Same Door, Same Time

There are four words in this book that get said before every door.

"Same door, same time."

It starts as a joke. That matters, and I want to be honest that I didn't plan it — I wrote it once, early, as the kind of thing a kid says to be funny when the alternative is admitting he's scared, and then I got to the next door and the line was simply there, waiting, the way these things are when they're right.

Nobody in the book ever decides to keep saying it. There's no scene where they agree it's their thing. It's just that they said it once and it worked, so they said it again, and by the third time it isn't a joke anymore and neither of them has acknowledged that out loud, because they are twelve.

What it actually means

It means: we go in together and we come out together, and we are not discussing the second part.

Jr and Dakota are the only two who say it. Not to anyone else, not about anyone else. And every time it comes up, it is doing two jobs at once — it's the last thing said before something hard, and it's the whole friendship compressed into four words so neither of them has to say the longer version.

That's how the real ones work, I think. My son and his best friend have had a running argument since the third grade that neither of them has ever won or expects to. That argument is their version. It's not what they're saying. It's that they still have something they only say to each other.

Why I kept it

Because kids do this and books mostly don't let them. A catchphrase in a children's book usually gets explained — somebody turns to somebody and says that's our thing, we say that because — and the explaining kills it dead.

So it never gets explained. It gets said, at six doors, by two boys in over their heads.

The first one is October 5.

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