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Overview
For fans of Crenshaw and When You Trap a Tiger comes the extraordinary tale of a headstrong girl and the magical dictionary she hopes will explain the complicated feelings she can't find the right words for—or erase them altogether.
Zia remembers the exact night the Shadoom arrived. One moment she was laughing with her best friends, and the next a dark room of shadows had crept into her chest. Zia has always loved words, but she can’t find a real one for the fear growing inside her. How can you defeat something if you don’t know its name?
After Zia’s mom announces that her grouchy Greek yiayia is moving into their tiny apartment, the Shadoom seems here to stay. Until Zia discovers an old family heirloom: the C. Scuro Dictionary, 13th Edition.
This is no ordinary dictionary. Hidden within its magical pages is a mysterious blue eraser shaped like an evil eye. When Zia starts to erase words that remind her of the Shadoom, they disappear one by one from the world around her. She finally has the confidence to befriend Alice, the new girl in sixth grade, and to perform at the Story Jamboree. But things quickly dissolve into chaos, as the words she erases turn out to be more vital than Zia knew.
In this raw, funny, and at times heartbreaking middle grade debut, Bree Barton reveals how—with the right kind of help—our darkest moments can nudge us toward the light.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780593350997 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Young Readers Group |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2022 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 1,071,873 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Lexile: | 620L (what's this?) |
| Age Range: | 8 - 12 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Every dictionary has secrets.
That’s to be expected, seeing as how a secret is made of words.
Dictionaries are heavy things, whole histories packed onto pages thin as spun silk. They are keepers of light and darkness, shimmer and shadow. Each word a patchwork of ideas stitched by many hands over many years. String enough words together, and you can hold all we have ever seen or felt or suffered.
Is it any wonder that sometimes, with a dash of magic and a dollop of mischief, a dictionary may choose to lessen its burden?
A vanished pronunciation?
A dropped definition?
A missing word?
I know of one such dictionary. It lies in a half-forgotten attic beneath a silver sheen of cobwebs, waiting for a girl who knows what it means to hold a secret.
I know of one such girl.
z |ˈzē| noun
1 the twenty-sixth and last letter of the English alphabet
2 denoting a third unknown or mysterious person or thing: The dictionary was a family heirloom, passed down fromX to Y to Z.
3 the nickname of Zia Angelis, the hero of our twisty tale
On days I’m not brave enough to face the cafeteria, I eat lunch in the girls’ restroom. It’s not as bad as it sounds. You just sit on the floor, angle your body away from the toilet, and have all the napkins you could ever want in a soft, white roll.
Today I’m nibbling my marshmallow crème sandwich in the far stall when I hear voices.
My stomach seizes. I chose this restroom because it gets minimal traffic. I donot want people to know I’m a hopeless weirdling, unable to enjoy my lunch in the cafeteria with normal humans who sit in chairs.
“Just come over after school,” says a familiar voice. “We can swim.”
“Sasha has the most gorgeous pool,” chimes in another.
Silently, I stand and peek through the crack, careful not to let my glasses clank noisily against the stall door. Who are they talking to? I only see two girls checking their reflections in the bathroom mirror: Sasha fixing her Afro puffy twists, and Jay squinting disapprovingly at her thick blond eyebrows. I know these faces well. They’re my best friends.
At least, they used to be.
Last year I sat with Sasha Davis and Jay Peterson every day at lunch. We played this game where we’d make up stories about which teachers were secretly in love, then see who could invent the most ridiculous ship names to crack each other up. I was good at it. Like, really good. Once I made Jay laugh so hard she snorted raspberry limeade up her nose.
Then the Shadoom came out of nowhere, and I wasn’t laughing anymore.
“You can spend the night,” Sasha says to the mystery person. “If your parents are cool with it.”
“I can’t,” says a third voice. “My mom’s a week past her due date. She needs me home.”
My heart squeezes three beats into two.
The mystery person is Alice.
Alice Phan is the new girl in sixth grade. I heard she went to private school before coming to Ryden. She wears cool bomber jackets with colorful sewn-on patches and three hair bands that never leave her wrist: gray, red, violet.
Last week in gym class, we were playing dodgeball when school villain Thom Strong chucked a ball at a girl’s face and made her nose bleed. “Look!” he shouted. “Weirdo bleeds red!” Alice marched right up to Thom and told him he was an asinine bully. Usually I’m crackerjack with words, but even I had to look up asinine on Mom’s laptop later. I thought it was an excellent choice.
“I just figured you’d want to hang out,” Sasha says, “since you’re new and all.”
Alice buffs the bathroom tile with the toe of her combat boot. “Sure. Thanks.”
“Maybe once your mom has the baby?” Jay offers.
“It’s whatever,” says Sasha. But I can tell she’s half-hurt, half-annoyed. “See you.”
Her red high-tops squeak as she walks out of the restroom, Jay’s jeweled sandals tripping along behind.
Alice leans over a sink and exhales so much air I realize she’s been holding her breath. She runs a hand through her chin-length black hair. It’s hard to tell through the crack, but in the mirror her sharp eyes look shinier than normal.
“I see you,” she says. “There under the stall.”
Now I’m not breathing. Alice Phan is talking to me. Sure, we’ve saidhey and hi. One time I tried an enthusiastic howdy! (mortifying). But a real, multi-word conversation? Not a chance.
This is one of those moments that make or break you, the kind you read about in books.
I take a big sip of courageous air.
“No you don’t,” I say.
“I really do.”
“It’s your imagination speaking. You’re having a conver-sation with yourself.”
“Are you going to open the door?”
It’s no use hiding. My hand shakes as I reach for the silver handle from the inside. She reaches from the outside at the same moment. The door swings fiercely open.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
She nods toward my lunch. “I didn’t know my imagination brown-bagged it.”
“Even imaginations must be fed.”
Alice cocks her head, the hint of a smile perched on her lips. “It’s Zia, right?”
I nod, stunned—and pleased—she knows my name. I’m good at making people laugh, but only when I know them already. I’m not the kind of person who stands out in a crowd. Medium height, medium build, medium-fair skin, medium- brown eyes. I used to say I’m a “happy medium” sort of person. These days, only half of that is true.
“You can call me Z,” I say, a little too quickly. “Like the last letter in the alphabet. I mean, obviously it’s the last letter! Number twenty-six. Actually I’m half Greek, and the Greek alphabet has twenty-fourletters . . .” I need to stop talking.
“Twenty-four seems reasonable,” she says. “I’m Vietnamese, and our alphabet has twenty-nine letters, but six different tones. Mind if I sit with you, Z?”
“It’s a bathroom.”
“Yes, I gathered that.” Alice gestures toward the cafeteria. “I don’t think I have the strength to go back into the wild today.”
I understand perfectly and usher her into the stall.
It’s a tight fit, but we make it work. For maybe a whole minute we sit in silence, two sphinxes guarding either side of the toilet. I offer her half my marshmallow sandwich, and she says no. I offer her my pink apple, and she says yes. There’s a yellow bruise on the skin, but she eats carefully around it, then tips open the silver box for tampons and drops the core inside.
“You must think I’m weird,” I say, right as she says, “This is cool.”
She scrunches her nose. “What’s wrong with weird? I’d rather be a weirdling than boring.”
I feel a goopy gush of delight. Weirdling is my word, and somehow Alice knows it.
Shyly, I take off my glasses and use my sleeve to polish the rims. When the dark rims are shiny, it makes the tiny yellow suns pop.
Alice sighs and rests the back of her head against the stall door.
“Tell me something you want, Zia. And not, like, suede boots or a mocha cappuccino. If you were granted one wish, what would it be?”
My mind scrolls through the things I should say. From the big—ending world hunger—all the way down to trading in my Grizzy brown hair. That’s a mix ofGreek and frizzy, two things you never want your hair to be.
But I don’t say hair or hunger. What I say is, “To get rid of the Shadoom.”
A sudden gust of air shivers up my spine, tickling the tiny follicles at the back of my neck. Maybe it’s the bathroom vent. Or maybe it’s the fact that Alice is a stranger, and I’ve never said that word out loud to anyone. Not to Jay. Not to Sasha. Not even to Mom.
The Shadoom is what I call the room of shadows inside me. I couldn’t find a real word to describe it, so I had to make one up. That’s not quite what the Shadoomis, but it’s how it feels. No windows, no sunlight, no doors—just a dark hole in the scoop of my chest. It’s impossible to explain and confusing to think about. How can an empty room be so full of fear and hurt and sadness? And if there’s no light, what’s casting all the shadows?
“The Shadoom,” Alice echoes, thoughtful. When I realize she’s not going to ask me to define my made-up word, I want to hug her. But I don’t.
She snaps the three elastic hair bands on her wrist, then waves her hand around the stall.
“This place is cool because it’s a secret. A secret suits you. Though you have to admit, it does kind of smell like—”
“Marshmallows,” I finish. “Definitely marshmallows.”
She gives me the side-eye, and we laugh at the exact same time.
yiayia |ˈyä-yä| noun
1 the Greek word for grandmother, the mother of one’s mother
2 a term of endearment for a cantankerous old lady with white hair and an Attifact full of secrets:The day Yiayia arrived was the day everything went wrong.
Mom is late picking me up again. I wait at our special spot—the far corner of the soccer field, so she doesn’t get stuck in what she calls the Slow Drip of Parents. In other words: the carpool line.
Mom waits tables at The Sweet Potato in the afternoons and teaches dance in the mornings. She says the classes are silly, more like aerobics, with wealthy ladies in pink yoga pants gushing about “living in abundance.” Mom used to be an amazing dancer—I’ve seen an old picture of her in her ruby leotard, and she looks like a shiny red streamer—but she says you can’t do something for fun once you’ve started doing it for money.
I try not to get annoyed when her lunch shift at The Sweet Potato runs late. Mom gave up her dinner shifts so she could be home after dark, even though the tips were better. The Shadoom is always worse at night.
I’m on the lookout for our car, the crumbling old station wagon we call the Brownie. So when the U-Haul truck pulls up at the corner, I assume it’s some other parent, a fellow fugitive of the Slow Drip.
Then the window rolls down.
“Hey, Z!” Mom calls. “Check out our fancy new wheels!”
I blink. Then blink again.
“Do you like it?” she says. “I-Haul, You-Haul, we all haul for U-Haul!”
Mom is trying to sound chipper, but her forehead creases the way it does when she’s stressed. Her thick black hair is swept up into a ponytail with little wispies falling around her face. Mom is proof that notall Greek hair is out of control, as long as it’s wavy. Give me Gravy over Grizzy any day.
“Why are you in a U-Haul?” I say. “Are we moving?”
“No, no, no. We’re staying put. But your yiayia . . .” She trails off.
Yiayia is my grumpy Greek grandmother. She’s like a piece of ancient pita bread: crusty, brittle, and not very sweet.
“Is this about the tests?” Last week Mom told me the doctors have been running a bunch of tests on Yiayia, and she’s not exactly getting As.
“Yes. Sort of.” Mom sighs. “Climb in, Sunshine Girl. I’ll explain everything.”
I swing myself up into the U-Haul, readjusting my glasses as I slide over the scratchy seat.
Mom has called me the Sunshine Girl for as long as I can remember. “Even when we’re apart,” she says, “you are the sunbeam in my life.” When I was little, that was true. Poke me with a pin, and sunbeams would leak onto my sock.
But when the Shadoom came, it’s like someone flipped a switch inside me and everything went from light to dark. Mom knows something is wrong, she just doesn’t know howbig a something. Partly it’s that I haven’t found the right words. Partly it’s that I’m afraid to tell her. These days Mom is always stressed or tired, or stressedand tired. Her back and feet hurt from working all the time. If I tell her about the room of shadows, I can’t be her Sunshine Girl, and right now Mom needs sunshine more than ever.
So I don’t tell her what I said to Alice in the girls’ restroom. I slap on a smile and crank up the sun.
“I’m just going to come right out and say it,” Mom says. “Yiayia is moving in with us.”
I choke on my tongue.
“What? Why?”
“Just for a little while,” she says, in a way that makes me think it’ll probably be forever.
“What about her house?”
“The doctors say it isn’t safe for her to be there alone anymore. The stairs alone are an accident waiting to happen. So the house will stay empty for a while, until we figure out what we want to do.”
“Where’s she going to sleep?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. Mom and I live in a 1-1 apartment (one bedroom, one bath) because the 2-2s were too pricey. I actually don’t mind sharing a bedroom. It helps me sleep knowing Mom is nearby.
“She’ll take my bed,” Mom says, just like I knew she would. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
Dread washes over me. Losing Mom as a roommate is the actual worst.
“My sweet Sunshine Girl.” She reaches across the seat and squeezes my knee. “How about a Lightning Bug?”
Mom and I have a secret code word, like in a spy movie. When I say Lightning Bug, she knows to tell me funny stories from the restaurant or do an impersonation of the wealthy ladies in pink yoga pants or hug me and tell me she loves me.
I’d never ask for a Bug around kids my age. Might as well eat some crayons and go back to preschool. But at home, when it’s just Mom and me and the Shadoom tapping at my chest?
“Yes, please.”
“So today at The Sweet Potato,” she says, “I dropped a whole beverage tray on a sweet elderly couple. Two coffees and two ice waters. Hotand cold. Even lost the ramekin of mustard! It flipped over and dropped right into the hem of this gentleman’s nice khaki pants.Ploop!”
I laugh. Mom is always dropping something on someone or uncorking a bottle of wine with dramatic flair and spritzing people. The customers love her anyway. Though she worries that her managers lose patience with her every time they have to give a customer a free bottle of wine.
A thought startles me. Does Mom lose patience with me every time she has to give me a Lightning Bug? And another thing: if you lose enough patience, do you stop being able to find it?
My laughter lodges in my throat like a tiny green grape.
“I wish I knew what was scaring you, Z,” she says softly, more to herself than to me.
I wish I knew, too. I want so much to tell Mom about the Shadoom, to find a better word for what’s happening inside me, one that will make her understand. I’ve always loved naming things. Like the time Jay got a potbelly pig for her tenth birthday, and I suggested she name him Hamlet. Sasha and I thought it was hilarious.
Jay did not.
Names help make something ours. We name pets when they become members of the family. We name feelings because it helps us own them. And if the name you want doesn’t exist? Make it up. Stitch two real words together or pluck a new one out of thin air. I invent words all the time. It’s kind of my superpower.
Thanks to the Shadoom, my superpower seems to be offline.
“It’ll all be okay, Sunshine Girl,” Mom says, steering the U-Haul into our apartment parking lot. “I love you to the stars and back.”
I smile, because I want so much to be the Sunshine Girl for Mom. But sometimes the Shadoom feels as big as the world, if not the universe. Like it might swallow me whole.
What if the Shadoom is a giant black hole that gobbles up Mom’s love star by star? What if I’m too big of a burden? Mom is dealing with enough already—working two jobs, paying the bills, and now taking care of Yiayia. She doesn’t need a broken kid, too.
If I fix myself, Mom won’t have to. I’ve looked and looked for a real word—adictionary word—to help me understand what’s happening inside me. I keep thinking that if I name it, I can claim it, and if I claim it, I can figure out how to make it leave.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter if I have the right word to describe it. I don’t know the true name of the Shadoom.
But the Shadoom knows mine.
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