The Name of This Book Is Secret (25 page)

Noting that it had been months since he’d been able to listen to any “real music,” Owen turned on the radio—blasting hip-hop with lyrics that the kids were glad their parents weren’t around to hear.

With the road as curvy as it was, there was no way they could have seen a vehicle that was more than a few feet ahead of them; with the music at such a high decibel level they couldn’t have heard the vehicle either.

So it was almost a miracle when Benjamin sat up in his sleep and screamed in his clearest voice, “Stop!”

Owen slammed on the brakes. The limousine skidded to a stop.

A few feet in front of them, a pickup truck was parked lengthwise across the narrow road and honking loudly.

“Who’s that? Are they from the spa?” asked Max-Ernest, now wide awake.

“Well, we’re not waiting long enough to find out, are we?” said Owen. “Hold on, ye all—let’s hope this limousine likes the bumps!”

He started backing up.

Then the honking was joined by a familiar and extremely loud bark.

“Wait!” said Cass. “That’s Sebastian!”

Owen braked again and everyone looked back at the pickup truck. Standing beside the truck were Grandpa Larry and Grandpa Wayne, waving like madmen.

Only bad books have good endings.

If a book is any good, its ending is always bad—because you don’t want the book to end.

More importantly—more importantly to me, anyway—endings are hard to write.

You try wrapping up your story, showing how your characters have grown, sewing up any holes in your plot, and underlining your theme—all in a single chapter!

No, really. Try.

Because I’m not going to do it.

(I’ll give you a hint about the theme of this book—it has nothing to do with the value of hard work. It isn’t “If at first you don’t succeed, try again,” or anything honorable and inspiring like that.)

Oh, I won’t leave you hanging entirely. There are levels of cruelty that even I am not capable of.
^*

As writing material, I will give you a few key incidents: things that happened after Cass and Max-Ernest were rescued, and that would have to be included in the ending of this book, if it had an ending.

To make it easier for both of us, I’m going to organize the material according to the characters involved. When these pages land in your hands, you can rearrange events as you see fit.

Owen

Let’s get rid of him first.

What I would imagine for Owen is a touching little good-bye scene in which he teases the kids about tying him up and says they better be careful because he’s going to get them back when they least expect it. Then he would leave with a tip of the hat, promising more adventures to come.

All this, don’t forget, in an amusing new accent—East Indian, say, or Korean.

You like that scene? Please use it.

But it didn’t happen.

What really happened is that Owen drove away as soon as he knew the kids were safe with Cass’s grandfathers. He was so quiet about it that nobody noticed until the limousine was gone. I can’t say why he didn’t say good-bye—it wasn’t very polite, and it hurt Cass’s feelings more than she would have cared to admit. Maybe he didn’t want to intrude on Cass’s moment with her grandfathers. Or maybe he couldn’t choose the right accent for a good-bye. Or maybe spies are just like that.

The Grandfathers

If you don’t mind, I’ll skip the part of the ending where Sebastian jumps out of Wayne’s truck and runs over to Cass and starts licking her face.

And where Cass hugs both her grandfathers in turn, and then both at once, and then both in turn again.

And where she says she knew, just
knew,
they’d come, and she guesses (correctly) that Max-Ernest’s parents told them where to look.

And, if you don’t mind, I’ll skip the part where the kids all climb into the back of Grandpa Wayne’s truck and they start driving down the mountain and everybody is really tired but really happy.

You knew all that stuff was going to happen as soon Cass heard Sebastian’s bark.

But there is one event that occurred on their way home—well, really it was more of a conversation— that I’d like to tell you about.

Picture an old, roadside gas station. Grandpa Wayne was sitting in the driver’s seat of his truck, studying a map, while Grandpa Larry was filling the truck with gas. Cass and Max-Ernest sat in the back of the truck with Benjamin, who was sleeping next to them on a blanket so ratty it must have belonged to Sebastian. Sebastian, meanwhile, was standing by the truck’s tailgate, sniffing the gasoline in the air like it was a delectable treat.

They’d already gone over the events that had transpired at the Midnight Sun five or six times when Max-Ernest looked at Cass and said, “So, I guess my doctor was wrong.”

“About what?” asked Cass.

“About how you’re just a survivalist ’cause of your dad being hit by lightning, and you don’t really care about saving people. ’Cause you actually did, you saved someone.” He pointed to the sleeping Benjamin.

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Cass, sounding oddly uncertain.

“Lightning, huh?” asked Grandpa Larry with a raised eyebrow. Apparently, he’d been listening from the gas pump.

“You don’t know anything about it!” said Cass, her ears turning red.

“Well, I know about good stories, and I’m all for them,” said Larry diplomatically, climbing back into the truck’s front cab.

Inside the cab, he whispered something into Wayne’s ear. Wayne nodded somberly and started driving the truck back onto the road.

“I guess I should tell you, I mean, now that we’re alive and everything,” said Cass, speaking to Max-Ernest but looking at her grandfathers, “I didn’t really tell you the whole story—about my dad.”

“You mean there’s more, besides him being hit by lightning?” asked Max-Ernest, eyes wide.

“Well, I don’t really
know
that he got hit by lightning.” Cass hesitated. “Actually, I don’t even know if he’s dead.”

“You mean you made up the story?” asked Max-Ernest, incredulous.

“I heard it on TV....”

Max-Ernest stared at her, then broke into a big smile.

“So, basically, you lied,” he said as if this were great news. “That cancels out my telling my doctor! We’re even! How ’bout that?”

“You don’t have to be so happy about it.”

“So who was your real dad?” asked Max-Ernest after a moment.

“I don’t know,” said Cass matter-of-factly.

“You don’t? Didn’t your mother tell you?” Max-Ernest couldn’t hide his astonishment.

Cass shook her head.

“Well, didn’t you ever ask?”

“Yeah, when I was little. But she used to just say she would tell me when I got older. And ever since, it’s like, I don’t know, I’m afraid to ask. Like it would hurt her feelings or something.”

“Well, I think you should ask again—”

“Leave her alone,” said Grandpa Larry, leaning out the back window. “She’ll ask when she’s ready.”

“OK,” said Max-Ernest. “I was just saying—”

But he didn’t say anything more.

Cass’s Mother

As you can imagine, Cass’s mother entered a state of extreme anxiety as soon as Cass failed to answer her cell phone at the usual hour. Proud of her self-control, her mother waited a whole minute before she called Cass’s grandfathers to ask where Cass was. When she couldn’t get through, she calmly and rationally drove to the airport—and screamed at the top of her lungs until she got on the first flight home.

Late that night, as Grandpa Wayne’s pickup truck pulled up in front of the firehouse, a taxi was pulling out. Cass’s mother stood in the doorway. Her eyes grew stern when she saw Cass hop out of the back of the truck.

“Cassandra! What were you doing in the back of that thing—do you know how dangerous that is? Not to mention against the law. And you two—” she said, pointing at Cass’s grandfathers. “You promised!”

Now, to my mind, Cass’s mother getting mad about Cass riding in the back of a truck—when Cass had been doing far more dangerous things only a short time before—is both funny and realistic. But you may want to leave it out and go immediately to the following:

And then Cass’s mother—she couldn’t keep it up any longer—she took her daughter in her arms and wouldn’t let go for one and a half minutes. (I know that doesn’t sound long, but count it out—one and a half minutes is a long hug.)

“I missed you so much,” she said.

“Me, too,” said Cass.

And then Cass—she couldn’t stop herself—she cried for the first time since these adventures began, as if she’d been saving up her tears and now she was spending them all at once.

Max-Ernest’s Parents

Max-Ernest’s parents are minor characters who serve mainly as comic relief. (Relief for us, I mean. For Max-Ernest, no doubt, they weren’t funny at all.) Nonetheless, they deserve a mention:

When he returned late that night, Max-Ernest naturally expected his parents to be full of questions. He started to explain, but his parents stopped him.

“No, don’t say anything,” said his father.

“No, not a word,” said his mother.

A strange thing had happened while Max-Ernest was away: his disappearance had brought his parents together. Their concern for their son had made them overcome their differences—and agree to split up.

Henceforward, they promised, they were going to be proper divorced parents. They would each have a house—separate from the other.

“You ran away to send us a message,” said his father.

“And we heard it loud and clear,” said his mother.

Max-Ernest thought it best not to correct them.

Amber

There’s absolutely no reason to go back to Amber at this late point in our story. But she would get really mad if we didn’t.

Not that she would say so. As the nicest girl in school, she would probably say it was “totally fine—I mean, I wouldn’t put you in my book, either.”

I take it back. There is a reason to go back to Amber. If only to report what Cass said the next time Amber offered her a Smoochie.

Cass said, “No.”

A little word, it’s true—but, for Cass, a big deal.

Mrs. Johnson

If Dr. L and Ms. Mauvais are the true villains in this book, then what is Mrs. Johnson? If I had to pick, I would say Mrs. Johnson represents
the law.
She’s like the policeperson in the world of our book—the one who makes the rules, and who punishes you when you break them.

Which gets us that much closer to the ending of our ending.

By now, readers will be wondering how much Cass and Max-Ernest confessed about their trip to the Midnight Sun.

The answer is: everything and nothing.

Oh, they tried.

But whenever they described their experience, reactions ranged from polite skepticism to outright disbelief.

You’d think that Benjamin Blake might have been some help. Why would he have a shaved head, Cass asked, if no one had wanted to suck his brains? But other people didn’t see it that way. There were plenty of reasons, they said. Like maybe he wanted to look like he was in a rock band. Or maybe he had lice.

Frustratingly, Benjamin himself had only the vaguest memories of his ordeal. As far as anyone could tell from his mumbled account, Cass and Max-Ernest had taken him on a trip to Egypt, where he sat around a campfire and ate mint-chip ice cream.

The day after Cass and Max-Ernest returned, a team of firemen and police investigators went to examine the site of the Midnight Sun, and the kids waited hopefully for their report. But the fire had decimated the entire spa. Incredibly, there were no survivors other than the kids. Or no survivors willing to identify themselves anyway. It was as if the Midnight Sun had never existed. The investigators would say only that they suspected arson.

After hearing the police report, people were no longer skeptical about Cass and Max-Ernest’s story; they were downright suspicious.

In a more emotionally satisfying book than this one, the principal would have wept when Cass returned. She would have apologized for ever doubting Cass, and she would have begged Cass’s forgiveness. There would have been some sort of celebratory assembly and Cass and Max-Ernest might even have received medals—for “best survivalist” and “best code breaker,” say.

Well—by now you know this book better than that.

(And, no, I’m not giving any ground on this one.)

Mrs. Johnson couldn’t prove it, but she was certain that Cass and Max-Ernest were responsible for Benjamin Blake’s disappearance, rather than for his rescue.

I won’t go into detail about their hours of detention and hard labor because the subject is too infuriating to my sense of justice (yes, I have a sense of justice, although not always an active one, I admit). If you’re a sadistic sort, you can flesh out that part for yourself. Otherwise, join me in turning a blind eye to their suffering.

Thankfully, after what Cass and Max-Ernest had been through, any punishment their principal could dish out was comparatively easy to endure.

What was harder to endure was that no one in the world believed them.

Dr. L and Ms. Mauvais