Just Like That Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Summer 1968

  One

  Two

  Fall Semester, September–December 1968: Obstacles

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Spring Semester, January–June 1969: Resolutions

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Summer 1969

  Forty

  About the Author

  Buy the Book

  Read More from Gary D. Schmidt

  Find Your Story

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Clarion Books

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  New York, New York 10016

  Copyright © 2021 by Gary D. Schmidt

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  hmhbooks.com

  Cover illustration © 2021 by James Lancett

  Cover design by Sharismar Rodriguez and Kaitlin Yang

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-08477-3

  eISBN 978-0-544-08455-1

  v1.1220

  For David and Taylor,

  with a father’s love

  Summer 1968

  One

  In June—the June before Meryl Lee Kowalski’s eighth-grade year—she watched the evening news reports from the Vietnam War. Twenty-three American soldiers in a CH-46A Sea Knight had helicoptered in to evacuate Marines not far from Khe Sanh, South Vietnam. Their helicopter was hit by enemy fire and went down. Half the men were killed.

  No one who loved those Marines had a chance to say goodbye.

  Meryl Lee watched the story with her hands up to her face.

  In July, Meryl Lee watched the evening news report about the American Marines on Hill 689, who killed three hundred and fifty North Vietnamese soldiers. They weren’t going to leave the hill, they said, until every North Vietnamese soldier was dead.

  They didn’t.

  And no one who loved those soldiers had a chance to say goodbye.

  Meryl Lee watched that story, crying.

  Then in August, Meryl Lee’s best friend—her very best friend who had once handed her a rose, who had danced with her at Danny Hupfer’s bar mitzvah, who had listened with her to the sound of a brand-new bottle of Coke when you pry the lid off and it starts to fizz—her very best friend was sitting in the back of his father’s Mustang on the way to a movie, a stupid movie, a stupid stupid movie, when they were rear-ended and Holling Hoodhood’s head snapped back.

  Just like that.

  Meryl Lee did not make it to Syosset Hospital in time to say goodbye.

  For Meryl Lee Kowalski, everything in the world, absolutely everything in the world, became a Blank.

  The service was at Saint Andrew Presbyterian Church. It was packed. Men in black suits, women in dark dresses. Everyone from Camillo Junior High—the principal, Mrs. Sidman; Holling’s teachers; his friends Danny Hupfer and Mai Thi. Cross-country runners from Bethpage and Farmingdale and Westbury and Wantagh, wearing their uniform shirts. Mr. Goldman from Goldman’s Best Bakery, sitting in the back, bawling. Mercutio Baker holding a new white perfect baseball he had wanted to throw with the kid, and Lieutenant Tybalt Baker in his dress uniform. The priest from Saint Adelbert’s. The rabbi from Temple Beth-El.

  His seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Baker, spoke the eulogy, holding a single chrysanthemum. She did fine until she got to the end: “Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun,” she said, “Nor the furious winter’s rages; / Thou thy worldly task hast done, / Home art gone and . . .” She could not finish. She tried, but she could not finish. She went back down to her seat. As she walked past the casket, she laid the chrysanthemum oh so gently upon it.

  So the pallbearers came to take Holling, and his father stood—they all stood—and when Holling passed him, his father put his hands on the casket and began to howl. Horrible, horrible hollow howls that could not be stopped, because there was no comfort.

  The pallbearers stood still. They waited a long time.

  Even through the Blank, Meryl Lee heard the howls.

  She thought she would hear them the rest of her life.

  She thought they would echo in the place where her heart had been, forever.

  She did not go to the graveside. She could not go to bear those last words, to bear that thud of earth, to see Holling . . .

  She could not go.

  Her parents drove her home.

  In the next weeks, Danny Hupfer and Mai Thi came over, and Mrs. Baker, and some of the other teachers from Camillo Junior High, and even Mr. Goldman, but Meryl Lee did not leave the house much that whole month. Everything she saw was without Holling, and the howls echoed in her empty chest. She could not go onto his block, she could not pass that Woolworth’s and its lunch counter where they had had a Coke, she could not walk down Lee Avenue, and she could not could not could not go near Camillo Junior High. She could not.

  Because if she did, then the Blank would change. It would become a hole, a dizzying white hole, and she would fall into it, and she would be the empty hole where the howling echoes rolled around, and she had already come close, very close, to falling in.

  So in September, her parents made phone calls to St. Elene’s Preparatory Academy for Girls. She would have a new start, her parents said. A whole new routine, her parents said. She would meet so many new friends. She would become so Accomplished. That’s what the headmistress had promised. Meryl Lee would become so Accomplished. And she had never before lived so close to the sea. The Maine ocean would be beautiful, they said.

  And Meryl Lee knew that Holling Hoodhood had never been to the coast of Maine. He had never been there. And nothing familiar would be in Maine. Not Lee Avenue. Not Camillo Junior High. Not Goldman’s Best Bakery. Not . . . anything. Maybe that was where she should go.

  Her mother packed her clothes for her.

  Her father packed some books for her.

  They bought her St. Elene’s regulation uniforms: six white shirts, three green and gold plaid skirts, two green and gold sweaters, and two green blazers with the gold St. Elene’s cross insignia. They packed them all carefully into her suitcase.

  Then on the day, they packed her into the car.

  On the ride up to St. Elene’s Preparatory Academy, it rained all across New York. And the whole way through Connecticut. And every mile of Massachusetts. New Hampshire and southern Maine were nothing but gray drizzle.

  They stopped at a hotel in Brunswick overnight, and it poured.


  The next morning, Meryl Lee leaned her head against the hotel window and stared at the blurred world outside.

  None of them spoke.

  Two

  1967–68

  No one on the peninsula knew how long Matt Coffin had been around. A year? How old was he? Hard to tell. Thirteen, fourteen? He was that kid who lived down by the shore, that kid who never went to school, that kid who skipped rocks into the waves at sunset, that kid who was always by himself.

  That kid who never let anyone get near him.

  He did live by the shore, in an old lobster shack left behind by Captain Cobb after he died. When folks saw smoke meandering out of its stone chimney, they figured some grizzled tramp had moved in, even though the place was falling down from rot and gravity. But fall came and went, and winter came and went, and the old shack still stood, and Matt Coffin lived like a seal near the ocean: he’d be standing by the water, and then he’d slip away and be gone.

  The town did try twice to force Matt Coffin into Harpswell Junior High, but both times he quit after a few days, and neither his teachers nor the principal were inclined to bring him back. So he spent his days clamming, or fishing, or tending the rows of beans he planted in the spring behind Captain Cobb’s shack, bush beans in rows straight enough and pole beans on posts sturdy enough that folks said he’d do as a gardener if he put his mind to it.

  Things might have gone on this way for a very long time, except one early spring evening, when the orange sun was low and the shadows of the pines long, Mrs. Nora MacKnockater came down the steep ridge to the shore beneath her house and settled her substantial rump on a smooth rock large enough to hold it. She watched a flat stone skip in the trough between the low waves—the tide was heading out—turned, and saw Matt Coffin brush back his hair, pull his arm to toss the next stone, see her, and stop.

  “Five skips,” she said, “is a creditable throw.”

  Matt Coffin jerked out the T-shirt looped around his belt and turned toward the pines.

  “Is that the best you can do?” said Mrs. MacKnockater.

  He turned back to her, pulling the shirt over his head.

  “Five?” she said.

  His head popped out. “Seventeen,” he said.

  Mrs. MacKnockater looked around her, rose, maneuvered about the rock, stooped, and picked up a stone. She steered her large self down toward the water as Matt Coffin stepped away—but he still watched.

  Mrs. MacKnockater pulled her arm back and threw.

  She turned to Matt Coffin. “Eight,” she said.

  “Seven,” he said.

  “You miscounted,” she said.

  “It doesn’t count when the last one goes into the wave.”

  “That is hardly charitable arithmetic,” said Mrs. MacKnockater.

  Matt Coffin came down to the shore beside her, stooped, and picked up two stones. He handed one to her. Until it got too dark to count, they threw stones into the water and watched them skip over the outgoing tide, away into the lowering dark orange.

  Mrs. MacKnockater was back at the next sunset.

  So was Matt Coffin.

  “Eleven,” he said.

  “What happened to the rule about the last skip going into the wave?” she said.

  “I didn’t count that one.”

  “You most certainly did,” said Mrs. MacKnockater, and she threw her stone.

  “One,” Matt Coffin said, “counting the skip into the wave. How’s that for charitable arithmetic?”

  “Do you like franks and beans?” said Mrs. MacKnockater.

  He looked at her. In the low light, she couldn’t quite tell what he was thinking—and she was good at telling what people were thinking.

  “Sometimes,” he said.

  “It would only take a moment to warm them up,” she said.

  Matt Coffin threw his last stone into the trough.

  “Three,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  It took more than a moment to warm up the franks and beans, and to set out the brown bread with raisins, and to lay a line of cinnamon over the applesauce, and to put out the dish of dill pickles, and to pour the ice cold milk, and to light the two tall candles that threw their lovely glow up to the ceiling beams.

  Matt Coffin ate everything on the table, stopping only once, then twice, to look at the rows of bookshelves that lined the walls of the parlor beyond.

  “Are those reading books?” he said.

  Mrs. MacKnockater nodded and moved the plate of brown bread closer to him. She scooted the plate of butter beside it.

  “You read all those?”

  “Every one,” she said. “Do you have a favorite writer?”

  He took another slice of brown bread, dipped it into the applesauce, and ate it.

  It rained the next day, and Mrs. MacKnockater did not go down to the shore. But at suppertime, when she could hear the waves at low tide, she stepped out onto the porch and Matt Coffin was standing by the rhododendrons, one hand in his pocket, one hand holding a half-full pillowcase over his shoulder, his hat drawn low and dripping.

  “Eighteen,” he said.

  “Meatloaf,” she said, and he came inside.

  “You can leave your bag in the parlor,” she said.

  He sat down, laid the pillowcase on the floor, and kicked it well underneath the sofa with his heel. He could already smell the meatloaf.

  “We’re ready,” Mrs. MacKnockater called from the kitchen.

  He picked out as many onions as he could, then ate almost the whole meatloaf by himself, stopping only to spread tomato ketchup over it. Mrs. MacKnockater watched him the whole time.

  Later, after two apple dumplings, he walked back into the parlor and looked at the rows of books.

  Mrs. MacKnockater followed. She drew out Treasure Island and showed it to him.

  “What’s it about?” he said.

  “A boy named Jim,” she said. “The sea. A search for buried treasure. Pirates. Captain Flint and Black Dog and Billy Bones and Long John Silver.”

  He took the book and flipped through it. “The pictures look pretty good,” he said. He handed the book back to her.

  “You know, Matthew, I’ve always enjoyed reading aloud. I used to do it when I was a teacher, but now I’ve no one to read to. Would you mind terribly if I read the opening chapter to you?”

  Matt shrugged. “If you want to,” he said.

  Later, when Dr. Livesey had stared down the Captain and Mrs. MacKnockater had finished the first chapter, Matt said, “Why do you talk so funny?”

  “Funny?” said Mrs. MacKnockater.

  “Yeah, funny.”

  “I grew up in Edinburgh,” said Mrs. MacKnockater. “A long, long way from here, across the wide ocean.”

  And Matt suddenly grew quiet, very quiet, and he looked at her, then he looked out the window into the dark, and he wondered if that would be far enough.

  On sunny days after that, Mrs. MacKnockater went down to the shore and skipped stones with Matt. And when they both got hungry—that is, when Mrs. MacKnockater got hungry, since Matt was always hungry—they climbed the shore ridge to her home and ate supper, and afterward Mrs. MacKnockater read Treasure Island. On rainy days, Matt just came to her house when it was suppertime.

  When he did not come, Mrs. MacKnockater understood that he was out on the water. At dusk on those days, she stood on her porch and held up her binoculars to watch the fishing boats and the lobster boats come in, and Matt would be standing on the deck of one, waving at her, and she would be surprised at the way her heart filled. Once she asked him about school.

  “I thought you weren’t a teacher anymore,” he said.

  “No teacher ever really stops being a teacher. I’m the headmistress at St. Elene’s Preparatory Academy for Girls.”

  “What does a headmistress do?”

  “I ensure that the school is run properly.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “With guile. Matthew, you should be in sch
ool.”

  “I tried that. Twice. I’m not going again.”

  “Whatever happened before, it is not inevitable that—”

  “Are we going to read tonight?”

  “Matthew . . .”

  “Are we?”

  So they ate supper together that night—slabs of white scrod with lots of tartar sauce—and then they read, and they read through the heat of July, and through the firefly nights of August, and into the first cool days of September when the maples looked as if they had tipped the edges of their leaves in pirate blood. They finished Treasure Island a few nights before St. Elene’s Preparatory Academy for Girls would open its doors to the new fall term, with the voice of Captain Flint squawking in the parlor: “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

  Mrs. MacKnockater looked down at the book. “Mr. Stevenson certainly knows how to tell an adventure,” she said.

  Matt was quiet, and then he said, “It’s like Long John Silver is a jerk, but it’s also like he’s Jim’s father. Sort of.”

  Mrs. MacKnockater looked at him. “I suppose that’s true, but Jim is certainly glad to be rid of him.”

  Matt reached over and closed the book in her hands. “I guess,” he said. “But still, he hopes he’s okay at the end.”

  “Perhaps,” Mrs. MacKnockater said quietly. Then, “Matthew, do you know where your father is?”

  Something shattered in the room like old glass. Matt Coffin looked at her as if betrayed. He stood up.

  “I don’t mean to pry, Matthew.”

  The screen door slapped behind him as he left the house.

  “Matthew,” she called.

  He did not come the next evening. Mrs. MacKnockater wrapped the meatloaf without onions in tinfoil and put it away in the refrigerator.

  Three days later, when Mrs. MacKnockater went to preside over the opening ceremony of St. Elene’s Preparatory Academy for Girls, the missing Matthew Coffin was all she could think about.

  Fall Semester

  September–December 1968

  Obstacles

  Three

  When Meryl Lee and her parents drove onto the grounds of St. Elene’s Preparatory Academy that first morning, girls in regulation green and gold school uniforms were holding dark umbrellas and pointing the way to the dormitories. They smiled in the rain as if they were the happiest girls in the world, and they waved as if Meryl Lee were a long-lost friend finally come home.