Laugh Out Loud Read online

  In my mind, I could definitely imagine my new book company operating out of the school library. It had everything we needed. Computers. Printers. Even art supplies. Kids in English classes would become our authors. Kids in art classes would be our illustrators. Kids from gym class would help us push heavy stuff around.

  But as much as Ms. Sprenkle wanted to support our “literary efforts,” opening my book company in the school library “just wouldn’t work out.”

  “Teachers need to use the copy machines,” she explained. “And I need shelf space for all the middle school classics: Anne of Green Gables, Because of Winn-Dixie, Bridge to Terabithia, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court…”

  I nodded so she wouldn’t go through her whole alphabetically organized list. Librarians like to organize stuff.

  “Plus, I have money in my budget to buy new books, ones that just came out. Those will take up even more shelf space. I’m afraid there just isn’t room in my library for your book company, Jimmy.”

  Discouraged, my friends and I hauled all the recycling bins back home. On the way, we passed a big chain bookstore sitting right next to a print-and-ship center.

  This would also be an excellent place to run a book company, I thought. We could print the books at the printing place and sell them at the bookstore! We could grab any art supplies we needed from the craft shop in the same strip mall.

  I told my idea to the manager of the bookstore and the manager of the printing place. I even told it to the lady behind the counter at the fro-yo place.

  They all laughed out loud.

  “Ha!” they all said. “Not gonna happen, kid. Not in a million years.”

  Then they all laughed out loud again.

  You want to know something pretty sad?

  The more grown-ups that tell a kid his or her dream can’t come true, the more the kid starts to believe them.

  Late that night, I rolled those three recycling bins out to the curb in front of our house, just like my father had told me to.

  The next morning, the bins were empty.

  My pages filled with stories were gone—gobbled up by a fleet of San Jose garbage trucks.

  Or so I thought.

  Yep, it’s time for a plot twist! (That’s writer talk for something unexpected!)

  Chapter 14

  G’BOSH

  Turns out that this family that lives up the block and around the corner from us is super, super rich.

  A few years ago, both the mom and the dad started up tech companies, which they sold to bigger tech companies for maybe a bazillion dollars. Each. So now they were double bazillionaires.

  They also had a five-car garage behind their megamansion and only three cars.

  I learned this all from their daughter, a very cool and confident girl named Hailey, with whitish-blond hair, whom I met on my way to school. She’s my age and was biking down the block with a copy of one of my books stuffed inside her bike basket—the one about the kids with wings.

  “Excuse me?” I said when I finally caught up to her. “Where’d you find that book?”

  “On the street in front of a house,” she said. “There were like two dozen copies of this one crammed into a garbage can. The other Dumpster had a different book. Pretty cool science fiction adventure about aliens…”

  “Actually, those were recycling bins. And that was my house.”

  “Oh, so you’re Jimmy? The author?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool. This story about the ‘angel experiment’ is awesome. I’m almost finished. I’m hoping to read the rest today during lunch. Or study hall. Or history. I hate history with Mr. Quackenberry. He’s always telling us about the greatest failures and disasters of all time.”

  “I know. I have him, too.”

  We strolled the rest of the way to school together. She told me how she had rescued all my books and safely stored them in her parents’ garage.

  “They’re too good to toss out,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “You and your books can be big, Jimmy,” she said. “But to be big, you need to think big. You know what my parents say all the time?”

  “Clean up your room? Take out the trash? Don’t run with scissors?”

  “I mean besides all that standard stuff.”

  “No, what do they say all the time?”

  “G’bosh!”

  “Huh?”

  “G-B-O-S-H. Go big or stay home!”

  “Oh. Cool.”

  “It worked for them. They went big and ended up even bigger. Oh, and Jimmy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Make me another book. Please?”

  Encouraged by my new friend Hailey and her parents’ awesome Go Big philosophy, I decided to give my big book company idea another, even bigger shot.

  “To be big, we need to think big!” I told my friends over lunch. “We need to give this book company a big name!”

  “How about Starbucks?” suggested Chris. “Everybody knows that name.”

  “Jimmy’s not selling coffee,” said Maxine.

  “Okay. How about McDonald’s?”

  “He’s not doing burgers and fries, either.”

  “I’ve got it!” I said. “Who’s the biggest book company in the world?”

  “I believe that would be Pearson PLC, in London,” said Pierce, who sometimes knows way too many facts. “They’re a publisher.”

  “How do you know this stuff?” asked Maxine.

  “To be honest,” said Pierce, “that’s the one thing I don’t really know.”

  “I’m talking about Amazon!” I said. “They’re huge, which is probably why they named themselves after one of the longest rivers in the world.”

  “It’s actually the second longest,” said Pierce.

  “I know! That’s why we’ll take the longest river and become the Nile Book Company! How’s that for thinking big?”

  Chris gave me a weird look. So did everybody else at the table.

  “Okay. Forget the Nile. We’ll go with another really long river: the Mississippi Book Company.”

  “I guess it’s better than the Yangtze or Ob Book Company,” said Pierce.

  “Where are those rivers?”

  “China and Russia.”

  I nodded. “Okay. We’ll stick with the Mississippi. Or the Nile. I still like the Nile. How about the Hudson?”

  I knew I hadn’t quite found the perfect name, but thinking big inspired me to make some big changes to my plans!

  Chapter 15

  Streaming Books

  Bouncing around all those big river names for my book company made me think about streaming books at my factory (pun intended). It also made me really need to pee.

  Anyway, it was time for a fresh design!

  Rafe came over to my house after school. Together, we sketched a new vision for our publishing company.

  “At my Mississippi Book Company,” I proudly announced during lunch on Friday, “nothing will slow down the rapid flow of ideas to the page, to the books, to the reader! Not even raging rapids!”

  “Because,” added Rafe, “the place will be like a giant water park! With water slides and waterfalls and a lazy river for the editors to drift along on, slowly making revisions!”

  “Um, wouldn’t water ruin the books?” asked Chris.

  “Definitely,” said my new friend Hailey, who’d joined us at our table. “You ever read in the bathtub? The pages get soggy. Then they’re all warped and wrinkly when they dry.”

  “We’ve thought about that,” said Rafe. “Right, Jimmy?”

  “Yep. Which is why all the books making their way through the factory would be wrapped inside plastic bubbles. That’ll also make them easier to ship, because who needs to bubble-wrap books that are already wrapped in bubbles?”

  “Cool,” said Chris. “Then you definitely need to put in a swimming pool, man. With a diving board. Especially for books that you want to make a big splash!”

  “To hel
p our workers keep up with the books making their way through the production pipeline,” I said, “every kid at the book factory will be given their own personal hoverboard. Or a pair of hover-shoes.”

  “And a helicopter hat,” added Rafe.

  We showed the gang our latest sketch.

  Everybody loved the new drawings.

  “But how on earth are you going to build it, Jimmy?” asked Pierce.

  “Not sure,” I replied. “Maybe we’ll use Legos.”

  Everybody loved that idea, too—especially since a bunch of us had been to the Legoland water park in Carlsbad, California. After the new sketches for the book company factory were passed around the cafeteria, we had a one hundred percent approval rating. All the kids in school wanted to work at the Mississippi Book Company. Or the Nile.

  The grown-ups, on the other hand… Well, let’s just say they thought my ideas were all wet.

  But even though the grown-ups were all laughing out loud at me and my dream, it didn’t get me down.

  No way was I going to give up.

  Because I knew a whole bunch of kids were counting on me to bring them books they actually wanted to read!

  Chapter 16

  Bank Shot

  So I did what grown-ups do when they want to start a company and their parents aren’t super rich.

  I went to the bank to get a loan. That’s right—it’s just like in Monopoly. If you want to buy, say, Marvin Gardens, but don’t have any money, you ask the banker to give you a loan. If it’s my friend Chris, he usually will. Because he likes to keep the game going. He won’t even make you mortgage one of your properties. He’ll just slip you an orange five-hundred-dollar bill and say, “Pay me back when you can.”

  I figured grown-up bankers would feel the same way. They’d loan me the money, and I’d make the books, sell the books, and pay them back their loan plus a little something extra (like, maybe, a free autographed copy of one of my books).

  With my factory all sketched out and ready to be built (all we had to do was order the Legos), I figured it should be super easy. A slam dunk.

  So my friends and I marched to the bank branch closest to my house, first thing on Saturday. Quixote went with us for moral support.

  I even put on my bow tie. Bankers love, love, love bow ties.

  As my pals peered through the big bank windows, I sat down with the loan officer, a nice lady named Mrs. McGillicutty. She liked my bow tie.

  But not much else.

  “All right, all right, all right,” I said to the crowd. “You can stop. I get it. You all think a kid starting his own book company is a ridiculous, laugh-out-loud, hilarious idea.”

  And that’s when it hit me!

  What a great idea!

  Forget all those rivers.

  I was going to name my new company Laugh Out Loud Books!

  No matter how many grown-ups loudly laughed at the idea!

  Chapter 17

  Mystery! Suspense! Magic!

  Okay, so this is turning into a suspense novel, right?

  You never know what’s going to happen next because I never knew what was going to happen next. As I chased my dream, my whole life turned into one giant mystery.

  Speaking of mysteries, that’s one of my favorite genres, which is a fancy way of saying “type of book.” When I first heard a teacher say genre I thought she was talking about a guy named John Ra. I figured he might be a flute player or something.

  Anyway, mysteries are one of my favorite kinds of story. I love Carl Hiaasen’s Flush and Hoot. I couldn’t put down The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd. And I love, love, love the whole Young Sherlock Holmes series by Andrew Lane, especially Death Cloud.

  When I started my own book company, I knew we’d definitely be doing a whole bunch of mysteries and thrillers.

  Okay, enough with the suspense. I can’t keep you dangling off a cliff forever. The rope might snap.

  So here’s what happened next.

  After my terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day at the bank, I woke up the next morning and there was a snowy-white owl sitting in my bedroom. He was perched on the back of my homework chair. There was a letter clutched in his beak.

  It was junk mail from a local carpet cleaning company.

  But—there was another rolled-up scroll of parchment tied to the owl’s left talon! I put on my favorite Harry Potter robe and scarf, unscrolled the missive, and read it.

  Shazam!

  All of a sudden, I had magical powers. I didn’t even have to go to a wizard school called Hogwarts or Pigpimples. I was like a modern-day Harry Potter, without the scar or glasses.

  Yep, I could do incredible magic.

  For instance, I could make our school bus fly.

  I put our super-serious history teacher Mr. Quackenberry under a jokelorum spell so everything he said was hysterical.

  And, in my biggest magical feat of them all, I made the pizza bread in the cafeteria actually taste like something besides cardboard smeared with ketchup.

  “Whoa,” said my buddy Chris, enjoying his lunch. “You really are a wizard.”

  “Shazambalamba bop!” I said, waving my arms around and using my number two soft lead pencil as a magic wand.

  A squadron of owls flew into the cafeteria and dropped everybody a box of glazed doughnuts. Hot glazed doughnuts.

  It was time to go home and put on my magic act for the toughest crowd in the world: my parents!

  Chapter 18

  Home Field Advantage

  Later that night, Mom and Dad were in the dining room, once again hunkered over stacks of paper they’d brought home from work.

  As usual, they didn’t even know I was there. It was like I was wearing an invisibility cloak, which maybe I was, seeing as how I’d recently become a certified Harry Potter–style magician.

  “Guess what, you guys?” I announced. “I’m officially a wizard!”

  “That’s nice, dear,” said Mom without looking up from a manila folder jammed with legal briefs.

  “It’s true. I have magical powers!”

  “Uhm-hmm,” mumbled Dad. “Have you been reading The Hobbit again?”

  “Yes. But that’s not what this is all about. You see, a wise messenger owl flew into my bedroom. Tied to his talon with a leather thong was a missive, which is really just a word that means ‘note,’ but missive sounds much more magical, don’t you think?”

  “Uhm-hmm,” said Mom.

  “That’s nice,” said Dad.

  Yep, neither one of them was paying any attention. I could’ve said an elephant flew into my bedroom and they still wouldn’t’ve looked up from their papers.

  It was time for a demonstration. I held up my number two soft lead pencil and flicked my wrist.

  “What the—?” said Dad. “All these tax returns just magically filled themselves in.”

  “And,” I pronounced, with another wave of my wand, “all of your clients will be receiving huge refunds!”

  “Amazing,” said Dad.

  I had his full, undivided attention.

  Mom’s, too!

  “Jimmy, can you magically help me file this motion on behalf of my client?”

  I whipped up a quick legalbeaglemus spell.

  “Done and done! Your client will be awarded three times the money they were suing for!”

  “Wow,” said Mom and Dad.

  “Work’s finished!” I said. “It’s time for family game night!”

  And so we all played Monopoly. With floating motels and talking tokens!

  I realized something amazing: I could use my newfound magical powers to create my book company!

  I waved my number two soft lead pencil over a ream of paper.

  Shazamalamadingdong!

  I conjured up two complete books! I could’ve waved my wand seven more times and written seven more sequels, but I figured that would’ve just been showing off.

  Chapter 19

  Sticky Notes

  Okay, okay, oka
y.

  Nothing from those last two chapters actually happened. At least not because I was a wizard with a magic pencil wand.

  But while I was telling the story, it all seemed so real. Even the white owl, which was really this pigeon with white feathers that likes to perch on the windowsill outside my bedroom so it can poop on Mom’s rosebushes below.

  Gosh, I love stories.

  Especially stories about magic. And pigeons.

  But magic isn’t how I started my book company.

  Nope. That took lots and lots of hard work. And sticky notes. Lots and lots of those, too.

  It was a Saturday. Mom and Dad went to their offices because they both had to work that weekend.

  I read a book after breakfast (The Crossover by Kwame Alexander—which, by the way, actually makes poetry cool), then went to work.

  I started jotting down ideas on sticky notes. Before long, my ideas were like potato chips, peanuts, or pimples. I couldn’t have just one. I had a billion of them.

  Before long, the stickies were climbing the walls of my room. So were a bunch of photographs and sketches. And three-by-five index cards. And newspaper clippings. I connected ideas that went together with yarn and string.

  When there was no more wall space, I started posting stuff on the window shades. And the desk lamp. And my computer screen. When I ran out of vertical spaces, I grabbed a ladder and started posting notes and clippings and photographs on the ceiling.

  My mind was racing, and I’d only had one Coca-Cola for breakfast. I was like Katniss Everdeen. I was a boy on fire!

  “What’s all this?” Mom asked when she and Dad came home that night.

  “Ideas!” I told her. “Inspiration!”

  “Well, it’s your room, Jimmy. You can decorate it any way you want…”

  “Personally, I would’ve gone with a sports motif,” said Dad. “You know—team jerseys. Bobblehead dolls. A spongy ‘we’re number one’ foam finger. But like your mother said, it’s your bedroom, Jimmy. If you want to go with a whole Post-it notes and detective’s wall theme, that’s fine by us.”