Simon Sort of Says: (Newbery Honor Book)
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Read between August 20 - August 26, 2025
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There are times when the worst thing a friend can be is right. This is about my trauma and anxiety, because I have suddenly remembered the date. And I’m suddenly thinking about the photo. There’s more than one, I know that. They are still the first things that come up if you google “Simon O’Keeffe.” But there’s this one. When they finally kicked the door in and shouted at everyone to raise their hands. The police body cam captured the exact second I saw everything, the exact second that they shouted, Raise your hands, and I did, but it was only me.
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“Agate, I just want to be normal. I want to live my normal life in Grin And Bear It, Nebraska, with my mom and her dead people and my dad and his sackbut obsession and my service puppy Hercules and my friend who wants to fake a space message. Okay? I want to be the kid who has that life and not be Simon O’Keeffe ever again.” “But you are Simon O’Keeffe.” She sounds baffled. “I just—” I say, “I just want to be the one from now.”
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I think there’s never going to be a now. I think there’s always going to be a before, and an after.
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This is the point where the narrator voice-over would say “He was not fine.”
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“Are you okay right now?” “Hardly ever,” I say. I actually meant to say “good as ever,” but like the narrator voice mentioned…. I think I might throw up.
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“Is this about Vega?” Agate stage-whispers. “Is this about what?” says Kevin. Agate launches in—“Simon and me have this plan…” And I absolutely cannot deal with that right now, I cannot deal with being outed to Kevin as a Space Message Crazy, cannot deal with the What Ifs of sending the message, of not sending the message, not right now,
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Agate yelps like a kicked puppy and shuts up.
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“It’s gonna s-h-i-t all over everything,” says Dad. I pull the blanket down under my chin. “Uh, Dad? You know I can spell now, right?” “My little boy,” says my dad, theatrically. “All grown up.”
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“If he does, I’m driving him straight to the taxidermist,” says my mother. “I’m donating him to an avian flu research program. I’m plucking his feathers and using them to fletch arrows. I’m gonna set those arrows on fire and—”
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My legs feel somehow both extra stiff and also rubbery, the way legs feel if you’ve run forever. Hercules knows the word “walk” because he’s a hecking genius. He comes prancing out from under the bed, stretches—downward dog, then upward dog, like a baby-fat yoga buddy—and then sits at my feet and grins up at me, mouth open.
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We’re all walking, like, extra careful—like we’re in a horror movie and we’re taking a poker to the basement to check out that weird noise. This is a crazy idea. And yet, there’s something good about the way my feet hit the ground. I’m walking. Two years ago, I was locked in a third-floor classroom with only one door, and I couldn’t get out. But now I’m walking. We’re walking. We emerge into our backyard, blinking in the sunlight like cave people. There is the muffled sound of a desperate peacock, a pickup rumbling down Main Street, the wind. The real world, the now. We walk out into it ...more
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I said we couldn’t get out, back then. The worse truth is: We didn’t try. We did what they told us to do. We did what we had practiced. We waited. We hid. We sheltered in place.
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It’s the Sunday after the Friday that is 5/15, and we have survived. We are on our feet. It feels like a turning point.
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The Jesus Squirrel himself has not been seen since Easter. Dad jokes he has probably ascended into squirrel heaven.
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her smile turns wicked as she plucks the last cinnamon roll right out of my fingers. “Hey!” “You stole the other ones,” she says. “You’re lucky I don’t take the hand.” She tears a strip off the outer coil and just pops it into her mouth, like threatening to dismember your only child is a normal thing to do.
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None of it was a lie. There were alpacas; they were on the local news. There was a tortoise making the world’s slowest break for freedom and the owl that ended up in the rafters with the back half of a cat, and they had to call the fire department to get them down. None of that was a lie. It’s just not the only thing. It’s not the main thing. Not the thing.
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I sort of want to apologize to him, but he hasn’t said the thing I thought he’d say. He hasn’t said Why didn’t you tell me.
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Other kids went back. Other kids were hashtag Omaha Onward. But I didn’t have a class to go back to. My friends—they’re all dead, and when I think about it it’s like having stones piled on me. “I didn’t go back,” I say. “My parents homeschooled me.” But even that hadn’t been enough, so we came here.
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I still kind of want to say sorry, and I know Kevin does, too, but neither one of us needs to because neither one of us did anything wrong. Things are wrong because sometimes the world just sucks, but my last therapist worked hard to teach me not to apologize for that. I don’t know where Kevin learned not to but it’s cool that he doesn’t. Still, I know him well enough to know he’s got something to say.
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When he got to the top, he could have turned right, not left. He didn’t, and there’s no reason. Sometimes things just happen. The way this morning it was almost summer.
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I remember how my therapist taught me that’s a symptom of not saying something you need to say. So I do. The fight stops. All of its oxygen got blown away.
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Dad’s turned white, as if I’d hit him in the stomach.
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“We could put out a notice,” says my mom, who professionally puts out notices. “The O’Keeffe family is traumatized to announce… This is Simon’s crisis, remember?” “Yeah,” says my dad, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Or, you know what, no. This is us. We’re in this together.” This is a thing we fight about, too: whether what happened is something that happened to me and then crashed into my family, or whether we all crashed together. (Hint: The right answer is the first one.)
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Some of the air is coming back into the fire. I know that Dad didn’t tell people because I asked him not to, and I get that now it’s kind of weird for him, but not compared to what it’s like for me, I say. Flames start up. Then Mom blows away all the air again: “Simon, have you told Agate?” Oh, man. Agate. I shake my head and drop my chin. My mom puts her hand on the back of my neck. My dad wraps his big musical hand around my arm. The shock waves just keep rattling through me.
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My parents have suggestions about how to tell Agate, but there is just absolutely no way to do it that makes sense. There’s no way to lead up to it. “Hey, you know, I forgot to mention when I met you that I’m the famous survivor of a famous school shooting and FYI I hate loud noises and rooms with only one door, hello.” But then again, Agate is terrible with lead-up. Maybe we just play a game called What’s the Most Traumatic Thing You Know? Maybe she’s the last person I need to worry about. But I do worry. What will I say? What will she say? Will she look at me with her hands in fists and a ...more
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I feel like my body is a kitchen sponge that had been soaked in stress and is now being wrung out. I’m, like, achy and dry and empty.
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Outside the window it’s the gray time before dawn, when the world looks like a video game that hasn’t finished rendering, like if you went outside they wouldn’t have the end of the street created yet. It doesn’t seem quite real, but it’s peaceful. Even Pretty Stabby the peacock (his tail feathers bent and battered) is asleep.
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YouTube has this way of pouring information over you so fast that you don’t need to think; you just soak some of it up as it goes by. I totally want that, a stream to fill up the dry-sponge holes in me. But of course I can’t have it, because, you know: radio telescopes. I can’t imagine anyone confusing Overly Sarcastic Productions with space aliens, but what do I know. Maybe that’s exactly what a signal from aliens looks like: just a weird thing that drenches you as it goes by.
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Whoever it is can’t be a bereaved relative, because she doesn’t deploy her Soothing Professional Manner.
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Unlike the one in the kitchen, which people might possibly see and is therefore normal-shaped like a rooster, this one is shaped like a coffin. My mom, ladies and gentlemen.
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“It wasn’t just for you, Simon, you know. I knew those kids, too. I knew their moms and dads, and then I…You’re not the only one who wanted to get the h-e-l-l out of Eagle Crest.”
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There are emus everywhere. I guess I was expecting, like, three emus. This is more emus. This is a lot of emus. This is maybe twenty emus. If you’re thinking twenty emus is not a lot, then you’ve never seen emus. I don’t think I had, up until now. We don’t get them much in Omaha. They are bigger than I’d thought they’d be: like five or six feet tall. They have bodies like huge gray-brown feather dusters, and long, long necks like they are actually Muppets and someone’s entire arm is in there. Their legs are like dinosaur legs, bare and lean and strong. They use their legs to run at absolutely ...more
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Emus are dodging and weaving, bobbing like carousel horses, making tight turns like squirrels in a corner. They do not look like they are going to kick people with the force of a sledgehammer. They also do not look like they are about to be caught.
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They have, maybe without noticing, adopted an emulike gait to do this, swaying with their hips and bobbing as if tango music is playing in their heads. The emu watches them come, looking brainless and blink-less. Its head is black and bald except for a few comb-over wisps. Its eyes are a weird reddish color. It has alpaca eyelashes. The firefighters salsa closer. Doug reaches out, slowly—and the emu darts right between them, knocking them down like bowling pins.
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“Did the humans win?” “No,” says Agate. “It was a decisive emu victory.”
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if those are really twenty-five thousand dollar birds being chased around like sugared-up toddlers at a Chuck E. Cheese, I don’t blame him. There are feathers flying in the air, and the emus are making noises like truck engines trying to turn over.
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He stares at her like she’s overloaded the fuse box in his brain. Which, to be fair, is a look a lot of people give Agate.
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Agate has rolled her head to face me. She is pink with pedaling and being upside down, and there is grass and emu feathers in her tangled red hair, but she looks at me the way people look at stars. There is nothing in her eyes but openness, and wonder.
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“Do you remember the shooting? Two years ago, at Eagle Crest Elementary?” “Of course,” says Agate. “That one’s famous.” “It was me.” My voice comes out in a croak. I’m not pedaling anymore. My arms are trembling under the weight of my upper body—locked in place but shaking like they’re about to buckle. “No,” she says, her feet slowing down. “That one was an adult intruder. Also I think in that one he killed himself at the scene.” Emus slide by us, majestically. They make weird booming noises, like my heart in my ears. “There was a kid,” I say. “In that class. All the kids were jammed in the ...more
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We turn around. We’re not holding hands but we’re close: Our pinkies are brushing together. There are tears on my face and there are tears on Agate’s face but no one can see that, and we are both smiling. Agate waves to her mom and to my mom, to the police, to Andy and Doug, the volunteer firefighters. The people in the field break into applause.
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And today’s the day. Agate knows. Kevin knows. Kevin’s mom knows, and she wants to “make sure I have support” and so… Today’s got to be the day.
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Mom’s shirt is ripped and her pants are filthy but she’s braided her hair and she looks happy as I’ve ever seen anyone look after an emu rodeo, even though Pearl is in the middle of telling her how kasha is just buckwheat that’s been toasted, which I know for sure Mom doesn’t care about. I look at Agate. Agate looks at me. She nods like she’s understood something.
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She knows something is up, but she doesn’t know enough to make up good questions. I guess the whole thing feels serious enough that she doesn’t try.
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I can’t make out words, but I can hear her funeral director voice, soft and calm and saying the unthinkable. Who’d have thought that voice would come in so handy? I almost can’t stand it, how handy her voice is.
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“A fun fact about ducks is that their penises are eight inches long.” I do an unwise thing and try to picture that. “No way.” “Yes way,” she says brightly. “They’re sort of…spring loaded.” I push my hands over my eyes, as if I could block out the mental image. “Ugh, I am so glad you didn’t tell that to Kevin.” She’d been about to, on our movie night. I can’t imagine how that would have gone. It would have been a heck of a first impression. Of course, Kevin’s first impression of me was the alpaca story, which was also pretty weird. Oh man. Kevin googled alpacas.
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My head spins. In the two whole days since 5/15, Project Fake Space Message has been the last thing on my mind. “Agate, I can’t think about that right now.” She puts the last of the duck eggs on the top of her scuffed-up white bucket—the Blue Bunny Ice Cream logo just barely shows through the dirt and scratches—and looks up at me with her round, open face. “Why not?” “Because—This was why I wanted to fly under the radar, get it? Because of Eagle Crest.” “But our message is a separate thing.” For her. For her, it’s separate. For me, it never has been. All the reasons I wanted to try it, all the ...more
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“Just,” I start. “Just give me a week, okay?” A week. In that moment, in the warm, dim, smelly duck coop, I decide. I decide—this is not smart and I know this is not smart—but I decide to fake it. Shake off the emu feathers, get the goat poop out of my hair and the duck penises out of my brain, strap the service vest on my puppy, and head into GNB Upper like nothing has changed. Maybe—you never know—there will be some other kind of miracle or catastrophe and everyone will have something else to talk about. Maybe I’ll never have to send any kind of message at all.
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Hercules susses out the situation instantly: He heaves a huge sigh and sprawls out flat on the linoleum, melting across it. He’s bored. He’s also hot. The Nebraska spring has slammed on its brakes and cornered, Tokyo Drift–style, straight into summer, with hot, sticky mornings and rumbling storms in the afternoon.
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I can’t catch Kevin’s eye. He knows now. He knows I didn’t tell him for months.
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Kevin and me were pretty okay out in the rock-throwing field. I thought we would probably keep being okay. But by the time science is over we’re not okay. Agate was right, way back the first day we met: Grin And Bear It is divided into sides, and Kevin is on Team Science. His mom has made sure of that. The other kids on Team Science, the ones who spent the whole class looking at me: Do they know? I want to ask but I can’t, not at school. I think Kevin probably wants to talk to me about it, but he can’t, not at school. We sit together at lunch and we try to talk about Minecraft. We try to talk ...more
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