X-Acto

Excerpt

It was 1973. Pen was eight years old; her brother, Thomas, was eleven. They were in Pennsylvania. They were spending the entire summer with their father and his girlfriend, a woman named Heidi who was an architecture school drop-out, and who made tiny houses out of white, thick cardboard.

“They’re just a hobby,” said Heidi. “A way to unwind, you know?”

Every line, every door, every wall of every house Heidi made was straight, exact, and true. Pen liked looking down at them and imagining herself inside their perfect emptiness—she held her breath because the houses were so fragile that it seemed as if someone could knock the walls down just by breathing on them.

I’ll huff and I’ll puff . . .

Also, Pen held her breath because she felt guilty admiring Heidi’s work. It seemed like a betrayal of her mother. She didn’t know why.

How did Heidi make the houses so perfect?

She used an X-Acto knife, that was part of it.

X-Acto.           

To Pen, the knife name sounded as if it belonged to a magician—X-Acto, the Magnificent!

But also, it made her think of the word “exactly,” a word that belonged to her father.

Kate DiCamillo

Kate DiCamillo has written many books for children. She is currently at work on a novel and a collection of short stories. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Patrick Ryan on “X-Acto”

I’ve always wondered if things that emotionally impact us as children shape us more than things that emotionally impact us as adults. On the one hand, of course they do. We’re still forming when we’re kids; what impacts us dents us. On the other hand, who feels dent-proof, once they turn twenty-one?

Kate DiCamillo’s new story, “X-Acto,” is about some impacting events that occur one summer while two young siblings, Pen and Thomas, are staying in Pennsylvania with their father and his new girlfriend, Heidi. It’s a story of quiet, potential menace. It’s also a story that asks how good and bad manage to co-exist in the world, given that power and control aren’t concerned with either.

But the story provides an answer to that question.

You’re probably familiar with Kate DiCamillo as the author of some of the best children’s fiction that’s ever been written. We’re thrilled to be putting into your hands a different kind of DiCamillo story—one that sees the complicated, deceptive, and sometimes frightening world of adulthood through the eyes of a child who is barreling toward it.