Nowhere Special by Matt Wallace

Author:Matt Wallace [Wallace, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

15

“That’s one of the things I like about cooking. You start fresh every day. It doesn’t matter what happened yesterday. The food you make today is totally new. You always get a second chance.”

—ELPIDIA

Stan had a new idea for a story. It was about a cook in the future, where everyone lived in floating buildings high in the sky because the ground had all been destroyed in a war, and chemicals got poured on it that made it so people couldn’t rebuild or survive down below anymore. The cook had a hover cart that she flew from window to window selling food to people, and for ingredients she had to make do with what she caught in the air, like different kinds of birds.

Stan didn’t know exactly what would happen in the story yet to make it exciting; he just had the character and what she did and the idea for the world. It was a start, though.

He wasn’t trying to impress Elpidia, not really, but he did hope she’d think it was cool. Stan wasn’t going to tell her he was basing the character on her. He just kind of hoped she’d notice on her own, if he finished the story, of course.

He was sitting on the floor, leaning against the foot of his bed that barely fit him anymore. He was writing out the first part of the story with a pen in one of his spiral notebooks, crossing out every third word or sentence when he decided he didn’t like it, but that was all part of writing.

It was hard to distract Stan when he was writing. He got in a zone in his head where he was inside whatever imaginary world he was writing about, and he tuned out everything about the real world when that happened. That had been his favorite thing to do before he met Charlie.

Still, as deep in that zone as he could get, sometimes the real world found a way to break through.

Stan heard his father yelling first. His loud voice carried through the whole of their little crumbling house when he was angry.

Stan’s mom yelled back at him. She didn’t sound scared, not yet anyway. She sounded just as mad as he did. Stan couldn’t make out the words from where he was sitting.

He tossed his notebook and pen behind him onto his bed and crawled across the floor of his bedroom. Stan pressed his ear against his closed door. He wasn’t supposed to come out when he heard them yelling. That was his mom’s rule, and she’d told it to him a million times. It didn’t matter if the yelling turned to screaming and the sounds of glass and furniture breaking—he was never supposed to come out when he was in his room and he heard them fighting.

“Where’s the money, then?” his father was demanding. “You’ve been workin’ every Saturday for months now. So where is it? You think I can’t count?”

Oh no, Stan thought.

It was about him training with Charlie.

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