B.u.g. Big Ugly Guy (9781101593523) by Adam Jane; Stemple Yolen

one could see it from the hallway.
    Staring at the few pieces of clay he’d already worked and the remains of the brick, he couldn’t help sighing aloud.
    And what kind of protector will I be building out of one brick of clay? Sure, it’s twenty-five pounds. But what’s
that
going to get us?
He made a face.
A protector the size and weight of a three-year-old?
He didn’t think a two-foot-tall golem was going to help anyone.
    â€œI need more clay!” he whispered, but in the room’s silence it sounded like a shout.
    I’ll need at least a two-hundred-pound golem, sort of the size and shape of Uncle Manny,
he told himself. In a family of runts, Uncle Manny was a giant.
Of course, he’d married in!
Sammy held his arms out, trying to remember how huge Uncle Manny was.
    I’ll need six bricks at least. Plus one for any clay that gets wasted in the process of shaping and another for shrinkage. That’s eight. I’ve got one here. So seven more trips to the garage to haul out nearly two hundred pounds of clay.
    It already sounded like a tough job before he had his next thought:
Seven more trips through the squeaky kitchen door.
    He couldn’t do that in one night. One squeak his parents might sleep through. But seven? Not a chance.
    Picking up the closeted brick, he hauled it to the bed to begin working . . .
    . . . and that’s when he realized he’d need to get a full eight bricks. In his hurry to hide the clay away yesterday, he hadn’t covered it well enough with the plastic wrapping and it was now too dry to be of any use.
    â€œStupid, stupid, stupid!” he muttered.
    Suddenly, everything about the golem, like the clay, seemed too hard. Not to mention insane.
    Dad might not miss one brick of clay, or even two—but nine?
    Sammy collapsed back onto his bed, suddenly close to tears. The light from the closet threw strange shadows onto the ceiling, as if a dark forest of trees were looking down on him. “It’s not just hard—it’s impossible.”
    He began to think the way he did when studying for a math test.
    This is my life test,
he thought
. I can’t tell Mom and Dad. They’ll think it’s crazy. That I’m crazy. And I can’t tell the major because it will set him off again. And Skink wouldn’t want that. And I can’t even tell Skink. But what do I do next?
    The trees in the ceiling didn’t provide any answers, so Sammy shifted his gaze back to the ruined block of clay. It looked particularly hopeless from this angle.
    A good Jew would go to his rabbi for advice. But since I stole from mine, that leaves him out, too.
    He lay still for a long moment, gathering his courage, wondering where courage was stored and how a person was supposed to gather it.
With a teaspoon? A shovel? A bucket loader?
His mind was awhirl with such questions. Stupid questions but important questions, too.
    Get up, Sammy,
he told himself
. So what if you don’t have many options? You’ve got this one, and who knows—it just might work.
He shook himself mentally. “It’s
got
to work.”
    He sat up. “Though my closet might get a bit messed up in the process.” He laughed at that. His closet was
always
a mess. What did a little more matter?
    Sammy thought for another minute.
If I can take two bricks a night from Dad’s studio, build the golem from the ground up in my closet—I’ll hide him behind my clothes. Then I can fire him on the fifth or sixth night.
    He didn’t want to think about firing the clay. Not yet. His father would surely realize something was happening then.
One: the kiln makes a lot of noise. Two: it gets really hot and takes a day to cool down. Three: . . .
Well, there wasn’t really a three.
    But he did know one thing. One important thing:
Working that way gets me a complete golem in under a week.
    He bit his lip
. I can be invisible for a week. Play