Laugh Out Loud Read online

  “You need a bouncy house,” said Maxine Peterman, another great pal of mine. “A place where employees can eat and goof off on their lunch break.”

  “But won’t all that bouncing up and down make people lose their lunch?” worried Chris.

  “Even better,” said Maxine with a shrug. “Projectile vomit is always fun.”

  With everybody’s awesome ideas, my dream factory was inching closer and closer to becoming a reality. At the end of the month, I had an actual blueprint—mostly because I drew it with a blue ballpoint pen.

  Yep, everybody at school was super excited about my big idea.

  My parents?

  Not so much.

  Chapter 6

  Meet the ’Rents

  So this is Mom and Dad.

  Dad’s a big-time CPA, a certified public accountant. That means he crunches numbers for other people and does their taxes for them. Mom is a hotshot lawyer. The kind that handles tax stuff. I sometimes wonder if Mom and Dad met on April fifteenth. You know—tax day.

  Mom never goes to court or does anything dramatic like, say, the awesome Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Instead of drama and excitement, my parents both have huge, boxy briefcases filled with paper. Not books. Paper. Reams and reams of it. Dad’s papers are covered in lines, grids, graphs, and numbers. Mom’s have Post-it notes sticking out between the pages.

  You know how most grown-ups work nine to five? My mom and dad work five to nine. That’s right. They head to their offices at 5 a.m. and don’t come home until 9 p.m., just in time to ask me if I finished my homework and say a quick good night.

  I sometimes wondered if I was actually an orphan, like some of my favorite characters in books. Harry Potter. Anne Shirley. Oliver Twist. Cinderella.

  In fact, I had a hunch that my real parents had been eaten by an angry rhinoceros so the couple I called my mother and father were actually my aunt Sponge and uncle Spiker. I kept waiting for an enormous enchanted orange to grow on a barren orange tree in our backyard so I could fly in it like a hot-air balloon, meet a bunch of friendly talking bugs, and set sail for New York City!

  But then I realized, that wasn’t my story. It was James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl—I just changed the fruit because I’d had orange juice for breakfast.

  Yep, there are a lot of orphans in books. Comic books, too. Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, Daredevil, Robin, Aquagirl—all those superheroes without any ’rents.

  Sometimes, that’s how I felt.

  Minus the X-ray vision or web-slinging.

  My superpower?

  Reading!

  Chapter 7

  Sharing My Dream

  Late one night, after Mom and Dad had both been home for like thirty minutes, I decided to show them my dream on paper.

  Actually, it was more like a dream on papers. I kept having more and more great ideas. So I taped all the different sketches together in one ginormous quilt, which I rolled up and carried into the dining room.

  It was maybe ten o’clock. They were both sitting at the table, not eating. Cardboard and Styrofoam cartons of cold takeout food sat next to their stacks of papers.

  I tiptoed into the room with my tube of taped-together sketches.

  “Mom? Dad?” I said. “I want to show you something.”

  “Is it your homework?” asked Dad. “Because it’s tax season, Jimmy, and I really need to finish these forms for Ferguson Fine Furniture before I can even look at your algebra equations.”

  “I can’t help you, either,” said Mom. “I need to familiarize myself with the particulars of this legal brief. The tax issues are quite complex.”

  “Well, Mom,” I said with a flourish, “since you need to study a brief, I’ll be brief, too. Ta-da!”

  I unfurled my grand schematic.

  Mom and Dad stared at my humongous sheet of factory plans. Then they blinked.

  Finally, Dad said, “Is that an amusement park you want to visit, Jimmy? Because I don’t get any vacation time until after April fifteenth…”

  “It looks more like a floor plan,” said Mom.

  “Exactly,” I said eagerly. “It’s the floor plan for a kid’s book company run by kids that makes books for other kids.”

  More staring and blinking.

  “Why?” asked Mom.

  “Because kids like Maddie next door need books.”

  “Is that a Ferris wheel?” asked Dad.

  “Yep.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s way cooler than a freight elevator.”

  “Interesting,” said Dad. Then he went back to his ledger sheets.

  Mom went back to her legal briefs.

  “It’s my dream!” I told them.

  “Next time,” added Dad, “don’t waste so much paper and tape, Jimmy. Paper and tape are not tax-deductible expenses for a boy your age.”

  I rolled up my sketches and headed back to my bedroom.

  I don’t think my mother and father have dreams anymore. I think they rolled them up and tucked them away when they were kids.

  Then they forgot where they hid them.

  Chapter 8

  Back to School

  As you probably already guessed, I wasn’t going to let my parents’ lack of enthusiasm crush my dream.

  It’s like they say in James Dashner’s The Maze Runner (a very cool book, btw): “We can’t give up. Ever.” (And then they say, “Run! Through the maze! Run!”)

  Plus, all my friends at school were still stoked about making my by-kids/for-kids book company happen.

  “You’re going to need an art department,” said Rafe.

  “I know!” I told him. “And I’m going to need you to run it!”

  He grinned. “My point exactly.”

  My friend Steve Bowman was already thinking about our first film projects.

  “We’ll make movies,” said Steve. “A lot of movies start as books.”

  “Hey, Jimmy?” My next-door neighbor’s little brother, Sammy, came charging up the hall. “Maddie needs another book. Like now. She’s stuck inside for the rest of the month. The pollen count is too high.”

  “Here you go.” I reached into my locker and pulled out my personal, dog-eared copy of one of my all-time faves: A Week in the Woods by Andrew Clements. When she cracked open the cover, Maddie could go snowshoeing, go camping, and get totally lost in the woods.

  “Thanks!” said Maddie’s little brother. “And Jimmy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Hurry up and start your book company, already!”

  Yep, everybody at school was excited about my book company, even though it wasn’t much more than an idea and bunch of sketches. Wait. Rewind. Check that.

  All the kids at school were excited.

  The grown-ups? Most of them were, more or less, in my parents’ camp.

  “Not gonna happen, kid,” said Bob the janitor. Then he showed me his faded drawings for a baseball stadium on the moon.

  “I drew this back when I was in middle school. Never could figure out how to stop every base hit from turning into a home run, what with there being no atmosphere on the moon to slow down the ball and that whole ‘five-sixths of earth’s gravity’ thing. Guess I wasted my time dreaming this baby up, huh?”

  Then there was Mr. Quackenberry.

  Chapter 9

  The World According to Quackenberry

  Mr. Quackenberry taught history and loved telling us about “the most colossal, most stupendous, and hugest failures in history.”

  “Big ideas lead to nothing but big disappointment!” was his catchphrase.

  Then he’d tell us about the Titanic. The giant cruise ship that sank on its first voyage.

  Or how a Mars orbiter was messed up because NASA used the metric system for measurements while the dudes building it used the English system of yards and feet.

  “And need I remind you children of the Edsel?” Mr. Quackenberry would say with delight. “Oh, the Edsel! In 1959, Henry Ford made exactly
the wrong car and named it after his son, Edsel B. Ford. It turned into a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar mistake. In today’s dollars, that would be one point eight five billion!”

  Mr. Quackenberry was always telling us “the timeline of history is littered with the shards of shattered dreams.” Then he’d giggle with glee. “Dreams are for fools, children! All dreams do is ruin a good night’s sleep and make you believe you could actually be a contestant on Jeopardy! when you know they’ll never even write you back no matter how many cards you send in and how well you do when you play against the TV!”

  I’d heard enough.

  “One day,” I said defiantly, “I’m going to make my dream come true! I’m going to open a book company! You’ll see.”

  Mr. Quackenberry smirked. “Right. It’ll never happen, kid.”

  I didn’t mind.

  Mr. Quackenberry was just one more grown-up I’d have to prove wrong!

  Chapter 10

  Dream Job

  Luckily, there was one adult at school who didn’t laugh out loud at my dream. Ms. Sprenkle.

  “My dream came true, Jimmy,” she told me. “Yours can, too.”

  “That’s awesome!” I said. “So what was your dream?”

  She spread her arms open wide.

  “This! To be a librarian. To spend my days surrounded by great stories and amazing facts that I can share with the world. Just think about it, Jimmy—there are incredible adventures sitting on every single shelf in this room. All of them just waiting for you or me or somebody to crack them open, dive in, and make the action begin again.”

  The way she said it, I could see it!

  “I’d like to add a few new characters to your world,” I told Ms. Sprenkle. “When I start making books, I want to make characters that’ll leap off the page!”

  “There’s always room for more, Jimmy. A book may only be an inch or two thick, but inside, you could find a cast of thousands. You can also meet famous people from the past, travel to distant lands, or learn how to build your own robot. I think author Neil Gaiman said it best: ‘A book is a dream you can hold in your hand!’”

  “So you don’t think I’m nutso for wanting to start my own book company?”

  “Nutso for creating more dreams for people to hold in their hands? Impossible. You love reading, right?”

  “You bet!”

  “And telling stories?”

  “I love, love, love that.”

  “Well, Jimmy, here’s my advice, for what it’s worth: Do what you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.”

  “You mean I won’t need to get a job, like Mom and Dad?”

  “No. What I mean is if you love your job, work will never seem like work. Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. ‘Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.’”

  “Wow. That’s a pretty inspirational slogan, Ms. Sprenkle.”

  “Thank you, but I can’t take credit for it. The legendary jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald said it first. This library also has a lot of books filled with famous quotations.”

  So I had one grown-up (and Ella Fitzgerald) on my side.

  Maybe that would be all I needed to make my dream come true!

  Chapter 11

  Ideas Take Flight

  One day after school, my friends and I were hanging out at our favorite coffee shop in San Jose.

  Not that any of us drink coffee. We prefer those slushy drinks with all the whipped cream and squiggly caramel sauce on top.

  “You can’t let Mr. Quackenberry demoralize you,” said my brainiac friend Pierce, who is a total techno geek. His dad and mom are both Silicon Valley engineers—they design and build cool stuff. Pierce probably could be one, too. He’s already built six robots by snapping together junked computers and spare electronic parts. “However, you do need to formulate a workable production plan if you truly hope to one day turn your aspiration into a practical reality.”

  “What?” (I sometimes wish I had one of those visiting aliens I imagined to help me translate what Pierce says.)

  “If you’re going to make books,” asked Maxine, “what do you need first, Jimmy?”

  “Story ideas,” I told her. “Ideas are where everything starts. Good thing I have a folder full of ’em. It’s six inches thick.”

  Then I told my friends this idea I had about a group of kids who could fly.

  “Like in Peter Pan?” said Chris.

  “Not exactly. These would be ordinary kids, except they have wings.”

  “Huh?” said Steve.

  “They’re genetic mutants who escaped from a mad scientist’s creepy lab!”

  Chris nodded. “Ohhhh. Sounds awesome! You should totally write that one up. It’d be a maximum ride!”

  “I can already see the movie!” added Steve.

  So where’d I get the inspiration for that particular idea?

  I dunno. Maybe from my dreams. Everybody dreams about flying, right? But what if that dream turned into a nightmare? What if the kids in the experiment weren’t exactly willing participants?

  Asking “What if?” is a great way to get a story started.

  It might be a great way to get my book company started, too.

  For instance, what if Billy Bonkers, the eccentric and mysterious owner of the Bonkers Big Books factory, opened his doors to five kids who found a golden bookmark tucked inside their copies of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl? And what if I was one of the kids and went on the factory tour with my grandpa Moe (I don’t have one, but I could make one up)? And what if all the other kids were so mean and rotten and bratty that Mr. Bonkers decided to give his factory to me because he could see that I have a good heart and would take excellent care of his dream?

  Or what if I just went to work on my dream?

  Chapter 12

  Booking It

  I realized that if I wanted to make my dream come true, I needed more than a folder full of ideas.

  I needed to sit down with those ideas and actually turn them into stories with beginnings, middles, and ends.

  Good thing Mom had a spare computer stored in the front closet because she’d just upgraded to the newer model. And since Dad had just bought a brand-new all-in-one printer that could do everything—scan, fax, print, and (I think) sew up the holes in the toes of his socks—there was an old, perfectly fine printer-that-just-prints stashed in the garage.

  The garage!

  Silicon Valley, where I live, is full of billion-dollar companies that started in garages. Apple Inc. Hewlett-Packard. Google.

  Well, our house had a garage, too. I wasn’t interested in making a billion dollars, just books.

  So I set up shop and went to work. Quixote was my assistant!

  Of course, I could only work in the garage when it was empty. But remember, Mom and Dad are both total workaholics! That meant our garage was car-free from five in the morning until nine at night.

  Everything was fine while I was writing my first books.

  That took several months of dedicated keyboard clacking. When I was finished, I could just roll my writing desk up against the rear wall. I wasn’t really taking up much more space than a weed whacker.

  But then I started printing out copies. Lots and lots of copies. I figured there were thousands of kids like Maddie who wanted fun books to read, and I didn’t want to disappoint any of them.

  So the garage became my book warehouse, too.

  And then, of course, my parents came home.

  With their cars.

  “What is all this, James?” asked Dad. (Yep. When I’m in trouble, I get the full-name treatment.)

  “My dream!” I told him.

  Mom eyed me suspiciously. “Your dream is to fill our entire two-car garage with boxes of paper?”

  “They’re books!” I told her. “My books.”

  “What?” said Dad. “What are they doing out here? All your books should be neatly organized on the
bookcase in your bedroom. Alphabetical by author…”

  “But these are new books,” I tried to explain. “Ones I wrote.”

  Mom shook her head. “Why would anyone want to read a book written by a boy in middle school, Jimmy?”

  “Because they’re fast-paced page-turners!” I answered excitedly. “You see, in this one, there’s a group of scrappy kids with wings growing out of their backs like birds. And here’s an awesome sci-fi thriller about an alien hunter—”

  Dad held up a hand to stop me. “Clean this mess up, James.”

  “Tonight,” added Mom. “We need to park our cars. They’re predicting rain in the morning.”

  “Put your so-called books in the recycling bins and roll them out to the curb,” said Dad.

  “B-b-but—”

  “Now!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Yep. That’s what I said I’d do.

  But it wasn’t what I did.

  I didn’t toss out anything. Nope. With a little help from my friends, I rolled it all to school!

  Chapter 13

  A Book’s Best Friend

  Where’s the best place on earth to store books?

  A library, of course! And Ms. Sprenkle, our school librarian, was the one grown-up who’d encouraged me to follow my dreams and do what I loved.

  “I’m sure Ms. Sprenkle will let me set up shop in the media center,” I told my friends as we wheeled the three recycling bins brimming with paper down the block.

  “An excellent idea,” said Pierce. “She is always saying she wishes the library had more books on the shelves.”

  “Well,” I said, “we’re about to make her wish come true!”