Savvy

“Suddenly, as I looked at those teenaged girls in their teenaged clothes, I felt younger than twelve-turning-thirteen and my special-occasion dress felt not-so-special. I realized that I had just turned into a teenager myself, and there were changes coming in my life that didn’t have anything to do with my savvy.”

On top of the sudden responsibility that comes with her newly acquired savvy, Mibs also must deal with the social complexities of no longer being a little girl. The older girls at her embarrassingly public birthday party seem not so much inspirational as threatening, and Mibs feels out of her depth now in two areas. On a day that’s supposed to be special, it’ll be hard for her to escape a large dose of humiliation.

“The magazine had a picture of a human heart on the cover, looking like nothing more than a big ball of watermelon threaded through with pale roots; I thought that picture made a person’s heart look like a fragile, fragile thing rather than the powerful muscle that I’d learned it to be in school. I looked at Bobbi then, and realized that she might just be the same way—tough and soft at the same time.”

Her sudden ability to read minds through people’s tattoos makes Mibs realize that, underneath their calm exteriors, most people are fragile and vulnerable. This includes Bobbi, the pastor’s rebellious teenage daughter, whose tough act hides a fearful yet caring person. Mibs sees that the things that seem tough can be fragile.

“I could see the sky go by outside the windows above me and watched an unending parade of telephone poles flick past like the ticks and tocks of a clock. Silos and water towers marked the distance between towns along the highway, but every time I rose up high enough to look out, all I saw was the same seemingly endless, sleeping landscape—field after field of last summer’s dead brown cornstalks and rows of lifeless, skeletal irrigation equipment, all waiting for the earth to wake up with spring and ask for a drink of water.”

Stowed away on the Bible delivery bus, Mibs marks the movement of time by watching the rhythms of the passing scenery. Its sameness is both soothing and monotonous; the beauty of spring hasn’t yet swelled the flat, featureless land, and its endlessness feels overpowering. The author’s use of a rhythmically rolling landscape brings forth both the boredom of waiting and the calm despair of having to travel far from one’s intended destination.

“‘In most ways, Mibs, we Beaumonts are just like other people,’ Momma said, letting go of me and adding a bit more flour to my dough as she recited the words I’d heard so many times before. ‘We get born, and sometime later we die. And in between, we’re happy and sad, we feel love and we feel fear, we eat and we sleep and we hurt like everyone else.’”

Mibs is just beginning to see that her special power isn’t what defines her; instead, it’s her humanity. Her mother knows that the powers don’t make people into gods. Momma’s ability, which Mibs glowingly interprets as being perfect in everything, is simply an uncanny way of getting things done right the first time. It’s not the savvy that matters but knowing how to fit it into one’s life.

“Perhaps Samson’s strengthening touch was just an ordinary sort of human magic, the kind of magic that exists in the honest, heartfelt concern of one person for another.”

Seven-year-old Samson is too young to have a savvy, yet somehow his touch has a soothing, empowering effect on others—a portion of the full savvy he’ll acquire when he turns 13. Mibs is learning that savvies aren’t really any different from most people’s talents, except they’re much more noticeable. The author wants kids to know that they, too, have savvies that, if smaller, are still important. An ordinary skill can be honed into something special if a person is willing to engage in the book’s theme of Learning to Accept Oneself.

“Bobbi had been right when she’d said that this deep-fried pickle of a situation was all my fault. If it hadn’t been for my birthday, or the choices I made because of my birthday, things might’ve turned out different. I was discovering that sometimes the outcome of a choice was almost as hard to predict or to control as a new savvy.”

Mibs is having a bad time dealing with her new savvy, especially as she doesn’t realize that her tattoo hallucinations are the new power. She’s caught between the sudden increase in her abilities, the need to keep it secret from friends and other outsiders, and the effect her startled reactions have on her brother’s violently stormy behavior. Anyone in such a completely novel situation would make mistakes. It’s part of the steep learning curve Mibs must undergo as she grapples with her psychic growth spurt. The resulting emotional and physical chaos symbolizes the turbulent changes that all kids go through when they reach their teen years.

“‘A savvy’s not a sickness or a disease, Mibs,’ Grandpa told me. ‘It’s not magic or sorcery, either. Your savvy’s in your blood. It’s an inheritance, like your brown eyes or your grandma’s long toes or her talent for dancing to polka music.’”

Like other Beaumonts, Mibs eagerly awaited the new power but feared what it might do to her. That it’s simply a genetic trait—a useful, if unusual, ability—doesn’t erase the worry that it also might mark its possessor as a freak of nature. Grandpa’s attitude, gained from years of experience, is a practical way to look at savvies, but Mibs’s young mind still swirls with doubts and fears.

“I began to understand that a savvy is just a know-how of a different sort.”

Mibs learns early on that a savvy isn’t something bad but something different. It’s not a curse to be ashamed of but an opportunity to be developed. Like any skill, a savvy comes with its own unique problems, but these can be resolved as the skill is mastered. Treating a savvy as something that can be mastered, just like the more common talents, takes some of the fear out of it.

“For the very first time since I was old enough to know what it meant to have a savvy, since the day that I’d begun to dream of what my own talent might come to be, I wished that I was more like Poppa and had no savvy at all. No savvy to cause me heartache. No savvy to make me hope, and then leave me useless.”

Like most kids, Mibs dreams of the powers of adulthood, but when those powers show up, they present complications, and suddenly she wishes they would go away. Adulthood isn’t an end to problems but an ability to deal with them; that responsibility can make a child wish she didn’t have to grow up. Mibs doesn’t yet appreciate the usefulness of her savvy; she sees only its difficulties.

“Walking into a diner full of tattooed bikers and truckers made me feel like someone had switched on a razzmatazz radio inside my head—a radio with a dial that kept spinning with a fizz and a zing from station to station to station to station without stop. Still reeling from my encounter with the homeless man, the new, added onslaught of all these strangers' thoughts and feelings and questions and answers made me feel like I was going to be sick.”

Mibs finally confronts the realization that her savvy isn’t waking people up but listening to tattoos as they express the thoughts and feelings of their wearers. Even a quiet room sounds noisy if it’s filled with tattoos. It’s a lot to get used to, especially when this power appears to have no function beyond tormenting the girl.

“‘Scumbling a savvy is like spreading a thin layer of paint over yourself […] If you don’t use enough paint,’ Momma continued, ‘your savvy will come through too strong, causing some pretty big problems for both you and the rest of the world. […] If you use too much paint, you’ll not only obscure your savvy completely, but most everything else in life will become dull and uninteresting for you too. You can’t get rid of part of what makes you you and be happy.’”

Artists use thin washes, called scumbling, to modify their paintings. It’s an art in itself, and too much or too little scumbling can spoil a work of art. Similarly, people with savvies must scumble their abilities so they don’t cause trouble but do cause pleasing results. Like any skill, a savvy must be controlled—but not too much.

“I watched Lill gaze fondly at Lester. I could tell by the way she looked at him that she found something in the man she admired. Maybe it had been the way Lester stopped to rescue her from her broken-down car, or how he’d helped her pick her money up off the floor, or his spur-of-the-moment plunder of the pie from the diner. Lester might not have looked the part of a hero, but I suppose you never can tell right off who might have a piece of Prince Charming deep down inside.”

Lester leaves much to be desired in the smarts department, but his heart is golden, and Lill recognizes in him that rare quality. The two begin to bond over their roles as temporary parents to the children. After a life suffering under the thumbs of a pushy mother and a selfish lady friend, Lester is entitled to a bit of real happiness, and he and Lill already are working on that for each other.

“Why is it that adults are always telling kids to go watch television as though we have nothing better to do?”

The kids don’t want Lill to see the missing-children TV alert about them, lest she decide to inform the authorities and get everyone, including the innocent Lester, into trouble. Mibs’s comment also points up the irony that parents, who fret about their children’s obsession with screens, instantly default to TV as a babysitter. Mibs suddenly has adult-level problems to deal with, issues that a TV won’t solve. Her secret savvy complicates things, and she must contend with adults who don’t understand that she’s ready and able to take on bigger responsibilities.

“Mibs, do you ever feel like your life is just some weird dream and someday you’ll wake up and find that you’re someone else entirely?”

Bobbi’s abrupt question comes when she, Mibs, Fish, and Will are in the motel swimming pool just east of Lincoln, Nebraska. They discuss Mibs’s sudden ability to read minds and Bobbi’s life as a preacher’s daughter. Both girls must confront that they’re different than most people expect and that who they are inside isn’t always what others expect. Both girls have recently awakened to themselves as different people—at least, different from their expectations—and they must deal with the consequences of their changed lives.

“You never can tell when a bad thing might make a good thing happen.”

Lill says this as she drops off to sleep in the motel. The idea nags at Mibs, who can’t see how goodness can rise up out of her problems. Struggling with her savvy, she sees its difficulties but not yet its opportunities. Mibs also frets over the trouble she’s gotten her companions into and doesn’t recognize the value that her stowaway adventure generates, with its new friendships, new possibilities for Lester, and new ways she can use her savvy to help others. Without the timeout of the bus trip, Mibs wouldn’t have the time to develop her savvy to the point where it can help her father.

“I thought about the boys across the hall, and about Will kissing me in the pool. I thought about Lester on his cot outside in the bus, and Lill next to me dreaming of him. I thought about Bobbi and how she was beginning to feel like something awfully close to a friend. And then I thought about the homeless man behind the diner and about Poppa tucked in his bed at Salina Hope—and I wondered if either of them would ever be able to find any good in all the bad they were caught in.”

All the problems and possibilities that swirl around Mibs stem from the accidental combination of her new savvy and her father’s coma. It’s an overwhelming whirl of fresh demands and sudden threats. She’s at the beginning of a long process of adjustment—the scumbling of her power and the negotiating of changed relationships with her companions—on which is piled the need to act quickly to save her father. Whether her savvy is a good thing is still up in the air.

“It occurred to me that maybe Poppa hadn’t been the only reason I’d run away. Running away meant running from something. When I walked out of that church in Hebron, I was running toward Poppa, but maybe—maybe—I was running away from something else. Running away from my unexpected, unwished-for savvy. Running away from the fact that I was growing up and life was changing as quick and sure and electrifying and terrifying as Rocket’s sparks or Fish’s hurricane or even a very first kiss. These thoughts kept me wide-awake late into the night.”

Mibs’s grand adventure as a stowaway on an old bus isn’t entirely a daring act of selflessness; it’s also her instinctive desire to escape the overwhelming changes happening to her all at once because of her new savvy. Her journey is an intensified version of the trek into adolescence that every kid must navigate. The savvy represents the rapid gain in power and the confusion it brings to kids entering their teens. So many social and mental skills that children have mastered suddenly unravel, and they must reassemble those abilities into new patterns that fit their changing lives. It’s no wonder Mibs loses sleep over it.

“I thought how often my poppa and momma were there inside my head with me, telling me right from wrong. Or how the voices of Ashley Bing and Emma Flint sometimes got stuck under my skin, taunting me and making me feel low, even when they weren’t around. I began to realize how hard it was to separate out all the voices to hear the single, strong one that came just from me.”

As Mibs begins to understand how people can be controlled by the thoughts of others—beginning with Lester, whose tattoos represent two people who constantly judge and criticize him—she also sees how this applies to her own life. She, too, has enemies who crawl inside her head and sabotage her self-confidence.

“I didn’t need to draw anything on Lill with my shiny silver pen to know that she was love-struck. I couldn’t fathom it myself, but I guessed that happy endings came in all shapes and sizes.”

Lill, a very capable, lively, and compassionate person, falls for Lester, a nervous wreck of a man held down by the people in his life. Lill sees that Lester is a good man, and she recognizes his potential as a mate and prosperous person. Mibs wouldn’t have chosen them for a couple, but the happenstance of Lill’s car breakdown and Lester’s kind offer to help are enough to ignite a romance in their hearts. Lill’s ability to see past Lester’s limitations and inspire his better attributes might just be a savvy of its own.

“I looked Will straight in the eye, ignoring the way Fish goggled at us from the next bench over. Will looked back at me, startled, and I kept my heart muscle strong, feeling something inside me shiver like a pale green flower shoot just waking up for spring. But whatever that thing was, it was still too new to feel ready to bloom; it wanted time to send down roots. Someday soon I was going to bloom like crazy, and then I’d have what I needed to keep me standing tall.”

Mibs is doing a lot of growing up in a hurry. On top of her new savvy and the trouble she’s gotten into by stowing away in a bus, Mibs must confront her dawning feelings for Will. He’s the first boy she’s interested in, and she wants to do things right so that she can grow into this new relationship properly and harmoniously. Given the power of the feelings involved, it’s a lot to ask, but, as in everything else she does, Mibs is willing to give it the full benefit of her best efforts. There’s no guarantee that she won’t make mistakes, but she’s learning that though the human heart seems fragile, it’s actually a very tough organ.

“I did everything I could to ignore Rhonda’s and Carlene’s raging abuse of Lester. I felt sick over his willingness to allow that kind of talk in his own head, and I vowed that I would never let Ashley Bing or Emma Flint or anybody else like them have that kind of power over me. I wouldn’t let the voices of bullies or meanies or people who barely-hardly knew me work their way in to my brain and stick.”

Lester’s cruel tattoos teach Mibs a big lesson—that other people’s mean thoughts should never influence her view of herself. It’s also clearly foolish to wear tattoos that memorialize meanness. These realizations are her first step toward scumbling her new savvy and making it useful.

“Lester and Lill were going to be safe, and I would soon be with my family. I wanted to thank Bill Meeks from the bottom of my mush-and-muscle heart, but I could find no words. For the first time, I wished that my savvy worked in reverse. I wished that all I had to do was draw a smiling face somewhere on my skin, so that others might know how I was feeling without me having to say a thing. But, from the way Bill was looking at me, I had the feeling he knew anyway.”

Officer Meeks carves a path through the bureaucratic complexities of the missing-children case and arranges for Lester and Lill to drive the kids to the hospital to visit Poppa. His kindness reminds Mibs that sometimes people express their feelings through actions and that no tattoo is needed to understand them. Mibs’s wish for a reverse savvy that transmits her true feelings is a sign of an honest desire to be in harmony with others. She possesses a sincere heart that cares about people and thrives on straightforward communication. That, more than her savvy, is what’s important in her life.

“I remembered what Lill had said just before falling asleep in the motel the night before. You never can tell when a bad thing might make a good thing happen. I realized that good and bad were always there and always mixed up together in a tangle.”

Mibs learns that life is complicated, that a person can never be sure exactly what to do, and that everyone must develop the ability to extract the good from the bad, almost as if it’s their savvy to do so. More than anything she learns from listening to tattoos, this is the most important thought she can receive.