by Rebecca Rupp
This year I’ve got Miss Walker in English class, and she gave me a copy of Walden by Henry David Thoreau. It might just turn out to be my special book, she said. A man who spends his time making the earth say blue potatoes might hit it off with a man who made the earth say beans.
“What?” I said.
“Chapter seven,” she said.
Then she assigned me an essay on it.
Being out didn’t turn out to be as awful as I thought it was going to be. After a while Ryan Baker started coming over to sit with me and Walter in the cafeteria, and then we picked up a couple of girls, and then all (three) members of the rocket club, and a kid from Brazil who’s a chess whiz in Portuguese.
Peter Reilly’s now on his eighth serious girlfriend, and we’re civil to each other.
I don’t hear from Isabelle anymore. She’s moved on. We all have. It’s just hard that moving on sometimes means leaving people behind.
I wish I could say that I’ve come to terms with what happened to my brother Eli, but I haven’t. I don’t think I ever will. I think about how things would be different, how much he would have done if he were here. For every person killed, Walter would say, so many parallel universes get snuffed out. In my Book of the Dead, there’s Henry Moseley, a British scientist who was so brilliant that everybody thought he was headed for a Nobel Prize. Instead, when he was twenty-seven, he was drafted, sent to fight in World War I, and shot through the head and killed at the Battle of Gallipoli.
After that, the British government pulled its head out of its ass and decided to stop sending all their scientists off to war. But by that time it was too late, and the world we might have had if Henry Moseley had stayed in it was long gone.
Like the world we might have had if Eli could have stuck around.
Mostly, though, I don’t think about Eli dying anymore. Maybe the old Egyptians were right that dying is a journey from the world of the living to whatever comes next, and that it takes a long time. It’s the same for the survivors too, and for me, my journey’s done. I think that maybe all this time with my Book of the Dead, I’ve been building a bridge between the world with Eli in it and the world without him, and now I’ve crossed over and I’m on the other side. I’ve reached what Walter calls closure, about which I guess Walter was right after all.
I don’t know where Eli is. But I can tell you this: his heart was lighter than that stupid feather. That old Egyptian Gobbler thing didn’t get Eli.
Walter once told me a quote from a Roman poet named Virgil. “Death twitches my ear. Live, he says. I am coming.”
“If you’re trying to make me feel better,” I said, “telling me that a guy with a scythe is lurking just around the corner is not helping. You are terminally creeping me out.”
Walter said no, it was a good thing. It was saying, make the most of your tomorrows, because life doesn’t last forever. Eli would have said that.
Which makes me think of Jennie Wade, the girl who got killed by mistake at the Battle of Gettysburg, when a bullet came through the kitchen door while she was kneading dough. The day after she died, her mother took all that dough and baked it into bread. It made fifteen loaves of bread.
When I first heard that, I thought it was pretty heartless, just baking after your daughter died as if nothing at all had happened. But now I think it was the right thing to do.
Because life goes on and people have to eat.
In November, the November after Isabelle left, I went for one last time to visit Eli’s grave. The wind was blowing out of the north, and the sky was gray and angry looking. Fall was pretty far gone. If a storm came that night, I figured it would take down the rest of the leaves.
“I’m not going to keep my Book of the Dead anymore,” I said.
The wind gave a little gust like an answer, and a whole bunch of leaves blew across Eli’s grave. I sat there for a long time.
I thought about how lucky I’d been to have Eli for a brother. I thought about all the stuff he’d tried to teach me. I thought of how, because of him, I had Jim and Emma and Walter and Miss Walker, and how because of him, Mom and Dad and I were working on being a family again. I thought how much I’d always miss him, and how I’d never forget him and how I’d carry his memory with me all my life.
If I ever had kids, I’d tell them about him. And I thought how I’d do my best to see that all those bright tomorrows he’d left me that should have been his didn’t go to waste.
“I swear and double-swear on a two-foot stack of Bibles,” I said. Like I was making a pact between Eli and me.
By the time I got up, my knees and fingers had gone stiff, and it was getting cold. I reached over and patted the top of Eli’s stone, gentle, like I’d sometimes seen Coach Bowers pat a football player’s shoulder after he’d played a really good game.
“Good-bye, Eli,” I said. “I love you.”
And then I headed home.
Many thanks to Cynthia Platt, my creative and kind-hearted editor; to Mike Miller and his science class, for so neatly solving the problem of E.T.; to Ethan Rupp, for averting computer disaster; and to Mary Lee Donovan and all of the wonderful people at Candlewick who make books possible.
REBECCA RUPP is the beloved author of more than a dozen books for young readers, among them The Dragon of Lonely Island, Sarah Simpson’s Rules for Living, and Octavia Boone’s Big Questions About Life, the Universe, and Everything. About After Eli, she says, “Benjamin Franklin once said, ‘There never was a good war or a bad peace.’ As a writer during the Revolution, he knew what he was talking about. As another writer in a time of war, I set out to capture the feelings of the young people who have been exposed to it — their fear, their loss, and ultimately their hope.” Rebecca Rupp and her family live in Swanton, Vermont.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2012 by Rebecca Rupp
Cover photographs: copyright © 2012 by Martin Barraud/Getty Images (boy in grass); copyright © 2012 by Stockbyte/Getty Images (book); copyright © 2012 by Corbis Photography/Veer (soldier)
“Nothing Gold Can Stay” from the book THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, copyright © 1951 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number pending
ISBN 978-0-7636-5810-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7636-6194-6 (electronic)
Candlewick Press
99 Dover Street
Somerville, Massachusetts 02144
visit us at www.candlewick.com
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
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