Read an Excerpt
True Blue
Book One of the True Blue Trilogy
By Joyce Scarbrough CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Copyright © 2016 Joyce Scarbrough
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5373-6885-6
CHAPTER 1
The flashlight pointing upward on the clubhouse floor between Jeana Russell and her two best friends, Wade Strickland and Billy Joe DuBose, turned the boys' faces into gruesome masks and transformed Wade's blond head into a buzz-cut version of Frankenstein's monster.
"The first meeting of the Mystery Masters is hereby called to order," Jeana said in her most official voice. "We will now proceed with the allegiance ceremony. Hold up your pinky fingers."
"Can we please use a finger that's not so girly sounding?" Billy Joe asked. "How 'bout our thumbs?"
Jeana folded her arms. "There's no such thing as a thumb swear, Billy Joe. And they're only called pinkies because it's the Dutch word for little finger. It has nothing to do with girls."
Billy Joe looked at Wade. "How does she know this stuff? She's like a walking encyclopedia."
Wade shrugged. "How do you know that, Jeana?"
"It was in a book I read about Anne Frank," she replied. "She and her family were Dutch citizens. I did a report on her for Social Studies, and I made an A-plus on it too."
"You didn't need to tell us that," Billy Joe said. "We know you'd be dead from a heart attack if you ever made a B."
Wade turned his face away so Jeana wouldn't see him laugh, but she wasn't fooled. She glared at both boys for a second, then she started to get up.
"Forget it. I should've known you wouldn't take this seriously. I don't know why I'm even friends with either one of you!"
Wade and Billy Joe each grabbed one of her hands before she could stand up all the way.
"Wait, we're sorry," Billy Joe said. "Don't leave, Jeana."
"Yeah, we'll be good, Redhot," Wade said. "Do the ceremony for us."
She pulled her hands free and tucked a long auburn curl behind each ear while she glared at them a few more seconds, then she sighed and sat down again. "Hold up your pinky fingers and prepare to swear."
Billy Joe looked as if he wanted to say something about that, but he kept quiet and linked his little fingers with Wade's and Jeana's.
"We will now share our most personal secrets as our vows of silence," Jeana said. "Repeat after me: I solemnly swear I will never reveal the secrets of my fellow Mystery Masters, even if tortured or faced with death."
The boys parroted her words in unison.
Jeana nodded. "Wade, you go first."
"Why me?"
"Because you're the oldest," Jeana replied.
"Only by a month."
One of Jeana's eyebrows rose impatiently.
"Okay, fine," he said. "My most personal secret is that I hate raisins. They make me puke if I try to eat one."
Jeana shook her head with a sigh. "That's not a secret, and it's not personal either. It has to be something you don't want anybody else to know."
Wade looked up at the ceiling. "Well, I don't have anything else. Let me think about it a minute."
"I told both of you to be thinking about this last night," Jeana said. "Okay, Billy Joe. You go while he tries to think."
Billy Joe smiled broadly. "My secret is that I can't swallow pills. My mother has to crush 'em up and put 'em in applesauce for me."
Jeana sighed again. "That's not a secret either. Everybody at school has known that ever since you cut your big toe swimming at H&W last year and your mama brought you applesauce with medicine in it at lunchtime every day for a week."
Billy Joe rolled his eyes. "Okay, then what's your secret, O Supreme Commander?"
Jeana's chin lifted haughtily. "Mine is that I'm going to marry Captain James T. Kirk someday."
The two boys looked at each other, then they burst into laughter.
"Well, that's definitely something you shouldn't want anybody to know," Billy Joe said. "But how're you gonna do it when he's not even a real person?"
Jeana's hazel eyes narrowed. "For your information, Billy Joe DuBose, Star Trek is based on real science, so all of it will probably be true someday. I'm sure there'll be somebody a lot like Captain Kirk to command the first starship, and we'll probably have them by the time I'm old enough to get married. So there."
Wade was looking away again, but Billy Joe laughed openly. Jeana reached across the circle and bopped him on his curly blond head.
"Since both of you are too busy laughing at me to think of your own secrets, I'll do it for you. Wade, yours is that you're scared of worms, and Billy Joe still sleeps with Bluey Bear."
The boys' laughter died a sudden death as they looked at each other sheepishly.
"I won't tell if you won't," Billy Joe said.
"Deal." Wade hooked his pinky with Billy Joe's again.
"Okay, good." Jeana linked her fingers with theirs as well. "I'll have the honor contracts for everybody to sign tomorrow after school, and they'll be written in the secret code I've been working on. I'll teach both of you how to read it before we sign them. And don't worry about missing the Big Show tomorrow. They're showing that dumb old Three Stooges in Orbit again — yuck!"
They all loved the cheesy monster and science fiction flicks their local station showed for the afternoon movie, like Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman and The Blob. Jeana was in charge of checking the TV Guide every week to see what was playing each day, and they took turns watching their favorites at each other's houses.
When they left the shed in Wade's back yard a few minutes later, they blinked as their eyes adjusted to the brightness of the late afternoon sun that was still warm enough for all of them to be wearing shorts in the middle of October — business as usual in Chickasaw, Alabama. The three of them said goodbye at the privacy fence that separated Wade's yard from Jeana's. Wade swung the loose board aside so Jeana could slip through, then he and Billy Joe watched until she was safely on her back porch.
They'd been looking out for Jeana all their lives, and neither of them planned to stop anytime soon. Sure, she was bossy and kind of a know-it-all, but she also wasn't silly and giggly like most of the other girls at school. She was so smart it was scary sometimes, and she'd been making up cool games for the three of them to play for as long as either boy could remember.
Of course, neither of them would ever consider admitting to anyone — including each other — the real reasons they would always look out for Jeana. That was a secret they kept hidden deep in their ten-year-old hearts and only thought about when they were lying awake at night, remembering the way Jeana's eyes looked when she smiled and the way it made her face glow like the strands of her curly red hair in the sunlight. Her smile made them want to be smarter, nicer, braver — someone who deserved the admiration of a girl as special as Jeana.
Those were the things that kept both boys willing to do anything she wanted as long as it meant they got to see that smile again.
* * *
When the bell rang at the end of school the next day, Jeana waited for Wade and Billy Joe on the steps at the end of Peter Joe Hamilton Elementary School's front hall. Jeana's teacher, Mrs. Stowe, always let her fourth grade class out immediately, but Billy Joe and Wade were in mean old Mrs. Doty's class and had to stay until the whole room was completely silent. With Billy Joe in there, it usually took a while.
When Jeana finally saw them coming, she could tell they were having another one of their arguments from their flushed faces.
"Jeana, would you please tell him I called Spider-Man for my Halloween costume last month," Billy Joe said when they walked up. "Remember, it was the same day we watched The Incredible Shrinking Man on the Big Show and he almost got eaten by the spider." He shoved Wade. "You can be Sub-Mariner since you think you're such a great swimmer and all."
Wade shoved him back. "No way! I'm the one who called Spidey first. Besides, all that hair of yours would never fit in a Spider-Man mask anyway. Tell him, Jeana."
She held up her hands in defense. "Leave me out of it. I don't know why either one of you wants to be him anyway. Why don't you go as something fun, like a pirate?"
Both boys looked as if she'd suggested they trick-or-treat naked.
Billy Joe scowled at her. "Forget fun, let's go as something healthy, like our favorite vegetables. I call rutabaga!"
Wade doubled over laughing, and Jeana folded her arms.
"You're right, you should be Spider-Man, Billy Joe. You're smart-alecky just like him."
It didn't take long for them to walk the half mile from the school to the end of West Grant Street where they all lived, and by the time they reached Jeana's house, the boys had worked out their costume argument. Wade grudgingly surrendered Spider-Man in exchange for Billy Joe's coveted copy of the Marvel Team-Up issue where Spider-Man meets the X-Men.
"Okay," Jeana said when they reached her driveway, "go change clothes and meet me in the clubhouse so I can show you how to read the secret code. And don't stop for snacks. I'll bring cookies."
"I can't," Billy Joe said. "I got basketball practice at the gym."
Jeana frowned. "You didn't say anything about practice yesterday, and didn't you just have it on Wednesday?"
"Yeah, but my coach called an extra practice because he really wants to beat Wade's team tomorrow." Billy Joe snickered. "Can't let his wife's team beat him again."
"Does that mean you have it too?" she asked Wade.
He shook his head. "Nah, my coach said we didn't need it 'cause we got an easy game this week."
Jeana sighed. "Okay, I'll show you the code and we can teach it to Billy Joe tomorrow."
"Fine, but I better get cookies too!" Billy Joe called as he ran across the street to his house.
"On second thought," Jeana said to Wade, "since we're not signing the contracts today, let's sit on my porch. We can see better there."
"Do we have to sign them in blood?" Wade looked a little pale at the idea. When Jeana's frown answered his question, he said, "Okay, I'll be back in a few minutes."
Ten minutes later, they were sitting in Jeana's front porch swing with two Yoo-hoos and a bowl of chocolate chip cookies between them.
"It's really not hard to read after you know the trick," Jeana said. "You just add the first letter of the next word to the end of the word before it. See if you can read what this says." She pointed at the writing on a spiral notebook in her hand: meetm ei nt enm inutes.
"Meet ... me ... in ... ten ... minutes." Wade looked up at her in triumph. "I did it!"
She smiled at him. "I told you I could teach it to you."
"That's because you're so good at explaining stuff," he said. "You should be a teacher when you grow up."
"Maybe I will." Jeana took a drink of her Yoo-hoo and thought about how much she'd like following in the footsteps of Jo March in Little Women, the book she'd just finished and then started reading again because she loved it so much. After a few seconds, she realized Wade was staring at her with unabashed admiration lighting up his green eyes.
"It's a great code," he said. "You always make up the best stuff."
Jeana's cheeks started to feel warm under his gaze. "I like making up fun things for us to do. I'm glad you don't think it's weird."
"Are you kidding? I think you're the coolest girl in the world, Redhot." He reached over and picked a cookie crumb from the auburn curl that always seemed to escape her ponytail. "Even if you do like to carry snacks around in your hair sometimes."
They wrote a few more practice messages to each other while they finished their drinks, then Wade's little sister came out on their front porch next door and called for him to come home. Jeana stretched out in the swing after he left, nibbling the last cookie while she thought about what he'd said, the worn boards wrapping her in their warmth in the approaching dusk.
Wade and Billy Joe had lived next door and across the street from her their entire lives, and they'd always been her best friends. She'd never felt the least bit awkward or shy around either of them, but there had definitely been something different about the way Wade had looked at her today. For the first time, she could tell he was seeing her as a girl instead of just a friend. And she liked the way that made her feel.
She liked it a lot.
CHAPTER 2
Mickey Royal was the best baseball player in his fourth grade class at Orchard Elementary School, but that wasn't good enough for Mickey. He had to be the best player in the whole Forest Hill Little League, even better than the boys who were older than him. Nobody had ever told him he had to be better or put any pressure on him to excel, he just knew he had to do it. He knew it because the only time his dad was really happy was when Mickey hit a home run or struck out a batter or made a great catch in center field. His dad might seem happy to other people the rest of the time, but Mickey knew better.
He knew it because his dad had started drinking.
The first time Mickey saw his dad drinking had been the previous spring when he woke up in the middle of the night and went to the kitchen for some water. He heard something out on the patio and looked through the sliding glass doors to see if it might be that possum who was always sneaking dog food from Monster's bowl. It was too dark to see anything clearly, but Mickey could tell it wasn't a possum. Someone was sitting in one of the patio chairs next to the table.
For a second, Mickey's stomach clenched with fear because he thought it might be a burglar or some crazy person who'd sneaked into their back yard. He was just about to turn and run to his parents' room when the person stood up and Mickey could tell it was his dad. He'd recognize those broad shoulders and that athletic build anywhere. But why was he sitting outside in the dark in the middle of the night?
The full moon came out from behind a cloud just then and illuminated the patio bright enough for Mickey to make out a glass and a squarish bottle sitting on the table. His dad emptied the bottle into the glass, but he didn't put it back down. He stared at the empty bottle in his hand for a long time, then he slowly went into a windup and hurled the bottle out into the yard like the all-star college pitcher he'd been, before he'd had to drop out of school and get a job to take care of his wife and unexpected baby. After the bottle landed somewhere near the back of the yard, he sat down again and leaned over with his head in his hands.
Mickey had a hard time going back to sleep that night, because he was the baby who'd ended his dad's baseball career. Mickey knew his dad loved him and his mom, but now he also knew just how unhappy he was because he'd had to give up his dream of playing professional baseball for the New York Yankees — like his hero, Mickey Mantle. The man he'd named his son after.
Mickey never said anything to his dad or his mom about what he'd seen. He didn't want to embarrass his dad, and he also felt a little ashamed, as though he'd been spying on him. Sometimes he'd find empty bottles out in the yard and would always put them in the garbage so his mom wouldn't see them. He didn't know whether or not she knew his dad was drinking, but he didn't want her to think anything bad about him.
For the next few weeks, Mickey worried about his dad and tried to figure out a way to help him. Then it was time for Mickey's baseball team to start the new season, and he got so busy practicing that he almost forgot about his dad's problem — until the night that Mickey hit his first home run of the year. When his dad picked him up in celebration after he crossed the plate, there wasn't a trace of sadness in his eyes as he looked at his son.
That's when Mickey knew what he had to do. He'd work harder than everybody else and be the best baseball player in the whole league. Maybe he could even play in the big leagues when he grew up, like his dad had wanted to do. Maybe even for the Yankees. Then his dad could be happy all the time, and he wouldn't need to drink anymore in the middle of the night.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from True Blue by Joyce Scarbrough. Copyright © 2016 Joyce Scarbrough. Excerpted by permission of CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
