The Handbook Read online

  For Griffin and Summer,

  who would never try to manipulate me.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Agent Washington ran a hand through his thin brown hair as he drove slowly through a quiet neighborhood. None of the agents really appreciated getting “Cruise the Neighborhood” assignments, and Washington resented these most of all.

  Washington picked up the microphone.

  “I’m on Torry Street, a couple streets south of Banbury, halfway down the block,” he grumbled. “Look, it’s getting late, nothing is going on. Maybe we can just call it a night here and—”

  Just then, a child’s voice screamed from behind some hedges.

  “Help! Help me!”

  Washington didn’t hesitate. He threw the car into park and barked into the handset.

  “Child in distress. Exiting vehicle.”

  He followed the screams through a dense cluster of bushes until he found himself in a tiny clearing, surrounded on all sides by high shrubs.

  “This would be a pretty good place for an ambush,” he whispered to himself as he slowly reached for his immobilizer. He checked the battery indicator. He had a full charge.

  Suddenly, small forms, dressed entirely in black, charged from all sides and crashed into him, driving him down hard on his stomach and sending his weapon flying.

  One of the attackers stood on his neck while the others swarmed over him and worked rapidly to expertly tie his hands and feet behind him. A blindfold followed, then a gag.

  He twisted and struggled to escape the ropes, but his attackers knew what they were doing.

  “Shut up and lie still,” the attacker hissed. It was the unmistakable voice of a young girl.

  Washington’s mind reeled. These are kids, he thought, and he heard another one of his assailants speak into a walkie-talkie.

  “Marion here,” she said. “Capture test a success. Enemy agent subdued. I have his weapon.”

  “Be careful with that,” a boy’s voice on the speaker cautioned her.

  “I know,” she snapped. “Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot.”

  “Of course you’re not an idiot. Those immobilizers aren’t lethal, but they will knock you out and they hurt like crazy. We all just want you to return to base unharmed.”

  She rolled her eyes and put the walkie-talkie in her pocket. She leaned in and inhaled Washington’s scent deeply.

  “He’s a dad,” she said.

  “How can you tell?” one of the masked accomplices asked.

  “I’m picking up coffee, shaving cream, and Fruit Roll-Ups. A man this age only has Fruit Roll-Ups if there are kids in the house.”

  The boy’s voice crackled over the walkie-talkie.

  “Marion. Release subject unharmed. I repeat, unharmed.”

  The girl calling herself Marion huffed.

  “I’m not kidding, Marion,” the boy said seriously. “Unharmed.”

  She forced Washington to roll over, and laughed as she pulled aside his blindfold. She wore a black bandana over most of her face, and he could see nothing of her features but her dark, angry eyes.

  “My commanding officer says I shouldn’t harm you. But don’t you get tired of people telling you what to do, like all the time? Like they think you’re stupid.”

  The other masked kids nodded and murmured in agreement.

  Agent Washington swallowed hard.

  “I sure do,” he said nervously. “I can really relate, Marion.”

  She chuckled softly.

  “How about when people that don’t even know you use your first name in an attempt to make you think that you’re friends; do you ever get tired of that?” she asked.

  The kids fell silent. Washington realized that he had crossed a line with her.

  The boy’s voice came over the walkie-talkie once more.

  “Give him the scissors, Marion,” he ordered.

  “Oh, I’ll give him the scissors, all right,” she said with a low chuckle.

  She raised her arm and he tensed up, but she brought the scissors down hard in the dirt, just inches from the side of his head.

  She exploded with laughter at his frightened expression and stood up.

  “Let’s go,” she commanded her squad, and they vanished silently into the darkness, leaving Agent Washington to roll around helplessly in the grass for the next ten minutes. He managed to wriggle the dull scissors out of the ground and clumsily snip and saw through the tough ropes.

  * * *

  By the time he got back to his car, sweating, humiliated, and clutching at a broken rib, other agents were there, waiting with gigantic grins, to hear the story of how he had been ambushed and disarmed by a bunch of kids.

  Trash Day.

  It came every Friday on Banbury Road.

  It’s a truly wonderful day, a bit like Christmas, except the gift givers were not aware that they were giving anybody a gift, and it’s not uncommon for the gift to be a dirty diaper.

  Jack’s next-door neighbors, the Wallaces, had just sold their house, and an immense mountain of their discarded junk sat on the curb and beckoned to Jack. It’s not often that this much high-quality trash gets piled up on the curb, and it was calling to Jack like a big, filthy, discarded mermaid. Jack was helpless to resist it.

  Jack’s mom didn’t understand the value of harvesting other people’s trash.

  How many times had Jack heard her lecture him endlessly about the topic?

  “Can you imagine what people will think of you? And you could cut your hand on something. Sometimes people throw away acid and things like that and you could be scarred for the rest of your life. Acid could dissolve off your face. Is that what you want, a dissolved-off face?” she would ask, her voice reminding Jack of a handful of spoons in a garbage disposal.

  And seriously, was the answer to the question ever in doubt?

  Why, yes, Mother, a dissolved-off face is the coolest new thing. It’s exactly what I want.

  But he couldn’t think about her lectures just then. He needed his full trashful concentration.

  Jack rode around the pile, circling it like a shark, like a shark analyzing his prey, like a blond, green-eyed shark throwing occasional glances over his shoulder to see if his mom was watching.

  Mom knew how to move the drapes ever so slightly, just enough so that a single accusing eye could glare through the gap. Jack knew that if she did the Drape Gap Move at this very moment, she would see the trash acquisition in progress, throw open the front door, and start h
owling like a baboon with its tail caught in a lawn mower.

  The mission would fail, the trash would not be acquired, and this was precisely why, he was certain, sharks never brought their moms along on hunts.

  He knew she was probably busy washing clothes or washing dishes or washing a tree or any of the other million things that moms apparently love to wash, but she could be unpredictable at times and had disrupted his plans more than once. Precision, he thought. This was a mission of precision. He noticed that the phrase mission of precision kind of rhymed and he felt that this made it more legitimate somehow.

  There were no flies buzzing around the pile. This was a good sign. Flies meant that there was a lot of icky garbagey stuff inside, like half a tuna casserole, or kitty litter, or the other half of that tuna casserole. Jack remarked to himself that if people really cared about kids, they would throw away only nice things.

  Jack had picked through more than his fair share of trash in his young life, and he had come to realize that adults apply a kind of science to trash stacking.

  Adults like to get hernias, which is some weird condition brought on by lifting something that you are not strong enough to lift. So the boxes they balance on the top of the pile are lightweight. This means that these boxes are either empty or have only a couple useless articles of holiday decorations, or worse: maybe Mrs. Wallace’s old bras.

  Jack briefly recalled an experience with a discarded old-lady bra that he had encountered as a much younger trash picker. He had pulled it slowly from the trash can and handled it curiously for a full minute before it occurred to him exactly what it was he was holding, and that it had been the very recent property of the million-year-old woman smiling and waving shyly from her porch. This is when he discovered that it is not possible to die from a case of the willies. If it was, Jack’s short life would have ended right there.

  Jack shook the bra memory from his mind and returned to his analysis of the boxes. The boxes at the bottom of the pile, the heavy ones, could contain things like toys, magazines, or power tools. Yes, it’s the bottom boxes where one must direct one’s attention. It’s all about focus.

  Unfortunately, while focusing his attention on the bottom boxes, Jack lost focus on things like potholes and gravity. That split second of carelessness sent him wobbling and clattering to the ground, a scraped-up tangle of bike and angry twelve-year-old.

  Please oh please oh please, Jack thought to himself with his eyes scrunched shut. PLEASE don’t let Maggie have seen that.

  Maggie was the prettiest girl in the world, and the only girl whose opinion mattered to Jack. She had lived across the street for about two years, and he had worked very hard to conceal his dorknicity from her.

  He wouldn’t want to be seen acting like a dope in front of Maggie if she was merely the Most Mediumest-Looking Girl in the world, either. And if we’re being honest here, even if Maggie was the goofiest-looking girl in the world, Jack would rather eat unsweetened oatmeal out of his math teacher’s shoe than appear stupid to her.

  Maggie was pretty, but way above that, she was smart, and Jack respected that. He opened his eyes slowly and looked with a cringe in the direction of her house.

  She wasn’t looking. Maggie hadn’t seen.

  His coolness remained intact.

  Then he looked back over at his house. His mom wasn’t running out in a panic with Band-Aids and antibiotics. That meant she hadn’t seen, either. Nobody had. The mission was still on.

  He quickly grabbed a box of heavy trash from the bottom of the heap, balanced it on the seat of his bike, and walked it swiftly into his garage, its weight teetering and shifting on his bike the entire way.

  He stashed it in the corner behind a plastic sled, a set of golf clubs, and a recycling bin that they weren’t using as much as they should be.

  Just as he had finished concealing his treasure, the door from the garage to the house flew open and Jack spun around to see his mom standing there, holding a large spoon in one hand and a bag of frozen vegetables in the other.

  “What have you done to your pants?” she screeched. “And where’s your helmet?”

  He looked down. In his crash, he had torn the knee out of one pant leg.

  “Do you have any idea how much pants cost, young man?” his mom shouted. “I’m sick and tired of you destroying all of your new clothes the minute you get them.” She waggled the bag of frozen vegetables at him in what was probably supposed to be a threatening manner.

  Jack tried to open his mouth to say something, but his mom was well practiced at spotting a mouth opening and could start yelling again with the blinding speed of a whip cracking.

  “And don’t give me any smart-aleck answers either, young man. Your father and I work very hard to make sure that you and your sister have nice things and a roof over your heads.”

  For a moment, Jack’s mind began to wander. Does anybody have a roof under his head? Would his parents prefer a dumb-aleck answer? Did his mom know how much she sounded like a goose when she was angry? What exactly is an “aleck” anyway?

  He snapped out of his thoughts just in time to hear Mom wrap up the lecture. He was always glad that he had thoughts like those to occupy his mind while his mom was talking.

  “… And the next time you’ll be grounded! Now wash your hands for dinner, and for the millionth time, turn off the garage light.”

  What did Mom really mean when she said “grounded”? Like, you’ll be buried in it? Chained to it? Or was it like telling a pilot that they aren’t allowed to fly?

  News flash, Mom: I don’t have a plane.

  Jack walked to the bathroom to wash up, and stopped briefly by the front window. He squinted. Across the street, he could see his best friend, Mike, his black hair hanging down in front of his eyes, trudging past a window, followed by his angry dad, who was waving his hands furiously. Mike was getting yelled at, too.

  “I wonder how many kids, at this very moment, are getting yelled at by their parents,” Jack said to himself, and began doing some calculations on a slip of paper.

  He looked at the figures and nodded.

  “Yes,” he said. “According to my math, it’s exactly one buttload of kids.”

  Jack wiped his mouth and put his napkin on the table. He knew that he had committed the serious crime of Not Eating Everything on His Plate, and was pretty sure that Dad, who thought of himself as Chief of the Food Police, was going to make an arrest.

  “Finish your dinner, pal,” Dad said, looking at Jack over the top of his glasses.

  “Dad, if those glasses are supposed to help you see, why do you look over the top of them all the time?” Jack asked.

  “Just finish your dinner.”

  “Dad, I’m full.”

  Jack’s little sister, Jessica, decided to be the Dinner Deputy and provide some backup to Officer Dad.

  “Maybe he ate some candy or something,” she offered, “and he soiled his appetite.”

  Jessica was perfectly adorable, from her sweet little pigtails to her pert little nose. She lisped the tiniest bit, due to a tooth that had recently fallen out, and that slight lisp was the thing that had pushed her over the edge from supercute to perfectly adorable. Her perfect adorableness, however, was not something her brother could appreciate.

  “That’s SPOILED, pinhead. Candy could SPOIL your appetite. Or cake could SPOIL your appetite. Or your sister’s face could SPOIL your appetite,” Jack said, and he sneered at her in such a way as to let his five-year-old sister know how dumb he thought she was, how dumb she had always been, and how dumb she would always be even if she went to college for a thousand years. True, that’s an awful lot to get across in a single sneer, but Jack was good at sneers, and he had sneered this particular one many times before.

  “There are people starving in India, and you leave your sister out of this,” Mom snapped. She jabbed her fork in the air at him for emphasis.

  Jack sputtered.

  “Wait a second, Mom. She’s the one that s
tuck her nose into my business. And, by the way, why don’t we FedEx our leftovers to India once in a while if you’re so concerned about the starving people there. And hey—let’s put Jessica in the box as well, and while we’re at it …”

  Dad’s face got bright red, but not the jolly red of a lollipop or a balloon. It was more like the red of an itchy rash or a monkey butt. The sight of it made Jack freeze in mid-sentence. It was not the red that any face should ever be.

  “Do you think that food grows on trees, young man?” he bellowed, bringing his fist down on the table like a meaty cannonball.

  Jack knew he should have stayed quiet. Only an idiot would have responded to that particular question at that particular moment.

  “Yeah, Dad. Lots of food grows on trees. It’s called fruit. Ever hear of it?” he said smugly.

  The next thing Jack knew, he was in his messy room, wondering why his parents were always asking if he thought something grew on trees. They also liked to ask him if he thought they were made of things, like when he asked them to buy him a phone: Do you think I’m made of money? they would ask. Do you think I’m made of phones?

  Sometimes he would answer, but it often turned out that they didn’t really want answers to those questions, which was confusing, because if he delayed for even a moment on other questions, they would sometimes impatiently shout, “ANSWER ME!”

  It was times like those that Jack wondered if there was a psychologist that his parents were supposed to be talking to four times a day but that they never had talked to him even once and never would and they weren’t taking the medicine he wanted them to, either.

  Up in his room, Jack stepped carefully though the clutter on his floor. He looked like somebody crossing a creek full of clothing by stepping on randomly placed carpet stones.

  He moved quietly toward his computer. The standard rule was that if he had been sent to his room, he was not allowed to get on his computer. But Jack figured he could be quick and quiet enough to log on, send Mike an email, and jump off before his dad had a clue.

  Technically, it would be against the rules, but he was pretty sure that if you said technically before you said a rule, this meant you didn’t have to follow the rule.