The Boy in the Book Is Real

People ask where the idea came from, and for a long time I gave a vague answer, because the real one is me cutting my son's hair in a bathroom.

Jr was a what-if kid. Always had been. He'd hand me some extreme situation out of nowhere — usually one with no clean answer — and want to talk it all the way through, and I learned early that "I don't know" was not an acceptable response and never ended the conversation.

This particular day he was twelve and standing at the bathroom mirror and I was cutting his hair. There's another mirror behind that one, so his reflection went back and back and back the way it does — the same boy, multiplying, smaller and smaller until the room ran out. He was looking straight at it. I was looking at the back of his head with a pair of scissors in my hand.

And he said: what if that's another world. What if I got pulled in.

So we stood there and imagined it. Not for a minute — properly, the way he always wanted it done. What would be over there. What the rules would be. How you'd get out. The hallway came out of that, and then the doors, and then we got stuck on the only question that actually mattered: what is behind them.

Video games, we decided, because video games could be anything. One door could be a racetrack and the next one a dungeon and the one after that a war, and a kid his age would already know how all of them worked without being taught. They'd be hard. And — this is the part we were deliberate about, standing in a bathroom — a game has an out. However bad it gets in there, a game is a thing that can be beaten.

That decision is the whole series. Lives, chances, a challenge built to be survivable: all of it comes from two people agreeing that a kid should be able to get out.

He has no idea, I don't think, that he handed me six books while getting a haircut.

He was twelve when he asked. I started writing it when he was thirteen. I finished it this year, and he is nineteen.

And when I came to write that bathroom down, I didn't write ours. I wrote my grandmother's — green, and unmistakably 1970s, the particular green that a whole decade committed to and then spent forty years apologizing for. I did not decide to do that. I sat down to describe a bathroom and my grandmother's is the one that came out, the way it always does.

Which means the doorway to the entire series is a green bathroom from the seventies. I've made my peace with it. There's something right about it, actually — a portal has no business being in a beautiful room.

The other half of it

The premise came from that bathroom. The two boys in it came from about twelve years of listening.

Their birthdays are about two weeks apart, and Dakota was at our house for Jr's every single year, so at some point I stopped treating them as two occasions and just celebrated the both of them together. Nobody had to be the one being sung at, which I did not understand the value of until much later. Every year, right up through their eighteenth.

On that eighteenth birthday, Jr signed on the dotted line for the Marine Corps. He finished his first year at LSU anyway — classes ended on a Thursday, and by Monday he was at Parris Island. I am not going to pretend that was a coincidence of timing I enjoyed.

And it was never only birthdays. This house was Dakota's second home. He was here most weekends the whole way through, and some summers he turned up after the last day of school and did not go home until it was time to get ready for the next one — video games, sleepovers, the two of them arguing about something in the next room while I worked.

The house has been quieter since the older two left, which is its own thing and not this post's thing.

That running argument is the sound I've been trying to get on the page ever since.

Jr

Jr is nineteen now. He's a Marine. He calls when he can, and the voice on the phone is a full-grown man's voice, and I am never fully prepared for it.

The boy in the book is twelve, and he stays twelve, and that is entirely on purpose. I did not write him to keep him — I'm not interested in the version of this where a mother freezes her kid in amber. I wrote him because twelve is the age where a person is still asking permission for most things and has already, quietly, stopped asking for the things that matter. That's an extraordinary age to write. It's also an extraordinary age to parent, and I did not fully understand it while it was happening. Writing it down was how I caught up.

He has never given me a review of this book and I don't expect one. That isn't coldness and it isn't disinterest — he's not a reader of this kind of thing, and he's stoic in the specific way the Marines did not invent in him so much as confirm. What he did was love that I was writing it. And he will own a copy of every book in this series, for one reason: I wrote them. That's the whole review, and I'd take it over a paragraph of praise.

Kaitlyn

His sister reads them with me.

Kaitlyn reads every manuscript with me. Sometimes that means the phone, the two of us going through it paragraph by paragraph so we can argue about it in real time; sometimes it's a text out of nowhere about something on page forty.

What she catches is not what I expected her to catch. She'll tell me a word is too old for the age range and hand me a better one. She finds the inconsistencies. And she asks questions about a section until I have to admit that what I meant and what it says are two different things, which is the most useful thing anybody does for me.

The rest of it is that we laugh. There are whole passages that sound so exactly like those two that you can hear them saying it — Jr going "that's not how this works, that's not how any of this works" — and she's the only other person on earth who knows whether that's right, because she grew up in the house with them. When she tells me something sounds like them, she isn't being kind to her mother. She was there.

Two kids, two completely different ways of showing up for the same book. One reads every line with me. One will put it on a shelf because I wrote it. I'll take both.

Dakota

Dakota is real, and Dakota is still his best friend, which is the detail that surprises adults more than anything else in this book.

Kids aren't surprised. Kids assume best friends are permanent, because at eleven and twelve that's how it feels and nobody's told them otherwise yet. Adults hear "still best friends at nineteen" and go quiet for a second, because most of us can name the person who used to be that and isn't anymore.

On the page, Dakota does what he did in my house every weekend for years: he goes in both feet first without checking what's on the other side. He rarely thought anything through. He dove.

And Jr wouldn't do a single thing until he had thought it all the way through, every aspect of it, which should have made them a terrible match and instead made them the only two people either of them needed. One of them got them moving. The other one got them back. In a story about six doors and a rule that punishes mistakes, that is either the most dangerous pairing you could put in a hallway or the only reason anybody gets out of one. Mostly it's both.

I did not have to invent his dialogue. I had to stop myself transcribing it.

What I changed

Everything around them, and almost nothing about them.

The hallway is invented. The mirror is not — square, thin brass frame gone dark at the corners, and it never sits straight no matter who levels it. The rules are invented. The danger is invented.

The two boys are not. The way Jr goes still and careful when something actually matters, the way Dakota fills a silence, the specific negotiation of who goes first through a door neither of them wants to open — that's from twelve years of weekends in my house.

One more real thing: he counts. Everything. Stairs, ceiling tiles, the days until something. I taught him that at a kitchen table without either of us noticing it was happening, and years later I put him in a place with no clock and no window and found out what it was for.

A book is out now about two twelve-year-olds and a hallway. One of them is my son. One of them is his best friend. And somewhere out there is a real nineteen-year-old in a uniform who, not very long ago, was in the next room losing an argument about zombies.

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