Okay for Now

Okay for Now Plot Summary

Introduction

The baseball cap was the only thing Doug Swieteck had ever owned that hadn't belonged to some other Swieteck before him. Joe Pepitone himself had placed it on Doug's head after a visit to Camillo Junior High, signed on the inside where anyone could tell it was real. Four and a half months Doug kept it hidden, until his brother found it and traded it away for cigarettes. Now it was probably rotting in some gutter on Jerusalem Avenue, just another piece of junk. But worse things were coming. Doug's father lost his job at the lumber yard after letting his fists do the talking to his boss, and now the family was packing up for Marysville, a nothing town upstate where Ernie Eco promised work at the paper mill. Doug's mother gave away her garden plants to the neighbors, carrying them three by three in her arms while the men waited by the truck. As they drove away from Long Island, Doug pressed his face to the window and watched everything familiar disappear behind them. Ahead lay Marysville—a place so forgettable that no one had ever heard of it unless they lived there, which hardly anyone did.

Chapter 1: Uprooted: The Reluctant Arrival in Marysville

The house past the paper mill was smaller than what they'd left behind, crammed with the smell of old disappointment and fresh paint that couldn't quite cover it. Doug would have to share a room with his brother Christopher again, while Lucas's old space waited empty—if Lucas ever came back from Vietnam at all. The whole place felt temporary, like a motel where nobody wanted to stay long enough to call it home. Marysville itself proved to be exactly as forgettable as Doug had feared. Eight beat-up stores lined the main drag, flanked by houses that seemed to shrink as you got closer to where the Swietecks now lived. The lawns grew smaller too, until you reached their street where dirt patches outnumbered grass. Doug counted the statistics as he walked: twelve blocks of decent houses with bicycles left carelessly on lawns, then four blocks of places like theirs where you didn't leave anything outside that you wanted to see again. At Washington Irving Junior High School, the teachers looked at Doug's last name and made their judgments. When Coach Reed tore Doug's gym shirt during a wrestling demonstration, the whole class saw what Doug had been hiding underneath: a tattoo across his back that read "Mama's Baby"—his father's idea of a twelfth birthday present, administered in a smoky parlor while Doug sobbed and his father laughed. The news spread through the school in minutes, and suddenly Doug wasn't just the new kid anymore. He was the freak with the tattoo, the one who looked like trouble because trouble was all anyone expected from a Swieteck. The only refuge came from an unexpected place. During one of his aimless walks through town, Doug discovered the Marysville Free Public Library, all marble steps and stained glass windows. Inside, on the second floor, sat a glass case containing the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen: a page from John James Audubon's Birds of America, showing an Arctic Tern plunging toward dark water, its wings spread in perfect desperation. The bird's round eye held all the terror Doug felt inside, the knowledge that everything was falling apart and there was nothing to catch you when you hit bottom.

Chapter 2: The Arctic Tern and Artistic Awakening

Mr. Powell, the head librarian, found Doug staring at the Arctic Tern during his third visit. Instead of shooing him away, the elderly man watched Doug trace the bird's outline with his finger against the glass, following every feather, every curve of wing and tail. When Mr. Powell quietly placed paper and pencils beside the display case, Doug insisted he didn't draw. "Ever try?" Mr. Powell asked. The feel of the pencil in Doug's fingers was, he admitted to himself, spectacular. The drawing lessons began in secret, Saturday afternoons when the library was nearly empty. Mr. Powell taught Doug about contour lines and composition, about how artists capture not just what they see but what they feel. The Arctic Tern became Doug's obsession—that moment of pure terror and beauty as the bird dove toward the water, every feather alive with movement. Doug learned that you couldn't draw every single feather; you had to suggest them, let the viewer's eye fill in the rest. It was like learning a new language, one that spoke in lines and shadows instead of words. But the lessons were interrupted when Doug discovered the town's dirty secret. Marysville was broke, and the Town Council had been quietly selling off pages from the Audubon book to pay for snow removal and road repairs. The Arctic Tern was already gone, sold to some anonymous collector overseas. The Red-Throated Diver had ended up over Mrs. Windermere's fireplace. The Brown Pelican hung in Principal Peattie's office like a trophy. What had once been a complete masterpiece was being carved up page by page, sold to the highest bidder. The injustice of it burned in Doug's chest. These weren't just pictures—they were windows into something larger than Marysville's petty concerns. Each bird told a story of survival, of beauty persisting despite the harshness of the world. When he looked at the Arctic Tern's desperate eye, Doug saw himself falling toward his own dark water, but he also saw the possibility of flight.

Chapter 3: Skinny Thug to Delivery Boy: Finding Connection

Lil Spicer called him a skinny thug the first time they met, when Doug was waiting outside the locked library on a Monday morning like a fool. She was the grocer's daughter, sharp-tongued and fearless, with green eyes that seemed to see right through his defenses. When she bought him a Coke out of pity and taught him how to drink it properly—guzzling it down until you could belch loud enough to wake the dead—Doug felt something he hadn't experienced in months: the possibility of friendship. The delivery job at Spicer's Deli came with its own challenges. Five dollars every other Saturday, plus tips if he was lucky, dragging groceries around Marysville in a wagon that seemed designed to attract every pothole and curb in town. But the work gave Doug something he'd never had before: a place in the community, however small. Mrs. Mason saved chocolate doughnuts for him. Mr. Loeffler found light bulbs that needed changing just so Doug could earn an extra dollar. Even the Daugherty kids, all five of them, would tackle Doug in their front yard like he was their favorite relative. The real test came with Mrs. Windermere, the eccentric playwright who lived in the mansion past the town limits. Ancient and imperious, with pencils stabbed through her wild white hair, she treated Doug like a combination servant and confidant. Her house was filled with books from floor to ceiling, and she spoke of something called the god of Creativity who would sit beside her typewriter and whisper stories into her ear. When Doug brought her ice cream and groceries, she would interrogate him about literature and life with the intensity of a prosecutor cross-examining a witness. It was Mrs. Windermere who first recognized that Doug couldn't read—not really. Oh, he could sound out words if he had to, but the fluid comprehension that let other kids race through assignments was beyond him. Instead of mocking him, she simply observed, "Skinny Delivery Boy, there are many kinds of intelligence. Perhaps yours simply hasn't been properly cultivated yet." Her casual acceptance of his limitation felt like absolution, the first step toward believing he might be more than the sum of his father's expectations.

Chapter 4: Broken Wings: When Family Fractures and Heals

Christmas brought Lucas home from Vietnam, but not the brother Doug remembered. The young man who returned sat in a wheelchair, his legs gone above the knees and his eyes wrapped in bandages that might never come off. The war had taken more than his limbs—it had stolen his future, his sense of purpose, everything that made him who he was. Doug watched his mother's careful smile as she tended to Lucas's wounds, saw how she turned his wheelchair toward the window so he could feel the warmth of sunlight on his damaged face. The whole family restructured itself around Lucas's needs. Christopher, the middle brother who'd always been heading toward trouble, suddenly became gentle and protective, carrying Lucas upstairs each night without complaint. Their mother cooked endless meals that mostly went uneaten, as if feeding the family could somehow fill the holes the war had torn in their lives. Only their father seemed unchanged, still quick with his hands and his temper, still looking for someone to blame for every disappointment. Doug found himself reading to Lucas from letters that arrived from other soldiers, letters that Lucas refused to hear but couldn't bring himself to throw away. The stories they contained were fragments of nightmare: friends lost, villages burned, the constant presence of death in a place where boys went to become men and came back as ghosts. Doug began to understand that his brother's visible wounds were only the beginning—there were deeper injuries that no doctor could repair, places in Lucas's soul that had been burned beyond healing. The breaking point came when their father, drunk and angry about some slight at the paper mill, started in on Lucas about being a burden to the family. Doug watched his brother's face crumble, saw him try to shrink into his wheelchair as if he could disappear entirely. That was when Doug found his voice, stepping between them and telling his father to shut up for once in his life. The backhanded slap that followed was worth it to see Lucas straighten up a little, to see some of his old defiance flicker back to life.

Chapter 5: Reclaiming Flight: The Mission to Save the Birds

The campaign to recover the stolen Audubon plates became Doug's secret mission, a quest that gave shape to the shapeless anger he carried inside. Each Saturday at the library, he and Mr. Powell would turn to another page in the butchered book, another gap where beauty had been carved away for the sake of balancing Marysville's budget. Doug began to see the town differently—not just as a place that had forgotten him, but as a place that had forgotten the difference between price and value. His first victory came through persistence rather than cunning. Mr. Ballard, the paper mill owner, had received the Yellow Shank as a gift from the Town Council, and he hung it in his office like any other piece of corporate art. But when Doug began visiting regularly to throw horseshoes behind the mill, he noticed how Mr. Ballard barely glanced at the beautiful bird on his wall. During one of their conversations, Doug casually mentioned that things belonged in the class to which they had been assigned. Mr. Ballard looked at the Yellow Shank with new eyes, and the next day he rolled it up and sent it back to the library. The Brown Pelican proved more challenging. Principal Peattie had received it as a reward for taking the job at Washington Irving Junior High, and he guarded it jealously in his office where every misbehaving student would have to look at it. But Doug had learned patience from watching the Arctic Tern, had absorbed something of the bird's focused intensity. He made a deal with the principal: if Christopher was cleared of the robbery charges that had been hanging over his head, the pelican would return to the library. When the real thief was caught—and Doug suspected his father's drinking buddy Ernie Eco knew more about that than he was saying—Peattie kept his word. Each recovered page felt like a small resurrection, proof that broken things could sometimes be made whole again. Doug would carry the tubes containing the prints to Mr. Powell like offerings, watching the old librarian's face light up as he smoothed each page back into its proper place in the book. They were rebuilding something that had been scattered, gathering the flock back together one bird at a time.

Chapter 6: Drawing New Lines: Literacy, Art, and Self-Discovery

Miss Cowper, the English teacher, noticed Doug's struggles with reading during the class attempt to tackle Jane Eyre. While other students raced through Charlotte Brontë's dense prose, Doug sat staring at pages full of incomprehensible symbols, his lips moving silently as he tried to sound out words that might as well have been written in ancient Greek. Instead of humiliating him in front of the class, Miss Cowper quietly developed what she called a County Literacy Unit, with Doug as her sole test subject. The lessons took place after school in Miss Cowper's empty classroom, where Doug learned about phonics and syllables and the mysterious ways that letters combined to form meaning. It was like learning to draw all over again—seeing patterns where once there had been only chaos, understanding that fluency came from practice rather than natural ability. Miss Cowper was endlessly patient, breaking down "soliloquized" into manageable pieces and celebrating when Doug successfully navigated "extraordinary" without stumbling. Meanwhile, his art lessons with Mr. Powell grew more sophisticated. They moved from simple line drawings to watercolors, from copying Audubon's work to creating original compositions inspired by the birds Doug observed around Marysville. He learned about stable and unstable compositions, about how artists used tension and balance to create emotion on a flat surface. The Large-Billed Puffins taught him about humor in art—how something could be both ridiculous and dignified at the same time. The Forked-Tailed Petrels showed him movement frozen in time, two birds fighting against opposing winds to reach each other. The breakthrough came when Doug realized he no longer needed to hide his capabilities. In geography class, he decorated his map of France with seagulls so realistic that Mr. Barber stopped and whistled in admiration. In physical science, he helped Mr. Ferris with visual demonstrations, his drawings bringing molecular structures to life for students who'd never quite grasped chemistry before. Word spread that the Swieteck kid could actually draw, and for once the family name carried positive associations. Teachers who had written him off began paying attention when Doug raised his hand.

Chapter 7: Love and Loss: When Lil Falls Ill

The spring brought a kind of happiness Doug had almost forgotten was possible. He and Lil had become inseparable, walking to school together each morning and meeting at the library each Saturday afternoon. She helped him practice his reading while he taught her to identify the birds they saw around town. When the local theater decided to stage a production of Jane Eyre, both Doug and Lil found themselves recruited—she as Helen Burns, he as the offstage voice of the mad woman in the attic. The irony wasn't lost on Doug that he'd gone from struggling to read Charlotte Brontë to performing in her most famous work. Their opening night triumph felt like a celebration of everything Doug had overcome. Joe Pepitone himself sat in the audience, and afterward he asked Doug to sign his program—a reversal so complete it seemed like something from a dream. Mrs. Windermere, glowing with the success of her adaptation, promised Doug and Lil the return of two more stolen Audubon plates as payment for their performances. For one perfect evening, Doug felt like he belonged somewhere, like he had found his place in a story larger than his family's dysfunction. But happiness, Doug had learned, was always temporary. Lil collapsed during the second week of performances, her appendix having ruptured while she powered through rehearsals despite increasing pain. What the doctors found during surgery was worse than anyone had imagined: cancer, already spreading through her young body like spilled ink across clean paper. The prognosis was brutal in its simplicity—one chance in four of surviving the year, and that only with aggressive treatment that would leave her bald and hollow-eyed. Doug spent his Saturdays now riding the bus to hospitals instead of visiting the library, watching Lil fight a battle she was too young to be fighting. She faced the treatments with the same fierce determination she'd brought to everything else, joking about her missing hair and planning elaborate future adventures they would take together. But Doug could see the fear in her green eyes, the way she gripped his hand a little too tightly when the nurses came with their needles and machines. They read to each other from the books she could no longer focus on alone, and Doug's hard-won reading skills became a gift he could offer when everything else felt inadequate.

Summary

Doug Swieteck's transformation from angry, illiterate teenager to young artist and reader came through the most unlikely sources: stolen birds, patient teachers, and the friendship of a girl brave enough to call him out on his self-pity. Each Audubon plate he helped return to its proper place in the library was also a piece of himself being restored, proof that broken things could be made beautiful again with enough care and attention. The Arctic Tern that had first captured his imagination—that desperate bird plunging toward dark water—no longer looked like a symbol of inevitable crash. Instead, Doug saw it as a creature in perfect control of its descent, diving toward something it needed rather than falling toward destruction. The story ends not with easy victories but with the recognition that life is an ongoing negotiation between hope and loss. Lil's illness hangs over Doug's newfound happiness like a storm cloud, reminding him that loving someone means accepting the possibility of losing them. Yet even in the face of such uncertainty, Doug has learned something crucial: that art and literacy and human connection are not luxuries but necessities, ways of making sense of a world that often seems senseless. Like the birds in Audubon's great book, each person must find their own way of taking flight, even when the winds are blowing in all directions at once. Doug Swieteck, no longer the angry boy who arrived in Marysville with nothing but a stolen jacket and a head full of rage, has discovered that sometimes the most important journey is not escaping from where you are, but learning to see beauty in the place you've landed.

About Author

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Gary D. Schmidt

Schmidt delves into the complexities of life through the lens of children's and young adult literature, exploring themes that blend humor and sadness with unexpected grace. His academic background in medieval literature informs his approach, allowing him to infuse his narratives with a deep emotional core and thematic richness. His personal experiences, including teaching writing in prisons and youth detention centers, have directly inspired works like "Orbiting Jupiter", where real-life encounters translate into compelling storytelling.\n\nIn addition to emotional and thematic exploration, Schmidt's books often draw from personal and family history. His ability to fictionalize real locations while grounding his narratives in genuine human experiences sets his work apart. Notable books such as "Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy" and "The Wednesday Wars" have earned him multiple Newbery Honors, underscoring his impact on the genre. His method of integrating these elements allows readers, particularly young audiences, to engage with literature that reflects the beatific and terrible complexities of their own lives.\n\nSchmidt's contributions as an author extend beyond entertainment; they provide readers with tools to navigate their own life experiences. Through the emotional depth of his characters and the realistic portrayal of challenges, his literature offers insight and understanding. This approach not only garners critical acclaim but also positions Schmidt as a guiding figure in contemporary children's literature, providing a bio of a writer whose works resonate on both intellectual and emotional levels.

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