Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware by M.T. Anderson Read Free Book Online Page B

mountains?”
    Jasper rose. “Mother,” he said. “I must return. I must again cross the bleak and blasted border of New Jersey. There is no other way. It shall not be for long this time.” He went and embraced her.
    Katie and Lily put down their forks. Mrs. Dash was always lonely. Desperately lonely. She had lived for years in this crumbling house of the future and had raised Jasper completely by herself, Jasper’s father being a beam of highly concentrated information emitted from the region of the Horsehead Nebula.
    Jasper and his mother held on to each other. “Oh, Jas. Jas,” she said, and she started to cry, cradling the back of his head. “Last time, you were gone for so long.”
    â€œMy friend is in need,” said Jasper.
    She closed her eyes, kissed the top of his head, and whispered, resigned, “Someone always is.”
    â€œWill you be okay?” he asked.
    She nodded. “I always am. I have my committee meetings. Tomorrow is the benefit dinner for the Save the Chameleon Fund. The Decentville Zoo thinks their chameleons are either dead, missing, or plaid.”
    â€œWe won’t be long,” said Jasper. “Just a few days. We’ll take the Gyroscopic Sky Suite.”
    â€œAnd your woolen socks,” said Mrs. Dash. “It gets cold up in those mountains.”
    At the word
mountains
, Katie picked up her fork and threw it down again.
    And so, our heroes were off to Delaware.
    Now they are at their homes, packing. Lights from passing cars slide across their bedroom walls. They have their suitcases open and are zipping up their sponge-bags. Lily and Katie are slightly at a loss as to what clothes to bring.
    But before I move the scene of this gripping tale to the Blue Hen State, I need to make a couple of things clear.
    Occasionally, an author will go away on a vacation for a week somewhere—someplace where the food is spicy and he doesn’t recognizeall the fruit—and he’ll have a really great time, and the culture will seem very exotic, and once he gets home to Ohio, or Minnesota, or Maine, he’ll decide to write a novel about it all. He’ll base the book on his one meager week staying at a Hilton Hotel a mile outside of the city he’s describing and his reading of a few library books with names like
The Jewel in the Dagger
, or
Siberian Uplift
, or
A Cornish Country Autumn
, or Time/Life’s
The Glory of Slurbostan.
    And so, instead of the book being written by someone who has lived there by the side of the ruins described and has spent their life eating those little crunchy fried things, you get a book by someone who really only has a cartoon idea of what a place is like, a bungled pantomime of information about customs and foods and wacky clothes and music. There are many books of that kind, written by people who have barely traveled to the destination they write about. You can’t trust them.
    For this reason, to put you at ease, let me reassure you: This is not one of those books. Ididn’t write this novel with a week’s research and a couple of foldout brochures. I wouldn’t do that to you. No, my friends, I solemnly promise: I have never once been to Delaware in my life. I can state with confidence that I am completely ignorant. I am a moron. I know absolutely nothing about the place. Everything I say is simply an uneducated guess. * You are not in good hands. You are in incredibly clumsy, incompetent hands.
    Of course, it is important to us here at Simon and Schuster that everything in our books be entirely accurate. I would hate it, for example, if you were actually from the state of Delaware and you found some inaccuracy in my portrayal.
    So, for that reason, if you do discover there is some difference between this book’s portrait of the state and the reality, please write a note describing the problem in full. Send it, with aself-addressed, stamped envelope, to:
    The Governor of