Past Perfect, Present Tense Read online

  What If?

  A story isn’t what is. It’s what if? Fiction isn’t real life with the names changed. It’s an alternate reality to reflect the reader’s own world.

  But what is a short story not? It’s not a condensation of a novel, or an unfinished one. It’s not Cliffs Notes to anything. It has its own shape and profile. It’s not the New York skyline; it’s a single church spire. Its end is much nearer its beginning, and so it can be overlooked.

  The short story is much misunderstood. There are even aspiring writers who think they’ll start out writing short stories and work their way up to the big time: novels. It doesn’t work like that. A short story isn’t easier than a novel. It has so little space to make its mark that it requires the kind of self-mutilating editing most new writers aren’t capable of. It has less time to plead its case.

  I hadn’t meant to be a short story writer.

  BOOKS BY RICHARD PECK

  NOVELS FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  Don’t Look and It Won’t Hurt

  Dreamland Lake

  Through a Brief Darkness

  Representing Super Doll

  The Ghost Belonged to Me

  Are You in the House Alone?

  Ghosts I Have Been

  Father Figure

  Secrets of the Shopping Mall

  Close Enough to Touch

  The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp

  Remembering the Good Times

  Blossom Culp and the Sleep of Death

  Princess Ashley

  Those Summer Girls I Never Met

  Voices After Midnight

  Unfinished Portrait of Jessica

  Bel-Air Bambi and the Mall Rats

  The Last Safe Place on Earth

  Lost in Cyberspace

  The Great Interactive Dream Machine

  Strays Like Us

  A Long Way from Chicago

  A Year Down Yonder

  Fair Weather

  Invitations to the World

  The River Between Us

  Past Perfect, Present Tense

  The Teacher’s Funeral: A Comedy in Three Parts

  Here Lies the Librarian

  NOVELS FOR ADULTS

  Amanda/Miranda

  London Holiday

  New York Time

  This Family of Women

  PICTURE BOOK

  Monster Night at Grandma’s House

  NONFICTION

  Anonymously Yours

  Invitations to the World

  New and Collected Stories by

  Richard Peck

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, II Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Dial Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2004

  Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2006

  Copyright © Richard Peck, 2004

  All rights reserved

  “Priscilla and the Wimps” previously appeared in Sixteen, edited by Donald R. Gallo, Delacorte Press, 1984.

  “The Electric Summer” first appeared in Time Capsule, edited by Donald R. Gallo, Delacorte Press, 1999.

  “Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Night Above Ground” first appeared in Twelve Shots, edited by Harry Mazer, Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 1997.

  “The Special Powers of Blossom Culp” first appeared in Birthday Surprises, edited by Johanna Hurwitz, Morrow Junior Books/HarperCollins Children’s Books, 1995.

  “Girl at the Window” first appeared in Night Terrors, edited by Lois Duncan, Aladdin Paperbacks, Simon & Schuster, 1996.

  “The Most Important Night of Melanie’s Life” first appeared in From One Experience to Another, edited by M. Jerry Weiss and Helen S. Weiss, Forge Books, Tom Doherty Associates, 1997.

  “Waiting for Sebastian” first appeared in Dirty Laundry, edited by Lisa Rowe Fraustino, Viking Books, 1988.

  “Shadows” first appeared in Visions, edited by Donald R. Gallo, Delacorte Press, 1987.

  “I Go Along” first appeared in Connections, edited by Donald R. Gallo, Delacorte Press, 1989.

  “The Kiss in the Carry-on Bag” first appeared in Destination Unexpected, edited by Donald R. Gallo, Candlewick Press, 2003.

  “The Three-Century Woman” first appeared in Second Sight, Philomel Books, 1999.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE DIAL EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Peck, Richard.

  Past perfect, present tense: new and collected stories / Richard Peck.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A collection of short stories, including two previously unpublished ones, that deal with the way things could be.

  1. Children’s stories, American. [1. Short stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P338Wh 2004 [Fic]—dc22 2003010904

  ISBN: 978-1-101-66440-7

  Designed by Lily Malcom

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Version_1

  To Marcia and John Servente

  Acknowledgments

  I acknowledge with thanks the editors who generously have included my work in their anthologies:

  Lois Duncan

  Lisa Rowe Fraustino

  Donald R. Gallo

  Michael Green

  Johanna Hurwitz

  Harry Mazer

  M. Jerry Weiss and

  Helen Weiss

  I am grateful to Roger Sutton, who encouraged this collection.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE FIRST

  Priscilla and the Wimps

  THE PAST

  The Electric Summer

  Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Night Above Ground

  The Special Powers of Blossom Culp

  By Far the Worst Pupil at Long Point School

  THE SUPERNATURAL

  Girl at the Window

  The Most Important Night of Melanie’s Life

  Waiting for Sebastian

  Shadows

  THE PRESENT

  Fluffy the Gangbuster

  I Go Along

  The Kiss in the Carry-on Bag

  The Three-Century Woman

  HOW TO WRITE A SHORT STORY

  FIVE HELPFUL HINTS

  Introduction

  A short story, like fiction of any length, i
s always about change. Even in a handful of pages, the characters can’t be the same people in the last paragraph whom we met in the first. If there’s no change, there’s no story, unless you write fiction for The New Yorker magazine.

  A word writers use is “epiphany.” In ancient Greece the word described the miraculous appearance of a god or goddess. The Christian church uses the word with a capital E to define Twelfth Night, the moment when the Magi, the Three Kings, made the long-heralded discovery of the Christ child.

  In fiction writing, the epiphany is a sudden breakthrough of understanding, of self-awareness. It’s that moment of change that changes every moment after. It’s the lightbulb switched suddenly on over somebody’s head. Novels tell of epiphanies acted upon. A short story tends to turn upon a single epiphany, sometimes in the last line. The change to come is to play out in the reader’s mind.

  In real life we have epiphanies all the time. But we wait for them to go away. Change is too hard, and threatening. That’s why we have fiction. Stories are better than real life, or we wouldn’t have them. Stories for the young present the metaphor of change upon the page to prepare the readers for the changes coming in their lives. Non-readers will never be ready.

  Again, like all fiction, a short story is never an answer, always a question. Writers with answers write nonfiction: advice columns and government pamphlets and textbooks. Fiction writers have only questions, and the eternal question all fiction asks the reader is:

  WHAT IF I WERE THE CHARACTER IN THIS STORY? WHAT WOULD I DO?

  This is the great gift readers receive: They can be anybody and go anywhere. They can try on all these lives to see which ones fit.

  Stories raise every kind of question. Stories for the young regularly invite their readers to ask themselves:

  WHEN WILL I START TAKING CHARGE OF MY LIFE?

  A comic story can ask serious questions. So can a tale of the supernatural, which is only another device for questioning actual people and wondering how they work. A story set in past times can ask a modern reader timeless questions about all those issues history and progress never solve. Even an animal character can be a way of asking what moves and motivates humans. Fiction writers creep up on as many sides of their readers as they can. They use as many techniques as they can think of.

  And so a short story is like all fiction: It’s a question about change.

  All stories begin with those same two words:

  WHAT IF?

  A story isn’t what is. It’s what if? Fiction isn’t real life with the names changed. It’s an alternate reality to reflect the reader’s own world.

  But what is a short story not? It’s not a condensation of a novel, or an unfinished one. It’s not Cliffs Notes to anything. It has its own shape and profile. It’s not the New York skyline; it’s a single church spire. Its end is much nearer its beginning, and so it can be overlooked.

  “One tends to overpraise a long book because one has got through it,” said E. M. Forster—a novelist. His tongue was in his cheek, but he makes a point. A full-length novel with its community of characters, its multiple epiphanies, its changing scenes, is taken more seriously—in class, in reviews, in the book club.

  The short story is much misunderstood. There are even aspiring writers who think they’ll start out writing short stories and work their way up to the big time: novels. It doesn’t work like that. A short story isn’t easier than a novel. It has so little space to make its mark that it requires the kind of self-mutilating editing most new writers aren’t capable of. It has less time to plead its case.

  Only poetry is less forgiving. But poetry can teach you how to throw out all the words that aren’t pulling their weight. In a short story there’s no place to hide, whether you’re the writer or the reader.

  I hadn’t meant to be a short-story writer. I’d hoped to be Mark Twain. The first of his books to lift me out of my world and into a bigger one was Life on the Mississippi.

  It seemed to be autobiography, and true. I little knew how much fictional technique, and fiction, that book embodied. I fell for nonfiction, the romance of the real.

  But later when I was a teacher, an English teacher naturally, my students preferred fiction to reality. They were in junior high, and so they preferred ANYTHING to reality. But our curriculum was heavy-laden with full-length novels, even when I drew up the reading list myself. I harbored the wan hope of stretching their attention spans.

  Junior-high teaching made a writer out of me. The first question a writer has to answer before putting pen to paper is:

  WHO ARE THE PEOPLE WHO MIGHT BE WILLING TO READ WHAT I MIGHT BE ABLE TO WRITE?

  I found those people in my roll book. They were the people I knew the best, and liked the best. From our first morning together I knew things about them their parents dared never know. Better yet, as their English teacher I saw in their compositions what they would never say aloud within the hearing of their powerful peers. The voices in their pages still ring in mine.

  When I quit teaching to write, I had novels in mind. First one, to see if I could do it, and now thirty-two novels through these thirty-two years later. But as the years went by, the short story found its own way into my career.

  Most of the short stories in this collection were written as assignments. Editors like Donald R. Gallo and Michael Green, writing colleagues like Lois Duncan and Harry Mazer, ask us to write short stories for collections they’re putting together. Sometimes they give us a theme, sometimes not. Sometimes they give us the length, sometimes not. They always give us deadlines. Real life turns out to be strangely like school: You have assignments—and deadlines. Yet deadlines are our friends. The deadline helps us find the time to write the story.

  But how much easier to talk about writing than to write. How much easier to generalize about a whole generation of readers than to reach just one of them upon the shared page . . .

  The First

  The first short story stands alone because it’s the first one I ever wrote. And because it may be the most widely read of anything I’ve ever written, of any length. From this story, I learned that short stories can go places novels can’t—into textbook anthologies and other people’s collections and endless magazine reprints in any number of languages.

  This one goes first because it proves that a writer can’t have a master plan for his career. A writer has to be ready to turn on a dime.

  One day more than twenty-five years ago, I was bent over the typewriter in the midst of a novel when the phone rang. It was the editor of a magazine for teenagers. She said she’d been reading my novels and wanted me to write a short story for her magazine. It had to be set in junior high/middle school. She already had too many stories about high school.

  When I could get a word in, I told her I didn’t do short stories.

  “We pay three hundred dollars,” she said.

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  “It has to be very short,” she said, “about a thousand words, and it needs to end with a bang. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we’ll need it by Thursday.”

  She hung up, and I had thirty-six hours to write my first short story. All I knew about it was that it had to be set in junior high, so I assumed the girl would be bigger than the boy. The story unfolded from there.

  I knew too that I wouldn’t be working on my novel for thirty-six hours, that I wouldn’t be leaving the house, that I’d be bringing my meals to the desk.

  What I didn’t know was that years later in another century, I’d be putting together a collection of my short stories because of that one and how it opened a new door.

  I called it “Priscilla and the Wimps.”

  Priscilla and the Wimps

  Listen, there was a time when you couldn’t even go to the restroom around this school without a pass. And I’m not talking about those little pink tickets made out by some teacher. I’m talking about a pass that would cost anywhere up to a buck, sold by Monk Klutter.

  Not
that Mighty Monk ever touched money, not in public. The gang he ran, which ran the school for him, was his collection agency. They were Klutter’s Kobras, a name spelled out in nailheads on six well-known black plastic windbreakers.

  Monk’s threads were more . . . subtle. A pile-lined suede battle jacket with lizard-skin flaps over tailored Levi’s and a pair of ostrich-skin boots, brass-toed and suitable for kicking people around. One of his Kobras did nothing all day but walk a half step behind Monk, carrying a fitted bag with Monk’s gym shoes, a coil of restroom passes, a cash box, and a switchblade that Monk gave himself manicures with at lunch over at the Kobras’ table.

  Speaking of lunch, there were cases of advanced malnutrition among the newer kids. The ones who were a little slow in handing over a cut of their lunch money and were therefore barred from the cafeteria. Monk ran a tight ship.

  I admit it. I’m five foot five, but when the Kobras slithered by, with or without Monk, I shrank. And I admit this too: I paid up on a regular basis. And I might add: so would you.

  This school was old Monk’s Garden of Eden. Unfortunately for him, there was a serpent in it. The reason Monk didn’t recognize trouble when it was staring him in the face is that the serpent in the Kobras’ Eden was a girl.

  Practically every guy in school could show you his scars. Fang marks from Kobras, you might say: lumps, lacerations, blue bruises. But girls usually got off with a warning.

  Except there was this one girl named Priscilla Roseberry. Picture a girl named Priscilla Roseberry, and you’ll be light years off. Priscilla was, hands down, the largest student in the school. I’m not talking fat. I’m talking big. Even beautiful, in a bionic way. Priscilla wasn’t inclined toward organized crime. Otherwise, she could have put together a gang that would turn Klutter’s Kobras into a bunch of garter snakes.

  Priscilla was basically a loner except she had one friend, a little guy named Melvin Detweiler. You talk about The Odd Couple. Melvin’s one of the smallest guys above midget status ever seen. They even had lockers next to each other in the same bank as mine. I don’t know what they had going. I’m not saying this was a romance. After all, people deserve their privacy.