Read an Excerpt
Exhibit 1: Entry in the Empire Day essay contest
What My Hometown Means to Me
by Peter Huckaby-Green, age 12
Stargazers Valley Community School
Imagine you’re lying on your back, looking up at the stars. It’s a cool night—in your imagination, I mean. It’s heading toward winter, and you’re stretched out on a checkered wool blanket between your parents, who are pointing out constellations, saying their names aloud. The Spinner. The Jackanapes. The Spindle Whorl. Just beyond the blanket, your little sisters are jumping up and down, having a contest to see who can catch a star in her fist, and you’re all so high up on the mountainside that you wonder if one of them might actually do it this time. They’re shrieking at you to jump, too, but you’re not going to get up off that blanket.
“Do you see?” your mom asks. You look where she’s pointing, even though you’ve got to tilt your head back as far as it can go before you spot the blue-green flicker at the edge of the dark sky. “The Southern Skeins are out,” Mom says, tracing the lights with her fingertip. “The Spinner must be at her wheel tonight.”
No one knows for sure when the Skeins will be out: not the astromancers, not even the scientists at the observatory. Sometimes the colors are almost too faint to notice, but other times they streak across the sky fast and bright, like your sisters smearing finger paint on the walls. On nights like that, everyone in town runs outside in their pajamas and slippers to watch, and the sky feels closer than ever.
Your sisters are still jumping, but they haven’t caught anything yet, so you roll onto your stomach and look down at the lights in Stargazers Valley. Those you can chart better than any star in the sky: There’s one at the inn, one outside the Bramblebean Café, one at the clambering shop, and one that glows red up at the observatory. There’s a light on in the school building, where a teacher must be working late, and a light on at the Parks’ house, where your friend Linnet is probably doodling in the corners of her homework. A bicycle lamp whizzes downhill like a comet. And you realize, up there on your blanket, that all those lights in the darkness are the constellation of your town—your safe spot in the wild, wide universe.
Exhibit 2: Burnt Gragment of Correspondence
...headed over to Stargazers Valley. The mountains are full of starstruff, and it's the sort of place you don't mind staying awhile...
Excerpts from the Narrative of Peter Huckaby-Green
The Third-Worst Mistake
I have to start by telling you about the third-worst mistake I ever made.
It didn’t seem so bad at first. It wasn’t at all like my seventh-worst mistake, stepping on a star-eating newt on the front path the summer I turned ten. If you ever step on a star-eating newt with your bare foot, you’ll know right away that something’s gone wrong. There’ll be a crackling noise and a smell of burnt toast. Then the blisters will pop up, bright blue and so painful you can hardly stand it. You’ll have to hop down the road to the hospital on the foot that isn’t blue, and after Dr. Rose gets you bandaged up, you’ll spend the rest of the summer with your leg propped on sofa cushions, even if you promised your mom you’d help out more around the inn.
But it wasn’t like that when I met the Tinkerers. I didn’t get blisters or anything.
I usually walk home from school with Linnet, but that day was different. Mr. Hughes had asked me to see him in his classroom after the last bell. He’s not the sort of teacher who usually keeps kids after class, and I’m not the sort of kid who usually gets into trouble, but I was pretty sure I knew why he wanted to see me: Along with teaching us writing and history, Mr. Hughes was our school’s clambering coach. And like everyone else in Stargazers Valley, Mr. Hughes was serious about clambering. In the year since he’d moved to town, he’d already climbed every trail in the valley and set speed records on at least two of them. He kept telling us twelve-year-olds that if we worked hard and practiced, we could do the same, and he seemed to really believe it. But even Mr. Hughes must have noticed that I hadn’t been setting any clambering records that fall. I figured he’d give me one of his sad, earnest looks and ask me if I was absolutely sure I couldn’t go any faster. Just the thought of that look made my stomach feel all knotted up as I opened the classroom door.
“Peter!” Mr. Hughes got up from his desk. He didn’t look sad, though. He looked pleased, in fact, and so did our school principal, Dr. Castle, who was standing next to him. “Congratulations!”
That’s when I knew that whatever he wanted to talk about, it didn’t have anything to do with clambering.
“Your essay!” Dr. Castle held up the writing assignment I’d turned in a few days earlier for the Empire Day essay contest. Every kid in the Belvederean Empire is supposed to write one, and a lot of people don’t take it too seriously, but I always do. The topic this year was What My Hometown Means to Me, and I’d spent two straight weeks trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. I must have gotten the words right at last, though, because now Dr. Castle was waving my essay in the air like it was some kind of flag. “It’s extraordinary!”
Mr. Hughes explained that Dr. Castle had chosen my essay as the best to represent Stargazers Valley, and now it would go up against essays written by kids from other towns all across the Southern Province. If it was chosen as the best of those, I’d get a special award on Empire Day. Dr. Castle gave me a hug, and Mr. Hughes shook my hand with his strong, callused fingers, and I felt like I could have clambered up Six Boulders Trail in record time right then, if anyone had needed me to.
I couldn’t stop grinning as I took the road down South Mountain toward home. It was clear-blue weather, good-news weather, the kind of weather Mom says she loves because it brings holiday travelers on its heels. A star-eating newt wandered out of the woods and skittered toward me, but I saw it in time; I laughed and stepped to my left. The newt went to its left. It’s not so hard to avoid them, really, I thought. You just have to pay attention.
