“It takes up the whole yard! The kids need more space, not less.”
“They’ve got the whole circle to play in,” Dad said.
“That’s not our property, Pat. And I can’t take the baby over there every day. He needs his own backyard to play in.”
“There’ll be enough space for one baby.”
Mom was silent.
“Then plan C is the answer,” said Dad.
“It’s too close to the fence. It’ll never get approved, and you know it.”
“There’s something else I know, Mitchie. You’re not going to find anything right with any of these plans.”
Mom said something I couldn’t hear.
“Michelle, we’re not going to put it on the market. And we’re not going to paint it. Not until we’ve thoroughly explored the possibilities of what we can do here.”
“I don’t want to do anything here!” Mom yelled.
I heard the thud and flutter of the pad of paper being flung down, Dad’s steps pounding down the basement stairs, a record going on in the distant basement. Sound vibrations came up through the walls as I crept back to bed.
CHAPTER 5
THE MORNING AFTER THE ARGUMENT, I got dressed for school before eating, backward from my usual routine, because I wanted to delay going to the kitchen. When I finally got there, things were as I had feared. Dad was nowhere in sight. Mom sat hunched over her toast on a stool at the counter. Was she crying or just trying to stop herself from throwing up? The dry toast was supposed to help. Poor Mom.
I stood in the kitchen doorway and waited for something to change. Nothing did, until Aimée came down the stairs behind me and said loudly, “What are you doing, Chérie?”
Mom turned and saw us. It was worse than I’d feared. Her eyes were red as if she’d been crying all night.
“What’s the matter, Mommy?” Aimée’s voice was almost panicked. This wasn’t the way Mom was going to tell her about the baby, I hoped.
Mom didn’t seem to focus on either of us. She put her hands to her eyes, wiped tears into her palms, held her hands out from her head to dry them. “Bobby Kennedy has been shot,” she said.
“Who’s Bobby Kennedy?” Aimée asked.
At the same time, I said, “Is he dead?”
The basement door opened just then, and Dad said, “JFK’s brother. He was running for president.”
“Is he dead?” I asked again, louder this time.
“They haven’t said yet,” Dad said.
Mom looked from Aimée to me with such a tired face. She couldn’t begin to explain. She said to Dad, “When does it end?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” he said tenderly. Not mad, then?
“JFK was John F. Kennedy,” Mom told Aimée. “He’s the president who got killed.”
“Shot?”
“Of course, stupid,” I said. Aimée never paid attention to anything except what was right in front of her or in her own head. Scared of tickling and open sewer drains and riding a bike, but not of all the bad news. Why, ever since Dr. King had been killed, people had done nothing but talk about him and JFK. Shot, like Bobby. And dead.
“The world is a wicked place,” said Dad in a voice that gave me a twinge like a pinch in my stomach.
“Pat,” said Mom, to stop him.
Aimée and I noticed the clock and ran for the door. Halfway down the steps I realized I still had the hairbrush in my hand. I ran back up and into the living room to drop it on the couch. I heard Dad say, “Nobody’s safe, Mitch. Nobody.”
I remembered I hadn’t eaten anything or brushed my teeth, but I spun around and sped off to school. Since I’d heard Mom say the word shot, my stomach had been getting smaller and smaller, and I knew nothing would fit inside it.
In English our class was reading “The Raven.” Well. You couldn’t grow up in Michelle Witkowski’s house without knowing more than a few lines of that scary poem about a creepy bird that came to the poet’s door one night. I had always loved the delicious way it made my skin crawl. I knew the whole thing practically by heart. But I stuck my hand in the air when Mr. Bergstrom hadn’t even finished telling us what page to turn to. “Are we reading this poem because of Bobby Kennedy?”
Mr. Bergstrom blinked at me. “Not intentionally,” he said. “It’s on the schedule, see?” Behind him on the board, it read: “Tuesday, poem.”
“It could be any poem!”
“It’s a poem by Poe. Edgar Allan Poe. He’s a poe-et. Get it?”
Oh. I realized that the word on the board wasn’t poem, but poe-m. Har-de-har-har.
“I already know it,” I said.
“Well, whoopedy-doo for you,” said Dave Asconti from three rows over.
“I know it by heart,” I insisted. “Couldn’t I just go to the library while you read it?”
“Are you serious, Chérie?” Mr. Bergstrom studied me with anxious blue eyes behind his glasses.
I looked straight ahead, and recited quickly, clearly:
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“Tis some visitor!’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.’”
Mr. Bergstrom watched me, shrugged, then nodded. “Go.”
I went to the school library and found a book on machines. It was full of careful drawings of pulleys, levers, gears, and seesaws with arrows showing which way the motion went. I hung over the book, using a fingertip to figure which way an elf that was standing on each piece would move when the piece moved. But there was a little shiver in my bones as I stood there, and I couldn’t not think of what was happening to Senator Kennedy—if he was already dead even now, and where the man was who’d shot him.
Once, when Mom’s voice had made shudders run all the way up my back, I had asked, “What does the raven want, Ma?”
“He’s Death,” Dad had said grimly, in a voice like the one he’d used today when he said, “Nobody’s safe.”
“Lord, Pat,” Mom had said, and laughed.
I shivered and tried to concentrate over the sounds of the first-grade class coming into the library for story time.
That night the headline on the Bridgefield Bell wrapped all the way across the front page, fat and black: KENNEDY IN ‘EXTREMELY CRITICAL CONDITION.’ He was still alive, with a bullet in his head. I rolled the headline quickly out of sight and into a red rubber band and folded the other twenty-eight papers without reading.
Up Marvin to Chauncey, around the corner to Onion Lane, and back up the other side of Marvin and then the other side of Chauncey, and a sprint back home. I thought I could avoid the news, but somehow I needed to know. Back home I sat next to Mom and read about the man who had walked up to Kennedy and shot him.
“I got out of English today,” I said. “We were reading ‘The Raven.’”
“Oh?” Mom said. “‘Once upon a midnight dreary’?”
“Right,” I said. “I didn’t want to hear it today, Mom. Do you understand?”
Mom looked into my eyes and ran a hand across my braids, squeezing them on the back of my neck. I leaned my head on Mom’s shoulder and felt her hand slide under my chin. I dreaded going to school the next day. I wanted to stay home, where it was safe.
The next morning the news was still grim, but he was still alive. I went to the library for the second half of the “Raven” lesson. The school librarian, Mrs. Pease, picked up the library phone and said something about Robert Kennedy, then got up and walked out of the library, leaving us kids to tear up the encyclopedia or climb the walls if we wanted to. I chased her down the hall, my sketch pad and my drawing of a Popsicle stick stairway flapping in my hand. “Mrs. Pease!” I said. “What about Bobby Kennedy?”
Mrs. Pease seemed to think twice, said
my name and grade and age to herself before saying quietly, “He died this morning.”
I knew it before she said it. Mrs. Pease looked dazed. She said, “Sorry, dear,” and turned toward the office, then: “You get back to your class now.”
I waited till she was gone, then walked away from the library, past classrooms, past the band room, past the art room. When I got to the playground door, I walked right out.
I crossed the playground and headed toward home.
All the way across the playground I expected to hear voices behind me, noise at my back, angry, indignant, bossy, stopping me from making my escape. I was astonished when none came. Was I invisible? I felt mixed, a glow of accomplishment and the stomachache-nervous knowledge that I hadn’t been missed.
I couldn’t go home a whole hour and a half early. As it was, Mom was going to wonder what had happened to my book bag and my lunch box. I hurried to the maze of stairways and balconies that was Cherry Square, the shopping center across the street. I walked as fast as I could without running, until I got to the stairs that ran down the back of the building. I sat there, drew in my sketchbook, and waited to hear school bells and kids’ voices.
It was Dave Asconti whom I heard, his voice like a donkey’s—loud, clear, and sudden—braying. “I know what you did, Chérie. Wait till Mr. Bergstrom finds out!”
I stood up when I heard Dave’s voice and dropped my book onto the cement step. He was upstairs, one flight above me.
“I saw you skip out of school.” You would think Dave Asconti had never done anything wrong all his life, to hear him.
“So?”
“You won’t get away with it.”
“What do you care?”
I turned away from him, my arms across my chest.
“I’m just warning you, Chérie,” he called down at me.
“I’m going home,” I said.
“Let’s go downtown,” he said. He was hanging over the rail, looking at me, his eyes like night.
I looked around. There wasn’t a clock. “I can’t. I—”
“It’s still early,” he said.
“How early?”
He glanced over his shoulder, embarrassed. “When I saw you leave, I decided to skip out, too. It’s ridiculous in there, Chérie. All the teachers are blubbering about the Kennedys.”
“And Martin, too,” I said.
“Martin!” He imitated me. “Dr. King to you.”
“My mother calls him Martin,” I said.
“I’m surprised she doesn’t call him Martine.” He jumped over the rail and landed beside me.
That wasn’t how Martin would sound in French, even if Mom did say it Frenchly. “How did you get out?” I asked. I could smell him sweating, not as cool as he thought.
“Went to the lav, then just left,” he said, acting as if it didn’t matter.
I took off my glasses, pulled the tail of my shirt out of the waist of my skirt, and wiped the glasses clear. I tried not to let Dave hear me sniff, keeping the tears inside.
I said, “I just want to go home.”
When I stood up straight, Dave’s face was close. “Come on then,” he said. “Race you.”
We ran down Marvin Road, Dave in his brown lace-up school shoes, his legs pumping. It was slower going for me in my slippery saddle shoes and flying plaid skirt.
At first, Marvin Road was a stretch of houses mixed with businesses that became fewer and fewer as Dave and I put distance between downtown and us.
The fence we ran past was painted red, but when I was little, it had been gray, with someone’s black graffiti: SUCK EGGS. Once when I asked what it meant, Mom had said, “It’s just rudeness,” and, “I feel sorry for people who have to express themselves that way.”
After the fence was the helicopter factory, with a sign with letters that changed like a movie marquee: TAKE TIME TO SMELL THE ROSES. HAPPY JUNE! I was always hoping Dad would convince someone to let me write the headlines, and I had good ideas. I wanted to see the sign empty and white except for one or two words: PEACE or GO METS! or SUCK EGGS or, just for fun, CHÉRIE WITKOWSKI.
Dave and I ducked into the woods between Marvin Road and the Little River. Dave turned his back and peed on a tree. “Pardon me,” he said.
I shrugged and said, “Glad I don’t have to go.” I knew how to go in the woods, and I figured my skirt would cover everything, but whenever I thought of trying, my insides seemed to clench up.
“You must be a camel,” Dave said disgustingly.
I smiled. It seemed like the first time I’d smiled in a week.
Dave grabbed onto a tree branch and swung himself up. I sank into the tall grass below the tree, out of view from across the river. Hiding, I felt powerful. I know something you don’t know.
Last year when Dave had read The Sword in the Stone, we had gone through a period of playing that we lived in the woods like Wart, which is what they called young King Arthur in the book. Dave was Wart, turning into fish in the river to learn how it felt to be something else from the inside. As Merlin I turned Dave into all kinds of things: rocks, frogs, a salamander. He was good at saying how it felt to be still, hard, wet, slithering.
Now I looked up at him in the tree and said in my solemn, mysterious Merlin voice, “How does it feel to be the tree, Wart?”
“I feel the wind,” said Dave, after a moment. I recognized his Wart voice. “But I cannot move. I’ll be blown over!” He let himself fall to the ground with a crash.
“Timber,” I said.
Dave stood up and asked, “How does it feel to be the raven?”
That was uncalled for. I was just playing. Why bring this horrible day into it? “Shut up about that,” I said. He sounded as if he was picking a fight, the way Pete would.
Across the river I spied Pete coming home from high school, which got out earlier than St. John Vianney’s. If he saw us, maybe he’d tell. Dave climbed the tree again. I felt like leaving him there.
“Pete made All-Stars,” said Dave from above.
“Did you?” I didn’t know what to hope.
“Yeah, and the idiots put me on his team,” Dave said.
“How’s he taking it?” I crouched in the tall grass, keeping an eye on Pete.
“You’re lucky, being the oldest,” Dave said. “And no brothers, even.”
“Not so far,” I said. Mom had said not to tell anyone yet, but suddenly I didn’t care. “My mom’s pregnant, you know.”
Dave threw a little stick at my head. “Liar,” he said.
“I am not,” I said. Another stick hit me.
“Aimée’s eight years old,” he said.
What did that matter? “It’s due on Halloween,” I said.
“That figures.”
I stood up out of the tall grass. I didn’t care if Pete saw me. Let him tell if he wanted to. “She’s probably having a boy,” I said. “That’s why she’s throwing up so much.”
A stick smacked into my back as I walked away.
I turned and screeched, “Stop it now!”
Dave threw a stick into my face. “Oh, Miss Teacher’s Pet Poetry Pupil who cuts class wants to save the trees now?” It was something I’d expect Pete to say, not Dave.
“It’s you I don’t want to go on living.”
“So?” Dave said. “It’s a good day to die.”
“Go play in traffic,” I screamed, walking away. If he wanted to scare me, he was succeeding. But I was already scared. I’d been scared all day.
Dave caught up and stood beside me. “I’d like to go point-blank, like Bobby Kennedy.” He pointed a finger at my head. “Pow.” His fist was so tight the tendons on his hand stood out white. He was scared, too, I realized.
“I have papers to deliver,” I said stiffly. I could imagine the big mournful headline: KENNEDY DEAD.
“Miss Important,” he said. “Bet they’ll be nice and bloody.”
I ran across the street and left Dave at the side of the road.
“Hi, Davey. Hi,
Cherry,” I heard Pete say. “Having a romantic walk in the woods?” I walked home as fast as I could, alone.
CHAPTER 6
HAD PETE FIGURED OUT THAT WE’D CUT SCHOOL? He hadn’t liked it when I’d helped rescue the ball from the sewer. I was afraid that one day he might tell on Dave and me. But nothing happened.
At school I avoided Dave, afraid Mr. Bergstrom would put two and two together and guess we’d been together the day we went missing. But he didn’t.
At home I avoided the Ascontis’ house, wanting no part of their fights about the news.
Soon Mom told Aimée about the new baby, then took Pete and Dave aside and told them (Dave pretended it was news), and pretty soon the rest of the neighborhood found out, because of Aimée.
Dave didn’t say anything about my parents’ being living proof of health class theories. He came over and hung around the porch being Mr. Sweet and Delightful. One afternoon I had already helped Mom bring in her grocery bags and figured she’d be okay putting the stuff in the cupboards herself. When Dave appeared, I thought he was going to keep me company while I got ready for my route. While I folded and banded papers, he jumped up and down, helping Mom. “Here, let me carry that, Aunt Mitch.… Get you anything, Aunt Mitch?”
Then he came out with a glass of lemonade and sat on the steps. By that time I was done with the papers. I heaved up an armful when I saw Dave coming and made myself busy packing Reshna’s baskets. “Did you get a tip?” I asked.
“Well, I’ve got to make some money somehow,” said Dave. He was fooling, of course. Our mothers never paid us money for anything we did.
Later Aunt Bonnie told me, “David needs to do things for people, mademoiselle.”
“Well, she’s my mother.”
Aunt Bonnie didn’t say, “Then why don’t you help her more?”
And I didn’t mention that I thought she was jealous, too—or that Dave came to our house to get away from his own. Instead I hung around Aunt Bonnie the way Dave hung around Mom. It wasn’t anything unusual, really. Aunt Bonnie had gone to art school, the way I wanted to. She had a little drawing table and an easel in the sewing room with the window that faced our house. I’d wander in there sometimes and get her to show me what she was painting.
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