The Size of the Truth Read online

  TO KELLY MILNER HALLS, WHO IS ONE OF THE BIGGEST REASONS I WRITE ABOUT FRIENDSHIPS

  THE FIRST DAY IN THE HOLE

  BEING ALONE IN THE DARK, IN A HOLE, ON THANKSGIVING DAY, IS NOT MUCH FUN; OR, OH WELL!

  This all starts with my first enormous truth, which was a hole.

  When I was four years old, on Thanksgiving Day, I fell into a very deep, very small hole.

  There were things in that hole. Things besides just me and dirt.

  Some people can’t remember anything at all from when they were four years old. It seems like most people’s memories begin when they’re in kindergarten or first grade.

  I can remember things that happened to me when I was only two.

  For example, I remember the first time I met Karim—just after he and his family moved into the house down the road from ours. That happened when I was two. But for years I could not remember what happened to me when I fell into that hole.

  Now I can.

  People say I’m smart. It’s not my fault, though. I never tried to be smart. To be honest, which is something I always do try to be, I stopped being able to talk after I got out of the hole, so I started school late, when I was seven. It was like being in a race, where every other boy and girl had a two-year head start on me.

  At least Karim always stuck with me, until we couldn’t stick anymore.

  The hole I fell into was an old well.

  In Blue Creek, Texas, which is where I live, everyone calls the hole an abandoned well, but that’s a strange way to describe a well. Nobody ever lived there and then moved out of it. It wasn’t a former pet, like a dog someone leaves out in the desert because they can’t take care of it anymore. So it’s hard for me to understand how a well can be “abandoned.”

  What I fell into was a hole that nobody bothered to point out to me was still there and was also still a hole. A very deep one.

  That day, Karim and I were running around in the woods behind his house with some older boys from the neighborhood, playing a game called Spud with a soccer ball that had gone flat.

  If this older kid named James Jenkins, who nobody liked and everyone was afraid of, hadn’t thrown the ball so high before Karim could catch it and yell Spud!, I would not have taken that last step (which wasn’t a step, to be honest, since planet Earth was not beneath my foot), and I would not have been swallowed up by a hole.

  But that’s what happened, and I fell.

  I felt my left shoe come off.

  Everything went dark.

  Somewhere above me, Karim yelled, “Spud!”

  And I kept falling.

  As scary as falling into an abandoned well might sound when you aren’t in the middle of falling into one, I remember feeling far more confused than frightened as I slipped farther and farther down beneath the surface of Texas.

  Falling seemed to take forever.

  I hit things, and dirt got into my mouth and nose. My jeans twisted around, and my T-shirt got pulled up around my shoulders. Somehow, my feet ended up above me and my head pointed down.

  As I fell, I worried about Mom and Dad, and how they were going to be mad at me.

  I stopped tumbling.

  Everything smelled and tasted like dirt.

  And I was upside down, lying like a capital J, looking up at my feet and a fist-size patch of blue, which would have been the afternoon sky above the hole I fell through.

  I spit mud out of my mouth.

  I yelled. “Hey!”

  I tried to move, to pull myself up.

  “Karim! Hey!”

  Then the walls around my shoulders seemed to widen out, and I fell again.

  The second trip was shorter than the first, and this time I hit what must have been the flat bottom of the well. I lay on my side with my arms curled around my head. Little bits of dirt and pebbles sprinkled down on me from the walls above. It sounded like rain. I shut my eyes.

  That was when I started being much more scared than confused.

  It was also when I started to cry, which made mudslides all over my face. When you’re four, it really isn’t a big deal if you cry, right? I mean, unlike when you’re a boy in middle school, when it becomes a completely different issue with all kinds of costly consequences.

  So I’m not embarrassed to say I cried. But let me make it clear: I was four, and I was at the bottom of a very deep hole.

  I didn’t think I was hurt, but I wasn’t really sure, either.

  I lay there for so long, just holding my head and trying to think about what had happened to me, and why this hole was here in the first place, but nothing made much sense.

  I was completely alone.

  It was Thanksgiving Day, and Mom and Dad were going to be so mad at me.

  I may have gone to sleep.

  HOW TO PROVE YOU’RE A UNICORN

  It starts with digging.

  Scritch scritch scritch!

  Scritch scritch scritch!

  I opened my eyes.

  Something else was in there with me.

  That’s kind of like the paradox of being in a hole: You don’t want to be alone, but then when something all-of-a-sudden shows up, you don’t want any company, either.

  Scritch scritch scritch!

  Whatever it was, the thing that was with me in the hole was digging. And I thought, Well, that was fast. Maybe someone has already come to pull me out. Maybe Mom and Dad won’t be so mad at me after all.

  I felt something brush against my foot—the one without the shoe.

  I jerked my leg back and turned over. There was just enough room for me to sit up. I had dirt in my mouth, and when I wiped my hand across my lips, they got dirtier.

  Scritch scritch scritch!

  “Hello?”

  For some reason that still confuses me, I whispered it.

  Why would anyone whisper when you’re stuck below the surface of Texas inside an abandoned well? It wasn’t like I was in a library or something.

  “Hello? Are you here to help me?”

  More digging by my feet. Then a dark, pointed object emerged through the dirt of the well’s wall. It was the snout of an armadillo, and he was burrowing his way into my abandoned well.

  The armadillo stopped. His nose was just an inch from my sock. He sniffed.

  “Hmm . . . A boy. What do you think you’re doing down here?” the armadillo asked.

  Not bothering to think about why an armadillo was talking to me, I said, “I think I fell down a hole and ended up someplace I am not allowed to be.”

  I wiped at the mud under my nose and looked up at the small bit of sky—so far above me. Maybe I was asleep, I thought. Maybe this was a dream. Maybe I was dead and this was what being dead is like: being stuck inside a very deep hole with a talking armadillo.

  And I thought, If I am dead, would an armadillo be something you would expect to find in heaven, or in (excuse me) hell?

  I said, “And what are you doing down here? I never knew armadillos dug so far down.”

  The armadillo snorted and corrected me. “Well, that’s where you’re wrong, kid. Besides, I am not an armadillo.”

  I said, “Oh?”

  And the armadillo said, “I’m a unicorn.”

  I may have only been four years old at the time, but I knew enough to know that I was talking to an armadillo, and that unicorns did not exist.

  “No such thing,” I argued.

  “That’s what you say,” the armadillo said.

  “You’re an armadillo.”

  The armadillo shook his snout. A little dirt fell down from the side of the well.

  “Don’t make a cave-in,” I said.

  “Unicorns never do bad things to little kids,” the armadillo said.

  “But what
about armadillos?”

  The armadillo sighed. “Look. I can prove to you that I’m really a unicorn.”

  I pointed out the obvious shortcoming. “But you don’t have a horn.”

  The armadillo scratched the beard on his chin with a dirty front claw.

  “It’s molting season,” he said. “And besides, lots of things that aren’t unicorns have horns. Like rhinoceroses and narwhals, for example. The best way to prove you’re a unicorn is this: Unicorns poop rainbows. Hang on, I can prove it.”

  Then the armadillo tucked himself back inside the hole he’d dug. I heard him turning around in there, and I was wondering—but not really wondering—what he was going to do. The reason I wasn’t wondering too much was that I thought a rainbow might actually make this deep dark hole a bit more cheerful.

  Everyone likes rainbows.

  After a few seconds, out poked the armadillo’s tail, which looked like a bunch of thread spools strung together on a line. The tip of the tail poked me in the foot.

  “Ready for the rainbow?” asked the armadillo, whose head was hidden inside his tunnel.

  “I guess,” I said.

  I was really hoping for a rainbow.

  But the armadillo (excuse me) pooped, right on my foot.

  It was definitely not a rainbow.

  “Hey! Quit that!” I said. I tried to pull my legs up toward my chest, but there was so little room to move around in that hole.

  I was stuck in a very deep hole, and I was being pooped on by an armadillo. It was not a good day.

  The armadillo laughed and laughed.

  “Ha ha ha! It works every time! Humans believe anything they hear! Ha ha!”

  Fresh armadillo (excuse me) poop stinks really bad, especially when you’re trapped inside an abandoned well with it.

  The armadillo’s tail (and his [excuse me] butt) disappeared back inside the burrow he’d dug, and then out popped his face once again, all smiling and laughing at me.

  “Oh man! Oh man, I crack myself up! Ha ha!” chuckled the armadillo. “Rainbows! Ha ha!”

  Then he calmed down and took a deep breath and sighed. He said, “Hey. You aren’t crying, are you?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  Because I was crying. It was all too much: being trapped and alone, inside a hole on Thanksgiving Day, and getting pooped on by a nasty armadillo-fake-unicorn-liar who was laughing at me. Besides, I was only four, so crying was okay.

  “Aww, now, don’t cry,” the armadillo said. “You’re making mud all over. It was just a joke.”

  Excuse me, but armadillo poop is not a good joke.

  The armadillo crawled out of his hole. He patted my knee with his front leg, which had claws that looked like enormous, dirty, old-person thick toenails. “You’re missing a shoe,” he said. “And your pants are about backward. Um. You’re a mess.”

  I tried straightening my clothes out. I could barely move, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about my missing shoe.

  “What’s your name, kid? My name’s Bartleby.”

  I didn’t care what his name was.

  I did not like Bartleby, even if he was suddenly trying to be nice to me.

  “That was really mean,” I said. “I don’t like you.”

  Bartleby stuck his armadillo lips out in an armadillo pout.

  He said, “Oh. I apologize. Really. I’m sorry, kid.”

  Bartleby took a breath and looked around inside our extremely cramped space. “So. Aren’t you going to tell me your name?” he asked.

  I said, “Sam Abernathy.”

  “Nice to meet you, Sam Abernathy!” Bartleby said.

  And as soon as Bartleby spoke my name, down the mouth of the well from up above us came something like an echo.

  “Sam?”

  I looked up.

  “Sam? Are you in there?”

  It was my best friend, Karim, calling down to me. He must have found my shoe where I’d fallen into the hole, and then figured out that I wasn’t invisible, but instead was a victim of gravity combined with a poor choice for water sources.

  That happened about seven years ago. I’m eleven now, and in middle school. But I still think about those days I spent at the bottom of the abandoned well.

  I think about them every day.

  • • •

  They plugged the hole up eventually.

  Everyone in Blue Creek calls it Sam’s Well.

  Some people still wear the T-shirts from seven years ago that say PRAY FOR SAM.

  Every time I see a PRAY FOR SAM T-shirt, I feel like crawling into a hole.

  EIGHTH GRADE

  TOP OF THE MIDDLE SCHOOL FOOD CHAIN

  This starts with time travel.

  I have an idea for a reality television show.

  The show follows an eleven-year-old boy named Sam Abernathy, who’s been jumped ahead during the first week of the school year, catapulted directly from sixth into eighth grade.

  The show is called Figure It Out, Kid!

  We are entirely uncertain whether or not the kid makes it out alive.

  Except I would never want to be on television, unless if it was maybe on a cooking show.

  I like to cook, even if my dad and mom wish I would be more focused on other things.

  The thing is, going from elementary school to middle school is like going from riding a bicycle with training wheels one day to flying a passenger jet the next. And nobody tells you anything to prepare you for it, because you’re evidently supposed to just figure it out, kid. And when the overnight jump is from sixth to eighth grade, it’s like flying a passenger jet blindfolded.

  It’s not just me they fail to tell certain key pieces of information to; it’s everyone. The problem is, all the other kids had a two-year head start on figuring things out for themselves, but I am stuck.

  It seems like it was only last June that I was in fifth grade.

  Well, it seems like it because last June I actually was in fifth grade. And then, during the first week of sixth grade at Dick Dowling Middle School, they brought me in for tests, and then they brought me in for tests again, and again after that, until I found myself in eighth grade, surrounded by giants and talking monsters with acne.

  The first thing they didn’t tell me about: The paradox of eighth grade is that you really want to be in eighth grade, because it is the top of the Middle School Food Chain, but when you are in eighth grade, you can’t think of anywhere that could possibly be a worse place to be, including the bottom of an abandoned well.

  The second thing they didn’t tell me about was this: In middle school, you have, like, six different teachers in one day, and some of the teachers are men.

  I mean, I knew that men were allowed to be teachers, at least according to television shows and stuff, but I had never actually had a grown-up man as a teacher. So when I crash-landed in Mr. Mannweiler’s eighth-grade homeroom, it almost felt as though I’d been drafted into the army, or put under arrest, or sent to prison or something—especially because, at Dick Dowling Middle School, all the homeroom classes were boys-only or girls-only.

  Mr. Mannweiler had an intimidating name, and his homeroom class smelled like damp socks. Mr. Mannweiler told me on my first day in his class I was the smallest eighth grader he’d ever seen. All the other boys laughed. Some of them made dumb jokes with their goofy man voices and bouncing Adam’s apples and pretended they couldn’t see me. That would have been fine with me.

  One of the boys drew a picture of what I assume was supposed to be me at the bottom of the well. But the drawing looked more like a digestive tract, with me inside a stomach. Another kid wrote “Pray for Sam” on Mr. Mannweiler’s whiteboard.

  Small towns have big memories.

  (Excuse me.)

  We are not allowed to say swear words. I say Excuse me when I feel like swearing.

  So, my first day of eighth grade was horrible. My mom came to school with me, to make sure I’d be okay. She stayed in the lobby of the school’s office and
waited there for me to check in with her between every class. It was very tiring, walking back and forth all day, carrying a pack of books that weighed a ton, and pretending that everything was perfectly fine when I was actually so nervous, I didn’t know what to say besides just saying Excuse me. The truth is, moms can’t do anything for you if things aren’t okay when you’re in middle school.

  I think middle school is the time in life when you first start to develop the grown-up habit of pretending everything’s fine when it really is not.

  It seemed to me that everyone thought they knew what was best for Sam—what was the right place for him. But ever since those days I spent alone (or not alone) at the bottom of the “abandoned” well, I felt as though everything was just a little bit off. Now, in eighth grade, I began to feel as though I’d been transported to a strange planet where nothing was right. My best friend was two grades behind me, beginning on Monday I was expected to be in the eighth-grade Boys’ PE class (which was completely different from sixth-grade PE class), my parents signed me up for Science Club without asking me if I even wanted to be in the stupid Science Club, and I had to miss the weekend working at my family’s miniature golf course because Dad had made plans to take me survival camping alone with him on Saturday morning.

  None of this was very Sam, in my opinion.

  Nobody knew what would have been Sam, if choices had been left up to me.

  But one of the biggest things they didn’t tell me about: Being in the same grade as James Jenkins is even scarier than living in the same small town with him.

  Maybe deep down I still blamed James Jenkins for throwing the ball so high, and for my falling into that well when I was four years old.

  (Excuse me.)

  JAMES JENKINS, MURDERER

  It starts when you’re afraid of things but can’t really explain why.

  James Jenkins walks like a murderer. He combs his hair like a murderer. James Jenkins chews Goldfish crackers for a really long time, which is something only a murderer would do.

  James Jenkins has this weird way of turning his head. He pivots his whole upper body like his neck’s in a brace, so he always keeps his chin pointing directly forward like the prow of a ship that is going to murder you.