{"product_id":"caring-is-creepy-isbn-9781569479773","title":"Caring Is Creepy","description":"Fifteen-year-old Lynn Marie Sugrue is doing her best to make it through a difficult summer. Her mother works long hours as a nurse, and Lynn suspects that her mother’s pill-popping boyfriend has enlisted her in his petty criminal enterprises. Lynn finds refuge in online flirtations, eventually meeting up with a troubled young soldier, Logan Loy, and inviting him home. When he’s forced to stay over in a storage space accessible through her closet, and the Army subsequently lists him as AWOL, she realizes that he’s the one thing in her life that she can control. Meanwhile, her mother’s boyfriend is on the receiving end of a series of increasingly violent threats, which places Lynn squarely in the cross-hairs.\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cu\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eCaring is Creepy\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/u\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAlex Award Winner\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Lynn’s voice is authentically sardonic and compelling.... The intersections of Lynn’s and Logan’s story line with the consequences of Hayes’s shady dealings are consistently exciting.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"David Zimmerman has written a beautifully menacing novel. I found it impossible to stop reading—as teenage girls flirt with danger online, an AWOL soldier hides out in a closet, and drug deals go dead wrong—and you will too, as the danger steadily escalates, the sentences unspooling like a detonator line that sizzles toward an explosive, unforgettable ending.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eBenjamin Percy, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Wilding\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eRefresh, Refresh \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"This story is sweet, funny, sad, infuriating, and all too real.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eTulsa Books Examiner\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"An engrossing and unforgettable tale based on actual events.... Those who can empathize with flawed characters in dire situations will not be able to put this book down.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"When Zimmerman's characters get dirty, you feel the grit, and when they hurt, you feel the sting.\" \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eAmes Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“[A]n insidious and deceiving but often sweet summertime ensnarement that is alternatively a tangled web and tender trap.” \u003cb\u003e—Blogcritics.org\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cu\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for David Zimmerman’s previous novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Sandbox\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/u\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] gripping first novel.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] remarkable debut.... Zimmerman is a talent to watch.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, STARRED REVIEW\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Zimmerman adroitly depicts [Iraq’s] isolated moonscape—a place as liable to produce hallucinations and heat exhaustion as it is to churn up sandstorms that last for days.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eDavid Zimmerman was raised in Atlanta, Georgia. After receiving his MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama, he spent several years living and working in Brazil and Ethiopia. He now teaches at Iowa State University. His debut novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Sandbox\u003c\/i\u003e, was released by Soho in 2010.\u003cb\u003eThe Game\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe most dangerous thing I ever did was tell a grown man my\u003cbr\u003ereal name. I typed it for him. Lynn Marie Sugrue. When it\u003cbr\u003ehappened, it didn’t seem like anything at all. Hardly something\u003cbr\u003eworth worrying over. Me and my best friend Dani were down in\u003cbr\u003eher basement bedroom on a night hot and thick enough to push\u003cbr\u003ein against the window screens. We were playing our favorite game\u003cbr\u003eof the moment, a sort of online combination of crank phone call\u003cbr\u003eand blind man’s bluff, but it was really more of a scheme to try out\u003cbr\u003ebeing bad in a place we thought it wouldn’t count. We just never\u003cbr\u003eexpected to be the ones wearing the blindfold.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo this is August of 2005 in Metter, Georgia, population half of\u003cbr\u003enothing. A million miles from anywhere good. So this is me and\u003cbr\u003eDani, just turned fifteen and a couple weeks away from our sophomore\u003cbr\u003eyear at Metter High. So this is me fucking up my life like you\u003cbr\u003ewouldn’t believe.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eNew Identities\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe trouble started with a gift. The day after my friend Dani’s\u003cbr\u003ebirthday, I found her moping down in her bedroom beside\u003cbr\u003ea pair of huge boxes. Dani’s dad owns that used car lot out where\u003cbr\u003eLewis Street meets the county highway—Big Dunham’s it’s called,\u003cbr\u003ethe one where in the commercials a girl in a bikini goes around\u003cbr\u003epopping balloons on windshields, saying, “We’re popping prices\u003cbr\u003elike you wouldn’t believe.” He’d been promising for years to buy\u003cbr\u003eher a car when she turned fifteen. Dani wouldn’t be able to drive\u003cbr\u003ewithout an adult sitting next to her for another year, but this hadn’t\u003cbr\u003ebothered her one whit. “I’ll get to have plenty of practice for the\u003cbr\u003elicense test,” she’d say. A few weeks before her birthday, though,\u003cbr\u003esomething happened to change Dani’s mother’s mind, something\u003cbr\u003enot even Dani would tell me about. Whatever it was she did, it\u003cbr\u003emade her mother decide poor little Dani wasn’t quite ready for a\u003cbr\u003ecar of her own. Instead, she got a new computer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI took a beer from my backpack and waved it in front of her face\u003cbr\u003eto get her attention. “Cheer up, there’s more naked men inside that\u003cbr\u003eplastic box over there on the floor than you could ever possibly\u003cbr\u003elook at.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDani closed her eyes and shook her hair so hard it twirled around\u003cbr\u003eher head like a skirt, but she snatched up the beer all the same.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Well,” she said. “For scientific study.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sure,” I said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDani had used the wholesome notion of scientific study as a\u003cbr\u003emeans of investigating all manner of nasty things over the years.\u003cbr\u003eWe’d spent a good deal of the summer watching dirty movies filched\u003cbr\u003efrom her dad’s footlocker in the garage, pausing at the stranger\u003cbr\u003eparts and studying them like scientists. Once, she even got her\u003cbr\u003emom to buy Judy Blume’s Forever with the excuse that she needed\u003cbr\u003eto write a paper on the mores of suburban adolescents in the 1970s\u003cbr\u003efor her social studies class. I still shake my head in wonder over that\u003cbr\u003ebit of bullshit.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt took both of us to tug the computer free. The Styrofoam\u003cbr\u003esqueaked like a stepped-on mouse.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow could I have known then the kind of craziness that would\u003cbr\u003ecome out of that box? Or that on that same exact day, maybe right\u003cbr\u003earound the same time, the boy who’d change everything about me,\u003cbr\u003eright down to my last clean pair of socks, was opening up his own\u003cbr\u003ebox of trouble? Inside his box was the decision to leave his job,\u003cbr\u003ehis home, his whole life. Inside his box was how he got caught\u003cbr\u003esketching a stray dog on the back of a pink requisition form and\u003cbr\u003ewas now pushing a mop as punishment. No more of this, he told\u003cbr\u003ehimself. No way. I’m through. And I remember thinking how a\u003cbr\u003enew computer smelled like clean.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDani tossed the instruction book and called her next-door\u003cbr\u003eneighbor, Wynn.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWynn was a year above us. He was bony and stooped and had\u003cbr\u003eM\u0026amp;M-sized whiteheads on the back of his neck. He smelled like\u003cbr\u003efresh-cut onion. As he sat at the keyboard, going through the startup\u003cbr\u003einstructions point by point, I made a shadow-puppet alligator\u003cbr\u003ecrawl across his back, showing Dani how any one of the whiteheads\u003cbr\u003ecould burst at the slightest touch, like a grenade with a loose pin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I’m going to leave you two lovebirds alone,” I said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDani pinched my arm, hard.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“And I’m going to stab you in the arm with a fork,” Dani said,\u003cbr\u003emaking an irritable V with her eyebrows.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut I didn’t leave. I sat on the woven rag rug that covered most\u003cbr\u003eof Dani’s floor. Hers was the kind of bedroom you’d expect to see\u003cbr\u003eon some Nickelodeon teen sitcom. It was the size of my living\u003cbr\u003eroom and decorated in a color scheme of teal and silver. Dani used\u003cbr\u003ethe word teal, anyhow—really, it was plain blue. The four-poster\u003cbr\u003ebed was blue, with blue sheets, and her two beanbag chairs were\u003cbr\u003esilver. She called this the hanging-out area and had hung posters of\u003cbr\u003eher favorite bands. In most, the musicians all had the look of longdistance\u003cbr\u003etruckers loitering in the parking lot of a Waffle House at\u003cbr\u003etwo am. But in the newest one, there weren’t any people at all, just\u003cbr\u003ea big blue box with the silhouettes of tan and white weeds. Dani\u003cbr\u003ehad become obsessed with a band called The Shins. Jingle-jangle\u003cbr\u003eguitars, sad whispering boys, and the occasional rim shot. Humalong\u003cbr\u003emusic that snuck up on you and stayed in your skull.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen Wynn told us we were online, Dani stared through the\u003cbr\u003ewall and tugged at a strand of hair as he set up an e-mail account\u003cbr\u003efor us and bookmarked some sites he said he thought might be of\u003cbr\u003einterest, so I could tell something was on her mind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“You like celebrity gossip?” Wynn asked. “Gaming news?\u003cbr\u003eThere’s this one site that’s really great that has all these funny alligator-\u003cbr\u003eeating-pet stories from Florida. You want to see that?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Really,” I said. “Florida?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Oh my God,” Dani snapped, “will you two shut up about\u003cbr\u003eFlorida? Look—” She squeezed her eyes shut until the lids\u003cbr\u003ewrinkled. Whatever it was she wanted to say seemed to be trapped\u003cbr\u003elike a hairball in her throat. Finally, she coughed it up. “Why don’t\u003cbr\u003eyou bring us to a site where we can . . . mess with people.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What do you mean?” Wynn asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Pretend to be someone else,” she said. “Talk to them. Get\u003cbr\u003einside their heads. Just mess with people, you know?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWynn wiped his hands on the back of his green corduroy cutoffs.\u003cbr\u003e“Who do you want to be?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe looked for a few moments over at the posters in the hanging-\u003cbr\u003eout area. “I could be a singer in some band from Scotland.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Come on, Dani,” I said. “Think big. Why not a fifty-year-old\u003cbr\u003egay guy with gorgeous pecs from Dothan, Alabama.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Or a pretty girl from Metter, Georgia,” Wynn said. There\u003cbr\u003ewere beads of sweat collecting in the wispy, little grandma mustache\u003cbr\u003ehe looked to be trying to grow. It was gross and I really wanted\u003cbr\u003ehim to wipe it off, but I didn’t say anything. Dani had flung\u003cbr\u003eenough mean at him for three people. Earlier she had asked him\u003cbr\u003eif he thought about me when he jerked off and I thought the boy\u003cbr\u003emight faint.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Oh, please,” Dani said. She let loose with a lip-flapping sigh\u003cbr\u003eand made what I thought of as her fat face. She’d kill me if she\u003cbr\u003eever heard me say this, but she had one of those Cabbage Patch\u003cbr\u003eKid faces. Round and plump. And when she frowned, like she was\u003cbr\u003edoing now, she’d push her chin down and the fat would wrinkle\u003cbr\u003eup under there, making it look like she’d suddenly lost her neck.\u003cbr\u003eDani wasn’t what you’d call fat fat, but she wasn’t even close to\u003cbr\u003eskinny either. She had beautiful black hair that came down to her\u003cbr\u003eshoulders and curled up at the ends in a flip and a button nose\u003cbr\u003ethat turned up at the end too. When I was mad at her, I called her\u003cbr\u003e“pig snout” in my head, but the truth was she had a pretty nose.\u003cbr\u003eI wouldn’t mind having it. Mine had a big bump on the bridge I\u003cbr\u003ehated. But her best feature, in my opinion, was her eyes, which\u003cbr\u003ewere the color of a Rolling Rock bottle that’d been smashed on\u003cbr\u003econcrete. Green with silvery splinters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“But why would you want to be someone else?” Wynn asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDani caught my eye and grinned. Wynn looked back and forth\u003cbr\u003ebetween us, wearing a smile that looked like it hurt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What?” he said. “What?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Alright,” Dani said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Alright, what?” Wynn said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Make me a fifty-year-old gay guy from Dothan, Alabama, The\u003cbr\u003ePeanut Capital of the World.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“With gorgeous pecs,” I added.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd so Wynn showed us how to become a fifty-year-old gay\u003cbr\u003eguy from Dothan, Alabama. We were never quite ourselves again\u003cbr\u003eafter that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAsshole\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy mother is a nurse and my father is an asshole. He left\u003cbr\u003eus when I was six. For the first couple of years after the\u003cbr\u003edivorce, he lived in Savannah and came up on weekends to see\u003cbr\u003eme. He paid his child support. My dad was an accountant at the\u003cbr\u003eGulfstream airplane factory. “Your father makes a pile of cash,”\u003cbr\u003emy mom would say whenever I asked her to get me something.\u003cbr\u003e“Ask him for it.” Or she’d say, “You can go see that movie with\u003cbr\u003eyour father if you think you can shake ten bucks out of him.” Or,\u003cbr\u003e“If your father had half a heart, he’d get you some decent shoes.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Your mother has an active imagination,” is what he’d tell me\u003cbr\u003ewhen I asked him. “Rich, my ass,” he’d say. “Gulfstream doesn’t\u003cbr\u003eeven have a union. At least not for accountants.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe last time I ever saw my dad was the Saturday he took me\u003cbr\u003eout to Tybee Island. In the parking lot, he swiped me a ratty orange\u003cbr\u003elife vest off of someone’s boat trailer. He reached in and grabbed it\u003cbr\u003eand just kept walking toward the beach.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was three weeks away from being eight years old. When\u003cbr\u003eDad didn’t call on my birthday, my mom tried to reach him and\u003cbr\u003efound his phone had been disconnected. She called his boss out\u003cbr\u003eat Gulfstream, who said he’d stopped showing up for work three\u003cbr\u003edays ago and hadn’t left a forwarding address. He and my dad had\u003cbr\u003ebeen friends since high school, so my mom thought Mack—that\u003cbr\u003ewas the boss’s name—was covering for him. She said she hoped\u003cbr\u003ehis wife did the same thing to him one day and for him to go fuck\u003cbr\u003ehimself. She wrapped the phone cord around her fingers so tight\u003cbr\u003ethey turned yellow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe next day, Mack called back. There was a problem with\u003cbr\u003eDad’s accounts. The day after that, the police came to our house.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI asked what Dad had done to make everybody so mad at him.\u003cbr\u003eMy mom said, “Your father’s an asshole. He did what comes natural\u003cbr\u003eto assholes. He shit all over everybody.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe year I turned eight I learned how to do laundry, make Kraft\u003cbr\u003emacaroni and cheese out of a box, and smoke cigarettes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI now divide my life into two parts—BDD and ADD—Before\u003cbr\u003eDad Disappeared and After Dad Disappeared, and more and more\u003cbr\u003eI don’t remember a lot about BDD.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI do remember Tybee Island, though.\u003cbr\u003eHe must of known he was leaving by then.\u003cbr\u003eI wonder if he’d planned to tell me.\u003cbr\u003eOr maybe he didn’t know yet. And when he figured it out, it was\u003cbr\u003etoo late to say anything.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis hair was curly and red and very thin on top. The sun turned\u003cbr\u003ehis scalp the color of boiled shrimp. We treaded water out past the\u003cbr\u003ebreakers, the gulls calling out threats to one another and the sunlight\u003cbr\u003esmashing into millions of pieces in the choppy water.","brand":"Soho Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299757248741,"sku":"NP9781569479773","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781569479773.jpg?v=1767723410","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/caring-is-creepy-isbn-9781569479773","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}