Buster by Caleb Huett (ebook reader library txt) 📕

thank you to Dr. Paul Baker for his suggestions in the early stages of talking about how to represent Tonio’s anxiety honestly and accurately.

It should be no surprise to anyone after reading this that games are close to my heart. I believe one of the greatest and most important things we can do with each other is play, so thank you to all the people who played with me during this process, among all their other kinds of support: Peter Reitz, Andy Carter, Lucy Ralston, Faith Jones, Tony Ransom, Patrick Brick, Ryan Kingdom, Dr. Karl Kamen-Mohn, Erin Lovett, Sean Ireland, Nick Kelly, Sydney Rappis, Leon Barillaro, Kelly White, Noah Salaway, Sofi Pujol, Tyler Lawrence, Andrew Nelson, Mila Nery, all the kids in the Dalton D&D group, and everyone who even played a single board game with me during this time!

Thank you to my book world families: Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia, and its booksellers past and present, WORD Bookstore, and Anyone Comics. (My comic book squad, Nick Eliopulos and John Jennison, finally got me back into X-Men during this, which I am impossibly grateful for.) Thank you to Holley Brown and all the other librarians and bookstores who hosted me during the Top Elf tour! Also shout-out to the New York Public Library for being way, way, way cooler than I could have even imagined.

If you are someone who listens, pays attention, and cares about what the people around you are feeling and struggling with: thank you, too. I hope this book reminds you of how important that work is.

Oh, and thank you for a decade of being an extremely good boy, Bogart. I miss you.

Caleb Zane Huett is a tabletop gamemaster, former bookseller, and definitely not a dog with a pen name. He’s a graduate of the University of Georgia, and he’s really good at trading card games. Eight different dogs have protected him throughout the years, and he currently has two cats who are furious they weren’t featured in this book. You can find him at calebzanehuett.com.

Copyright © 2021 by Caleb Zane Huett

All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

First edition, March 2021

Cover art © 2021 by Betsy Luk

Cover design by Maeve Norton

e-ISBN 978-1-338-71754-9

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.