You Don't Know About Me

BOOK: You Don't Know About Me
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Also by Brian Meehl

Out of Patience
Suck It Up

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2011 by Brian Meehl

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meehl, Brian.
You don't know about me / Brian Meehl.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Billy has spent his almost-sixteen years with four cardinal points—Mother, Christ, Bible, and home-school—but when he sets off on a wild road trip to find the father he thought was dead, he learns much about himself and life.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89715-3

[1. Christian life—Fiction.
2. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Mothers and sons—Fiction.
4. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 5. Automobile travel—Fiction. 6. Gays—Fiction.]
I. Title. II. Title: You do not know about me.
PZ7.M512817You 2011

[Fic]—dc22
2010017101

Random House Children's Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

v3.1

Contents
2 - Adventures of Billy Allbright
  
4 - My Raft
  
7 - Hunter
  
8 - Packin'
  
9 - Busted

To the Reader

There is a book that has been closed to the world since 1884. In the margins of the book, Mark Twain mapped out the sequel to his masterpiece,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. It was a story he could not tell in his lifetime. The following story was inspired by that long-lost book, and Twain's incredible notes.

Note to the Lord

T.L.
,

You're totally-knowing; got it. You know what I'm going to write before my pen hits paper. You know what rattles in my head and stirs in my heart before I have a clue. No surprise there, I'm the last to know what I think or feel. So why send You a note when it's a copy of a t-mail (thought-mail) You already got? Because, on the wonky chance You've gone
less
knowing these days—and who could blame You?—or that You now use angels to screen Your t-mail, I wanted to be sure You got this.

Here's the must-know. I'm not writing my sketchy, blasphemous story to piss You off so You can tap the smite stick and slap me with boils, leprosy, head-to-toe pimples, or whatever You're smiting people with these days. I'm telling the story of what happened last summer for two reasons:

  1. I promised someone I would (You know who).
  2. And I want to see if I can write (You know why).

Wow, soon as I wrote that
—bam!—
whacked with brain lock. Maybe it was You crashing my cranium for having vainglorious thoughts like I can write. Whatever, while I was staring at the cement birdbath in the backyard, hearing nada because it's so hot the birds are in the trees taking shade baths, the silence of Your creation made me remember the other thing I wanted You to know.

As this pen lays down the trail of my adventure, I don't expect Your help or blessing. I mean, it's not Your kind of story. There's no prophets or heroes in it like in the Bible. There's no one You can be proud of. Actually, there's people in it that make me think Your smite stick has been jammed lately. It's about regular people. Your people. And me. Whether I'm “regular” I don't have a clue. Still sorting that one out.

I want to finish with a prayer.

  • T.L., any time you want to God-up and hit me with some of Your zigzag loving-kindness, feel free. I always appreciate it.
  • And please let Your only begotten Son help me Son-up and walk in His Way.
  • Amen.

Your big fan, then-now-forevermore,
Billy

1
The Facts of Me

At the beginning of last summer I had a grip on the facts of me.

  • Born Charles William Allbright
  • August 29, 1994
  • Little Rock, Arkansas
  • Dream: to be a champion mountain biker

I didn't stay in Little Rock long. I didn't stay anywhere long. In my almost sixteen years of life, me and Mom had moved sixteen times. Some kids get their height penciled on doorframes as they get taller. My height got marked on the old U-Haul trailer that followed us everywhere. On my eleventh birthday I shrank an inch. Then we figured out that the U-Haul tires had been pumped up. Had a laugh over that one.

I never liked moving. I was always the NIT: the Newbie In Town. Whenever I made a friend, I knew he'd never be a best buddy. Best buds are for life. We moved too much to have anything for life. Except the F-word: “faith.”

Mom gave me the same pep talk whenever we moved. “Billy, God blessed you with more than the cornerstones
of a house. He's given you a compass with four cardinal points.” My cardinal points weren't north, south, east, west. They were Mother, Christ, Bible, homeschool. Mom said as long as I followed those points I'd never be lost. I'd walk in His Way. I'd Son-up.

When we hit a new town, the first thing we did was church-shop. It was Mom's version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” This church was too sinful. This church wasn't Spirit-filled enough. This church was juuust righteous. So we'd join it. We'd be dialed into it for a while, but sooner or later she'd find something wonky and wicked about our church. One time she stood up during Sunday service and shouted scripture:
“I have hated the congregation of evildoers and will not sit with the wicked!”
As she pulled me out of there I asked her what made them “evildoers.” She told me I was too young to understand.

Last July, a month before turning sixteen, I totally got why we left the Assembly of Assemblies Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After we joined Assembly of Assemblies, the pastor let a company put a cell tower in the steeple. Mom had no problem with the company paying the church big bucks to have a comm tower in their steeple. But hellfire hit the fan when she found out that some of the stuff zapping through the tower was pornography. I couldn't fault her on that one. When you're in church launching prayers to heaven, you don't want them scummed by a layer of triple-X fornication. Mom calls it the “pornosphere.” That's one of the cool things about being homeschooled. You learn things go-to-school kids don't. I learned about the stratosphere, the troposphere, and the pornosphere.

BOOK: You Don't Know About Me
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