1st 5 Pages January Workshop - Bowles

Name: Emily Bowles
Genre: Middle-grade fantasy
Title: Starloom, Spindle

Chapter 1: Sam’s Secret Code

“Sam, dinner!” Her mom’s voice echoed through the duplex, a loud reminder of how empty the house was without their furniture—and without Sam’s father, who had left them exactly 37 days ago.

Not that Sam was counting, but…well…numbers meant more to her right now than the words her friends used when they talked in the cafeteria or at recess.  

Sam loved math.  She liked the way numbers felt real and heavy.  They settled her in a way that nothing else could.  Sometimes, she didn’t know how to respond to people when they talked to her.  She’d hear them say hello, but her mind was miles away, trying to work through computations that she could see, numbers floating right beneath the surface in a way that seemed to make sense of things.  

Sometimes she felt like there were voices telling her how to weave letters and numbers together, voices that almost sang in her mind.  The voices hummed, faster and faster as she worked, and they slowed when she reached points that were difficult, places in the code where she was losing the pattern, where meaning and intelligibility defied her.  

In fourth grade, she’d tried to explain that to one of her friends.  When her teacher overheard, he took her aside.  “Sam,” he had said, “I think you’d really be great at coding.”  

Coding was something that she’d heard older boys talking about at lunch.  It seemed like a secret world, where punctuation marks and words meant—simultaneously—more and less to them than they did to other people.  

When Mr. Cleary said that to her, she felt like she was being invited into a world where she might just fit in.  

Girls who liked math more than they liked cheerleading or pageants didn’t really have a place in Roanoke.  At least, not in the suburbs where Sam had always lived.  Even in elementary school, she stood out like a sore thumb when she didn’t remember to wear school colors for pep rallies—and where she was the only girl in her class who had no clue about who the next Miss Summitridge High would be.   

Of course, it didn’t help that her older sister Bethany had been Miss Summitridge High her junior and senior years, or that her mother’s dress shop was the sole supplier of the gowns, Belle’s Boutique.  

Sometimes Sam talked on the phone to her grandmother after school and tried to explain how out of place she felt.  When she was little, her grandmother visited a lot.  She’d take the train all the way from the condo she lived in down in Florida so she could spend a few days with Sam’s family.  Even as her eyes deteriorated and she began to struggle with cataracts, her grandmother stayed independent.  She loved spending time with them in Roanoke, and she always came a few weeks before pageants so she could help Sam’s mom out.  

It had been about two years ago when her visits became farther and farther apart.  Young as she’d been, Sam realized something was wrong.  When Iris failed to come up before the big pageant, Sam had to ask her mother what was the matter.  Bethany knew better than to ask.  She was the type of girl who only asked questions she thought her parents wanted her to ask—not the questions they were avoiding.  

Her mom couldn’t avoid it when Sam asked where their grandma was.

“Well, she’s been struggling for a long time now,” Liz paused, trying to put together the right words for her daughter.  “Her doctors thought cataract surgery might change things, but it just delayed the inevitable.  She’s lost her vision.”  

Sam’s brain twisted and turned the words around.  At school, she’d studied mystics and visionaries.  Was her grandmother one?  And if so, why did she lose that?  

She stared into space for a few minutes before it clicked.  

Her grandmother had gone blind.  

“How will she sew?” Sam’s voice came out more like a scream than she’d intended it to, but she couldn’t help it.  Her grandmother’s whole life, her whole identity, hinged on her sight.  Even after retiring from her job at a fine yarn store where tourists bought expensive, hand-dyed yarns and handmade accessories that somehow managed to be beachy souvenirs even though they were made of silk or acrylic fibers (rarely did she knit with wool), Iris spent hours sewing and knitting.  She created gifts for the family, and she poured herself into her work.  She could talk for hours as long as she held a ball of yarn and some needles in her lap.  

Sam didn’t know how many times her grandmother had tried to teach her simple stitches—or how many times she’d dropped them in frustration before returning to her keyboard.       

For the past two years, coding had helped Sam find a way of expressing herself without having to say a word.  Sometimes she wondered if her grandmother felt the same way about thread and yarn as she did about coding.  She didn’t understand it well enough to know for sure, but she had seen her grandmother’s face when she fixed a dropped stitch and recognized it as the face she made when she realized where she’d added an extra bracket that temporarily ruined her code.  

She really needed that, since the people who listened to her drove her crazy—and the people she wanted to talk to rarely had time for anything other than preparing for the pageant.    

Somehow, the square brackets and computational thinking processes helped her reduce her life to order.  Plus, she was building things through code that she could hardly even imagine in the real world.  

Things her mother would definitely throw away in one of her cleaning fits—which exponentially multiplied after they moved into the duplex on Chimney Lane.   

Sam’s mom had never had much patience for clutter. Her aesthetic was streamlined at home, maybe because she spent her day surrounded by sequins and fake flowers.  She hated extraneous objects and sometimes seemed like she was sending clothes to Goodwill while Sam still had them on her body.  

Kind of the opposite of Sam’s father, who kept books and loose papers piled high in every possible shelf and drawer.  Sam felt like him sometimes.  Other days, she wanted to take a match to the notebooks she’d hidden under her bed and start over.  

Over the past few days, she’d been working through a project Mr. Cleary had given her.  It was the toughest assignment she’d ever had.  

She’d come home from school every day, grab a glass of milk, and head straight upstairs, where she’d add and subtract, trying to redesign the code so she could map out what looked like a rainbow spider web, radiating endless loops.  

Each day, she felt like she was building something bolder and brighter.  She was proud of herself. She was almost ready to show Mr. Cleary.  

Just a few finishing touches, and she knew she’d have something polished enough that she might be able to try out for the Computing Olympiad this year.