The Great Googlini Read online

  We don’t have all the ingredients, but Mrs. Zupan hands an egg and a bag of coconut across the gap. She teaches me how to cream butter and sugar. Basically, you mash the two with the back of the wooden spoon.

  After supper I take the stairwell steps two at a time.

  I feel light as air. Happy about Uncle Mato and happy to be on my way to Frances’s!

  Outside, the sky is salted with stars.

  My uncles don’t see so many stars in the city. There’s too much light from the office buildings and streetlights.

  You need a little darkness to see the stars.

  The cookie tin is warm and heavy in my hands as I map Ursa Major and the Belt of Orion.

  It’s a school night in Bording, British Columbia. I don’t feel bored at all.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you very much to Dragan, who cast a knowledgeable Croatian eye on this novel, confirming—or laughing at—its references to Croatian food and culture. And love always to my dear son, Ezra, who overheard with me a woman on the Paris Metro telling a friend she was “a master googler” who could find anything on the Internet. His trip to the Pompidou was delayed as I squatted on a curb, scribbling the notes that became this book. Thanks too to Hazel and Alden, who support and encourage their mom always. And thank you to Andrew, without whom—and without Google—I would not have had the life-changing joy of meeting. Thanks to ever-inspiring friends Pam, Leslie, John, Julie, Andrea, Lesley, Bruce, Amaya, Amanda and Liz McG. And to my generous, inventive editor, Liz Kemp.

  Sara Cassidy is a poet and journalist and the author of nine books for young readers, including Slick and Skylark. Her books have been selected for the Junior Library Guild, and she has been a finalist for the Kirkus Children’s Literature Prize, the Chocolate Lily Award and the Bolen Books Children’s Book Prize. Sara has taught at Camosun College and Royal Roads University. For more information, visit saracassidywriter.com.

  Chapter One

  Ancient potatoes lurk in our bedroom closets. Under beds with dust bunnies. In the toes of rubber boots no one has worn since spring. When Mom finds one of the withered gray tubers, she waves it in our faces.

  “Do your homework, Rudy!” she says. “Cyrus, clean your room! Or I’ll touch you with this putrid thing. I’ll cook it in your soup without you knowing!”

  A slimy tornado of fear whirls in my throat at the thought of wrinkly-potato soup. I try not to gag.

  I expect the potato to clink and clack when Mom shakes it in my face, but of course it doesn’t. It’s not a baby’s rattle, it’s a potato. A potato that looks like it’s had a fight with a hole punch. The shriveled spud is the leftover ammo from a potato-gun battle between my brother Rudy and me. Rudy’s eight, and I’m nine.

  A potato gun looks like a water pistol, but instead of water, you fill it with potato. First, you find a big potato in the stinky kitchen drawer. Then you shove the gun’s short barrel in past the peel to load it with potato flesh. A potato pellet is shaped like a pencil eraser, only it’s crunchy and white, not rubbery and pink.

  It doesn’t exactly hurt when you get shot with a potato pellet, but it can sting. Sometimes, if Mom’s out of potatoes, Rudy and I battle with apples. Once, when Mom was at work, we tried a banana. It was disgusting. Banana pellets don’t sting—they just mush and dribble.

  Eventually, Rudy and I tire of shooting each other with bits of spud. We get distracted by the tv or lego. Or by Wigglechin, our cat, who is old and often clinging to things she’s trying not to fall from. Like the living room curtains or the dining-room chandelier.

  We drop our guns and leave our hole-pocked potatoes to fester where they fall. A month or two later, Mom discovers one and shakes it at us. I sure wish I wasn’t so frightened of a withered potato.