Sparks Read online

  To Mandy and Christi

  Woodbury, Minnesota

  Copyright Information

  Sparks: The Epic, Completely True Blue, (Almost) Holy Quest of Debbie © 2011 by S. J. Adams.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Flux, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover models used for illustrative purposes only and may not endorse or represent the book’s subject.

  First e-book edition © 2011

  E-book ISBN: 9780738730028

  Book design by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Lisa Novak

  Cover art © Glenn Gustafson

  Flux is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

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  Flux

  Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

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  Woodbury, MN 55125

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Ronni, of course, and to Jennifer Laughran, to Brian Farrey, and to everyone at Flux.

  Also, thanks to Andrew Karre, Jessi Dunlap, Jonathan Spring, Amanda Walters, Hector Reyes, Willie Williams, Nadia Cornier, Jen Hathy, Jeff Jeske, Deborah Sacks, Amy Vincent, Julie Halpern, James Klise, James Kennedy, my family, the Smart Aleck staff, and the cast and crew of Full House.

  I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that my “Ragged Glory: Debbie Does Detention” playlist has been the heart and soul of this project from the beginning. So thanks to The Beach Boys, Kimya Dawson, The Hold Steady, Neko Case, The Mountain Goats, Pearl Jam, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Long Blondes, The Moldy Peaches, Counting Crows, Bob Dylan, The Ike Reilly Assassination, Miracle Legion, Polaris, Vixy and Tony, Seanan McGuire, Ben Folds, Regina Spektor, and Tom Waits.

  One

  My dad’s a regular guy, and my mom’s a total kook, so I guess I had a fifty percent chance of coming out normal. Leave it to me to screw it up.

  When I was a kid, Mom was always saying things like, “You know, Debbie, a lot of girls find out they have psychic abilities when they hit puberty. Maybe you’ll be one of them!” That was her idea of encouraging me to dream big. I think she was very disappointed when I started shaving my legs and didn’t suddenly remember that I was a plowman in a former life or something.

  I assume that it was all her fault when Dad moved to Minneapolis to live with another woman when I was twelve. I didn’t exactly blame him. It was probably either that or get dragged to another “couples retreat” where he’d have to dance around naked with middle-aged strangers and eat figs.

  And I’m one hundred percent certain that it’s her fault that I always feel like people can read my mind. I work really, really hard not to think about sex or having to pee or anything embarrassing like that when I’m in class, because I just can’t shake the feeling that someone in there—maybe everyone—will be able to tell what I’m thinking about just by looking at me. I know that they can’t, really, but I always feel like they can.

  When I’m in public and something personal comes into my head, I count to twenty-five over and over and just focus on the numbers, hoping that even if it doesn’t get anything all the way out of my head, maybe I can at least jam the signal for any mind readers who happen to be nearby.

  And that’s what I was doing on the cloudy Friday morning before my junior year spring break as I rode to school in Lisa Ashby’s car.

  “When he holds my hand, he does this thing where he rubs one of his fingers between my thumb and index finger,” Lisa said. “Like, back and forth, back and forth. Its a-mazing.”

  1, 2, 3, 4 …

  Lisa, my best friend of all time, was driving me to school and talking about her new boyfriend, Norman Hastings, who’s probably the most boring human being on the planet. I didn’t want her reading my mind and knowing that I thought she was making a huge mistake.

  “My next project is going to be to get him to stop dressing like he’s going fishing for trout,” she said.

  “Fishing for trout?”

  “Yeah. When he’s not in school, he dresses like he fell out of an Eddie Bauer catalog or something. If you saw him on the street, you’d say, ‘Now, there goes a guy who’s going fishing for trout!’ ”

  I chuckled in spite of myself. Lisa was the funniest person I’d ever known. No matter how upset I was, she could always make me laugh.

  To me, Norman looked like … well, he just looked like a Norman. He looked like he had taken a picture of a doctor from an old pamphlet about venereal disease to the barber and said, “Make me look like this!” And he was one of about six people in school who took the option of wearing a shirt and tie rather than the normal uniform (a plain shirt in blue or white, the school colors, with iron-on lettering optional if you insist on expressing yourself).

  “Oh, and hey,” Lisa said. “I probably can’t give you a ride home today. I’ve got some stuff going on with

  Jennifer Pratt.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I can walk. It probably won’t start raining until late.”

  Lisa had turned the radio off right after they’d said that Omaha was expecting the biggest storm in five years, and we always get Nebraska’s weather here in central Iowa a few hours later. There was still some blue sky above us, but dark clouds were already rolling in from the west.

  “And I won’t be able to watch TV tonight, obviously,” Lisa went on.

  “No problem,” I said, as if it didn’t matter.

  But it did. It mattered a lot.

  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 …

  It’s amazing how much it hurts to see your best friend hooking up with a loser.

  And Lisa wasn’t just my best friend, she was also pretty much my only friend. She and I had spent every Friday night since sixth grade in her bedroom watching cheesy old family sitcoms—the kind where every episode ends with someone getting a lecture with soft music in the background, followed by everyone hugging. Full House, mostly. We’d been through that whole series four times. It was our thing.

  Honestly, I’d have preferred to be watching something more “adult,” but Lisa and her family were really religious. They thought shows where people swear or have premarital sex were trashy, and I just went with the flow. I even went to ACTs (Active Christian Teens) with her, despite the fact that I was really sort of an atheist. Keeping my thoughts to myself at those meetings was stressful enough to give me migraines.

  And now I’d been dumped. Ca
st aside. Left behind. My services as a friend were no longer needed. I’d been blown off for the last boy on the planet to be named

  Norman.

  NORMAN!

  As soon as we got out of the car, Norman and a couple of his friends from the FCA (Fellowship of Christian Athletes) started walking toward us.

  “Here he comes,” she almost sang.

  She skipped away from me (yes, skipped) over to Norman and his boring FCA friends. I half expected her to break into song or something.

  And here’s the thing: I don’t think anyone in Lisa’s family would be against it if she and Norman got engaged by the end of high school. Getting a ring as a graduation gift next year was a distinct possibility for her.

  Lisa was raised to believe that you’re supposed to fall in love at sixteen, marry your high school sweetheart when you’re nineteen or twenty, and be a mommy nine months later. I don’t think her parents ever heard of a marriage they didn’t think was a good idea (as long as it was between a man and a woman), and I think they were more disturbed by my parents’ divorce than I was. It’s almost like they had a marriage fetish. Probably a prayer fetish, too.

  As soon as I thought of that, I had to push the image of Lisa breathing heavier and heavier while Norman prayed over her out of my brain. Out, out, out! She was still just a couple of feet away from me—prime thought-reading range.

  I was going to need to find a new best friend. Fast.

  I raced through the parking lot and into school as fast as I could, then ducked into the first bathroom I came to. Angela Mackenzie, another girl from ACTs who sat with us at lunch, was doing her makeup in the mirror. Next to her was an overweight girl with short blond hair that she’d done a pretty bad job of dying red and the kind of pointy glasses waitresses in movies always wear.

  She nodded at me and I nodded back at her, then I turned to Angela. “Doing anything for spring break?” I asked.

  She put her lipstick back in her purse and dug out an eyebrow pencil.

  “Babysitting, mostly,” she said. “Picking up an overnight gig in Urbandale tonight.”

  “I’m staying in town, too,” I said. “Maybe we can hang out.”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ll give you a call.”

  I doubted that she actually would. She was nice, but she was also one of those people who’s friends with everyone in town, so she couldn’t possibly have had much time for me.

  Still, I knew that I needed to loosen up a little. Angela could help. She went to ACTs and all, but I knew she’d slept with a guy or two.

  She was wearing a T-shirt that said One Year, Three Months! The time left until graduation, I think.

  Cornersville Trace High School is the only school in the Des Moines metro area that has a uniform policy, as far as I know. The whole thing of ironing words onto uniforms is new; the reason they started making us wear uniforms in the first place had less to do with stifling free expression than stopping kids from having to worry about name-brand clothes, but when a bunch of kids complained that it did stifle free expression, the school board compromised. Now you could iron words onto your shirt in plain block letters, as long as the words weren’t obscene or about drugs or gangs.

  Lisa’s T-shirt that day read Get High on Love!

  The heavyset girl beside Angela was wearing one that said Tangled Up in Blue, whatever that meant.

  Mine was plain white.

  “Can you believe Lisa is actually going out with that Norman guy?” I asked.

  “Seriously,” said Angela. “She could do better.”

  “Hastings?” asked the other girl. “Barf-o-rama.”

  “I don’t know what Lisa even sees in him,” I said as I leaned against the wall. “I mean, she’s so funny, and he’s so boring!”

  “Security,” said Angela. “His dad owns ones of those car lots on Merle Hay Road. He’s totally loaded.”

  “That can’t be it,” I asked. “I mean, she’s, like … perfect. She’s cute, she’s smart, she’s funny. She’s the kind of person everyone wants to be.”

  “So?” asked Angela.

  “So, Norman is the kind of person everyone wants to punch.”

  “Oh, for sure,” Angela agreed. “He’s boring as hell, and he’s a major assho … ” She stopped herself mid-swear and said, “Jerk. Major jerk.”

  Lisa’s reputation as a goody-goody had rubbed off on me. And why shouldn’t it have? I’d practically willed it to.

  “You can say the A-word in front of me,” I said. “Lisa’s the one who’s weird about cursing. I’ve actually been thinking about staging an intervention to get her to just say ‘ass’ instead of ‘tushy.’ ”

  Angela chuckled. “Today, the A-word, tomorrow, the F-bomb!”

  “Heh,” said the other girl. “In a way, you and Norman are both building her up to a fuck.”

  Angela laughed. “Nice one, Emma.”

  It took me a second to get the joke. When I did, I turned my head and slumped into the wall. The cold, glossy paint was cold against my ear.

  “And she probably doesn’t even know it, if he is,” I said. “She probably thinks that only guys who take auto shop actually want to have premarital sex.”

  “No one’s that naïve,” said Angela.

  “She might be,” I said. “She watches a whole lot of Full House, you know.”

  Angela chuckled. “Are you guys going to that ACTs picnic on Tuesday?”

  “I don’t think I’m going to go to freaking ACTs at all anymore.”

  I hadn’t wanted to say “freaking,” but the right word just didn’t come out. Lisa and her family had sunk their claws too far into me.

  “Gonna join Fellowship of Christian Athletes instead?”

  “Hell no.”

  Angela seemed kind of amused at how upset I was. “What?” she asked. “You don’t like Christian bowling?”

  “Christian bowling?” asked Emma, the other girl. “What, do the pins rise again on the third frame?”

  Angela snickered. I probably would have laughed, too, if I didn’t feel like my guts were about to fall apart.

  Then Emma turned away from the mirror and looked right at me. “You okay?” she asked.

  “I’m just trying to figure out what the hell I’m going to do tonight. I’m so used to hanging out with Lisa on Fridays. And she’s, like, ditching me. It’s throwing my whole routine off.”

  “Creature of habit, huh?” said Angela.

  “Totally.”

  Emma smiled, which bugged me. “You feel lost? Alone?” she asked.

  I just shrugged. I’d seen Emma around, hanging out with this one guy, Tim Sanders, who I’d heard was gay, but I didn’t know her well enough to want her advice

  or anything.

  “I know something that might help,” she said.

  “If you say Jesus, I’ll punch you in the face,” I said.

  She laughed, and just as she did, the first bell rang. I ran off toward my first class before she could say anything.

  Lisa was lost in a world where a future with a guy named Norman who wore ties to high school was something to skip about. And I was left by myself. At sixteen, I was going to have to either face life as a total loner, tag along on Lisa and Norman’s dates, or just, like, restart my whole adolescence.

  I collapsed into my first-period desk, which was the most uncomfortable desk on the planet. The chair was attached to the desk and the cold metal of the legs rubbed against my knees no matter how I tried to

  position myself.

  While everyone else talked about their spring break plans (which made them too busy to bother with reading my mind, I hoped), I repeated to myself that I was my own person, not just half of Lisa-and-Debbie. That I didn’t need Lisa just to exist—I wasn’t just her wacky friend and s
idekick, like Kimmy Gibbler, D. J. Tanner’s weird friend on Full House.

  I repeated it, but I didn’t totally believe it.

  In an attempt to reassure myself, I made a list while I waited for class to start.

  Reasons I’m Not Like a Full House Character (especially Kimmy Gibbler)

  1.I sometimes say curse words you can’t say on family TV (at least in private).

  2.My feet don’t smell so bad they could set off a smoke alarm, like Kimmy’s.

  3.I’m failing science. (Had to cross this out after I remembered the episode where D. J. gets an F for her paper on photosynthesis.)

  4.I don’t go around hugging people. Much.

  5.I’ve never snuck out of school to get a rock star’s autograph, or secretly arranged to study with boys, or helped anyone sneak into a movie theater.

  6.I have never taken a trip to Vegas or Hawaii or Disney World.

  7.I have never come down with amnesia and needed clips from previous episodes to jar my memory.

  I crossed out numbers 5–7 because they were all ways the people on Full House had more exciting, daring lives than I did, which was just depressing.

  It was starting to look like the only difference between me and a wacky sidekick was that I wasn’t very wacky.

  So just before the bell rang, I wrote down The Big One. In really tiny letters. The one I’d never written down anywhere, not even in my diary. The one I certainly hadn’t said out loud or even thought about when anyone else was in the room with me.

  8.I’m reasonably sure that the reason Kimmy hung out with D. J. was NOT because she’d had a stupid, hopeless crush on her for years.

  So there, Gibbler. You can kiss my ass.

  Two

  I counted to twenty-five again and again and again as I folded that list into a tiny wad and put it in my backpack. I was too afraid to rip it up and put it in the trash, because if I did, I knew I’d spend weeks imagining that someone had gone through the trash and managed to put all the tiny pieces back together again.