Strider
Beverly Cleary
Illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky
For Malcolm
Contents
June 6
This afternoon, as Mom was leaving for work at the…
June 7
Today I have something important to write about! The summer…
June 8
Back to yesterday. There are so many places our moms…
June 9
Writing all this, I don’t feel so lonely at night…
June 10
When Mom opened the door, I held my breath while…
June 11
Barry’s parents said the same thing about our having joint…
June 16
For a whole week now, Barry and I have had…
June 22
Time goes fast these days. Barry and I begin each…
June 30
Tomorrow Barry has to fly down to what he calls…
July 8
Strider has been mine for a whole week! I brush…
July 9
Today when I took Strider out, the fog was beginning…
July 10
I spoke too soon. Today when Strider and I came…
July 13
Today the mailman brought a postcard from Barry with a…
July 18
Something happened today! Dad turned up, live and in person.
July 20
Today Mom said I had to take our washing to…
July 30
Yesterday Mr. Brinkerhoff invited Strider and me to go to…
August 10
Now that Barry has returned, summer is going fast. Barry…
August 19
Last night Dad telephoned from Bakersfield to say that today…
August 20
My pants are too short! All of them!
September 12
Today I discovered two kinds of people go to high…
September 16
After that first day, I washed my shirt every night…
September 19
This morning Mom said, “Please, Leigh, wear a different shirt…
September 21
Lots of Many things have happened lately. (I guess you…
September 24
Mom and I haven’t been getting along as well as…
September 26
Today was a real shocker. This evening, while Mom was…
September 30
In English we finished studying The Rime of the Ancient…
October 4
I still feel so cross with old Wounded-hair (today her…
November 25
October and November were so boring I didn’t have anything…
December 17
Running with Strider is cold, damp work. I overheard one…
December 25
Christmas! Friday Barry left for Los Smogland with his two…
January 6
The day before Christmas vacation ended, serious rain came pounding…
January 7
That’s enough about my being sick, except to say that…
January 8
I’m writing all this because I’m bored. As I read…
January 10
Today the weather was good for a change. Although I…
January 12
Barry and I quarreled. I feel terrible.
January 14
Yesterday Barry avoided me.
January 16
Barry is avoiding me. He even walked to school a…
January 20
Strider’s ghost haunts this cottage. The windows are smeared with…
January 25
Funny. Even though I no longer have to exercise Strider…
January 26
Today after the math final, I ran into Barry in…
February 13
Today Kevin and I turned out for track. Mr. Kurtz…
February 14
On a scale of one to ten, today was about…
March 1
The first of the month, I was about to hide…
March 2
A fence, a fence, my kingdom for a fence, as…
March 12
I got to thinking: if Barry’s father would be willing…
March 13
Now that I have solved a few of my problems…
March 14
Today I did a stupid thing. I watched Geneva run…
March 15
Track, track, track.
March 17
My first track meet was about as far from the…
March 31
Run with Strider, school, track, study, sleep, start all over…
April 1
After breakfast I said to Mom, “Well, I guess I’ll…
April 14
Coach says Geneva, Kevin, and I all have times that…
April 29
The invitational meet was held yesterday at our track here…
May 2
Yesterday I handed in my composition. This morning Mr. Drexler…
About the Author
Other Books by Beverly Cleary
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
From the Diary of Leigh Botts
June 6
This afternoon, as Mom was leaving for work at the hospital, she said for the millionth time, “Leigh, please clean up your room. There is no excuse for such a mess. And don’t forget the junk under your bed.”
I said, “Mom, you’re nagging. I’m going to Barry’s house.”
She plunked a kiss on my hair and said, “Room first, Barry second. Besides, where would the world be without nagging mothers? Everything would go to pieces.”
Maybe she’s right. Things are pretty deep in my room. I hauled all the rubbish out from under my bed. In the midst of all the old socks, school papers, models that have fallen apart, paperback books (one library book—oops!), and other stuff, I found the diary I kept a couple of years ago when I was a mixed-up kid in the sixth grade. Mom had just divorced Dad and moved with me to Pacific Grove, better known as P.G., where I was a new kid in school, which wasn’t easy.
I sat there on the floor reading my diary, and when I finished, I continued to sit there. What had changed?
Dad still drives his tractor-trailer rig, lives mostly on the road, and is late with his child support checks or forgets them. I don’t often see him, but I don’t get as angry about this as I did in the sixth grade. I no longer feel like crying, but I still hurt when he doesn’t telephone when he said he would. Whenever I see a big rig, excitement shoots through me until I see Dad isn’t the driver. I wish—oh well, forget it.
Mom has finished her vocational nurse course and works at the hospital from three to eleven because that shift pays more than the daytime shift. Mornings she studies to become a registered nurse so she can earn more money. We still live in what our landlady called our “charming garden cottage” but I call a shack. Mom is looking for an apartment, but so far no luck.
Twice a week I mop the floor at Catering by Katy, where Mom used to work before she got her license. Katy gives me good things to eat. I like earning my own spending money, but I feel I could use the squares of Katy’s linoleum for a checkerboard in my sleep.
Mom, who used to think TV was one of the greatest evils of the universe, finally had our set repaired because my grades were good and she no longer felt TV would rot my brain and leave me twiddling my shoelaces. At first I watched everything until I got bored and cut back to news and animal programs. Then I began to feel that every lion on the Serengeti must have his own personal hairdresser. That left the news, which sometimes worries me. If I see a truck accident with the tractor hanging over the edge of a bridge, or tons of tomatoes spilled on a freeway, I
can hardly breathe until I see the driver isn’t Dad.
One part of my diary made me smile, the part about wanting to be a famous author like Boyd Henshaw someday. Maybe I do, maybe I don’t, but I’m glad that when I wrote to him, he said I should keep a diary.
I worry about what I’m going to do with my life, and so does Mom. Dad is probably too busy worrying about meeting his deadline with a trailer load of lettuce before it rots to even think of me. Or maybe he is wasting his time playing video games at some truck stop.
Until the last sentence, I enjoyed writing this. Maybe I’ll go back to writing in composition books, but not every day, just once in a while, like now, when I feel like writing something.
The gas station next door has stopped ping-pinging, which means it’s after ten o’clock. Mom gets home about eleven-thirty, and my room is still a mess. No problem. Except for books and my diary, I’ll dump everything in the trash.
I just remembered. I forgot about Barry.
June 7
Today I have something important to write about! The summer fog was so low the whole world seemed to drip. Mom went to class, and our shack was so lonely, I climbed the hill to see Barry. I like to go to his big old house, built on a slope so that it has a view of the bay when the fog lifts. Everything in the house is shabby and comfortable. There is a smell of good things cooking. Barry’s stepmother, Mrs. Brinkerhoff, is plump, but she doesn’t worry about it the way Mom’s friends worry about gaining one teeny ounce.
Barry’s house is full of cats, hamsters in cages, and little sisters. I once saw a tortoise under the couch, but I have never seen it again. Sometimes a grandmother is there. She knits sweaters out of beautiful soft yarns in wild designs she makes up as she goes along. Barry says she sells them to an expensive boutique for a lot of money. Watching her needles move so quickly in and out of beautiful yarns fascinates me.
The basic Brinkerhoffs are the parents, Barry, and five little sisters. Two girls belong to Barry’s father, two to his stepmother, and the little one, who crawls and likes to play peekaboo around corners, belongs to both parents. Sometimes the girls seem like more than five because their friends come over, and they all dress up in old clothes Mrs. Brinkerhoff keeps in a big box.
This morning a bunch of girls were kneeling on chairs around the kitchen table, popping corn in the electric corn popper. When they dumped it out in a bowl, Barry and I reached for some.
The girls tried to slap our hands away. “This isn’t for eating,” one of them said. “This is for shrinking.”
That stopped us. Whoever heard of shrinking popcorn?
The girls were busy dropping perfectly good popcorn into a bowl of water, one piece at a time, to watch it shrink until nobody would eat it except maybe a hamster.
“That’s a stupid thing to do,” Barry told the girls.
“It is not,” said the oldest sister. Betsy I think is her name. “We are performing a scientific experiment to prove that popcorn has memory. Drop it in water, and it remembers it is supposed to be little and hard instead of big and fluffy.”
Barry and I helped ourselves to more popcorn. “You’re being mean to popcorn,” said one of the girls, which made me wonder what popcorn remembered when I chewed it.
Barry and I went to his room to work on a model of an antique car with many little parts. If we put glue on one piece and couldn’t find where it belonged right away, the plastic melted, and the piece wouldn’t fit. That happened a couple of times. Then I got glue on the hood. When I tried to wipe it off, the shine wiped off, too. The funny part was, I didn’t much care.
I looked at Barry, and he looked at me. I could see we both had the same thought at the same time: we had outgrown models. Without saying anything, we threw the car pieces into the wastebasket, and as we went through the kitchen, we snatched some more popcorn.
Here comes Mom’s car, it’s almost midnight, I’m supposed to be asleep, and I haven’t even come to the good part. I’ll write more about today tomorrow.
June 8
Back to yesterday. There are so many places our moms won’t let us hang around, like the Frostee Freeze and the video arcade, that we headed for the beach, not for any special reason. The beach was just a place to go. The damp air gave us goose bumps below our cutoffs. Fog dripping off the eucalyptus trees made them smell like old tomcats.
The beach was so gray and chilly the only person around was a rugged old man we call Mr. President because he is always saying if he were president he would make a few changes in this country. He patrols beaches and parks, dragging two gunnysacks, one for broken glass and beer bottles, the other for aluminum cans, so kids won’t cut their feet. Some people think he’s nutty because he lives in an old bread truck, but we don’t. Sometimes we help him.
At the foot of the steps to the beach, beside the seawall, a dog was sitting in the soft sand. He was tan with a few white spots and a white mark in the center of his face. He looked strong for a medium-sized dog.
“Hi, dog,” I said and thought of my ex-dog Bandit and the fun we used to have before the divorce, when Mom got me and Dad got Bandit.
This dog looked worried and made little whimpering noises.
Mr. President came dragging his gunnysacks through the sand. “Dog’s been sittin’ there since yesterday,” he said. “No collar, no license, no nothin’. Just sits there in sorrow.”
“Come on, fella,” I said to the dog and patted my knee.
The dog didn’t move. I scratched his chest where Bandit liked to be scratched. This dog looked up at me with his ears laid back and the saddest look I have ever seen on a dog’s face. If dogs could cry, this dog would be crying hard.
“Come on, dog,” said Barry. The dog wagged his docked tail. It wasn’t a happy wag. It was an anxious wag. Dogs can say a lot with their tails, or what people let them keep of their tails. If he still had a tail, it would be between his legs.
“Seems like somebody told him to stay, so he’s staying,” said Mr. President. “If he sits much longer, that dog jailer will come along and haul him off to the dog bastille.”
“Come on, boy,” I coaxed. The dog didn’t budge.
“If I were running this country, I would hang everyone who dumps animals,” said Mr. President and went back to picking up beer bottles people leave on the beach.
Barry and I slogged through the dry sand to the wet sand, both of us hoping the dog would follow, but he didn’t. I couldn’t forget the look on that dog’s face. I know what it feels like to be left behind, so I probably have the same look on my face when Dad and Bandit drop in to see me and then drive off, leaving me behind.
When we reached the water, Barry said, “Remember that movie Dad took us to that began with all those guys in track suits running through the waves at the edge of the beach?”
I got the idea. We both pulled off our shoes and socks and began to run up and down the beach, splashing through the little waves that crawled around our feet. The water just about froze our toes. As we ran, I could almost hear the movie sound track.
When we began to pant, we pretended we were running in slow motion the way the movie showed the actors. All the time I thought about that sad dog waiting for someone who didn’t come, maybe was never going to come. People can be pretty mean sometimes.
Suddenly the dog came racing across the sand and began to run along with us. We speeded up, and so did he.
“Good boy, Strider,” I said, no longer playing a part in a movie. I guess I called him Strider because there is a track club called the Bayside Striders, and Strider seemed like a good name for a running dog.
When we reached the shoes and socks we had left on the beach, Strider shook himself and slunk, drooping, back to the place by the seawall where we had first seen him. He looked miserable and guilty.
“Poor old Strider,” said Barry. “Something’s sure bothering him.” I wasn’t surprised when Barry called the dog Strider. We usually agree.
“Let’s take him home,” I said
as I tried to wipe the sand from between my toes with my socks. “Maybe we could find his owner before the animal control officer gets him.”
When we got our shoes and damp socks on our sandy feet, we called, coaxed, and whistled, but Strider wouldn’t budge. He just looked worried and confused, as if he wanted to follow but knew he shouldn’t. Strider can’t talk, but he sure can act.
The sun was coming out. So were surfers, who were struggling into wet suits beside their vans. We asked, but no one had ever seen the dog before.
We gave up and walked to my shack because it is closer than Barry’s house. Walking in wet sandy socks wasn’t much fun.
Oops. Here comes Mom. I’ll pretend I’m asleep. I didn’t mean to write a novel. More tomorrow.
June 9
Writing all this, I don’t feel so lonely at night, and when I am busy, I forget to listen for funny noises.
To continue, Mom still wasn’t home from class when Barry and I got back from the beach. We sat on the bathroom floor with our feet in the shower to wash sand from our toes. We didn’t say much.
“I bet Strider’s hungry,” said Barry finally.
“And thirsty,” I said.
We raced back to the beach with a couple of hot dogs (sorry, Mom), a bottle of water, and a bowl, feeling as if Strider was going to be hauled off to the gas chamber if we didn’t get there in time.