My Life as a Book

Derek makes a bargain with Margot to have his group skip Fraction Friday if he reads a chapter of a book from his summer reading list. Derek manages to get through half a chapter, picturing each detail as vividly as possible and imagining the characters. Afterward, he picks up his vocabulary sketchbook and flips through it, realizing that it looks very much like a story or movie of his summer, “like one of those old flip-o-ramas” (100). He goes to show his dad, proud of what he has unintentionally created, and his dad predictably turns it into an excuse to bug Derek about reading some more so that he can add more pages to his sketchbook. The prospect of work ruins the moment for Derek, and he goes to play with a friend named Henry instead.

Derek’s mom picks him up from Learning Camp, along with Carly, whose mother asked for help that day. Outside Carly’s house are many beautiful plants and flowers, and Derek is sure that when Carly’s mother invites them inside, the experience will be boring and awful. Instead, Derek sees the class hedgehog (which Carly is watching for the summer). Even better, Carly shows Derek her imaginary heist game that she set up in the basement using fishing line and velvet cloth. Derek is surprised and impressed by Carly’s creativity and her appreciation for action movies. He’s also surprised to find himself having fun with Carly and asks to stay at her house a while longer. He and Carly play the heist game as she shows him how to get through the maze, and Derek feels jealous that Carly can manage to read all the summer books and still have the time to create such intricate games to play. To illustrate the word “intricate,” Derek draws a spiderweb with a happy spider on it.

Amy is babysitting Derek but mostly ignores him to watch TV and talk with her friend on the phone. Derek decides to amuse himself by going into his mom’s veterinary office and lying in one of the dogs’ cages with the other dogs. As he ponders how much he misses Matt, Amy walks in to tell Derek that Matt is on the phone. Matt tells Derek about all the fun things he has been doing, including riding the carousel, which Derek draws as a boy riding an elephant on a pole. Matt went to the beach where Susan drowned and informs Derek that it’s known as a dangerous beach with “monumental waves and a riptide” (114). Derek tells Matt about Margot and his illustrations, but then Matt must go. In a fit of anger and a feeling of injustice, Derek decides to climb the roof of the garage and throw his shoe at the satellite to upset Amy and ruin her show. Derek often acts out in destructive ways when he’s angry, sad, or jealous, and people like Amy or his parents usually pay the price.

One afternoon following camp, Derek receives two important emails: one from his grandma, talking about how much she misses the family (she lives in Boston; they live in California), the other from Madeline James, Susan’s mother, thanking him for his post on the memorial page and assuring Derek that Susan “looks down on [him] from heaven with pride” (118). Derek wonders if Susan really is his guardian angel and depicts the word “guardian” by drawing an angel looking down on a boy watching TV. Derek decides to try and manipulate his mother into taking him up to see his grandma and then stopping to see Matt (and Martha’s Vineyard) on the way back. When his mom realizes what he’s doing, she gets angry with him and sends him to his room. Derek decides to enlist his grandma’s help in convincing his mom to take him.

Derek’s mother decides that a family trip to Boston will be good for everyone and agrees that they’ll go next weekend. Derek must read the books on his summer reading list as his part of the deal, and the adults even allow him to bring Bodi on the trip. Although Matt won’t be at Martha’s Vineyard by the time they arrive, Derek’s mother thinks the trip will help Derek. She tells him that they’ll visit the beach and Susan’s mom so that he can “see there’s no big mystery and move on” (125). Derek is full of excitement, and when he goes to open the pizza that his mother brought home, he finds three books inside. His mom holds back laughter as Derek opens the other box and takes a slice of pizza. He takes his dinner upstairs and opens one of the books, noticing the prompting questions from Ms. Williams in the margins for the first time. Derek jokes that his only question is how long it will take him to read the book if he must “stop every minute to answer all these stupid questions” (128). He writes to his grandma to tell her how happy he is to be coming to see her. Derek has his first good news of the summer and finally has something to look forward to as well.

Derek takes Bodi for a walk to the park and sits down under a tree to read some Calvin & Hobbes. He notices that he and Bodi are sitting the exact same way as Calvin & Hobbes do in the book and finds that amusing. Ms. Williams is at the park playing softball. Her hair is in pigtails, and she wears casual attire: high tops and cut-off jeans. Derek finds the situation awkward and wants it to end quickly, but when he has a chance to show off his illustrations, he can’t pass it up. Ms. Williams compliments the drawings and mentions that Carly told her about how great they were. Derek is surprised to hear that Carly complimented his art. When he gets home that day, he finds three emails from his grandma (who is clearly excited about the upcoming visit). He writes back, expressing the same sentiment, and then looks at the memorial page again. He finds a new entry indicating that a girl named Lauren was with Susan that day. Afterward, Derek goes out to the porch to draw.

Derek has the opportunity to visit Pedro the monkey at his home one afternoon with his mother. Pedro is a helper for Michael, a 17-year-old boy with cerebral palsy. When Derek hangs out with Michael and Pedro, he gets to see Pedro fetch a DVD, place it in the player, and then microwave popcorn for Michael. It’s “everything [he] hoped hanging out with a monkey would be” (138). Derek sees how Pedro looks “at Michael with affection” (138-139) and draws a picture of himself holding his dog with the word “affection” underneath to remind himself what this word means. As Derek and Michael watch the movie, Derek thinks about how his mother is a great veterinarian and his father is a great illustrator, and he wonders if he’ll ever be great. After the movie, Derek shows Michael his drawings, and Michael shows Derek how to turn them into animations using the computer. Derek is amazed, and together the boys turn several of Derek’s vocabulary drawings into moving pictures.

Derek observes that his perception of reading has evolved over the summer. In the beginning, Margot taught him how to visualize what he read as a movie. He then discovered that he could view his drawings like a flipbook. Now, he’s seeing his drawings turned into actual animations, like his “flip-o-rama book just jumped onto the computer screen for all to see” (141). When Derek gets home, he tells his dad about the animations, inspiring his dad to break out of his routine and try the program himself. Derek feels like he finally did something right.