The Great Googlini
Text copyright © 2018 Sara Cassidy
Illustrations copyright © 2018 Charlene Chua
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cassidy, Sara, author
The Great Googlini / Sara Cassidy ; illustrated by Charlene Chua.
(Orca echoes)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4598-1703-6 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1704-3 (PDF).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1705-0 (EPUB)
I. Chua, Charlene, 1980–, illustrator II. Title. III. Series: Orca echoes
PS8555.A7812G74 2018 jC813'.54 C2017-907678-7
C2017-907679-5
First published in the United States, 2018
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933730
Summary: In this chapter book, a young boy copes with his uncle’s cancer diagnosis by seeking answers from the Great Googlini, an information scientist who emerges from his computer.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Edited by Liz Kemp
Cover artwork and interior illustrations by Charlene Chua
Author photo by Amaya Tarasoff
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
orcabook.com
21 20 19 18 • 4 3 2 1
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For my brilliant nieces Rebecca and Emma
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Acknowledgments
An Excerpt from “Not for Sale”
Chapter One
“I am coming to the end of my tenth orbit around the sun,” I tell Ivan.
“You’ve traveled nearly nine billion four hundred million kilometers,” Ivan says.
Ivan is super smart. And skinny, like stretched toffee. Me, I’m toffee before it got stretched—short and wide. Ivan and I have been best friends since kindergarten.
“How can traveling through space make me older? I mean, I can’t even feel it.”
“If you could, you’d have no skin,” Ivan says. “Atmosphere burn. A lot worse than carpet burn.”
We’re in front of my mom’s old computer, googling salt for a school project. We’ve watched cars race across the huge salt flats of Utah—they look like fields of snow—and have learned that Canadians put more salt on icy highways than they do on food.
Mrs. Zupan hands us steaming bowls of goulash through the window. “Here, boys.”
Ivan takes a bite. “Pass the sodium chloride.”
I hand him the saltshaker.
We stare at the screen again. The cursor flashes in the search bar, as if Google is tapping its toe: Throw something at me. Anything.
“Okay, Google,” I say. The microphone throbs for input. “Google!”
Google churns and spits out the top results for Google.
It has found itself.
“Ha,” Ivan says. “My turn. Okay, Google…”
But before he can speak, I sneeze.
Ah-choo!
Google hears pet chip.
So, as Ivan and I gobble our goulash, we learn about microchips the size of a grain of rice that you can get injected under your pet’s skin. The chip has a code, so if the animal gets lost, the chip company can figure out where it is. Dogs, cats, horses, snakes—even rare fish get microchip implants.
“Fish and chips!” I say.
“How could a fish get lost?” Ivan asks.
Ivan is smart about smart things but not about normal things.
“They get stolen, not lost. Some koi are worth more than a car.”
Just then Ivan’s father’s car rattles into the parking lot down below.
“Definitely more than that car,” I add.
Ivan’s car is held together with bungee cords. Ivan’s dad honks. Ivan grabs his backpack. “Thank Mrs. Zupan for the galoshes. And don’t forget to invite me to your orbit-completion celebration.”
I snort. Who else would I invite to my birthday party?
I spend another hour at the computer. I get sucked in. The screen is basically a window showing the whole world. The windows of our apartment only show the buildings next door.
Our apartment building is like a brown shoe box. It’s squeezed between other brown shoe boxes on Third Street East. The town’s name is Bording. It’s a clump of low buildings stuck to the edge of the big city. Like a growth.
Bording is named after a pretty town in England. I looked it up on Google Street View. Bording in England has narrow streets, stone houses and cute, roundish cars. Bording in British Columbia is not pretty. Sometimes a sparrow looks cute, pecking at the dirt in the sidewalk cracks, and in spring cherry petals flutter in the breeze like snow. But mostly, Bording is dull. My uncles don’t even pronounce the d. “How do people stay awake in Boring?” they ask.
Uncle Mato and Uncle Boris live forty minutes away in Vancouver, where there are mansions and skyscrapers and the grocery stores sell twenty types of salt—lilac salt, bacon salt, Himalayan pink salt, black truffle Italian sea salt, even chocolate salt. Here in Bording you get one kind of salt—salt.
I’m still at the computer when the building’s ancient elevator rumbles and its doors screech open. Mom’s home! I’ve been at the screen for more than the two hours I’m allowed each day. I put the computer in sleep mode, dive onto the couch, stretch out my legs and open a magazine, all in one move.
Mom comes through the door. “Hi, dear.”
“Hi,” I answer, trying not to sound out of breath.
“You’re reading about the sales?” Mom asks, surprised.
The “magazine” is actually the flyer for the local supermarket.
“Yep.”
Mom shrugs. “Circle anything that you want for your birthday.”
Mom is nice. Dad is nice too. I don’t have any brothers or sisters, only a salamander named Hitokage. That’s the Japanese name for Charmander from Pokémon.
Mom and Dad own The Paprenjak, a coffee shop on Main Street with big tables and fluorescent lights that hum and tick. A paprenjak is like a gingerbread cookie, but more peppery. People eat it in Croatia. Croatia is across the Adriatic Sea from Italy, and it’s where Mom and Dad are from. They immigrated to Canada because it was too hard to find work there. My dad’s brothers, Uncle Boris and Uncle Mato—he’s my favorite—came with them. Mom was pregnant with me when they boarded the plane.
> “You were a world traveler before you were born” she likes to tell me.
How did I start? Like a seed in a garden. Planted the moment Mom and Dad first saw each other in a dark, noisy nightclub in Zagreb. Ten years ago. A decade. The word, Google tells me, comes from deka, ancient Greek for ten. As in decapods—lobsters, crabs, shrimp and other creatures that crawl through life on ten legs.
Ten. As in my ten toes, which Mom says she counted the day I was born, to make sure all of me had arrived.
Ten. The Chinese write +. The Romans wrote X. In English we make a one and a zero, a stick and a stone, a French fry beside an onion ring, 1-0. Like binary code, the computer’s heartbeat.
I say there’s Mom, Dad, Uncle Mato and Uncle Boris in my family. But there’s also Mrs. Zupan, who is also from Croatia. Her apartment is in the shoe box next to ours, in a whole other building, but it’s like she’s in the next room. It’s like she lives with us. Our kitchen window looks into her kitchen window, a meter away. I once stretched a broom handle across the distance, marked it with a piece of chalk, then used a ruler to get the measure.
When we moved into our sixth-floor apartment, Mrs. Zupan was at her stove, stirring stew, a cloud of steam billowing out her window and into ours. Mom and Dad stopped in their tracks and forgot the heavy boxes in their arms.
“Janjetina!” Mom sighed.
Dad closed his eyes. “Janjetina,” he swooned. They were in a trance. Janjetina, I now know, is roast lamb with paprika, sour cream and parsley. It’s a favorite meal in Croatia.
Mrs. Zupan put down her wooden spoon, and we all shook hands across the gap between the buildings. An hour later she handed a pot of janjetina through the window. Janjetina was our first meal in our new apartment.
A long time ago Ivan and I dropped a ball out the kitchen window and counted the seconds—one chimpanzee, two chim—until it hit the grass. We timed the fall with the clock on Ivan’s iPod too. For both measurements we got a second and a half. Ivan did the math. Objects fall at nine meters per second, so the drop was about thirteen meters.
But Ivan wanted an exact measurement. So we tied a bolt to the end of my mom’s roll of parcel string and lowered it to the ground—13.3 meters. According to Google, that’s the length of the neck of an Apatosaurus. We now call the gap between the buildings the Apatosaurus Chasm.
At the bottom is a strip of pale grass that no one bothers to water. The worms I get there for Hitokage—when I can’t find them anywhere else—are thin. But on sunny days in early summer the grass is green and high and dotted with yellow dandelions. It reminds Mom of a field in Croatia that she played in as a girl.
When we first moved in, Mrs. Zupan told us that cooking—frying onions for burek or roasting red peppers for ajvar—cheered her up. Her husband had just died, she said, and cooking gave her something to do. “It’s better than crying.”
I was only six then and felt terrible, hearing about her husband. “Don’t worry, Filip,” she said to me. “Life is a beautiful flower. Once in a while, though, it must be watered with tears.”
Mrs. Zupan did so much cooking that her fridge and freezer filled up. Uncle Boris, who is huge and strong, helped Dad move a second freezer into Mrs. Zupan’s apartment. There was so little room in the elevator, they sat on the freezer for the ride up.
Then that freezer filled up, and Mrs. Zupan started handing platters of cabbage rolls and shish kabobs across Apatosaurus Chasm to us, for supper, lunch, breakfast! Finally Dad asked Mrs. Zupan if she would like to cook for The Paprenjak. People come all the way from Vancouver for her meals.
Often while I’m tapping—tap-tap—on the keyboard, Mrs. Zupan’s chopping at her cutting board—chop-chop. Garlic, potatoes, parsley, turnips. Once in a while she asks me to google the weather report for the village where she grew up, or home remedies for arthritis. Sometimes she shouts to me to find an online Croatian radio station. I turn up the volume, and she whirls around her kitchen to the accordion music.
Every Wednesday, Uncle Mato drives up from Vancouver and I meet him at The Paprenjak after school. I have a cup of chocolate milk and we head to the soccer field. But this week when I arrive at the coffeehouse, things feel different. Uncle Mato, Mom and Dad are at a table drinking coffee as usual, but when I push open the door, making the bell jump on its string, my family doesn’t greet me with noisy, teasing hellos. Instead they clam up and stare.
“What did I do?” I ask. “Hello-o?”
Uncle Mato hops up. “Okay, okay. We were talking about your birthday present. The fact is, you aren’t getting anything.”
“Maybe—a lump of coal,” Dad says.
“Coal is a Christmas thing, Dad.” After ten years in Canada, my parents still get things confused. Dad once lit fireworks on Thanksgiving, and Mom has served turkey with cranberry sauce on Canada Day.
“Right,” Uncle Mato says. “Then you’re not even getting coal.”
Dad nods stiffly. He looks pale. Mom too. “It’s true, son,” Dad says. “We’ve got nothing for you.”
Dad’s a terrible liar. But last night he and Mom were sorting through the bills and grumbling.
Mom can’t stand it. “They’re joking, Filip. They’re meanos.”
“It’s meanies, not meanos,” I say.
I’m glad it was a joke, but it wasn’t funny. My knees feel like oatmeal.
Uncle Mato gives me one of his bear hugs, then lifts me over his head until I touch the ceiling. We’ve done this since I was little. My handprints are all over the place up there. The smallest are the darkest––chocolate pudding and mud puddle.
Uncle Mato gets the soccer ball from his bag.
“You’re playing?” Mom asks. “Today?”
“Why wouldn’t we?” I ask.
“The weather’s not so good.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Filip,” Dad warns.
“Worry pimple,” Uncle Mato teases Mom, smiling. Uncle Mato has beautiful, sparkly teeth. Everyone says so.
Mom’s eyes tear up.
“Mom, he’s just teasing!”
Soon Uncle Mato and I are leaping along the sidewalk’s graham-cracker slabs, trying to touch each square once only. It’s easier for Uncle Mato since his legs are longer than mine. I trot after him.
“Well, Filip,” Uncle Mato says. “You’re at the end of the single digits. Once you cross into the land of double digits, there’s no going back.”
“I know,” I pant. An airplane chalks a dusty line across the blue sky. “But I can’t not enter the land of the double digits.”
“True.” Uncle Mato slows down. We’re at the soccer park.
“Anyway, I’m aiming for three digits.”
Uncle Mato ruffles my hair. “Why not shoot for four, like Tom Bombadil in Lord of the Rings?”
“That would be so cool,” I say, imagining being over a thousand years old.
“You could sing trees to sleep, like he does.”
I laugh. Nothing that exciting would ever happen to me. Hopping up Main Street with Uncle Mato on Wednesday afternoons is as exciting as my life gets.
While Uncle Mato tightens his shoelaces, I ask him The Question. I ask it every week. For a year the answer has been no.
“So. Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Pardon?”
“You know what I said. Do you have a girlfriend?”
“I can’t hear you.”
I put my hands on my hips and shout, “DO YOU HAVE A GIRLFRIEND?!”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Yes?” I jump on Uncle Mato’s back.
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Nearly.”
“Who?”
“A nurse.”
“In white shoes with rubbery soles?”
“When she’s at work, yes.” Uncle Mato lowers me to the ground.
“Where did you meet?”
“The hospital.”
“What were you doing at a hospital?”
“People don’t just wander around hospitals.”
“You’re right.” Uncle Mato’s giant eyebrow ripples. The eyebrow is thick and black and runs over both of his eyes without breaking at his nose. It thins a little there, but basically Uncle Mato has one eyebrow. If you look at it too long, it starts to wiggle like a tropical millipede. Sometimes I’ve worried that Uncle Mato’s eyebrow was why he couldn’t get a girlfriend.
“I was visiting a friend.” He shrugs.
He dropkicks the soccer ball. The ball hits a tree trunk, sending a batch of crows squawking from the branches into the sky. Then, without touching the ground, the ball flies toward a power pole. It bounces off the power pole and then—incredible!—zooms directly into the soccer net. Zing, bong, whoosh!
“Goal!” Uncle Mato shouts. “Ludicrous goal!”
We burst out laughing and end up rolling on the ground, holding our stomachs, trying to catch our breath.
Finally I wipe my eyes and stare up at the blue sky, where the crows are still flapping around.
Each crow looks like Uncle Mato’s eyebrow.
“…and today is Filip Horvat’s birthday.”
Through the pa speaker, the principal sounds like a robot with a head cold. “Filip, to the office!”
Nearly every day a student gets called down for a birthday surprise. Stuck at your desk, you hear the lucky kid scurry down the empty hallway like a spirit. Today I’m the one scurrying down the hallway. I’m the birthday ghost.
Principal Jansen steps off her treadmill. “Happy birthday, Filip,” she says, patting at her neck with a towel. “Ten’s a big year.”
Last year she said nine’s a big year. And the year before that, eight’s a big year.
“Are any years small?” I ask.
Principal Jansen squashes her nose with her forefinger. After a moment she lifts her finger, and her nose springs back into place. “Yes. Fifty-three is pretty small. Fifty-four might be too, but I don’t know for sure yet.”