When vital clues to the mystery of her mother's past appear, Heidi embarks upon a lone cross-country trip to search for that elusive truth.

'Mama would smile her sweet, wide smile and pat my knee the way she always did when I sat close to her. 'Sometimes I'd sit down next to her on the couch, open up a magazine, and flip through the pictures, pointing at things-a baby, a dog, a car. I hoped it might slip out of her mouth and onto her pillowcase as she closed her eyes and relaxed into the rhythm of my scratching.

' 'What is soof, Mama?' I'd whisper as I sat on the edge of her bed at night gently scratching her back. While most of those twenty-three words are common ones, there is one- soof-that is uniquely Heidi's mom's. Meanwhile, Heidi has her own unusual quality-a gift that falls into the realm of magic.īut it will take more than just magic to uncover the truth of her mother's origins. Bernadette, who has since been raising and homeschooling Heidi while caring for Heidi's mother, has her own incapacitating disability-she's plagued by a phobia that prevents her from ever leaving the pair of attached apartments that the trio share. When Heidi's mother appeared on Bernadette's doorstep in Reno twelve years earlier with baby Heidi in her arms, Bernie's repeated questioning of who they were elicited the same response again and again from the mother: 'So be it' and 'Heidi.' Thus, they became So B. ' 'All the basic parts are there, Heidi, and from the outside she looks like she should work just fine, but inside there are lots of mysterious little pieces busted or bent or missing altogether, and without them her machine doesn't run quite right.' Bernie once explained it to me by comparing Mama to a broken machine. My mother loved me in her own special way, but she couldn't take care of me herself because of her bum brain. Bernadette started off being the next-door neighbor, but that didn't last very long. What I had was Mama and Bernadette, and as far as I was concerned, that was plenty. 'One thing I knew for a fact, from the time I knew anything at all, was that I didn't have a father. That is due to the fact that there are a grand total of twenty-three words, sounds, or short phrases that her mother is capable of articulating. The truth about her mother's background and past is as totally unknown to Heidi as is the true color of dinosaur skin. But that was a long time ago, before I knew what I know now about both dinosaur skin and the truth.' I used to think, without really thinking about it, that I knew what color that was. 'If truth was a crayon and it was up to me to put a wrapper around it and name its color, I know just what I would call it- dinosaur skin. IT: A NOVEL by Sarah Weeks, HarperCollins/Laura Geringer Books, May 2004, ISBN: 0-06-623622-3 ISBN Library: 0-06-623623-1

So B. It by Sarah Weeks