Pity Party, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Kathleen Lane
Illustrations © 2021 by Neil Swaab
Cover art copyright © 2021 by Lora Zombie. Cover design by Jenny Kimura.
Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lane, Kathleen, 1967– author. Title: Pity party : stories / by Kathleen Lane. Description: First edition. | New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2021. | Audience: Ages 8-12. | Summary: “A grab bag of deliciously dark short fiction set in middle school that explores anxieties and twists them into funny, resonant, and reassuring psychological thrills”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020005648 | ISBN 9780316417365 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316417358 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316417389 (ebook other) Subjects: LCSH: Middle school students—Juvenile fiction. | Children’s stories. | CYAC: Middle schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Short stories. Classification: LCC PZ7.L2501 Pit 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005648
ISBNs: 978-0-316-41736-5 (hardcover), 978-0-316-41735-8 (ebook)
E3-20201215-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Voice: Part I Odd
Choose Your Own Catastrophe
Ugly Duck
Personality Test
The Voice: Part II Ghosted
Choose Your Own Catastrophe
Gio X
Choose Your Own Catastrophe
Squirrely Squirrely
The Voice: Part III Choose Your Own Catastrophe
Imposter
Behaviorally Challenged
Chart of Relative Calamity
The Voice: Part IV Choose Your Own Catastrophe
Followers
What Makes You Happy
The Voice: Part V True Story
Choose Your Own Catastrophe
Farewell to the Voice
Thank You
About the Author
To you.
Dear weird toes
crooked nose
stressed out, left out
freaked out
Dear strep throat, chicken pox
ate a moldy muffin
stepped in poison oak
Dear lost sweatshirt
Dear lost dog
Dear didn’t make the team
didn’t get the part
didn’t pass the test
Dear just moved to this town
Dear desperate to get out of this town
Dear missing parts, broken hearts
picked on, passed up
misunderstood
sitting alone
Dear ADD, ADHD, OCD
WX, Y and Z
Dear everyone
Dear you
You are cordially invited
Come as you are
Help yourself to the cake
Spin your troubles round the dance floor
This party’s for you
The Voice
Part I
For as long as Katya could remember, The Voice had been with her. Her earliest memory: Three years old, returning from an afternoon at the pond with her older sister, she had ridden her tricycle directly into the street. Over the growl of an approaching truck, The Voice came to her, loud and clear. PEDAL PEDAL PEDAL, it said. FASTER, it said, FASTER, until Katya’s tiny legs had spun her safely to the other side. No more than a second later, the truck sped by. Had it not been for The Voice, she most certainly would have been flattened under the truck’s enormous wheels.
Recalling the event later, Katya would often imagine a flattened version of herself next to a flattened version of her tricycle. It was not a horrible image. There was no blood involved, no broken bones, not even so much as a scratch. She was simply flat. Like the peel-and-stick books she had always loved but rarely received (except for the worn-out, fuzz-covered hand-me-downs from her older cousins). Sometimes Katya would imagine peeling herself off the page of her own life and placing herself in an altogether different life. A fancier life filled with fancier things.
She imagined flattened versions of her sister and parents too, and her dog Mudjo, and in their peel-and-stick world, she and her family and Mudjo would travel to exotic places, where they rode flattened elephants and ate flattened cakes under flattened chandeliers. Her mother wore brightly colored flattened sun hats. Her father: flattened safari shorts, a chatty flattened parakeet riding on his shoulder—at least, she imagined him chatty, revealing the locations of buried treasures, demanding crackers in return. Mudjo always had a flattened bone between his paws. He made friends with a flattened monkey. Gone were her parents’ worries about money, their fights in the kitchen over who worked harder, who spent more of their earnings on unnecessary things.
In this peel-and-stick world, Katya had little need for The Voice, and when it came time to leave this imagined life behind, she was older and more capable of looking out for herself. She knew better than to ride her bike into traffic. She had long ago mastered the dangers of the house, learned to stand upwind of campfires, learned (the hard way) not to poke blueberries up her nose. Only very occasionally did The Voice return, to warn her of an unfriendly dog, or sometimes person, but as the months passed, she heard fewer and fewer of its warnings. Which is why she was so startled when, as she sat on the living room floor before her record-setting haul of Halloween candy, unwrapping a 3 Musketeers, The Voice suddenly called out: STOP! DO NOT EAT THAT 3 MUSKETEERS!
Only then did Katya remember. That day at school she had overheard Jonah Michaels talking about people who put poison in Halloween candy.
DO YOU KNOW EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO GAVE YOU THAT CANDY? The Voice asked.
The Voice was right! There could be poison in any one of these candies!
Once again The Voice had saved her life.
That night, The Voice slept in Katya’s room. It was like a slumber party, except the kind of slumber party that isn’t very fun. Like when you sleep over at your much younger cousin’s house and have to pretend you’re squirrel sisters. Or like the kind of slumber party where you’re awakened every half hour by the family’s grandfather clock, and just when you’re about to finally fall asleep, a cat walks across your face. That’s the kind of slumber party it was. The kind that felt to Katya like it would never, ever end.
(To be continued.)
Odd
Immediately Julian knew that something was not right. He could feel it all over his body. And then he saw it. That. His head spun at the thought of how close he had come to stepping on it—he came this close.
Twenty-two dirty grey steps down to the subway, that’s how many there were supposed to be—there were always twenty-two dirty grey steps. Today, though, there were twenty-one dirty grey steps and one very shiny grey step with not one scratch or spot of dirt on it anywhere.
This shiny step meant that Julian now had a problem. There was only one step like it, and one meant odd, and odd numbers were the very worst numbers. Odd numbers made everything all wrong.
However, if Julian were to step over that one shiny step, he would then have to step over a second step in order to make it two steps that he stepped over, and the very obvious problem with stepping over a second step is that this second step would be a grey step: a single grey step: one grey step: odd.
Julian’s therapist, if she were here with him, would not only make him step on that one shiny step, which now appeared to be floating and swirling before his eyes, but she would make him say the number out loud. Sometimes, in her office, she made him read an entire list of numbers—terrible numbers—odd numbers. And every time, she would say, “See, Julian? Did anything bad happen?”
This was a difficult question to answer because, in a way, something bad did happen. There was the shaky dizzy feeling, and the cold sweaty feeling, followed by a tightness in his head, as if a giant hand had grabbed hold of his skull and squeezed. And always in that moment, Julian found it difficult to breathe, as if another giant hand had grabbed hold of his throat.
His therapist also liked to say, “Next time it will be even easier,” when he had never agreed to it being easy in the first place. And anyway, this was also untrue. Never was it ever any easier the next time.
It was difficult enough to just sort out which was worse—s
This presented an entirely new problem, however.
There were certain people from Julian’s school who also rode this subway, certain people who knew about his preference for even numbers, and if those certain people were to find him just standing here on the stairs, they might suspect that he was counting, which could lead to any number of possible cruelties, such as whispering odd numbers—or worse, odd—into his ear, as they had been known to do.
To avoid such a fate, Julian brought a notebook out from his backpack and looked at it with great concentration, as if he were puzzling out the most challenging of math equations—though why would he choose to work on his math homework while standing on the subway steps? No, what he was doing instead was searching his notebook for something… a paper he was to bring home… a paper that he just realized he might have accidentally left in his locker and so it was very important that he stop here on these subway stairs to search his notebook.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” That was another of his therapist’s favorite things to say. “Will the world end if you eat five potato chips instead of four?”
Personally, Julian did not feel that she was qualified to be his therapist because she had zero experience. Yes, she had college degrees—an odd number of them hanging on her wall—but she did not have any real experience. She did not know anything at all about being Julian.
Also, how did she know that the world would not come to an end? Was she an expert on world endings?
Oof. Someone just bumped into Julian and he nearly fell onto the shiny step!
It was a guy from school who did it, and now he was grinning, so Julian was pretty sure that he did it on purpose. Jake—that was his name. Jake P.
Julian waited for Jake to reach the bottom of the stairs and turn for the tunnel, and then he waited for these two girls from his school to pass by. They were not girls who knew about his counting, and Julian preferred to keep it that way.
It almost seemed as if Julian’s therapist herself had arranged to have this one step cleaned and polished, just so he would be forced to step on it. Just so he would finally learn that nothing bad could come of an odd number.
Fine! He would do it. He would step on that shiny step. It wasn’t as if he had much choice. The sky was beginning to darken, and soon his parents would grow worried.
He just had to check two things in his notebook and then he would do it. He would step on that shiny step.
He just had to check four things first and then he would totally do it.
Just six things.
Just eight things and then for sure he would do it.
Two deep breaths in, two deep breaths out.
Four deep breaths in, four deep breaths out.
Now for his foot. Foot out… foot out a little farther… just a little farther. And lower… lower… lower…
And this is where our story ends. For, as Julian had predicted—just as he had told his therapist so many times—as soon as his foot touched down upon that single shiny step, the sky went dark, the planets dropped like fallen apples, the trees and flowers drew themselves back into the earth, space and time collapsed into one (the most dreadful of all odd numbers), and the world as we know it came to a sudden end.
CHOOSE YOUR OWN CATASTROPHE
You are walking through a field when suddenly you fall into a deep pit. Fortunately—miraculously—you have not broken any limbs. Though you must have fallen thirty feet, you have only a small scratch on your arm to show for it. You cannot see this scratch—it is so dark inside the pit that you can barely make out your own hands—but you can feel the sting of it just below your elbow.
Patting the ground around you, you discover what feels to be a shoe, a skull-sized rock, a matchbook, and a pile of wood.
If you would like to toss the skull-sized rock around, just for a bit of fun, turn to here.
If you would like to try on the shoe to see if it fits, turn to here.
If you would like to use the matchbook and wood to light a fire so you can see more of your surroundings and possibly find your way out of the pit, turn to here.
If you would like to sit and do nothing because if you stay in the pit long enough to be discovered on the brink of death, it would be a really cool story to tell your friends and might even go viral, turn to here.
Ugly Duck
Duck was especially ugly today, her splotchy spots brightened by the morning light angling into the fish tank. Yes, the angling light also highlighted the poo swirling through the water, but Cora only had eyes for Duck—the fish that all of Cora’s classmates agreed was the ugliest of the tank, her jaw jutting out farther than those of the other “normal” fish and her spots, according to many of Cora’s classmates, the color of puke. But to Cora’s eyes, Duck’s spots were the magical green of the moss that clung beardlike from the trees in Forest Park.
Though Cora’s (now least favorite) aunt had once said, on the death of Cora’s betta fish, Betty, “Well, at least fish don’t have feelings,” and Cora’s (now least favorite) uncle had added, “Not the brightest creatures on the planet either,” Cora knew better. Fish just had their own way of communicating, and from Cora’s experience, it was a much better way than how most humans communicated. Like her aunt and uncle, for instance. Like Naomi and all of Naomi’s friends. If only people could be more like fish. “Right, Duck?” Cora whispered, and Duck, in her own wordless, lippy way, agreed.
“Hi Cora.”
Of course it would be Naomi. Of course she would be the one to interrupt Cora’s perfectly peaceful moment. And of course she would just stand there, as she always did, waiting for Cora to cautiously say hi back, because maybe this would be the moment when Naomi Parsons would finally be nice to her again, like when they were younger—back before, for reasons Cora never understood, everything changed. But no. As soon as Cora allowed a quiet “hi” to escape her lips, Naomi ever-so-casually, using only the tip of her pinky, tipped the bottle of fish food off the table, and a thousand flakes scattered out across the floor.
As Cora could have predicted if she had given it a moment’s thought, Naomi’s next move was to announce, for all to hear—especially Mr. Blevins, who was up at the front of the classroom looking over papers—“Cora, you better clean that up before Mr. Blevins sees!”
Mr. Blevins stood up from his desk to get a look at the mess of fish food on his floor. He sighed in that way that teachers sigh when they want you to know how disappointed they are, and oh how Cora hated to disappoint her teachers. “It’s okay, Cora,” he said with another sigh. “Just get it cleaned up before class.”
“But I—”
“Here, let me help you,” Naomi said, kicking flakes in Cora’s direction.
And once again, Cora could not think of what to say. Later she would come up with the perfect words: By knocking over the bottle again? Is that how you’re going to “help” me?—said just loud enough for Mr. Blevins to hear. In that awful moment, though, she could only manage to stare at Naomi’s lip-glossed mouth, those sticky lips smiling in that way that appeared so sweet to others, but Cora knew better.
When she had finished gathering the flakes into a paper towel, she said her silent goodbye to Duck, who seemed to be looking at her with a sad expression, her lips even more frowny than usual, and Cora couldn’t help but wish that it was Naomi who was the sad one for once, wish that it was Naomi who was ugly, that it was Naomi whose face was covered in puke-colored spots. Then she would know. Then she would finally understand what it felt like to be Cora and Duck.
At lunch, Jaylah whispered, “You heard about Naomi?”
“No, and I don’t care,” Cora said, digging her thumbnail into a grape and splitting it in two. She assumed Naomi had won another award or managed to get yet another boy to fall in love with her.
