Becoming Thuperman

By Elgon Williams

What if you could take make believe and make it real?

It’s the summer of 1988 and little is normal about Will and Sandra, except for the name of their town, Normal, Illinois. The two precocious eight-year-olds share overactive imaginations, a love of baseball and genuine affection for each other. But over the course of a singl

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
• Release date: Apr 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781945502613

Elgon Williams

Elgon Williams is a Global Publicist and Author currently living in Central Florida. He has worked in Retail Management for much of his adult life, but also has experience in Computer Repair, Technology Consulting, Advertising, Public Relations and Sales Management. Born in Springfield, Ohio, Williams grew up on a farm near the town of South Charleston and the village of Selma in rural southeastern Clark County, "...about two miles from nowhere and between cornfields." He graduated from Shawnee High School in 1974. In the fall of that year he began studies at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, receiving a BA in Mass Communication in 1978. Later, in 1981 he received a degree in Marketing Administration from The University of Texas in Austin. In 1983 he joined the US Air Force and attended the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey in California where he studied Chinese Mandarin. Upon completion of military training he spent two years in Asia. Shortly after returning to the US, Williams left the military and began a long career in management. Although his early writing is considered sci-fi and fantasy, it is difficult to classify his work as any single genre. His most recent publications, Fried Windows (In a Light White Sauce) and Becoming Thuperman, blend urban fantasy and science fiction. Upcoming projects include Homer Underby, the sequel to Becoming Thuperman, Castles of Nija Bread, sequel to Fried Windows and the first installment of the long anticipated epic fantasy, Wolfcats. All books will be released through Pandamoon Publishing.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Going on a Road Trip

In 1986, when I was six, there was an unfortunate accident on the school playground involving a pretty girl named Judy, a bully fifth grader named Jake, and a teeter-totter that hit me in the chin causing me to bite off the tip of my tongue. After lots of blood, seventy-three stitches, and a couple of years with a school speech therapist, I still talked with a lisp. Even before that, I never was all that talkative. But afterward, only family and my few friends, those who were used to my difficulty, seemed able to understand me without me repeating everything I said.

Dad, whose given name is Irving—Irv for short—was born and raised on a family farm near Normal, Illinois. Yeah, there really is a place called that. When he graduated from high school, Papaw insisted he go to college to learn everything there was to know about agriculture. So, he attended Illinois State University, which was just on the other side of town from where he grew up. Somewhere along the way, Dad decided to study business administration instead of agriculture. Also, around the beginning of his junior year at college, Dad met my mom.

Mom, whose name is Eloise—though she cringes whenever anyone calls her that—was anything but a farm girl. Sometimes Dad calls her big city, because technically she’s from Chicago—at least she was born there. In truth, she grew-up in the suburbs on the northwest side of the city. Her parents, my Gram and Gramps, always call her Ellie. Dad and everyone else apart from us kids call her Lois.

Dad used to tell my sisters and me crazy stories about Mom. Some of them were loosely based on fact. In one of his favorite fabrications, she ran away from home and eloped with him. In another, he said she married him because she didn’t have bus fare to get back to Chicago after she graduated. He claimed Mamaw and Papaw, what I call Dad’s parents, gave them a place to stay right after they married so they didn’t have to freeze to death out in the cold or anything.

When I asked Mom if Dad’s version of things was true, she didn’t exactly deny it, but she made it sound more like she felt sorry for Dad because he was a country boy who always wanted to be a city boy. In her version, Dad married her because she knew all about the big city and could sort of interpret things for him whenever he had to go to Chicago while keeping keep him from getting lost or in trouble. As embarrassing as it is for me to admit it, I was pretty easily duped into believing just about anything when I was really little. So, I believed them both.

However, as best I can determine, here’s what really happened: like me, Dad was shy when he was growing up. By the time he reached college, he had some close friends. A couple of them set him up to meet Mom at a party. Apparently, Mom did most of the talking. They liked each other a lot and dated for a couple of years. Around the time they were ready to graduate, Dad asked Mom to marry him and she said yes. They lived on Mamaw and Papaw’s farm for about a year. Then they moved into their own house. Brenda was born shortly after that and a couple of years later Linda came. About a year and a half after that, I was born, otherwise I wouldn’t be here telling the story.

If Dad had a special gift, it was how to be quiet, so much so that if you didn’t happen to notice him, you might think he wasn’t there. When he did talk, you probably needed to listen because usually he was mad about something or there was something important about to happen. Mostly he let Mom do the talking, which she was okay with because she loved chatting. Mom always had a lot of friends and usually her friends’ husbands became Dad’s friends.

It wasn’t only Dad’s stories I fell for when I was younger. A lot of times, my sisters tricked me, too. What did I know? I was easily misled. Whether it was done as a joke or not, it was not right to lie to a little kid—I’m just saying.

Back when I was only six, I still believed in a lot of things people lie about—including Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and most of the special offers advertised on Saturday morning TV cereal commercials. Brenda, my oldest sister, who was the first person I knew up to that time who actually went by her given name as it appeared on her birth certificate, enjoyed being the source of my disappointment. She reveled in telling me whenever someone had lied and I had stupidly fallen for the deception. By the time I was old enough to know better, I overcompensated and disbelieved everything anyone told me, except for Sandra, my best friend. She always told me the truth and therefore deserved my trust.

Whenever Brenda made fun of me, my other older sister, Linda—whose real name was Belinda—laughed and joined in teasing me because of how gullible I was. To their thinking, older sisters were supposed to do things to their baby brothers. Revenge would come, I promised myself. In the summer of being eight-years-old, I was still subject to my sisters’ abuse, though, for a little while longer.

Mom grew up an only child not too far from Lake Michigan and only a few minutes from the Wisconsin border. She lived in this really big house with a lot of extra rooms. To me it seemed like Gram and Gramps had too much space in their big house for just two people, but they didn’t have to worry about where everyone was going to sleep whenever we all came to visit them. When my sisters and I were all little, Mom and Dad took us to see Gram and Gramps at least twice every summer on holiday weekends. Each of us kids got our own rooms, which was especially nice for Brenda and Linda because they hated having to share a room at home. Gram and Gramps had a swimming pool in the backyard, which was great, but also they lived close to Lake Michigan and drove a van they would load all of into so they could take us to the beach.

Additionally, they had a huge recreational vehicle that looked a lot like a bus. Every October, Gram and Gramps drove it to their place in Florida where they lived from Halloween to Easter—except for the week they flew back home just after Christmas for New Year’s just so they could be there when we went to their house for a couple of days over the holidays. Even though it was always a few days late, that was also when we celebrated Christmas with Gram and Gramps.

Gramps used to be an executive of some kind who worked in one of the tall buildings in downtown Chicago. Gram did a lot of charity work, kind of like what Mom did between taking care of us kids. Of course, being a kid I didn’t realize how well-to-do Mom’s parents were compared to Mamaw and Papaw.

Going anywhere for visits was great, especially Chicago in the summertime. On Fourth of July weekend, we piled into my Gram’s van and headed for the beach to stay all afternoon and watch the fireworks over the lake at night. Not that I complained, but I wasn’t sure why it was necessary to go to the beach because we could have easily watched the fireworks from Gram and Gramp’s backyard like we did most every New Year’s Eve. If all we were going to do was swim, we could have done that in the backyard pool at my grandparent’s house. But the lake was more fun, I guess. There were other things to do there as well, like making sand castles and watching people sailing on boats further out on the lake. Also, there were a whole bunch of new kids to meet and new games to learn how to play.

Oblivious to all the warnings about overexposure to the sun, especially when there was fun stuff to do, going to the beach meant sunburn for me. Spending an entire day out in the sun, even with sun block on, was extremely dangerous due to my fair complexion. Mom had a fair complexion, too, and she said that, like her, I could walk past a picture of the sunset and get burnt. Yeah, she was exaggerating, but that wasn’t far from the truth. I had inherited her red hair, freckles, and extremely pale skin.

Since generally I was outside whenever I played, I stayed in the shade as much as possible. Even so, wherever my skin was exposed it turned red, and if I was out too long it blistered. Maybe before the end of the summer, it might sort of turn into a tan, if I was lucky.

By contrast, Sandra’s complexion was darker. She got it from her Italian mother, so she usually looked like she had a tan. She never worried much about getting sunburned. However, when we were out playing, she always noticed whenever I was turning red and warned me before I burned too badly.

Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Easter were holidays we always spent on the farm where Dad grew up, though we didn’t stay overnight at their house because it was kind of small, and we were only a little way from home, anyway. Always we had a cookout there. Some times during the summer, usually on Labor Day, Sandra was invited as well. On Thanksgiving and Easter, Mom helped Mamaw cook everyone a nice dinner. We also spent some time there every Christmas Day. Mom helped Mamaw fix dinner for everyone then too, which also included whoever was staying over at our house for the holiday. It was fun going to the farm anytime of the year because usually we could ride the horse, pet the cows, and play with Winston, the English Sheepdog, and Emily, the Border Collie.

On the first Wednesday of summer vacation the year Sandra and I were eight, my dad was going up to Chicago to fly out for a business meeting in New York City like he did four times a year. Mom was driving him to Midway Airport. Dad hated flying in or out of O’Hare and avoided it if at all possible. And since the relatively smaller airport in Bloomington never seemed to have timely connecting flights into Midway, it was usually better to just drive up to Chicago. Also, he claimed the spaghetti-like freeway system around O’Hare was confusing. I’m not sure why that mattered, because he never drove when he had to go to the airport. Mom did. Since she grew up around Chicago, she knew how to get to just about anywhere Dad ever needed to go. Somehow, despite all the things that changed about the city since she last lived there, never once did she get lost.

Other than taking Dad to the airport, Mom had nothing else planned for the trip. Of course, Mom told me about the trip a couple of days before, so by the time I finished eating breakfast, I was ready and raring to go. Even at age eight, I understood Mom needed to take me along because she didn’t trust my older sisters to pay proper attention to me in her absence. Brenda had turned thirteen earlier that year so she was old enough to be my babysitter, I guess, and she was self-impressed with finally being a teenager even if she was just barely one. But she wasn’t reliable when it came to watching me. Linda was ten and said that having reached double digits was sort of like being a teen, somehow. Anyway, she could take care of herself well enough, provided Brenda was around. Neither of them paid a lot of attention to me, though, which was usually a good thing. The exceptions were whenever they devised something evil to do to me, or on the rare occasions when Mom was forced to have them watch me for a little while so she could run errands, like going to the post office to mail bigger things that wouldn’t fit in the mailbox.

Really, whenever I was home alone with my sisters, I could die and they wouldn’t know it, at least not until they came looking for me in response to Mom’s car pulling into the driveway. Then both of them would immediately realize it had been a while since they last saw me. One time I hid just so they would panic. That was funny even if they didn’t think so. To Mom’s credit, she suspected the girls did mean things to me. That’s why she rarely ever left me alone for very long with them.

Since a trip to Chicago and back would take a huge chunk out of the middle of the day—around five or six hours—it was too long for Mom to leave me with my mostly inattentive sisters. For that reason, she almost always took me with her. I didn’t mind the adventure.

The alternative to the girls watching me would have been hanging out at Sandra’s house, just a few doors down the street from where I lived. For whatever reason, Mom didn’t like me being there when she wasn’t home, though. In fact, she didn’t like me spending the whole day playing with Sandra anyway, even though I did that a lot. Mom said she worried about me wearing out my welcome. But when I asked Sandra’s mom, Betty, she told me I was like part of their family. Family can wear out their welcome too, I suppose, just it takes longer. Having said that, Sandra told me that, like my mom, Betty worried about the amount of time I spent playing with her daughter. That was because I was a boy and Sandra was a girl and she considered it unnatural for us to be best friends when we were only eight years old. Considering we’d been best friends for as long as either of us could remember, it seemed odd for our parents to think that way.

Except for the excitement of the idea of a road trip, I might have preferred staying behind just to be at a Sandra’s house, because she had some really cool things to do at her place like playing the board games she kept in her closet or the fairy castle and her collection of fairies. Also, she had a cool tire swing that hung from a tree limb in her backyard. My desires didn’t figure into Mom’s plans all that often, though. So, even if I said I didn’t want to go with her, she would have insisted on taking me. I knew how that worked, so I didn’t try to get out of it. Instead, I planned ahead and asked Sandra to go along with us.

You see, the trip to the airport with me along would take longer because we would have to stop somewhere to eat and use the restroom. But it was better for Mom because she didn’t have to drive all the way back home alone. Having someone else in the car was preferable to listening to the radio and not being able to talk to anyone. But on the way, I’d be in the back seat alone and bored without Sandra coming along.

Usually Sandra and I planned every day around playing together but going anywhere was better than just hanging around in the neighborhood. So that Wednesday morning, we kind of already figured things out so that on the way to and from the airport we could play games and stuff like that in the backseat. It made a lot of sense to me seeing as how Mom and Dad would be busy talking on the way to Chicago and really wouldn’t want me interrupting them.

Even if Sandra and I hadn’t had anything specific planned, always I called Sandra or she called me and we arranged to meet at her house or mine to do something together. That made both of our lives more interesting. When I talked to her on the phone the night before, Sandra told me she was working on a special super-secret project that she couldn’t tell me about just yet. So, I couldn’t wait to find out what that was about, but I hadn’t bothered to mention to Mom yet that I invited Sandra along for the ride to the airport. Mom would say it was okay. She always did. Sandra went places with us all the time. What surprised me, though, was how when I mentioned inviting Sandra, it started a chain reaction of questions, like: Did Betty say she could go? and What if Betty has something planned to do with her?

I didn’t know about anything Betty might have planned. Sandra didn’t mention anything. All I knew was that there wasn’t an eight-year-old kid in the world who would refuse a road trip. The whole thing caused a minor discussion, though. In the end, Mom told me I needed to call to ask Sandra to get her mom’s permission, which seemed silly to me since, like I said, Sandra went places with us all the time. Getting permission once for something should be enough to cover every future time as long as nothing bad happened before, right? But I knew better than to argue the point. As required, I called Sandra’s house. When Betty answered the phone, I seized the opportunity and asked directly. Can Sandra come with us to take my dad to the airport in Chicago?

Betty was a teacher’s aide at school, and so she was sort of like a teacher in lots of ways, especially when it came to correcting my grammar about the proper use of may and can. After we straightened all that out, Betty yelled upstairs to Sandra’s room to ask her if she wanted to go. The only reason she would have yelled that loud was because Sandra was in her room with the door shut. I figured Sandra was either working on her super-secret project or getting dressed to come to my house, just like we planned. So, I knew what the answer was going to be before I heard her confirm it with her mom. Why was all that extra asking and answering necessary? The discussion over something pretty trivial seemed ridiculous.

Sometimes people just feel it’s necessary to talk even if all they do is ask silly questions and receive stupid answers. To me, it was something Mom could have answered with a simple okay and been done with it. Yeah, maybe I should have asked her the day before, but didn’t Sandra usually come with us on road trips?

It wasn’t a big deal for Sandra tagging along for the ride or anything. Mom liked Sandra a lot. Dad did too, but he never came right out and said it. Dad was a friend of Sandra’s dad, Bud. Our moms got along really well, too. Dad worried a little about me hanging out with a girl almost all the time, but also he understood the situation I was in. She lived close, so it was convenient for both her and me to play together. The other guys on my street were mostly a lot younger or too much older. The few who were close to my age were the kids who picked on me at school. I didn’t want to be around them.

Sandra became my best—and pretty much only—friend by default. But she was special because she was also my first friend. Even as babies we were inseparable.

For a kid, the idea of going to Chicago for any reason was exciting. It was reason enough to go along on the otherwise dull trip up Interstate 55 from Normal to Chicago. As our adventure began, both of us looked out the car’s windows. On my side of the car, I saw the Jones’ house, and pointed out to Sandra that old man Jones’ sister was standing in the upstairs window looking out. She’s creepy. It seems like she’s watching us, I said. People thought the place was haunted. Kids said Old Man Jones’ sister was a witch. The two of them had a dog with a really bad attitude about strangers coming close to the house. For that reason, and all the others, no one bothered him or her, not even for trick or treat at Halloween.

Are you scared? Sandra asked.

Me? No! I claimed. It’s just, why is it she always seems to be watching us?

I don’t think she’s watching us, Sandra said. Just she’s bored and looking out the window. That’s all.

As we left the neighborhood and headed out of town, we kept looking out the car windows to see if anything had changed since the last time we’d traveled together. That’s when I noticed the black van.

I’d seen it around the neighborhood before. Just I didn’t know who owned it. Sometimes it was parked in the alley by the Jones’ house. Other times I’d notice it parked along the street by the sporting goods/hardware store Sandra’s dad owned. I mean, it could have been different vans, but somehow, I knew it was the same one.

What’s wrong? Sandra asked, calling my attention back to her.

It’s that van.

Not that again.

It’s following us.

Just then, as if on cue, the van turned down a side street.

See, Sandra said with a smile. Just happened to be going the same way we were.

Once outside of the city where I grew up, the countryside was more nothing to see than anything to do, or as Dad said, there was more nothing per square mile than people. Without Sandra along, I might have fallen asleep while staring out the backseat window as the humdrum landscape passed by. The one or two interesting things to see along the way were the exceptions that Mom or Dad might have pointed out in the past to prevent me from missing them, but considering I was eight, I had made the trip often enough that I was on my own as far sightseeing went.

If you’ve never experienced a highway ride anywhere in the Midwest, let me explain. It’s mostly flat, dull landscape with barns and silos scattered here and there along with a few clumps of trees. Every so often alongside the Interstate, usually close to an exit, there is a billboard.

When a storm rolls through and lightning strikes, it hits the tallest things. In the Midwest, those things tend to be trees, barns, silos, houses, or sometimes anything taller than the grass. Many times, an approaching overpass looks like a hill from a distance.

In some places between Normal and Chicago, tall towers carried electricity across the countryside, and here and there were windmills on farms that, from having visited my Mamaw and Papaw’s farm, I knew were once used to pump water out of deep wells.

Like me, when we were on the highway, Sandra found the rest of the scenery on the way to the airport pretty ordinary and dull. So, as we sat together in the back seat, mostly we ignored what was passing by and talked quietly to one another. That way, Mom and Dad could pay attention to their conversation about things that did not interest eight-year-olds in the least. Sandra and I were the source of our own entertainment.

Before the trip began, Mom gave us coloring books and crayons. Dad offered us a legal pad and two pencils. That was their attempt to give us something to do, but we bored quickly with those things. We broke out our travel games and went at it in head-to-head competition until motion sickness got the better of me, as it always seemed to do. Settling back in the seat with a headache, I apologized to Sandra. She shrugged it off. I’m kind of tired of beating you anyway.

The way she phrased that made me laugh. Always she seemed to do that for me, making our time together fun.

You know, we could play connect the dots with your freckles and see if there are any hidden pictures, she suggested. We can use your right arm, that way you can play too. Sandra knew I was ambidextrous but usually wrote with my left hand. She used her right hand for almost everything.

Maybe we should just talk instead, I countered. I got in a lot of trouble last time from all the ink on my arm, and it hurt when Mom scrubbed it off with an old toothbrush.

I’ve got some washable markers at home. I should have brought those.

That would’ve been better, I agreed.

So, what do you want to do instead?

I guess I’ll just wait for my headache to go away.

Sandra nodded and pulled out a book of mazes and puzzles she’d brought in her backpack. While we continued to talk, she worked on solving some of those. Meanwhile, I sat still, hoping for the motion sickness to go away soon.

Chapter 2

Maps and Mazes

Sandra was at least as good at solving puzzles as she was at winning games. That was a big part of her special powers as a budding super-heroine. While many eight-year-old girls play with dolls and have tea parties with the other girls, pretending to be grownup, Sandra preferred to be whatever she wanted to be and do whatever she wanted to do. Other girls her age read fairy tales or stories about princesses, knights, and things like that. Sandra read comic books about doing great things like saving the world and beating-up bad guys. Usually as girls grow older, they stop playing with dolls and just collect them. Instead of fairy tales, they read romance novels like my sister Brenda had already started to do. Sandra wanted something else with her life, like using her imagination to create things. She was really good at coming up with things I’d never thought of.

Whenever Sandra played games, she was competitive, but always she wanted to play by the rules and never cheated. She figured out how to win at everything she did, and really, I didn’t know anyone better at solving puzzles. If she went to the bookstore, she bought books on how to beat arcade games and, very often, she would also buy a book of puzzles to solve in her spare time. It didn’t matter what kind of puzzles were in the book. She’d figure them out and within a few days she would solve every one. She was that good!

The car radio played Country music, Dad’s kind of music, in the background. My parents were in the front seat talking about the sorts of things adults discuss. In the backseat, I was mostly recovered from my woozy stomach and headache, when Sandra commented, I like this song. It surprised me a little that she was paying attention to the music. Always before, I thought that, like me, she didn’t have any musical preferences. Even though she was taking piano lessons, I never noticed her paying a lot of attention to music. For example, I didn’t know if she had a favorite singer or band. As much time as I spent with her, you’d think I would have noticed.

Her older brother, Spike, whose real name was Lyle—yeah, Spike was definitely a cooler name—played drums in a punk rock band called Drill. They were supposed to be pretty good, as good as any band in Normal, anyway. People actually paid them to play at parties and things like that. They played at area competitions called Battle-of-the-Bands. Sandra said they had won a couple of times. Spike said that since they made money that made them professional even if all the guys in the band were still in high school. Like teenagers do, he dressed funny and frequently changed his hairdo and its color. Each time he did, it usually involved switching from something shocking to something more shocking, and the colors were usually something not normally found in nature. As his nickname implied, his hair was stiffened with gel into sharp peaks atop his head. Whenever his hair was dark, he colored the tips red so it almost looked like he had a forest of matches sticking out of his scalp. Definitely, he was not normal either, but that was cool, because who was, especially in my world?

Having tired of solving mazes, Sandra pulled out her small purse from her backpack and removed a folded piece of paper from where it was intended to keep paper money. She had six dollars in there, which was really good for a Wednesday because she got her allowance every Friday, same as me. Carefully, she opened the folded sheet of paper and then handed it to me.

What’s this? I asked.

What does it look like?

It sorta looks like a map.

That’s good because that’s what it is.

What’s it a map of?

A world I’m making. I drew it last night.

This was the super-secret project you were working on?

Part of it.

It goes this way? I mean this is the top? I asked after turning it this way and that.

Yeah, that’s north. She pointed to the top of the page.

I nodded. None of the dots on it have names.

I can’t exactly name any of the places until I’ve been there, can I?

I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work with maps. I kinda think they’re supposed to help people find places even if they have never been there. To do that, you have to name the places beforehand so if the map is all wrong or it confuses you somehow, you can stop and ask for directions.

What if I don’t want to ever go to those places? she asked.

They’re still there, though.

Are they?

Sure they are, I said. I mean—Dad’s going to New York City. I’ve never been there, but I know it’s way over there somewhere. I pointed out the window to what I believed was east.

Well, that’s different.

How it is different?

Because your Dad is flying there, of course. He has to be going somewhere if he is flying.

Even if he wasn’t flying there, it would still be there.

She laughed. Well, those are the rules of your world. You can believe there are places you’ve never been. This one is mine. She pointed to the map. So, I make the rules. That’s the first rule for my world: I make all the rules.

So, you’re inventing a whole new world and making it up as you go?

Well, not yet, just one part of it. I figure that page is probably like the size of our neighborhood.

Okay.

I didn’t want it to get too big just yet. It’s not like I’m ready to draw the whole world. I think my world should be large enough so I don’t feel trapped but small enough so I don’t get lost along the way.

That makes some sense, I said—it did then and still does. So, is this tied to the real world?

Not necessarily. This is my world, okay? But because it is mine and we’re friends we can both be in it.

Where are we now, then?

Way off the edge!

"Okay. So, this is tied to the real world?"

It sort of is, I guess, but it doesn’t have to be.

I like this. I mean, if you don’t like where you are, you can just be somewhere else, in this world.

Exactly. She laughed.

I started to give it back to her.

No, you keep that one. It’s yours.

What about you?

I have another one, exactly like it. I made another one on Dad’s copier. That’s the original there, so whatever we discover on that one, we mark it and it will appear on the other one automatically.

You think so?

Yeah, it’s a copy. That’s how it works.

I’m not so sure about that, Sandra.

That’s how things work in my world. And since I make the rules—

That’s cool. We can sort of make-up the world to suit us, I guess.

Yeah, I could use your help. That’s why I made a copy for you.

Taking out my own wallet, I started to fold up the map.

No, once you open it, you can’t put it away when you’re traveling, otherwise it doesn’t work anymore and you’ll get lost. Being lost where none of the places have names would be bad.

Okay, but we are already way off that map.

We are, she confirmed. At least until it adjusts to where we are. Then the dots become other places.

So you can just name the places other things and keep using the same map over and over.

Of course.

I’ll have to think about that one.

You’ll get used to it, she assured me.

Anyway, it’s going to be kind of hard to keep it open all the time whenever we go anywhere. Maybe not so much if we are riding in a car, but when I’m on my bike…

Well, you have to keep it out until you memorize it, then.

I can probably live with that rule. Setting the map on the seat between us, I leaned forward to return the wallet to my hip pocket. It wasn’t like there was any reason for me to carry my wallet all the time. It didn’t have any money in it. Every week I spent all my allowance before Sunday was over, mostly playing games at the arcade that was across the street from our school, down the street from where we lived. I was used to being broke for the rest of the week, so it didn’t matter all that much that I had no money.

The only things I had in my wallet were pictures of Mom, Dad, and my two sisters just in case I ever forgot what they looked like, I guess. And there was a picture of me on my ID card. I carried that around ever since the day the police came to school to make them for the kids who had their parents’ permission. An official file was created with my fingerprints and it listed the color or my eyes, hair and where I have birthmarks and scars—stuff like that. It was supposed to be so they could find me easier if I got lost. In a way, it seemed silly to me.

You