When Friendship Followed Me Home Read online

  DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  Penguin Young Readers group

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Paul Griffin

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  eBook ISBN 9781101994504

  ISBN 9780803738164

  Quote 1 and Quote 2 from Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson, copyright 2007 by Jacqueline Woodson.

  Used by permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

  DREAMLAND AT NIGHT photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division,

  Detroit Publishing Company Collection [LC-DIG-det-4a12420]

  Photo 1 and Photo 2 by Risa Morimoto

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Risa, with all my love and thanks for letting me travel time with you.

  and

  For John, kid brother, superhero.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1: Chunky Mold

  2: Heir to the Empire

  3: The Demon, the Dog and the Diva

  4: The Stalker

  5: Mom

  6: The Microchip

  7: The Mold Horde

  8: The Underwear Thief

  9: Return of the Rainbow Girl

  10: Destined For Amazingness

  11: I Write, Therefore I Am

  12: The Traveler from the Past

  13: The Unexpected Solution to the Florida Problem

  14: Itchy Socks

  15: No Smoking in Mrs. Pinto’s

  16: The Exploded Rainbow

  17: The Laboratory of Mercurious Raines

  18: The Magic Box

  19: Fire Alarms and Fire Escapes

  20: The House by the Cemetery

  21: Doggy Daycare

  22: The Magician Who Rides the Moon

  23: Leo Means Lion

  24: The Test

  25: The Launchpad

  26: Halley’s Rap

  27: The Ringside Seat

  28: Rocks and Books

  29: Read to Rufus

  30: The Next Installment of the Magic Box

  31: Ginger

  32: How Was Mexico?

  33: The Mystical Manhattan Bookstore Tour

  34: The Dumbest Thing I Ever Did

  35: The Fake Marble Angel

  36: The Mobile Motel

  37: Flip’s Eyes and the Last Good-bye

  38: The Worst Time to Get the Flu

  39: Coupons, Movies and Promises

  40: Traveler Brian and the Tunnel of Light

  41: The Man Who Comes to Take You Away

  42: The Midnight Meeting

  43: Jeanie

  44: Chewie

  45: The Rainbow Girl and the Flying Trapeze

  46: Don’t Be Scared

  47: Sirius

  48: I Always Wanted to Be a Vampire

  49: Where’s Halley?

  50: It’s Like When You Bite Your Tongue

  51: Flip’s Magic

  52: Halley’s Stardust and Rainbow Snow

  53: Mrs. Salvador and Peacock Feathers

  54: Friends and Kites

  55: Whoa

  56: Good-bye for a While

  57: Travelers and Magicians

  Acknowledgments

  LUKE SKYWALKER: What’s in there?

  YODA: Only what you take with you.

  STAR WARS, EPISODE V: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

  1

  CHUNKY MOLD

  You’d have to be nuts to trust a magician. I learned that lesson the hard way. And then, if you can believe it, I actually became a magician’s assistant. That part was the Rainbow Girl’s fault, but the rest of it I blame on a little dog named Flip.

  The trouble started the second Friday of seventh grade. Damon Rayburn shoved me out of the lunch line. “Thanks, Coffin,” he said.

  “For what?” I said.

  “Offering to buy me a slice.”

  If you think a little threat like that could get me to surrender my pizza money to an idiot like Damon Rayburn, you know me pretty well. He slapped the back of my head and cut to the front of the line.

  “You’re half a foot taller than him, Coffin,” this kid half a foot shorter than Rayburn said. His name was Chucky Mull, but everybody called him Chunky Mold. “You should have belted him. Now he knows he can push you around.”

  “Allow me to quote Yoda, from The Empire Strikes Back,” I said. “‘A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.’”

  “You were being called upon to defend your inalienable right to eat meatball pizza,” Mold said. “Yoda also says don’t be a wimp.”

  “Yoda never uses the word wimp.”

  “He says, ‘Fear is the path to the dark side.’ Dude, hello, The Phantom Menace?”

  There was no debating Mold on this stuff. He had the T-shirts—the sheets too. I shoved him toward our spot far, far away in the dark corner where they kept the garbage dumpster nobody ever dumped. Mold’s mom had stuck a note on the waxed paper that barely covered his foot-long hero. It said, LOVE YOU. He tossed the note and crammed a hunk of sandwich into his mouth. “Any chance you would consider splitting that with me?” I said. “Come on, Mold, you’ll never be able to finish the whole thing.”

  “Watch me,” Chucky said. “Holy crud, here she comes.”

  Mrs. Pinto worked her way toward us. She was really pretty for a principal or even a normal human being. “Hi guys,” she said.

  “Good, how are you?” Mold said.

  “If you ever need anything, stop by my office, okay?”

  “You too,” Mold said.

  Mrs. Pinto patted my shoulder as she left.

  “She totally just touched you,” Chucky said. “You, a loser, caressed on your loser shoulder by Mrs. P. I sent her the wink almost like four hours ago now. Nothing. Why are you staring at me like that? Dude, the emoticon? Are you visiting from The Stone Age?”

  “I know what the wink is. I just can’t believe you sent her one.”

  “So?”

  “She’s old. Mold, she’s like thirty.”

  “It’s not what you think. On Facebook the wink is a sign of supreme respect. It’s like when somebody inspires you, you wink at them. It’s true. It’s an ancient custom that goes all the way back to classical times, the Greeks and Romanians. It’s like you’re bowing to her to acknowledge her awesomeness.”

  “Then why not just send her a bow?”

  “Because there’s no emoticon for that, you moron. Just because she has a tota
lly amazing butt doesn’t mean she can’t be my hero too, for her, you know, incredible wisdom and everything.”

  “That’s why you winked at her—her wisdom.”

  “What do you know anyway? You’re not even on Facebook. It’s a real thing, I swear. In many cultures it’s considered rude not to send the wink.” He batted away a fly from where the peanut butter slimed his lip like a gluey booger.

  I had to believe him, firstly because you can tell when somebody’s lying, and he truly didn’t think he was, and most of all because he was right about me not being on Facebook. The whole friends thing: It wasn’t really happening. Even Mold was more aggravation than ally. I moved to the neighborhood less than two years before. In a year me and my mom were heading to Florida, right after she retired. We could live great down there for cheap, she said. I figured why bother making friends when I was out of here pretty soon?

  “Chucky, not even a bite? Really?” I said.

  “Dream on,” he said, or something like that. I couldn’t tell with the sandwich all gunked up in his braces.

  2

  HEIR TO THE EMPIRE

  My stomach was growling by the time the last bell rang and they set us free for the weekend. I headed down the boardwalk toward the library. Mrs. Lorentz always kept a plate of Chips Ahoy! at the front desk.

  I was feeling pretty terrific for somebody who got robbed of his pizza money. You can’t be sad in Coney Island on a clear September day. The ocean was glittery. The air smelled salty and sweet. My audiobook was nearing the climax. I couldn’t get caught walking around with a book book, of course. That’s like begging for a wedgie. I cranked up my headphones and Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn. Things were looking crummy for Han Solo. Thrawn’s fighters swarmed the Millennium Falcon. The sound cut out when somebody came up behind me and ripped the headphones off my head.

  “Who buys yellow headphones?” this girl Angelina Caramello said. She was really pretty even though she was friends with Damon Rayburn. “It’s like lemons growing out of your ears.”

  “Plus you missed a belt loop,” Angelina’s best friend Ronda Glomski said. She yanked on the loop I missed. “I truly don’t understand how you got skipped a grade. How can you be so lame yet so totally adorbs?”

  “Ew,” Angelina said. She chucked my headphones at me. Then Ronda shoved me so hard she knocked the gum out of my mouth.

  I had to think about this. Ronda Glomski, ranked eleventh prettiest in our grade, said that I, Ben Coffin, was not totally revolting. Even though she practically decked me right after she said it and her name was a little gross sounding. I know, like I should talk when my name reminds you of where a zombie escaped from. We were kind of perfect for each other if you took out the part about Ronda being really mean.

  In my side vision I saw Damon Rayburn coming, which meant I had to be going, and fast.

  I was wheezing a little by the time I got to the library. It wasn’t that far a sprint, but my asthma was kicking in, and I had forgotten my inhaler. Fortunately Mrs. Lorentz had it. “You left it on the windowsill again,” she said. She pushed a book at me. “I need you to read this. My daughter can’t stop talking about it. I’m looking for a second opinion before I put it on top of my stack.”

  It was Feathers, by Jacqueline Woodson. “This doesn’t look like sci-fi,” I said.

  “You won’t spontaneously combust,” Mrs. Lorentz said. “Ben, you’ll love it, trust me.”

  “After you just said you haven’t read it?”

  “Why are you standing here talking to me when you should be reading?”

  “It’s written by a girl,” I said.

  “So?”

  “Like, I’m a dude.”

  “Take some cookies with you, dude. And yes, you can keep the fire escape door open a crack.”

  She let me do that on asthma days. The breeze felt nice. I didn’t know it just then, but getting stopped by Angelina and Ronda, which led to me getting chased by Rayburn, which got my asthma going, which made me crack the alley door, was about to flip my life upside down.

  I propped open the door with one of the grimy old encyclopedias Mrs. Lorentz was always trying to dump on everybody—Volume 10, Gargantuan to Halitosis—and settled in at my table hidden away in the back. There were all these giant pictures silkscreened onto the walls, photographs from the old days when Coney Island was the most famous beach in America. My favorite was called Dreamland at Night. It was the way Luna Park, this amusement park right on the ocean, looked in 1905. The tower shined like a softer sun. Think of honey lit up with the kind of electricity inside an angel’s mind when she’s wishing only the most beautiful things for you.

  I took a breath from my inhaler and eyed Feathers. The cover was a picture of, guess what, a feather. No spaceships, no exploding Death Star, not even a freaking laser sword. The story went like this: There’s this new kid in school. Some call him the Jesus Boy, others think he’s a freak and they bully him bad. I related to him. I’m not talking about the bullying but about how I always felt like a stranger, even to myself sometimes. I just didn’t know where I fit in or what I was supposed to do or be in life, like maybe I was a mistake.

  Pretty soon I was on the last page of the book. The story was the kind that ends too quick and leaves you worrying about what’s going to happen to the characters, almost like they’re your friends, except not annoying. Frannie, the narrator, wants to be a writer. Her teacher is telling her that each day comes with its own special moments and that Frannie had better keep an eye out for them and write them down for later. I was okay with that part. I’m sure Timothy Zahn did that kind of stuff when he was writing Heir to the Empire. But I had to stop when I read the next thing Frannie’s teacher said about these so-called special moments. “Some of them might be perfect, filled with light and hope and laughter. Moments that stay with us forever and ever.”

  This was a lie. Nothing lasts forever. It’s a scientific fact. Things happen and they’re over and you can’t get them back.

  Einstein said we can travel to the future, and the astronauts proved it. They synchronized twenty clocks and took ten into space. They spent six months up there, whipping around at 17,000 miles an hour, almost five miles per second. When they landed, all the clocks in Mission Control were .007 seconds ahead of all the ones that went into space. You see what happened? They traveled a fraction of a second into the future. Look it up if you don’t believe me. This means if you travel really fast, like at light speed, when you land back on Earth the clocks will be years and years ahead, and you’ve escaped far into the future. Here’s the problem: Einstein used the same math to prove we can never go back to the past.

  I stared into the picture of Luna Park in 1905. I would never get to be there. I’d never feel safe with all those gold and silver lights on my face. I’d never see the world from the top of the tower. I’d never believe magic was real.

  A cat hissed outside the fire escape door. It charged something down the alley. Then came that creepy sound a cat makes when it’s mad, like a demon possessed it.

  3

  THE DEMON, THE DOG AND THE DIVA

  I stepped into the alley. The cat was beating the heck out of this other, much smaller one, except the little guy was a dog.

  I shooed away the cat. The dog was a shivering mess. His fur was all tarred up. His tongue stuck out the side of his mouth. His eyes were gunky and pointed out toward the sides. His tail was chomped up and bent, what I could see of it. He had it between his legs. What a shrimp he was. He weighed maybe eight pounds. He wasn’t young either, with the gray in his muzzle. I went to pet him. He ducked and scampered out of the alley. I tried to find him, but he was gone.

  • • •

  I brought Feathers back to Mrs. Lorentz. “So?” she said.

  “It makes me upset.”

  “That’s great,” she said.

  “Great?”
r />   “Why does it upset you, Ben?”

  “I’m not sure. Can you hold it for me?”

  “You don’t want to take it home?” she said.

  “I forgot my backpack today.”

  “It weighs four point five ounces, not to mention its title is Feathers. You can’t carry it?”

  I looked out the window. A bunch of guys were hanging out by the free newspaper boxes everybody throws garbage in. They’d take Feathers and rip it up, and then Frannie and the Jesus Boy would be in pieces, getting kicked around in the wind. “How do you know it weighs four point five ounces?” I said.

  “I’m guessing.” She dropped the book onto a postage scale: 4.5 exactly.

  “You’re not human,” I said.

  She nodded and leaned in and whispered, “I’m a librarian.” She wrote on a sticky paper and stuck it to the book. Then the weirdest thing happened. Her lips trembled and I swear she was about to cry. “Don’t forget your inhaler,” she said as she put the book aside to help this other kid check out a stack of video games. I leaned over the counter to see what she wrote. The note said: HOLD FOR MY BEN.

  I was going to miss her next year, when Mom and I moved to Miami. It almost made me want to join Facebook, the idea that if I didn’t, I’d never see her again. I would send her the biggest wink, Mrs. Lorentz, to acknowledge all the kindness she showed me the past two years, not to mention her totally amazing wisdom. I’d send her the wink every freaking day.

  I was heading out when this girl was coming in. I held the door for her. She wore a lime-green beret, oversized sunglasses, a glittery scarf, and a red suit jacket with gold buttons buttoned up to her neck, even though it was like seventy-five degrees out. She wore purple gloves with the fingers cut off. Her high-tops were pink sparkles. She pretty much had every color of the rainbow covered. Her backpack was one of those mesh ones so she could show you how totally brilliant she was with all the books she had in there.

  The big bad tough guys outside didn’t mess with her—no sir. She was the kind of girl who, if you cracked some lame comment about her books or gloves or whatever, she’d come back with something that made you feel even stupider than you are, and in front of all your buddies too. Even the dumbest guy knows not to mess with a diva.