Lenore Look - Allergic to Dead Bodies, Funerals, and Other Fatal Circumstances

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Text copyright 2011 by Lenore Look
Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright 2011 by LeUyen Pham All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schwartz & Wade Books,
an imprint of Random House Childrens Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Schwartz & Wade Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Look, Lenore.
Alvin Ho : allergic to dead bodies, funerals, and other fatal circumstances ; /
Lenore Look ; [illustrations by LeUyen Pham].1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: A fearful second grader in Concord, Massachusetts, learns about death
when his grandfathers best friend passes away and he offers to accompany his
grandfather to the funeral.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89882-2
[1. FearFiction. 2. Self-confidenceFiction. 3.

DeathFiction.
4. GrandfathersFiction. 5. Chinese AmericansFiction.
6. Concord (Mass.)Fiction.] I. II. II.

Title.
PZ7.L8682Akv 2011
[Fic]dc22
2010046968 The illustrations were rendered in ink. Random House Childrens Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read. v3.1 This book belongs to
Francisco Nahoe,
who gave me the idea and dared me to write it.
Death , he said. I bet your editor wont go for it.
Well, she did.
And here it is!
L.L. This one is for Kolbe.
L.P.

Ismelldeath.

I can smell somebody an tell if theyre gonna die. Dill, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee The millions are awake enough for physical labor, but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854 Writing a book takes your soul. I know this because every time I finish a book, I will weep uncontrollably.

It will start at my desk; then I will get up and walk through the rooms of my house, wailing and howling as if I have lost someone dear to me and I am looking for them. It is only when this happens that I know for certain that my book is finished. During the writing of this book, this strange weeping happened TWICE before I got to the end. Each time was when Alvin nudged me awake enough to glimpse life, real life, for a brief secondand it was beautiful, so beautiful that I wept. And it was then that I realized why I weep at the end of a book. When your soul is taken, the feeling is not death, but rapture, which is a fancy word for losing your soul and having to look for it.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all who worked on Alvin, especially Ann Kelley for her marvelous editing and LeUyen Pham for bringing Alvin to wonderful, joyful life. Thank you.

call me alvin ho . I was born scared, and I am still scared. And this is my book of scary stories. I tell the truth mostly, on account of thats what happens when youre all freaked out.

You tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God. And if youve read my other books, you know that they get scarier and scarier, which means that the book youre holding should have made you run away by the title alone. So if youre afraid of creepy stories, you might want to put this down and read something else, like Charlottes Web or Alice in Wonderland, two books about girls. And girl stories, as everyone knows, are not nearly as terrifying as boy stories. On second thought, maybe you should read the dictionary, which isnt frightening at all until you get to abominable snowmann. a large legendary manlike or apelike creature Gulp.

Never mind. But if youre still reading this, dont turn the page. If you do, dont say I didnt warn you. Normally, on this page, Id tell you about all the things that scare me, such as: Book reports. Reading in class. Lightning. Lightning.

Poisoned darts. Poisoned apples. Fairy tales. Vampires. Principals. Drowning in the bathtub.

But this is not normal. Theres no time for all that. Theres not even time to tell you that I live in Concord, Massachusetts, which is hard to spell. Or that this was once a fantastic town where the American Revolutionary War began, with lots of explosions and bad language and dead bodies on all the lawns. But its not that kind of town anymore. Its now a boring place on account of explosions and bad language have been outlawed except on Patriots Day, which is when they try to start the American Revolutionary War all over again every year, charging and firing and cursing at one another, just like in the old days.

But if you try to start a war or use a bad word any other day, youve got all sorts of trouble coming to you and none of the red bean mochi cakes that your pohpoh made. And as for dead bodies all over the place, Ill get to that soon enough. But first I need to start with my history test. Miss P announced that we were going to have a history test in second grade very soon. This wouldnt be so frightening if I hadnt already taken the practice test, which was more than I could bear. Worse, I couldnt ask for help.

I cant speak in school. I can scream my head off on the bus, but as soon as I get to school, my voice doesnt work. Im as silent as a hard-boiled egg. This is on account of I have so-so performance anxiety disorder, which is a fancy way of saying school freaks me out.