You Don't Know About Me Read online

  Also by Brian Meehl

  Out of Patience

  Suck It Up

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

  Text copyright © 2011 by Brian Meehl

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Meehl, Brian.

  You don’t know about me / Brian Meehl.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Billy has spent his almost-sixteen years with four cardinal points—Mother, Christ, Bible, and home-school—but when he sets off on a wild road trip to find the father he thought was dead, he learns much about himself and life.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89715-3

  [1. Christian life—Fiction.

  2. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Mothers and sons—Fiction.

  4. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 5. Automobile travel—Fiction. 6. Gays—Fiction.]

  I. Title. II. Title: You do not know about me.

  PZ7.M512817You 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010017101

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  To the Reader

  1 - The Good Book 1 - The Facts of Me

  2 - The Facts of Mom

  3 - Independence, MO

  4 - Taffy Town

  5 - Corndog

  6 - The Prayer Rug

  7 - Stupid Neighbors

  8 - Everyday Miracle

  9 - Resurrection

  10 - Wicked Hearts

  2 - Adventures of Billy Allbright 1 - Between the Covers

  2 - Geocaching

  3 - My Getaway

  4 - My Raft

  5 - Behind the Wheel

  6 - Cat and Mouse

  7 - Hunter

  8 - Packin’

  9 - Busted

  10 - Speaking in Tongues

  11 - Doubt-swapping

  12 - I Witness

  13 - Phone Call

  14 - Giff

  15 - The N-Word

  16 - Colorado

  17 - Trading Secrets

  18 - Bad Samaritans

  19 - St. Petersburg

  20 - Reset Buttons

  21 - Out at First

  22 - Escape

  23 - The Faggot Bomb

  24 - Thinking Twice

  25 - Continental Divides

  26 - Word Shrapnel

  27 - Providence

  28 - A New Plan

  29 - Saving Ruah Branch

  30 - Into the Desert

  31 - Shaken Out

  32 - Notus

  33 - Cache Prize

  34 - The Potlatchers

  35 - Detours

  36 - Burning Man

  37 - Across the Playa

  38 - The Sun Dance

  39 - Nontraditional Gift

  40 - One More Boob

  41 - Getting Glassed

  42 - Black Night

  43 - Homedale

  44 - Un-moviemaking 101

  45 - The Bullet Hole

  46 - The Shoot

  47 - Crossing Lines

  3 - The Bad Book 1 - S’mores

  2 - Wrath

  3 - Blackmailees

  4 - Stonehenge

  5 - Night Voices

  6 - A Fight

  7 - Drugstore

  8 - Boot Heel Collectibles

  9 - Pap

  10 - The Hunt

  11 - Genizah

  12 - Negotiation

  13 - Nothing More to Say

  14 - Howling Adventures

  15 - In Plain Sight

  16 - Ain’t A-Comin’ Back No Mo’

  17 - Homecoming

  18 - Picnic

  19 - Entry the Last

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To the Reader

  There is a book that has been closed to the world since 1884. In the margins of the book, Mark Twain mapped out the sequel to his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It was a story he could not tell in his lifetime. The following story was inspired by that long-lost book, and Twain’s incredible notes.

  Note to the Lord

  T.L.,

  You’re totally-knowing; got it. You know what I’m going to write before my pen hits paper. You know what rattles in my head and stirs in my heart before I have a clue. No surprise there, I’m the last to know what I think or feel. So why send You a note when it’s a copy of a t-mail (thought-mail) You already got? Because, on the wonky chance You’ve gone less knowing these days—and who could blame You?—or that You now use angels to screen Your t-mail, I wanted to be sure You got this.

  Here’s the must-know. I’m not writing my sketchy, blasphemous story to piss You off so You can tap the smite stick and slap me with boils, leprosy, head-to-toe pimples, or whatever You’re smiting people with these days. I’m telling the story of what happened last summer for two reasons:

  I promised someone I would (You know who).

  And I want to see if I can write (You know why).

  Wow, soon as I wrote that—bam!—whacked with brain lock. Maybe it was You crashing my cranium for having vainglorious thoughts like I can write. Whatever, while I was staring at the cement birdbath in the backyard, hearing nada because it’s so hot the birds are in the trees taking shade baths, the silence of Your creation made me remember the other thing I wanted You to know.

  As this pen lays down the trail of my adventure, I don’t expect Your help or blessing. I mean, it’s not Your kind of story. There’s no prophets or heroes in it like in the Bible. There’s no one You can be proud of. Actually, there’s people in it that make me think Your smite stick has been jammed lately. It’s about regular people. Your people. And me. Whether I’m “regular” I don’t have a clue. Still sorting that one out.

  I want to finish with a prayer.

  T.L., any time you want to God-up and hit me with some of Your zigzag loving-kindness, feel free. I always appreciate it.

  And please let Your only begotten Son help me Son-up and walk in His Way.

  Amen.

  Your big fan, then-now-forevermore,

  Billy

  1

  The Facts of Me

  At the beginning of last summer I had a grip on the facts of me.

  Born Charles William Allbright

  August 29, 1994

  Little Rock, Arkansas

  Dream: to be a champion mountain biker

  I didn’t stay in Little Rock long. I didn’t stay anywhere long. In my almost sixteen years of life, me and Mom had moved sixteen times. Some kids get their height penciled on doorframes as they get taller. My height got marked on the old U-Haul trailer that followed us everywhere. On my eleventh birthday I shrank an inch. Then we figured out that the U-Haul tires had been pumped up. Had a laugh over that one.

  I never liked moving. I was always the NIT: the Newbie In Town. Whenever I made a friend, I knew he’d never be a best buddy. Best buds are for life. We moved too much to have anything fo
r life. Except the F-word: “faith.”

  Mom gave me the same pep talk whenever we moved. “Billy, God blessed you with more than the cornerstones of a house. He’s given you a compass with four cardinal points.” My cardinal points weren’t north, south, east, west. They were Mother, Christ, Bible, homeschool. Mom said as long as I followed those points I’d never be lost. I’d walk in His Way. I’d Son-up.

  When we hit a new town, the first thing we did was church-shop. It was Mom’s version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” This church was too sinful. This church wasn’t Spirit-filled enough. This church was juuust righteous. So we’d join it. We’d be dialed into it for a while, but sooner or later she’d find something wonky and wicked about our church. One time she stood up during Sunday service and shouted scripture: “I have hated the congregation of evildoers and will not sit with the wicked!” As she pulled me out of there I asked her what made them “evildoers.” She told me I was too young to understand.

  Last July, a month before turning sixteen, I totally got why we left the Assembly of Assemblies Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After we joined Assembly of Assemblies, the pastor let a company put a cell tower in the steeple. Mom had no problem with the company paying the church big bucks to have a comm tower in their steeple. But hellfire hit the fan when she found out that some of the stuff zapping through the tower was pornography. I couldn’t fault her on that one. When you’re in church launching prayers to heaven, you don’t want them scummed by a layer of triple-X fornication. Mom calls it the “pornosphere.” That’s one of the cool things about being homeschooled. You learn things go-to-school kids don’t. I learned about the stratosphere, the troposphere, and the pornosphere.

  And that’s just what happens when you start thinking about the pornosphere. It’s like trail biking behind a bike bunny on a bumpy track. Her jiggly parts make you dizzy and you go blind to the real bumps. It’s one of the rigid rules of mountain biking: Beware of male blindness; it leads to the kiss of dirt.

  Okay, I’m jumping ahead. Back to the facts of me, and the how and why of me bombing into the world.

  In the summer of 1993, when Mom was single, and still Tilda Hayes, she belonged to a fundamentalist group called the Jesus Brigade. One weekend, the J-Brigade got on one of those riverboats that go up and down the Mississippi. The boat was filled with sinful gamblers. The J-Brigade was there to witness for Christ, especially to gamblers with empty pockets and empty hearts.

  While Mom was witnessing to this one gambler, his heart swung wide open. By the time she turned him from his evil ways he was not only slain by the Lord, he was slain by Tilda Hayes. After that, he joined the J-Brigade and joined Tilda at the altar. His name was Richard Allbright. He was so in love with her, and Jesus, that he quickly became a reverend. Not the kind who goes to school and gets a degree. The kind who gets a tricked-out piece of paper in the mail and starts circuit preaching in one-room churches in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

  After they got married Tilda got pregnant. As she was belly-packing me around she said she had a real good feeling and a real bad feeling. The good feeling came from me pedaling around inside her. The bad feeling came from watching her husband’s preaching star rise too fast. One day, when her bad feeling was super bad, she did one of her providence checks. She was going to find out what the Lord had in store. She shut her eyes and prayed till she felt the Spirit. She opened her Bible, finger-planted on a verse, and looked to see what God had to tell her. For everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted. Mom’s heart trembled.

  The next day, my father was driving home after a week on the circuit. He got caught in a hailstorm but kept hammering for Little Rock. Taking a corner, his car left the road and plunged into the Arkansas River. He tried to get out. He didn’t. His spirit went to heaven. According to Mom, so much of his body went to the catfish that when they found his car there wasn’t enough left of Richard Allbright to bury. He never got a grave we could visit.

  I didn’t even know what my father looked like. All his pictures were torched in a trailer fire when I was a baby. The fire incinerated the paper that made him a reverend too, and the family Bible recording their marriage and my birth.

  But my father wasn’t like one of those metal bits that chips off inside your bike frame and you can’t get to; my father wasn’t unobtanium. The stories Mom told me about meeting him on the riverboat and watching him preach in tiny churches put a movie in my head. She said I even looked like him. Especially my nose, a big beak of a thing. To see him all I had to do was stand in front of the mirror and age-up. I’d slick down my stick-up hair. I’d use a piece of charcoal to smear on a five o’clock shadow. I’d squint till things got blurry. And there he’d be: Reverend Richard Allbright, behind his pulpit. I’d push my voice down and preach a sermon on anything in the Bible. If there was one thing Reverend Allbright and his son knew, it was the Good Book. It was our cardinal point.

  And that’s how my compass of Mother-Christ-Bible-homeschool, with my dad’s face shimmering in the glass, kept me carving a line in the trail of the Lord. Those were the facts of me. From The Book of Tilda, anyway.

  Then, at fifteen years and eleven months old, my compass got smashed. I went ripping off trail. Gonzo off trail.

  2

  The Facts of Mom

  Halfway through last summer we moved. We drove up from Tulsa in a heat wave that made me sticky as a glazed doughnut. The temperature didn’t slip below a hundred till after sunset.

  I was asleep in the front seat, in the zonk-bag, as we drove through Kansas City and into town #17, Independence, Missouri. I woke up with my neck sweat-stuck to the back of the seat. It made a twacky sound in my ear as it unstuck.

  Mom held the MapQuest directions she’d printed up at the Tulsa library in one hand, the wheel in the other. “Rise and navigate,” she said. “We’re here.”

  I checked out the new “here.” The street was lined with stores and a couple food places, all closed. The place was bizarro-empty for a Saturday night. That was probably why Mom picked it. Independence was independent of sinners.

  The real reason we were moving to town #17 was because we had to blow out of town #16. Mom had done more than give the Assembly of Assemblies a scripture-spanking for having a steeple stuck in the pornosphere. She’d climbed into the steeple with cable cutters and severed the “tentacles of Satan.”

  The facts of Mom went like this:

  Forty-two

  Tall, thin

  Straight brown hair cut halfway down her neck Sometimes a gray hair sprang from the brown

  A face that was still pretty but could pinch tight and show lines

  Gray eyes that got super intense, especially when they were juiced with the Spirit

  Leader of the New J-Brigade

  The New J-Brigade was an army of two: her and me. We didn’t just show up for the big battles at abortion clinics and courthouses that married homosexuals. We specialized in the little scraps with Satan. We were ninja warriors for the Lord, playing Whac-a-Mole with demons wherever they popped up.

  In Memphis we took on Satan at Piggly Wiggly. We armed ourselves with black markers, went into the supermarket, and blotted out the word “devil” wherever we found it. We eliminated the devil from devil’s food cake, Devil Dogs, and Devil’s Duel Sauce. We were annihilating the devil pictures on bottles of Mean Devil Woman Cajun Hot Sauce when the cops stopped us from completely casting Satan out of Piggly Wiggly. The store’s security cameras caught us on tape and we made the local news. When everyone knows you and your mom are crazy criminals for Christ, and she gets hit with a fine she can’t pay, it’s time to disappear. That’s when we left town #7 for town #8.

  But the Piggly Wiggly Incursion was a picnic compared with the time we took on a motorcycle gang. In Topeka, Kansas, Mom had a job as a motel clerk. A biker gang roared up and checked in for the night. The trouble began when Mom spotted the slogan on their New Hampshire license pl
ates. LIVE FREE OR DIE, it said in raised green letters.

  Later that night, we drove to the motel with ball-peen hammers. Mom told me the slogan was a blasphemy to the Lord. “Live Free or Die” denied God’s control over our lives and encouraged people to be libertines and hedonists.

  We were halfway through hammering the LIVE FREE OR DIE slogans to flat-out oblivion when the biker gang poured out of a bar across the street. I did my own take on Live Free or Die and ran. A biker grabbed me. I didn’t know what was more pucker-up petrifying, the mega-hairy guy holding me, or Mom whaling on a license plate and shouting, “We are sheep in the midst of wolves doing His work!” Another guy grabbed her as she yelled, “If we perish, we perish!”

  I screamed, “I don’t wanna perish!”

  God must’ve heard me. A cop car shot into the parking lot just before the bikers pulped us with their mondo boots. After we were taken away, the cops said they would’ve put Mom in jail for the night if it weren’t for me. She must’ve known she was going to get fined again, or worse. That night we packed the U-Haul and left the state in our righteous dust.

  As we drove to town #10—Des Moines, Iowa—Mom informed me that we were “antinomians.” I’d never heard the word and thought maybe an antinomian was someone who hated gnomes, like those plastic ones in people’s yards. Mom had taught me that gnomes and leprechauns were antiangels who worked for the devil. So I thought maybe our next mission was going to be kidnapping lawn gnomes and stoning them to death.

  I was wrong. She told me an antinomian is someone who knows there’s two kinds of law: the law of the land and the law of God. When an antinomian has to choose between following one or the other, he always chooses God’s law. That’s another thing about Mom’s brand of homeschooling. When you’re on the run, some of it’s car-schooling.

  But Mom was good at more than whaling holy on Satan. She could always find a job. Being a super-fast typist, she got a lot of work doing data entry. She’d usually go to work after dinner. That way she could homeschool me during the day. Sometimes it freaked me out to be alone at night. But it wasn’t like I was alone alone. “Don’t ever be scared,” she’d say. “Your Heavenly Father is in the house looking after you.” If I ever really got scared I’d lock myself in the bathroom, stand in front of the mirror, and become Reverend Allbright. When my father preached a mirror sermon, I wasn’t afraid of anything.