By nine o’clock that same Friday night, Alec admitted to himself that he wished Nina would care more about him and less about Kent. But the fact was, if Nina chose to hang around with Kent, there wasn’t much he could do about it.
So he did what he’d always done whenever a problem pushed in at him: He went looking for his comfort books. And much later, when he finally fell asleep, Alec was shipwrecked on an island with the Swiss family Robinson.
He woke up around seven on Saturday morning, which was way too early. He tried getting back to sleep, but all his thoughts from the night before came crashing in. Plus, Luke was already awake—he heard soft computer game explosions through the wall.
Then he smelled coffee, so he pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt and headed downstairs. He found his dad out back on the sunporch, reading the news on an iPad.
He smiled at Alec. “You’re up early.”
“Yeah, I couldn’t get back to sleep.”
“Your light was on at midnight, and you were drooling all over your book.”
Alec smiled. “Thanks for saving my place. And for shutting off the light.”
His dad looked at him. “You couldn’t stay awake last night, and you couldn’t stay asleep this morning….What’s up? I know the schoolwork is going great—those Friday reports? Really excellent.”
“Thanks,” Alec said. “Yeah, school’s good. It’s after school, the reading club and everything.”
His dad closed the cover of the iPad but didn’t say anything, just waited.
Alec said, “So…when you were a kid, did you ever get bullied?”
“You mean, did kids punch me, and stuff me into my locker, and hold me upside down in the boys’ room with my head stuck inside a flushing toilet?”
Alec’s eyes got huge. “That happened to you?”
His dad smiled. “Nope, never. I was always a computer geek, but I was never small enough for anybody to try stuff like that. But I still got called a nerd by just about everybody. And teasing like that, it’s still bullying.” He took a sip of coffee, then said, “Are you getting bullied after school?”
Alec shook his head. “Nah—it’s more like what you said, teased. Except they call me a bookworm.”
His dad frowned. “Let me guess: Kent Blair, right?”
“Yup. Kent again. Except, I am a bookworm. I just…am.”
“Well,” his dad said, “I’m a genuine nerd—I always have been, and I always will be. You have to learn not to care about the words.”
Alec said, “Yeah, except nerds and geeks are cool now. They can end up being billionaires. I don’t know what bookworms turn into, but they don’t turn into billionaires.”
His dad said, “Trust me, most nerds don’t become billionaires. And it’s not about money, anyway. It’s about doing what you’re good at, doing what you love. You still love books, right? Still love reading?”
“Sure.”
“Then don’t let a stupid label bother you. Keep doing what you love—except not during classes.”
Alec nodded. “Right.” Then he was quiet a moment. “It’s just…well, girls don’t like guys that are bookworms much. They mostly like sports guys.”
“Oh,” his dad said slowly. “Girls. Well…maybe this isn’t going to sound like much help, but girls are really, really smart. And they’re just like everybody else, because they think they like one thing for a while, and then they think some more, and they figure out that maybe they don’t like that so much. And everybody figures out that labels don’t matter either, like ‘bookworm’—or ‘sports guy,’ because that’s a label, too. And eventually everyone figures out that it’s not what someone does that matters most. It’s what a person is—on the inside.” His dad made a face. “Yikes! That sounded like something from one of those morning talk shows! I need more coffee—or maybe I need less coffee.”
Alec smiled a little, but then he shook his head. “I get what you mean, but girls don’t like bookworms. Period.”
“So,” his dad said, “maybe you should stop being a bookworm. Be something else.”
“Right,” Alec said, “like that could ever happen.”
“And besides,” his dad added, “you’re kind of a sports guy yourself—I don’t know any other twelve-year-old kid who can water-ski the way you do!”
His dad had a point, sort of.
Alec had first learned to water-ski the summer after second grade, when he was barely eight years old. His grandparents had a cottage on a lake in New Hampshire, and their neighbors had a son Alec’s age named Paul. They also had a powerful ski boat. Paul’s family skied every afternoon when it wasn’t raining, and Alec always got to tag along.
It turned out that Alec was a natural on skis—he had a great sense of balance, he was strong and agile, and most importantly, he wasn’t afraid to fall. Paul’s older brother, Liam, was an expert at slalom skiing, and after Alec’s very first time skiing, that became his goal. He wanted to go cutting back and forth across the wake on a single ski like Liam did—blasting out big plumes of spray with each sharp turn.
With good coaching from Liam, by the end of his second summer as a skier, Alec was able to get up and stay up on one ski. And this past summer before sixth grade, he’d really started feeling like he had full control out there—he was even able to use the wake of the motorboat like a ramp and launch himself a few feet into the air as he zipped back and forth. There were always three or four other people in the boat, but they were at the far end of the towrope. Alec felt like he was totally alone out there, slicing the surface of the lake. He still fell, but not very often, and that feeling of speed and freedom and self-control was like nothing else.
The skiing made him strong, too. A ten-minute slalom ride was like an hour and a half of heavy exercise. Read all morning, water-ski all afternoon, read all night—that three weeks in New Hampshire was Alec’s idea of the perfect summer vacation.
But being great on a slalom ski? It wasn’t the same as being good at baseball or basketball or soccer. Or even kickball. Water-skiing was something he did mostly by himself…sort of like reading. And no matter how good he was at it, it didn’t count—not at school.
And not with girls.
His dad saw that Alec wasn’t really buying either idea—that he could decide to be something else, or that he could call himself a sports guy.
“Okay,” he said, “here’s a true story. About ten years ago I worked for this company that made computer hard drives—kind of clunky, but they were super reliable, and the company sold hundreds of thousands of them. Then we got a bad batch of parts, and we didn’t know it until the bad parts got built into about fifty thousand of our drives, and they got shipped out all over the world. And the drives started failing, and people lost their data, and all of a sudden our reputation was dead. We fixed the problem fast, made the same terrific drives as before, but no one would buy anything with our name on it—our brand was ruined.”
“So what happened?” Alec asked.
“Well, it pretty much killed the company…but only for about six months. First of all, we fixed our quality control to be sure bad parts could never slip past again. Then we changed the design of our cases, and we made plans to offer good deals that would get customers buying again…and we changed the name of our company, our brand name—we rebranded ourselves. Made a new logo, too.”
Alec had a puzzled look on his face. “But you said maybe I should stop being a bookworm.”
“Yeah, but what I meant is, keep being who you are, keep doing what you do, but rebrand yourself. What you do and what you are? Call it something else.”
“Okay,” Alec said slowly, “but…like, what?”
His dad shrugged. “I don’t know. But bookworm is just a word, right? Bookworm, sports guy, airhead, brainiac—all those labels, they’re all just words. Bookworm calls up a picture in the mind, and you don’t like it. So pick another word, a word that calls up a different picture, something that’s more what you are really like.??
?
Alec said, “What was your company’s old name?”
“Eastern Data.”
“And the new name?”
His dad opened the iPad cover, tapped on the screen, and then turned it toward Alec. “Here,” he said. “The new name and logo go together.”
Alec read the name out loud. “ ‘Blockhouse Digital’…that’s way better than Eastern Data—and that picture? There’s a blockhouse like that in Treasure Island !” He thought a moment, then said, “So the computer drives were still the same?”
“Yup,” his dad said, “on the inside they were exactly the same. Except rebranding is tricky. You have to get the timing right. But a new name and a good logo at the right time? It can be a help. Anyway, it’s just something to think about. And the girls thing? Like I said, girls are smart. If you keep on being one of the good guys, girls are going to figure that out, no matter what.”
All that sounded good to Alec, and most of it even made sense…but he still didn’t feel much better. And after he ate some breakfast, he went back to The Swiss Family Robinson, back to living in a tree house on a distant island.
Alec stayed tucked away inside his comfort books for the rest of the weekend. When he finished The Swiss Family Robinson and left their island, he started The Call of the Wild, surviving in the frozen Klondike—and those two books took care of his Saturday. He spent most of Sunday stuck in survival mode, reading The Hunger Games. By bedtime on Sunday, Alec was four chapters into Hatchet, camped beside a wilderness lake, lost and totally alone.
And these favorite books had worked their magic, blotting out his own worrying and wondering and plotting and planning for two whole days.
But Alec’s reading skidded to a stop as the school day began on Monday morning, and once again he had to deal with real people—all his thoughts about them, and all their thoughts about him, too.
Kent? He was in first-period art class, acting tough and sneery and impossible to ignore.
Nina? She waved and smiled when Alec saw her in third-period language arts. But all he could think about was how Kent had probably gone over to her house on Saturday, and how they must have played basketball…in the moonlight—plus Kent had probably taken every chance he got to tell Nina not to hang around that club with that dorky bookworm anymore…and wouldn’t she like to just switch over to Active Games and become a super sports girl…because together they could rule the world!
I am such an idiot! When am I going to get it? I’m not in charge of anybody but my own stupid self! Kent is Kent, and Nina is Nina, and I am me—and that’s that! And I have to mind my own dumb business!
This silent self-scolding session actually worked pretty well, because later, when he noticed Kent stopping to say hi to Nina at her table during lunch, it barely bothered him at all. And later, when Alec got to the gym and he saw Nina getting another kickball lesson from Kent? He just shrugged and walked back to his table—no imaginary scenes or stories or plotlines. Still, he couldn’t help thinking about Kent, but realistically—no fiction allowed.
The guy was a bully and a show-off—he definitely thought he was the king of all sports. But if someone as smart as Nina still sort of liked him, and he was nice enough and patient enough to help her get better at sports? Well, then maybe Kent wasn’t such a completely rotten jerk—and even after all that stuff his dad had said about labels, those were the kindest words Alec could find to describe Kent.
And with these semi-cheerful, semi-generous, semi-friendly thoughts in his mind, Alec sat down at the club table.
Trying to shift his thinking away from Kent, he smiled at Lily and then opened Hatchet. After just a few pages, the long school day faded away, and then the club table vanished, and finally the whole gym, with all its drama, disappeared.
Five minutes later, something bumped the table, and Alec looked up, expecting to see Nina. It was someone else, a boy he didn’t know.
The kid said, “This is the Losers Club, right? I mean, that’s what it says on the sign.”
Alec nodded. “That’s right.”
“Well, I’m here to join.”
Alec closed his book. “How come you want to join?”
“Well, I don’t actually want to….”
Alec stared at him. “Then why are you here?”
“Because of Kent. He told me I had to join.”
“What?”
“He picked me for his team Friday, but I dropped two pop-ups during our games, so Kent said that I had to go and spend two weeks in the Losers Club, and then maybe he’d pick me for his team again. When I got back.”
Alec was so angry he couldn’t speak. Kent had sent this kid to his club as a punishment—the way the British used to send criminals to Australia!
All those calm, half-generous thoughts from minutes before were smashed to bits, and Kent shot right back to the top of Alec’s Most Hated list.
The boy fidgeted, then said, “And…and Kent told me something else. He said that while I was here, he wanted me to keep an eye on his girlfriend.”
The kid was embarrassed to say that word, especially with Lily listening in. His face turned bright pink.
Alec glared at the guy. Sounding as angry as he felt, he said, “There’s no talking or goofing around over here. No playing games, no listening to music, nothing like that. And Kent can’t make you be somewhere you don’t want to be. This table is only for reading, so you’d better just walk right back over there and tell him—”
“Oh, I know about the reading,” the boy cut in. “Kent told me. That’s partly why I got in trouble. Whenever it wasn’t my turn, I always sat down to read, and Kent kept catching me. And that’s when he started calling me a bookworm loser, and then I made those mess-ups, and now—here I am!” The boy tried to smile. “My name’s Jason.”
Alec did not smile back.
The kid started to sit in Nina’s spot, and Alec snapped, “Someone else sits there,” and to himself he said, Unless she never comes back from kickball cuddle camp!
Jason hurried around and sat on the same side as Alec, but as far away as he could get.
Alec narrowed his eyes and examined the intruder. “So, you’re in fifth grade?”
Jason shook his head. “Fourth.”
For a fourth grader, he looked pretty big.
Alec scowled, and using his gruffest voice, he said, “Well, like I said, you can’t do anything here except read—that’s the number one rule of this club.”
Jason nodded and said, “Right…okay.” He grabbed his backpack and got out a book, then sat up straight, holding it out in front of him, a serious look on his face.
Alec tried to see the title of his book, and he tried to remember what he’d been reading back then. He almost asked, “So, have you read Because of Winn-Dixie?” But he stopped himself. The club rules said he had to let any kid join, but that didn’t mean he had to be nice to this one.
And then he opened up Hatchet again.
The plot was still exciting, and Brian was still brave and smart, still hanging on, still facing one problem after another.
But real life kept nudging Alec, and he couldn’t get into the story.
He glanced up, and Lily was looking at him. Her expression was partly puzzled, but mostly concerned.
Alec was too mad to care what Lily thought, and he kept on reading, or at least trying to. Because the new kid was so annoying! If he shifted his weight, or turned a page, or scratched his chin, or reached for a pencil, Alec noticed.
Then the kid began to eat potato chips, and every crinkle of the bag, every munch and crunch felt like a small earthquake to Alec. He groaned inside, and he was just about to yell at Jason when Nina showed up.
She looked at the boy, then at Alec. “Who’s this?”
Without lifting his eyes from his book, Alec said, “That’s another loser—he’s in fourth grade, and Kent sent him over to keep me company.”
Nina tilted her head and looked at Alec a long moment. She almost repl
ied, but then turned to the newcomer.
“Hi—I’m Nina.”
The boy glanced at Alec, then back at Nina.
Whispering, he said, “I’m Jason.”
She looked at his book and smiled. “I love that book—totally hilarious, right?”
Curious, Alec took a quick look—the kid was reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.
Jason nodded. Still speaking softly, he said, “It’s really good, but I usually go for stuff with more action, especially stories that are really different from my own life, y’know? Like, have you read A Long Walk to Water?”
“Yes! And the part when he went across that desert? That really got me!”
“Yeah,” Jason said, “and what about the crocodiles? I don’t know if I could have—”
“Hey!” Alec snapped. “I’m trying to read over here!” He was especially annoyed because he hadn’t read the book Nina and Jason were talking about.
“Oh, sorry!” And Jason ducked back into his book.
Alec went back to reading, too…but out of the corner of his eye, he saw Nina turn his way and felt her staring at him.
Alec kept focused on his book, but he braced himself for a blast—Nina was going to say something.
But she didn’t.
And after she took out her book, Alec didn’t know whether he was relieved or disappointed.
Part of him wanted to close his book and take Nina aside and have a talk.
But instead, Alec just kept reading chapter after chapter about a boy lost in the wilderness, trying to stay alive—which was exactly the way he felt.
“Alec, it’s for you.”
Alec didn’t hear. He had finished Hatchet on the ride home from Extended Day, and after dinner and some math homework, he had started Johnny Tremain. So now he was fighting the redcoats in old Boston. Again.
His little brother’s voice rang out again, much louder.
“Alec! Get the phone, the landline!”
“Oh, sorry!”
Alec scrambled out into the hall, grabbed the phone from the table by the top of the stairs, and took it back into his room.