Or at least that’s what I tried to say. I didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence.



My mom came home at eleven. As usual.

I heard her talking with my dad in the living room. She laughed at something he said. She always laughed, whether or not what he said was actually funny. I heard my dad bring my name up, but it was so casual—so dismissive—I might as well have been laundry or a random item for the grocery list.

She came straight to my room. As usual.

She was still wearing her Hideo’s Video uniform—baby blue, matching her soft eyes. Hideo’s Video—owned by this Japanese retrophiliac, Hideo Fujimoto—was the only video store in Happy Valley. It was the last middle finger saluting to Netflix and Redbox, and you know what? It had business! Because sometimes people want to watch that awesome movie from way back in the day, and sometimes those assholes at Netflix cycle it out of their rotation, and then what are you supposed to do? The truth is that people like going to video stores. Especially ones where the clerk happens to know everything there is to know about every movie ever filmed in the history of ever.

That was my mom.

It was actually thanks to her job at Hideo’s Video that Shane and I had a pretty sweet setup in our room. We inherited an ancient thirteen-inch TV/DVD/VCR combo, and Hideo let us have our pick of everything that cycled out of inventory and hadn’t been purchased from the discount bin within X amount of time. We had three whole bookshelves filled with the Hollywood greats—Ridley Scott and James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino. If we had to pick a favorite genre, it would probably chisel down to a solid tie between sci-fi and gangster films. Jim Carrey was a close third place. (Yes, Jim Carrey is totally a genre in and of himself.)

“Hey, sweetie,” said my mom.

Not We need to talk, or I thought you said you weren’t going to get in any more fights, or anything like that. Just this…love. This love that hurt because I knew I was disappointing her, and her heart was just too big to tell me the truth.

“Hey,” I said. I was lying on my bunk bed—bottom bunk, of course, because the top belonged to Shane, and I respected his space. I pretended to read my book. Mostly to hide the right side of my face. It was easier to pretend like nothing was wrong. Because, like, when everything is wrong, where the hell do you even start?

My mom sat down on the corner of my bed that wasn’t covered in Cliff. “Whatcha reading?”

“A book.”

“Oh, please. Stop. Spare me the details. I can’t. I just can’t.”

I couldn’t help snickering. I was defenseless. I closed the book and showed her the cover.

“Speaker for the Dead?” said my mom in her worst attempt at not sounding impressed. “Dang, we’re busting out the heavy Orson Scott Card. That’s some pretty philosophical sci-fi. You reading that for school?”

“I’m suspended, remember? And I don’t do schoolwork.”

“Oh, right. Because my rebel son only reads American literary classics for fun. Sorry, I forgot.”

“It’s science fiction.”

“Hey, only a snob sticks his nose up at science fiction. The best sci-fi tells us the truths about ourselves that we’re too afraid to hear. What part are you at?”

“I’m at the part . . .