“Why is it called The Bubblegum Reaper, anyway?” I said.
“Why do you think?”
“I have no idea. That’s why I’m asking you!”
He laughed. “Well, there are many theories.”
“I did an Internet search already. I’m not buying what’s out there.”
“Then maybe you should ask the author yourself.”
“How can I do that?”
“Mr. Booker actually lives within walking distance of this school. Did you know that?”
“Are you even serious?”
Mr. Graves smiled like he had been leading me down a path without my knowing it. “And I hear that if you offer to buy him a cup of coffee at the House, he’ll speak with you. Although I should warn you that he never, ever gives a straight answer. And I think he actually hates The Bubblegum Reaper now.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I wrote him many letters when I was a teenager, until he finally met with the sixteen-year-old me.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, I’m not going to spoil it for you. You’ve got to meet him yourself. It’s definitely an experience. One that I’m pretty sure I can arrange for you. That is—if you’re game.”
4
A Hymn to the Noble Art of Quitting
I was most definitely game.
Mr. Graves made the arrangements, and I soon found myself sitting down across from Nigel Booker, the author of my new favorite book. The House is the local coffee place, and it’s only about six blocks from my actual domicile. You’ll find mostly older people in there, which doesn’t bother me one bit, because I’m not all that fond of my generation, truth be told.
“Ms. O’Hare?” he said when he arrived. When I nodded, he extended his hand. I shook it, and he said, “Call me Booker. I’m not a mister type.” He was older than Mr. Graves by a few decades. Tufts of white hair sprouted from his gigantic ears. Plaid pants that were too short at the bottom and too baggy around the waist. His oversize cable-knit wool sweater was worn and a bit dirty. And he had hair slicked back on the sides and poufed up at the top like Elvis—only gray. “You really want to buy this old man coffee?” he said, pointing his thumbs back at his face. “How did I get so lucky?”
I nodded, and then we ordered and I paid, and we sat down.
“So?” he said.
I took a deep breath and said, “The Bubblegum Reaper is my new personal manifesto. I didn’t know that there were other people like me, but there obviously are. And you get it, too. Which is why—”
“Okay,” he said, and then chuckled. “That’s enough of that.”
I couldn’t tell if he was just being modest, so I pressed on with my questions. “Why isn’t it in print anymore?”
“Probably because it isn’t very good,” he said, and then laughed. “I didn’t have any formal training as a fiction writer. I just had this story in my head and I had to get it out. It was like I had a fever one summer and the writing was the medicine. I couldn’t believe it got published, and I have no idea why I sent it to New York in the first place. Probably a double case of temporary insanity—me and the obscure publisher, which went out of business shortly after the book came out. Go figure. They only had time to do one moderate-sized paperback print run. Thank God.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, so I stuck to the questions I had prepared ahead of time. “Is it true that you buy all the used copies off the Internet and burn them?”
He laughed and said, “I don’t even have an Internet in my home.”
The way he said “an Internet” made me believe he was telling the truth. You can always tell when an old person has no idea what you are talking about, because they mess up the wording almost as if they’re trying to defeat the thing you are discussing by refusing to name it correctly. I call this technique senior-citizen word voodoo.
I went to my third question, saying, “What happens to Wrigley after he gets out of the creek?”
“Who says he ever gets out?”
“So he drowns?”
“We can’t know for sure.”
“Why?”
“The story ends.”
“But you could write more.”
“No, I can’t. There’s no more to write.”
“Why?”
“Just the way it is. The story ends where it ends.”
“I don’t understand.”
“See that nice woman who served us our coffee?”
I looked back over my shoulder at the tall cashier with the brown ponytail and the permanent smile on her face, and I nodded.
“Her name is Ruth,” Booker said. “Ever see her before?”
Kids my age never came into this coffee shop, so I said, “No.”
“Maybe you won’t ever see her again.”
“So?”
“You only got to see five minutes of Ruth’s story. And that’s just the way it is. But Ruth, well, she goes on now whether you’re looking or not. She does all sorts of things that some people see and some don’t. But your version of Ruth’s story will be the five minutes you spent buying coffee from her. That’s just the way it is.”
“All right,” I said. “But what does that have to do with The Bubblegum Reaper? Ruth is real. Wrigley’s a fictional character.”
“There are no such things as fictional characters.”
“What?”
He sipped his coffee, smirked, and said, “I wrote that book a long time ago. Before you were even born. It’s hard to remember what I was thinking back then. I can hardly remember what I was thinking this morning. You seem like an intelligent young person. You don’t need me to explain anything to you.”