Deborah Prum: Writing Tips and Cautionary Tales

Just got the news that my young adult novel, Fatty in the Back Seat, has advanced to Quarter-Finalist,  the top 5% level.  This means an excerpt from the novel is posted on Amazon.com.  For the next few days, people can read the excerpt and post comments.  If you want to post a review (I’d love that, but don’t feel obligated), you can read the excerpt below, then you can go to the Amazon site to post a very brief review. Here is the link to Amazon.com where you can review the excerpt from Fatty in the Back Seat Once you are there, select “Create your own review.” (Note: the contest managers messed up formatting on the Kindle site leaving the excerpt with spacing problems, but the excerpt below does not have the spacing problems.)

If the above link doesn’t work for you, all you need to do is go to Amazon.com.  Type in, Fatty in the Back Seat as a book selection, then post a review.

Here is the excerpt from the novel:

 

FATTY IN THE BACK SEAT

PROLOGUE

 

I am not a criminal.  Well, maybe I’m a slight criminal in the state of New York.  Honestly, though, it was an accident—an awful accident.

You could say it was partly Mrs. Clark’s fault.  She was my remedial English teacher.  Maybe a better word for her would be remedial English torturer.  For all of sophomore year, I suffered through her lectures during my last hour of school.

Each afternoon, it took only about five minutes before most of the back row guys were snoozing.  I tried to pay attention.  But sometimes she stunned me into boredom so deep that I’d forget to breathe.  All of a sudden, I’d be gasping for air right in the middle her droning on about dangling split definitives, or something like that.

The only non-boring times in that class were Friday afternoons when Mrs. Clark gave us spelling and vocabulary quizzes.  Sheer terror kept me wide-awake as I took them.  No matter how hard I studied, I always tanked on those tests.  My average stayed in the D minus range all year.  My dad and Mrs. Clark claim I’m lazy, but that’s not true at all.  It’s as if there is a shelf missing in my brain—the shelf where you store all those words.  My shelf just isn’t there.

One particular hot afternoon in May, we took a killer test on “ei” and “ie” words.  Like I could ever keep those straight.

Mrs. Clark made us correct each other’s tests.  She claimed it would train us to spot errors more easily.  Right.  I think she didn’t want to spend her weekends grading tests.  So who is the lazy one here?

Joey Timenko checked my paper.  I managed to screw up nineteen of the twenty questions, an all-time low even for me.  Instead of returning it to me, Joey passed my quiz to the back row so that everybody could have a good chuckle.

Laughing was a federal offense in Clark’s class.  So, when she heard the guys yukking it up, she rushed to the back row and grabbed the paper.  Now, you’d think Mrs. Clark would have yelled at those morons for creating a disturbance.  Nope.

The teacher took one look at my grade, then laced into me.  “You’ve spent eight months in this class and have refused to learn anything.  This has gone far enough!”

Mrs. Clark reached into her file cabinet and pulled out a folder filled with all my tests from the year.  “Bring this home to your father.  Have him sign each one.  Tell him to schedule an appointment with me.”  She slammed the folder onto my desk.

Just then, the bell rang.  As I slunk out of class, a couple of the guys pounded me on the back.  “Hey, thanks for providing entertainment.  Too bad you’re dumb as a rock.”

I got onto the bus as fast as I could and hid in the last seat, strategically putting my backpack in front of my face.  The driver let me off in front of our neighbor’s farm.  If I had been smart, I would have walked right past Mr. Frazier’s barn and headed straight home.  That would have spared me a mountain of trouble, but no….

The wide wooden barn doors were swung open.  I walked out of the heat and into the cool dark place.  Barn smells surrounded me, peaceful smells: apples rotting in a barrel, oiled leather saddles, hay piled up in the loft, the smell of manure and horse sweat from near the stall.  Too bad Dusty wasn’t there.  That horse never thought I was lazy or stupid.  I would have liked to give her an apple.  But she must have been out to pasture.

So, I sat on Mr. Frazier’s tractor, thinking about my miserable life.  My father, a big shot college professor, would flip out for sure when he got a look at all those tests.  I’d hear the old “why can’t you get A’s like your sisters” speech.

Light shone from a window high above in the hayloft.  I watched little bits of dust float down through the rays.  As I looked up, I noticed a box of wooden matches on a ledge over my head.

I love wooden matches.  I really do.  I like the sound you hear as you scratch them along the gray rough side of the box.  I love the whiff of a little smell they make when they just catch.  I get pumped when I see a bright flicker.  I feel good that stupid old me can strike a match and poof—I’ve created a hot beautiful flame.  For that minute, I’m king of the universe.

So, I took one match and lit a piece of straw from the pile next to the tractor.  The straw caught way faster than I expected.  I dropped it and stomped on it.

If all my brain cells had been working, I might have wondered why the straw flared up so fast.  I remembered smelling something funny, but I didn’t make the connection.  I didn’t realize that Mr. Frazier must have spilled gas on the straw when he filled the tractor tank.

All I could think about was my backpack full of tests and what my father was going to say.  So, I put those papers on top of the straw.  Then, I lit a match and dropped it.

That pile of papers went up just great.  No problem, nice big flame. I relaxed a little as I saw all that bad history turn to ashes.

But then, the whole area around my tiny fire just seemed to whoosh up at once.  That must have been where Mr. Frazier had spilled the gas.  In a second, a huge flame jumped over to a stack of hay bales.  They began blazing like crazy.  As I stared, they turned into one big column of fire.  Before I knew it, flames had sprung up between me and the front door.

How could this be happening?  It was only a little match.

Thick black smoke choked my lungs.  My skin felt like I had the worst sunburn ever.  All of a sudden, I realized I better run for my life.  I grabbed my backpack and sped toward the small window at the back of the barn.

As I was heading back, I heard a pop, then an explosion.  Maybe the gas can blew up.  Both the front and side of the building were on fire.  I jammed my body through a half-open window, then ran home.  I called 9-1-1, mixing up the numbers twice before I finally got them straight.  By the time the firemen came, the barn was totaled and the field next to Mr. Frazier’s house was burning.

I didn’t give my name when I phoned the firemen, but I guess they must have traced the call.

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

 

FLORIDA– ONE MONTH LATER

When I first laid eyes on my probation officer, I was amazed.  In the movies, law enforcement types seemed to have muscles everywhere.  They could dodge all those cars in heavy traffic and not get hit.  They could throw punches and kicks, leveling four or five bad guys all at once.

Not my probation officer.  He looked lots heavier than I imagined any cop could look.  He sat in one of those tippy swivel chairs, parts of him bulging out on either side of the seat.  If he leaned back, I wondered if he would just keep going.  I couldn’t imagine him ever chasing a criminal.  Maybe lying in front of a criminal to trip him.  But chasing him?  No way.

The man told me to sit down.  Then, he reached over his desk and stuck out his big hand.  “Name’s Mr. Nucci.”

“I’m Cuss.  Cuss Brewster.”

“Cuss? That’s not what it says on this sheet.  There’s a different name on this paper.”  Mr. Nucci tapped the cover page on my file.  “Says here ‘Carolus Linneas Brewster’.”

“My father named me after that famous plant guy.”  My father stuck me with a horrible name.  On the other hand, his father gave him a nice normal name: John James Brewster.

Mr. Nucci looked confused.  “Plants?  You mean like factory plants?  Manufacturing plants?”

“No, you know—that guy who thought of all the special names for flowers.”

“Never heard of him.  Can’t be that famous.”

“Well, maybe not like movie star famous.  I think maybe he’s just famous around another plant guys—what’s the word?  You know, botanists.  My father is one of them, just like Linnaeus.  I guess my dad thought it was a cool name.”

“Oh, ‘botany’—the study of plants.”

“Yeah, the word slipped my mind for a minute.”  It seems like I’m always looking for the right word.  My father works in the botany department at Cornell.  Only now he’s off to some “A” country on sabbatical—Australia.  I get it mixed up with Austria and Alabama.  No, I guess Alabama is a state.  His job is to look at a bunch of plants and then write articles about them.  My mother says he doesn’t so much write his own articles, but tears up other guy’s articles.

“Tough luck.  About the name, I mean.  Kids give you a hard time?”

“Yeah, they nicknamed me ‘Careless’ at school.”

“So, you call yourself ‘Cuss’?”

“My sister couldn’t pronounce my name.  It came out “Cuss” and it stuck.  That’s what everybody else calls me, except for my father.”

Mr. Nucci kept a huge plastic jar of pretzels under his desk.  The whole time he talked to me, he kept one in his mouth, like a cigar.  He saw me staring and said, “I’m trying to quit the habit.  My lungs are bad.  You wanna pretzel?”

“Sure.”  I stuck the pretzel in my mouth and sucked on it like a cigar, too.

“I just read this here report from the juvenile court judge in New York.  Pretty heavy duty stuff.”  Mr. Nucci stared at me real hard.

“The whole thing….it was an accident.”  I wished I could shrink to the size of a roach and crawl out under the door.  Seeing this guy every other week was not going to be fun.

“Yeah.  Tell me about it.”

I looked down at my feet.  “It’s a very long story.”

“I like stories.  They put a little pizzazz in my job.”  He took out a pen and a yellow pad.  Mr. Nucci had the hairiest hands I had ever seen.  Every finger was covered with curly black hair.  Even though his face and neck were shaved clean, he had black hair sprouting up the front and back of his shirt.  His eyebrows grew in a straight thick line over his eyes.  And if I had nose hairs as long as his, I would for sure grow a mustache.  But maybe if he did let all that facial hair grow in, he’d worry about looking like a wolf.   Every time Nucci opened his mouth, I was tempted to look in and see if he had hair on his tongue, too.  That would be something.

“Well….what’s your story? I haven’t got all day.  Just plunge right in.”

I wanted to stall but I also didn’t want to irritate this guy.  He had my life in his hands.  So, I started out by saying, “I don’t do so great in school.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”  Mr. Nucci pulled out my transcript from inside my file folder.  I knew he was looking at a sheet covered with C’s, D’s and a few F’s.  “To tell you the truth, school was not my strong point either.”

Mr. Nucci grabbed the edge of his desk with both hands and with a loud grunt hauled himself out of his chair.  He walked to a tiny refrigerator tucked in between file cabinets and pulled out two cans of Diet Dr. Pepper.  I have to tell you I hate that kind of soda worse than drinking green swamp water.  The Diet part made it even ten times yuckier.  But I opened the can and drank it anyway.  I needed a caffeine jolt to get through my story.

I gulped down the soda, took a deep breath and launched in.  I told him about getting humiliated in Clark’s class, burning up the tests and setting Mr. Frazier’s barn on fire.  Mr. Nucci asked lots of questions the whole time I talked.

Mr. Nucci shuffled through some papers.  “It says here that the fire caused over one hundred thousand dollars worth of damage.”

“Yeah, the barn, all the tools and equipment, some antique furniture.  All that was gone.  Plus, the side of the house and all of the patio stuff was wrecked before the firemen got the flames under control.”  I held my head in my hands. Mr. Frazier is a great old guy.  I didn’t mean to burn up all his stuff.

Mr. Nucci glanced down at my file.  “You have other fire-related incidents, too?”

“Well, kinda.  I can explain them.  It’s not like it seems.”

“We’re running out of time today.”  Nucci started chewing on another one of his pretzel-cigars.  “You’re living with your mother now, right?”

“Yeah, my dad is….”

“No matter.  We’ll talk about it later.  Here’s the deal.  That juvenile court judge in New York let you out of his state on these conditions: You have to see me every other week, without fail.  Come here at 3:30 every other Friday.  You have to stay out of trouble.  All trouble, all the time.  Especially, stay away from matches, cigarette lighters, napalm.  You got it?”

I nodded.

“In November, at the end of six months that judge wants a report from the Florida juvenile court.  You’ll have a hearing before a judge down here.  I’ll tell him exactly how you’ve spent your time.  Then, he’ll send a recommendation to the New York judge.  Based on your behavior, he’ll say whether you will be set free or whether you’ll have to go to juvenile correction center in New York.  Kiddie jail—let me tell you, you would hate it.”

I covered my face with my hands.  Being good for six months?  My father once said, “Son, I’ve never met anyone like you.  You are stalked by accidents and incidents.”  He’s probably right.

“Cuss, you look like you’re drifting.”  Nucci leaned close to my face.  “Pay attention to this part—if you cause problems down here in this lovely state of Florida, if you miss more than one appointment or if you goof around at all, you might as well start packing your bags.”

“Okay.  I won’t mess up.”

Mr. Nucci stood up and shook my hand.  He had a painful grip for a chubby guy.  He held on lots longer than I liked.  If he was trying to scare me, it worked.  “You can go now.  I’ll be out of town next Friday.  So, we’ll start in two weeks at 3:30. You don’t want to fool with me.  I am not known for being merciful.”

As I said, staying out of trouble isn’t as easy as it sounds.  In fact, trouble just seems to chase me down.

Before she left for work that morning, my mother told me how to get to and from the court building.  She wrote down the number of the bus I had to take.  Her house is one block away from the main road that leads straight into the city.  She said, “Cuss, this is easy.  Go to the bus stop in front of CVS.  Get on bus number 143.  You’ll ride about four miles.  Look for the Juvenile Court building sign.  You can’t miss it.  Get off there.  When you’re ready to come home, cross the street and look for bus 143 heading back toward our house.  It’s simple.  You can do it.  I’ve got to go now or I’ll miss my eleven o’clock appointment.”  She gave me bus fare and rushed out the door.

Well, Mr. Nucci scared me plenty, so when I stepped out of the juvenile court building, my brain wasn’t thinking straight.  The directions my mother gave me jumbled up in my mind.  I forgot that I had to cross the street and ride in the opposite direction in order to get home.

When I saw a bus go past with the number 134 on it, I just figured it was my bus.  Of course, later I realized I should have been looking for 143, not 134, plus I was on the wrong side of the street.  Anyway, I panicked and chased the bus down to a red light where it was stopped.

I knocked hard on the bus door.  The driver looked surprised, but went ahead and opened it.  He said something that sounded like “You work at the Haven?”

What was he talking about?  I had no idea, but nodded anyway and got onto the bus.  Every person on the bus had to be around the same age as Adam and Eve.  That should have been my first clue something was wrong.

I plopped down in the only open seat, next to a little old guy with no chest area whatsoever and whose pants were hitched up almost all the way to his shoulders. One of those green oxygen tubes came out of his nose.  It connected to a small tank on the seat next to him.  The gray skin on his forehead was so thin I actually saw blue veins beating.

Right after I sat down, the guy pointed to the seatback in front of him and yelled in my direction, “Hey, Bob, can you adjust the screen?   I can’t see the dang game.”

He told me to fiddle with the knobs to get better reception.  I kept saying we were on a bus and there was no TV.  That just made him madder.  Finally, I said, “Sorry the TV is broken.”

He seemed to accept that news.  But then he kept telling me, “Go down the corner.  Pick me up some Marlboros and a six pack.  Can’t watch the game without a six pack.”

Lucky for me, the bus ride lasted only a couple more minutes.  We turned off of the main road, took a bunch of rights and lefts, then we pulled into the driveway of a rest home where everybody got off except me.  When the bus driver stood up to leave, I said, “Hey wait, what about the rest of the trip?”

It took a while for me to figure out what happened.  When a nurse’s aide at the home heard my story, she said she’d give me a ride.  During her break, the lady drove me back to a bus stop on the main road where I could pick up 143 heading to my mother’s house.

Once I got settled on the right bus, I thought about my conversation with Mr. Nucci.  Did I tell him too much?   I didn’t bother to mention my father’s reaction when he got home that night.

I shuddered as I remembered my father’s face.  “Fire?! What is it with you and fire?  People are still upset about that chemistry lab explosion.  Now this?  What the hell were you thinking?”   My father towered over me as I sunk lower into the big leather chair in his study.

“I…”

“Don’t talk.  I can’t bear the sound of your voice.  Do you realize how much damage you’ve done?  Not to mention, you could have killed yourself.”  He pointed his finger very close to my face.  My dad was never one to spank me when I was little, but at that moment I definitely got the idea that he wanted to pick me up and shake me.

“Carolus, this complicates everything.  I meant to tell you sooner, but there’s never been the right time.  I’m going out of the country on sabbatical, leaving in four weeks, at the end of May.”  He sat down now at his desk chair across the room from me.

“Where are you going?  Am I going with you?”  How many bad things can happen in one day?

“Australia, for a year.  No, I’m sorry.   I can’t take you.  I’ll be out in the bush lots of the time.  As you’ve proven today, you need more supervision than I can provide.”

“Supervision?  I’ll be good, really.”

“No.  I had already talked with your mother….before all this happened.  She says she’ll take you for a year.”

“Florida?  I have to go live in Florida?”  I love my mother, but I hate bugs and heat.

“At this point, you will be very fortunate if the judge allows you to go to Florida.  You have very serious charges hanging over your head.  Thank God you’re a minor, or you’d likely be in jail tonight.”

He let that information sink in for a minute, then he went on.  “I can’t tell you how disappointed I am in you.  Your grades are embarrassing.  As far as I can tell, you don’t even try.  Not with anything.  Not even with other kids.  When is the last time you invited a friend home?”

Now that was a joke.  My own idiot father didn’t realize I don’t have any friends.  I kept quiet.  What could I say?

“I just don’t know what to do with you.  Maybe living with your mother will straighten you out.”

My father was such a piece of work.  “Yeah, maybe you’re right.  It couldn’t possibly be any worse than living with you!”

A couple weeks later I had to appear before the juvenile court judge in New York.  My guidance counselor gave me a ride from school.  My father was supposed to arrive straight from work.  The plan was that he’d tell the judge how I shouldn’t go to juvenile detention because I was such a good kid.

Of course, my father—who was acting like a one hundred percent slime ball—never bothered to show up at the hearing.  Later he told me that he was watching his girlfriend defend her dissertation.  He felt she needed his support.  He said he couldn’t leave her while the faculty was grilling her.  The funny thing is that he wound up dumping her anyway, a week later, just before he left on sabbatical.

Lucky for me, my guidance counselor Mrs. Shalen stuck around in court.  She put in a good word for me.  She said basically I was a wonderful kid but suffered from lack of supervision.  (I don’t think she liked my father, either.)  Then, she told the judge that my father was leaving the country.  She asked the judge to let me live with my mother where she thought I would get more “guidance and nurturing.”

Obviously, Mrs. Shalen had never met my mother.  My poor mother could not guide herself out of a paper bag.  She is one of those people who’s always looking for The Answer in life, but never finding it.  As for nurturing… Mom means well, but let’s just say that pets and potted plants never live long in her house.

But I kept my mouth shut.  Life with Mom in Florida looked lots better than a prison cell or whatever they put teens in.  So that’s how I wound up in Florida.

The bus driver hit a big bump and that brought me back to reality.  I had forgotten I was sitting on the bus.  Maybe my face had some horrible expression on it.  Out of the blue, some guy jumped up and started yelling at me.

“Whatchu lookin’ at, huh?”  Even though he stood six inches shorter than me, the man was solid muscle, every inch.  Two big loopy gold earrings hung in each of his ears.  I like those tiny little diamond stud ones, but his big earrings looked girlish to me.

I froze.  I didn’t even know I had been looking anywhere in particular.

The man leaned over and grabbed the front of my nice white shirt, the one I permanently borrowed from my dad to wear to all my court stuff.  “You want a piece of me?”

By this time, the bus driver started paying attention.  “Hey, you two—no fighting!”

No fighting?  How about “no getting beaten up”?

Just then, the bus pulled over to let some people on.  I jumped off even though I knew I would have to walk at least six blocks to get to my own stop.

Would I be able to make it back to my mother’s house without another incident?  I could almost taste jail food.

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

Bam!  As I walked up the street toward my mother’s house, I saw my mom back out of the driveway, then pull up real fast again.  Every time she pulled up, I heard a crashing sound.

I ran up to the house and saw that she was slamming into two of her metal garbage cans and with each hit, pushing them a little farther up the driveway.  You may be wondering why she’d risk damaging her car.  The answer is that her car is an old lime green Fiat which itself looks like a garbage can on wheels.  I don’t think she cared one way or another about the bumper.

For sure, I figured some neighbor would call the police.  That’s all I’d need, more cop involvement in my life.  So, I headed over to the driver’s side of the car and started waving like a crazy person so she’d see me.  I didn’t want her to run me over.  “Ma!  Ma!  Just stop.  I’ll take them in.  Really.”

“Why didn’t you take them in before?  Those miserable garbage men left them in the middle of the driveway.”  My mother started backing up again.

“They were still full when I left.  I’m just getting home.  I’m late.  Stop, would you?”  I held on to the door handle of the car, stupidly thinking I might slow her down.

It worked.  Sort of.  She slammed on her brakes and I went flying.  She opened the door and as she stepped over me, she said, “I’ve had a very bad day, Cuss.  A very bad day.”

I dragged the two garbage cans to a shed by the side of the house.  They were crunched up, but still usable.  Amazingly, the Fiat looked fine.  Well, as fine as it usually looks, which is pretty awful.  My father refers to it as “That hideous car.”  I’ll have to say I agree with him for once.

I stayed out there by the shed longer than I needed to.  Only a suicidal person would ever want to be near my mother when she’s having a bad day.

My guess was that she had a run-in with her boss, Dr. Warburton.  I think his name is Warburton.  My mother always calls him The Twit or some other non-complimentary name.  He is the director of the university mental health center where my mother works as a therapist.

Mom is mad because she’s not the director and has to take orders from an “ignorant dweeb who just recently bribed his way out of graduate school.”  The only reason that my mother is not director, or so she says, is that she never finished her dissertation and never got her doctorate.

You don’t ever want to get her started on that subject.  At least, I don’t.  She blames my dad.   When the three of us kids were little, my mom worked while my dad earned his Ph.D.  Then, he was supposed to support us while she finished hers.  Instead, he dumped her.

When my folks split, they had a big custody battle.            Who knows what happened in court?  I was around six at the time.  All I’m sure of is that my sisters stayed with Mom in Florida.  Dad won me—the consolation prize.  Right after that, we left for Dad’s new job in New York.

Anyway, I tried to sneak in quietly through the front door.  It didn’t work.

“Cuss?  You know what that creep is trying to do?  Put me on early mornings and weekends?  Can you believe it?  I’ve worked there longer than anyone else and he’s trying to stick me with the worst shifts.”

“Sorry.”  I watched her as she banged several pots and pans.  Definitely, there was a lot more banging than necessary.  I don’t know where all the pots and pans came from.  She hadn’t cooked in days.  Supposedly, my mom is a vegetarian.  At least, that’s what she says when people ask.  But really, she hates beans, brown rice, yogurt and most green vegetables.  When we go out to eat, mostly she’ll order a burger, fried chicken or a pepperoni pizza.

In reality, I’d have to say she is more of a White Food Group person.  In the privacy of her own home, she eats plain old white bread, mashed potatoes, marshmallows, potato chips, pasta with butter—stuff like that.

Although, she doesn’t like all white foods.  For example, she buys tofu at least once a month because she says it’s good for you.  But then, she lets it go bad.  She throws out the unopened package several weeks later.  Somehow, in my mother’s mind, just buying the tofu makes her a healthier person.

In the few weeks I’d lived with mom, I’d heard lots more than I’d ever wanted to hear about her boss, The Twit.  So, I thought I’d change the subject. “I saw my probation officer today.”

“What happened?”  Mom stopped banging and pulled up a chair at the kitchen table.

“He’s a very hairy guy.  Never seen anything like it.”  I was about to tell her all the locations of Nucci’s hairiness, but she interrupted me.

“Cuss!  What did the man say?  What do you have to do?”

“Stay out of trouble or in six months I go to jail back in New York.  He was pretty scary.”

“You better stay scared enough to be good.  Please.”