Here in the Real World Read online

  Dedication

  To my daughter, Hillary,

  for keeping this book here in the real world

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-One

  Seventy-Two

  Seventy-Three

  Seventy-Four

  Seventy-Five

  Seventy-Six

  Seventy-Seven

  Seventy-Eight

  About the Author

  Books by Sara Pennypacker

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Ware patted the two bricks stacked beside him on the pool deck, scored on the morning’s ramble. Tomorrow he’d bash them into chips to build the ramparts of his castle, but tonight he had another use for them.

  He swirled his legs through the water, turquoise in the twilight, and at exactly 7:56, he snapped on his goggles and adjusted them snug. “The boy began to prepare himself for the big event.” He whispered the voice-over, in case anyone had their windows open, or the Twin Kings were lurking around.

  The Twin Kings weren’t twins, just two old men who dressed alike in plaid shorts and bucket hats. They weren’t kings either, but they paraded around Sunset Palms Retirement Village like royal tyrants, making life miserable for anyone they encountered.

  Ware had studied the Middle Ages in school. Back then, kings could be kind and wise, kings could be cruel and crazy. Luck of the draw: serf or knight, you lived with it.

  The first time the Twin Kings had come across Ware, he’d been cheek down in the grass, watching a line of ants patiently climb up, then over, then down a rock, thinking about how much harder human life would be if people didn’t know they could just go around some obstacles. “Space Man” they’d dubbed him, claiming they’d had to yell at him three times before he’d lifted his head.

  Now, whenever they found him, they delivered some zinger they found so hilarious they had to double over and grab their knees. The comments were not hilarious, though. They were only mean.

  Which was okay—people made fun of him for spacing out; he was used to it.

  No, the mortifying thing was when Big Deal came out and sent the kings slinking away with a single glare. An eleven-and-a-half-year-old boy was supposed to protect his grandmother, not the other way around.

  “Oh, they’re harmless,” Big Deal had said last night, laughing and making him feel even more ashamed. “They’re deathly afraid of germs, so just tell them you’re sick. Diarrhea works best.”

  As if he’d called them up by thinking of them, the Twin Kings rolled around the corner, hands clasped around their royal bellies. “Earth to Space Man!” the shorter one cackled. “Don’t get your air hose caught in the drain down there!”

  Ware glanced back at his grandmother’s unit, then faced them. “Better stay away. I’m sick.” He grabbed his belly and groaned in a convincing manner. The Twin Kings scuttled back around the corner.

  Ware raised his eyes to the clock again: 7:58. He kicked off the seconds in the water.

  At 7:59, he picked up the bricks. Then he slowly filled his lungs with the sunscreeny air—hot and sweet, as if someone was frying coconuts nearby—and slipped into the deep end. The bricks seemed to double in weight, sinking him softly to the bottom.

  He’d never been on the bottom before, thanks to a certain amount of padding that functioned as an internal flotation device. “Baby fat,” his mother called it. “It’ll turn into muscle.” Witnessing his bathing-suited self in his grandmother’s mirror every day, he realized his mother had omitted a crucial detail: how it would turn into muscle. Probably exercise was involved. Maybe tomorrow.

  Ware located the four huge date palms—each one anchoring a corner of the pool. Their chunky trunks staggered in the ripples like live gargoyles.

  At eight, the twinkle lights winding up those trunks were set to come on. Tonight he would see it from the bottom of the pool. Okay, the big event was not exactly a dazzling spectacle, but he’d discovered that everything looked more interesting through water—mysteriously distorted, but somehow clearer, too. He could hold his breath for over a minute, so he’d have plenty of time to appreciate the effect.

  Five seconds later, though—a surprise. The palm fronds began to flash red.

  Ware understood right away: ambulance. Three times already in the weeks he’d been at Sunset Palms, he’d been awakened by strobing red lights—no shock in a retirement place. He knew the drill: the ambulance cut the siren at the entrance—no sense causing any extra heart attacks. It parked between the buildings, and then a crew ran around poolside where the doors to the units were sliders, easier to roll the stretchers in, haul the people out.

  Don’t be afraid, he telegraphed to whoever lay on the stretcher, the way he had the other times. Scared people seemed like raw eggs to him, wobbling around without their shells. It hurt just to think about people being scared.

  While he watched the date palms pulse, he thought about being happy instead. How happiness could sneak up on you, like, for instance, when your parents send you away for the summer to your grandmother’s place, which you know you’ll hate, but it turns out you love it there because for the first time in your life you have long hours free and alone. Well, except for maybe two old men so harmless they’re afraid of germs.

  An egret, as white and smooth as though carved from soap, glided through the purpling sky. In a movie, a single flying bird like that would let you know that the main character was starting out on a journey. Ware wished, the way he always did when he saw something wonderful, that he could share things like this. You see that? Wow. But he didn’t really know anyone besides his grandmother here, and she hadn’t been feeling well today, had barely stepped out of—

  Ware released the bricks, burst to the surface, snapped off his goggles, and saw: Big Deal’s sliding glass doors gaping open like a gasp, two
EMTs inside, bent over a stretcher.

  A third EMT squinted toward the pool, her white coat flashing pink in the lights, as if her heart beat in neon. Mrs. Sauer from Unit 4 hovered behind her, bathrobe clutched to her chest, face clenched. She raised one bony arm like a rifle and aimed her finger right at Ware.

  Ware shot over to the ladder, slapped the water from his left ear, his right, and as he scrambled out he heard, “That’s her grandson. Off in his own world.”

  At eight exactly, the twinkle lights came on.

  Two

  Ware woke, disoriented to find himself in his own bed instead of on the prickly couch at his grandmother’s place. The night swept over him—the grim, silent ride to the hospital, following the ambulance in Mrs. Sauer’s old Buick; the air-conditioned waiting room where he’d shivered, pool soaked and worried, until a nurse dropped a blanket over his shoulders; his mother charging in a few hours later, her jaw set like a rock. He flung off the sheets and got up.

  Halfway downstairs, he heard his parents talking in the kitchen.

  “Except that’s not what you wanted,” he heard his father say.

  “I know, I know,” his mother said. “I only wish . . .”

  Ware hurried the rest of the way down. “What do you wish, Mom? Is Big Deal okay?”

  His dad slid off the counter. “You all right? Tough night, yesterday.”

  “Mom. How’s Big Deal?”

  “She’s awake,” his mother answered, looking down into her coffee. “She’ll be okay.”

  “Oh, good. So when am I going back?”

  “Back?”

  His mom’s phone rang just then. She picked it up and gripped her forehead with the other hand as if she were afraid it might shatter, and marched into the bedroom.

  His father watched her go with a worried expression.

  Of course, worried was his dad’s normal state. “It comes with the job,” he often said, and he always sounded proud of it. Signaling airplanes down the runway meant thinking about every possible catastrophe.

  But Ware grew worried then, too. His mother was the manager at the city’s crisis center. She juggled twenty volunteers’ schedules, talked people down from bridges, and got babies delivered. She took control, as if control were a package sitting on the doorstep with her name on it. She didn’t grip her forehead as if it might shatter.

  “Dad. Big Deal’s okay. Mom said. When’s she getting out?”

  “Well. She is okay, she just let her blood sugar get low yesterday. That’s not good with her condition. They’ll have to—”

  “Her condition? Is Big Deal sick?”

  “Oh. Well, it’s . . . she’s not young. But she fell, is—”

  “Being old is a condition?”

  “She fell, is the thing. They need to make sure she’s all right.”

  “Oh. Okay, good. So what about the plan?”

  “The plan?”

  “I spend the summer there, so you and Mom can work double shifts, buy this house. The plan.”

  “Oh. Well, that was plan A,” his dad agreed. He picked up a Summer Rec brochure from the counter. “Plan B might be a little different.”

  Three

  Ware stood at the kitchen door, forehead pressed to the screen, building his argument.

  He could stay home alone, so no, he sure did not need to go to Rec again, if that’s what they were thinking. Rec was another name for day care, with heat rash and humiliation thrown in free of charge.

  The first time he’d gone to that program had been the summer after first grade, and the memory still hurt. “Go join in with the others,” a teenaged counselor had urged.

  “I am. Joined in with the others,” he’d answered, bewildered.

  “No. I mean inside the group. You’re outside.”

  Ware had studied the situation, trying to see what the counselor saw. He saw something different. He saw a huge space with kids scattered all over. “The outside is part of the inside when it’s people,” he’d tried to explain, then felt his face burn when that counselor had leaned into another counselor and laughed.

  In that precise moment he’d learned that the place that had always felt so right—standing enough apart from a situation that he could observe it, in the castle watchtower, as he’d come to think of it later—was wrong.

  Afterward, Ware had tried to forget the embarrassing episode. And that was when he’d learned the cruel irony of memory: you could be capable of forgetting things—Ware himself, at six, routinely forgot to comb his hair or bring home his lunch box—but the harder you tried to erase something from your brain, the deeper it got engraved.

  The other kids hadn’t forgotten either. The outside label stuck to him summer after summer, invisible but undeniable, like a bad smell, and outside was where they left him.

  Which was okay, although from then on, he made certain to appear to be part of the group if any grown-ups were watching. It wasn’t hard—“joined in” was simply a matter of geography to grown-ups. A few steps one direction or another did the trick.

  No matter. He wasn’t going back. Not even for the week or two until he could return to Sunset Palms.

  He’d been really happy there. The pool had been barely over his head and so narrow he could practically touch both walls at once. But the instant he’d slipped in, he’d always felt good. Really good. And something about it had worked like fertilizer on his imagination. He’d had dozens of great ideas drifting around that pool. Hundreds.

  Even better, when he’d told his grandmother about his report, “Defending Medieval Castles,” and how he wanted to actually build a model to see for himself how life had been for the knights, she’d shocked him by waving her hands over her dining table and saying, “Build it right here. We’ll eat our meals at the counter, and that’s that.”

  At Sunset Palms, he’d spent entire blissful days exploring the neighborhood, picking up things for his model. Whole nights happily building it. He’d been a little homesick, sure. But something that had been clenched tight inside him his whole life had loosened.

  He stepped into the backyard, looking for something to convince his parents that he could keep busy for a week or so. The yard seemed to shrug in apology. “The boy surveyed a wasteland,” he voice-overed—silently, of course.

  “Wasteland” was an exaggeration, but not much. Mr. Shepard wasn’t a spend-money-on-yard-maintenance kind of landlord, and his parents weren’t the spend-time-working-on-a-lawn kind of parents, so the yard was barren. Besides an old shed crammed with junk abandoned when the previous tenants left a decade ago, there were only a couple of rusting lounge chairs and a listing picnic table. They seemed to be gasping for final breaths before the weeds drowned them. “Wasteland,” he repeated.

  Which was, he suddenly realized, exactly perfect.

  He jumped off the step. A stunningly great idea had just sprung up, even without the imagination-boosting benefit of a pool.

  When his parents bought this place at the end of the summer, they’d own the backyard, too. The lounge chairs could be broken down to make armor. The shed would work as a throne room. The picnic table could be a drawbridge once he sawed off the legs. He’d turn the narrow side yard into a barbicon, the courtyard of deathly obstacles for attackers. No boiling oil, obviously, but definitely a catapult. He’d notch toeholds in the wooden fence and take running leaps to claim the top—mounting the ramparts, it was called. This last was such a satisfying image, he replayed it, this time in classic knight’s stance: Chin up, chest out, advance boldly.

  Ware dropped to the picnic table and stretched out. Sometimes he wished he lived back in the Middle Ages. Things were a lot simpler then, anyway, especially if you were a knight. Knights had a rule book—their code of chivalry—that covered everything: Thou shalt always do this, thou shalt never be that. If you were a knight, you knew where you stood.

  Too often, Ware wasn’t even sure he was standing. Sometimes he felt as if he was wafting, in fact. A little drifty.

 
; His mother, like the knights, operated from a clear code, and she was always trying to share it with him. “If you aren’t thinking three steps ahead,” she would say, for example, “you’re already four steps behind.” The trouble was, Ware hadn’t the faintest clue how to unravel an advice-puzzle like that.

  His father lived by a code also, made up of sports sayings. It was equally undecipherable.

  “Ware!” his dad called just then from the back door.

  Given the level of irritation in his voice, Ware knew he’d called a few times already. He jumped up. “Sorry. What?”

  “Inside. Team huddle.”

  Four

  Ware’s mother sat at the kitchen table, still gripping her phone.

  “What happened?”

  His dad took a seat. He patted the chair between them.

  Ware stayed standing. “What’s wrong?”

  “When she fell, your grandmother fractured her hips. Both hips!” His mother’s voice was extremely cheerful and determined, but it had gone up into a strange new register. “She’ll have to have them replaced.”

  “Replaced?” Images of things that got replaced presented themselves unhelpfully in his mind. Batteries, light bulbs, toothbrushes. A hip didn’t fit.

  “Artificial joints. Surgery. Nothing for a child to be concerned with.” His mother smiled hard, but she blinked her eyes quickly.

  Ware felt the world collapse a little, as if it had suddenly remembered it was hollow at its core. Was his mother going to cry?

  His dad seemed as shaken as Ware by those blinking eyes. He took over. “Hip replacement is a common operation, and your grandmother is pretty tough.”

  Pretty tough. Ware almost laughed at that. Big Deal was always asking piercing questions—She’s direct, his mother explained in excuse—and she expected answers. Whenever they saw her—holidays mostly—she ran the visit like a military maneuver. Even the Thanksgiving turkey had seemed to salute when she walked by. He’d been kind of scared of her, actually.

  But staying with her, he’d experienced the flip side of her toughness. Instead of holding it up against him, she’d wrapped it around him like a shield, the way she’d done with the Twin Kings.

  “I’ll help her out. Do stuff for her when I’m back there next week,” he said.