Dead Wednesday

by Jerry Spinelli

  Worm may be still waiting for his social maturity to catch up with his underarm hair, but he knows a great love story when he hears one. He likes how she’s taken his arm, like they’re man and wife in an old black-and-white movie. He keeps his elbow out, like he’s supposed to. He wishes he didn’t know the ending isn’t happy.

  She pulls him close, grins. “You wish it would end there, don’t you?”

  He can’t speak. He nods.

  She squeezes him closer, leans in for a head touch. “Me too,” she says. “But hey”—another quick change, back to cheery—“I counted the days. A hundred and thirty-two. Total. And a hundred and thirty-one were heaven. How many people can say that?” She sighs. She looks at the sky, mouth wide open, as if inviting it in. “I’ll tell you, Worm, dead does wonders for your optimism. I look back and the glass is always half-full.” She smiles, closes her eyes, wags her head. “The times we had.”

  She says nothing for a while. Thinking about those times, Worm figures. He doesn’t dare disturb her. They walk…they walk. They pass a block from Eddie’s house. Worm wonders who won the fight.

  She clutches him tighter. He can feel her breast against his shoulder. She’s thinking of Pooter. But holding on to Worm. He’s glad they’re out here in the burbs, fewer people to see him in the hat. Her earlobe is pierced but has no earring. Her face is dazzling. He wonders if ghosts get sunburn. She wears no makeup. Like Claire Meeson.

  She speaks. “Like I said, I’m not prom queen material. Him, he’ll be prom king, you wait and see.” She looks away. “We would have been seniors next year.” She seems to be inspecting the neighborhood. “So for the last couple weeks of summer, I’m like, ‘Why me?’ Y’know? He could have anybody. And at that time I wasn’t real big on self-esteem. So it took me a while to get over it. Like, ‘Wow, what a lucky girl am I! Do I deserve this?’

  “By the time school started in September, I figured I did. Not in a cocky, entitled way. It’s like naturally, while we were talking…talking…we became three. Him. Me. Us. We liked the same shows. We finished each other’s sentences. We were both terrified of thousand-leggers. Even the way our differences balanced out. His confidence. My doubts. His cool. My temper. We weren’t the same. That wouldn’t be good. But we meshed. We fit.”

  She turns to Worm, leans in, and tilts her face till she’s under the hat brim too. She nose-bumps him. “Someday you’ll fit, Worm. You’ll surprise some girl. You’ll surprise yourself. She’ll call you Robbie.” She laughs out loud. “Hah!”

  “What?” says Worm.

  “Names. H.D. Har. That’s what everybody called him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, I changed all that. The world can thank”—she thumbs her chest—“me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Y’know,” she says, “it’s obvious from here. It was the moment I started to feel I really belonged, I was a full partner in us.”

  She waits, seems to want a prompt.

  “When?” he says. “How?”

  She giggles. “When I named him Pooter.” She lets go of Worm, twirls past two houses, comes back to him. “I told him, ‘People think you’re perfect. We need to mess you up.’ He says, ‘Be my guest.’ ”

  She told him he needed a nickname, but not an impressive one. A silly one. A nickname that would knock him off his pedestal.

  “I thought about it for a week. Went through a hundred names. Then I remembered a little kid who used to live next to us. Just over being a baby, learning to talk, walk. He was being potty-trained. He got so he knew what he was doing, he just hadn’t gotten the hang of controlling it. So he was still toddling around in diapers. And whenever he had to do number two, well, he would just go ahead and do number two. And then he would get all proud and toddle up to the nearest grown-up and point to his diaper and say, all proud, ‘Poot.’ And there it was.” She laughs. “Hey—even I wasn’t gonna call him Poop.

  “So I told him to kneel before me. I put my hand on the top of his head and I said, ‘I name thee Pooter Dean Baker.’ ”

  “What did he think?” Worm says.

  She laughs some more. “He loved it. He got it. Like, how could anyone take somebody named Pooter seriously? See, I knew what a lot of others didn’t: he hated the pedestal. He wasn’t perfect and he knew it.

  “All you had to do was pay attention to him for five minutes, and you could figure that out. Like, he bit his fingernails. He was afraid of water. He couldn’t swim! And the turtle! Second day after he got his driver’s license? Ran over a turtle. Not because he was speeding. Because he’d just gotten a text and he took a second—just a second—to look down at his phone. Not to text back but just to see who it was. And he looks back up and there’s the turtle in his rearview. Killed it. I held his hand. I told him about my fireflies. We teared up. Together.”

  She looks wistfully into the distance. “That was the day, the night. The new name, the turtle, the fireflies, crying together. We became us.” She shakes her head, smiles at something only she can see. “The times we had…”

  The mood is changing. Worm feels the name story is unfinished. “So,” he says, “Pooter. How’d it go? I mean, with everybody else?”

  She snaps her fingers. “No problem. He told his buddies to start calling him Pooter, and by October even the teachers were tempted to call him that, you could tell. Of course”—she laughs—“all the silly name did was make him more popular. Lovable.”

  He can’t believe they’re going to walk all the way to the cabins.

  She repeats: “The times we had…” She takes a deep breath, the exhale nothing but pain. Here it comes, he thinks. “It was my fault, Worm. You have to understand that.” She’s looking at him, expecting a response. He nods. “My fault. Him. My parents. Three people. Three people who loved me standing over me in a cemetery. I did that. Me. Understand?”

  He croaks, “Yeah.”

  “So…couples”—she swallows—“couples. There’s a thing they usually do. Some little thing special to them. Secret. Maybe it’s a signal you give each other as you pass in the hallway after third period. Maybe it’s something you stick in each other’s locker every day. Hooking little fingers. It can be silly. Even stupid. That’s not the point. See what I’m saying?”

  Sort of. He nods. “Uh-huh.”

  “So our secret little thing was this. Every morning when I woke up, first thing I did was reach for my phone and text him an emoji. Nothing else. Just that.”

  “Which one?” he says.

  “The one with the red heart and a littler heart sort of floating above it? We liked to think it meant our one big blended heart had a little baby heart. Weren’t we adorable?”

  He nods again.

  “And then each night the last thing he did before he went to bed was text our emoji to me. Sometimes I was still awake, but even if I was sleeping, I’d hear it come in and see it and go back to sleep with a smile on my face.”

  Not in any organized way or anything, Worm has lately been collecting boy-girl romance stuff he might want to make use of when the time comes for him. Keeps them in a little box in his head. He adds the two-hearted emoji.

  “Starting around the end of October, every day and night. The bookends of my life. Us confirmed.”

  She lets go of his arm, puts a little distance between them. This bothers him, though he doesn’t know why. Sometimes she’s right down on his level, seems to get him as well as Eddie does. Other times he’s reminded that she’s three grades ahead of him. She inhabits a world he sees only as a dark portal.

  “Then…” She takes a deep breath. “The twenty-third of December. When I got home from school, there were already flurries. It was going to be a major snow dump. Not that I cared. For me Christmas would begin on December twenty-sixth. That’s because Pooter would be away both Christmas Eve and Christmas
Day. Every year the family spent those two days with his grandparents somewhere way up in New York State. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Cell phone reception between there and back home stunk, Pooter said. You were lucky to get through one out of ten times. We probably wouldn’t be able to text or talk.

  “How I treasured the emoji he sent me that night! In fact, he sent me a whole screenful of double hearts. I went to sleep clutching my iPhone like a teddy bear.

  “The snow was a foot deep and still coming down when I woke up late Christmas Eve morning. My father is one of those snow-shovel fanatics. He doesn’t wait till it stops snowing. He’s out there in the driveway shoveling away while it’s piling up again behind him. He has some complicated man-reason that my mom and I never understood.

  “Meanwhile, Pooter, I figured, was already halfway to New York.

  “I spent Christmas Eve day wrapping gifts and reading and moping and missing my Pooter. Every half hour I tried calling or texting him. No luck. And no buzzes from him.

  “Looking back, I can see how it happened. With every failed text, I got a little more frustrated. The more I failed, the more I wanted to make contact. So by the time I went to bed, I was ready to run to New York. But something else occurred to me—and it was brilliant.

  “I got my old little-kid snow shovel from the basement. I didn’t bother to change: pj’s, slippers. I put on my dad’s long winter overcoat. I put the present in a pocket. (I’ll get to that in a minute.) I got my boots from the closet and threw them in the car. I’d put them on when I got there. I snuck my father’s car down the driveway, already shoveled except for a couple inches. Thanks, Dad!

  “There was a glaze on the moonlit snow. The storm had finished with sleet. Meaning sharp edges for trench diggers. Perfect.

  “Every station on the car radio was saying how cold it was going to be for the next couple days. Perfect.

  “ ‘Don’t drive unless you have to,’ the radio was saying. Well, I had to.

  “The snowplows were out. The salt slingers were out. I went slow, crunching the salt. Careful…careful…be cool….

  “Pooter’s house was normally fifteen minutes from mine. This would take longer. No problem. The whole point was to get there—I was actually giggling in the car at the thought of it. When I got to his house, I would put on my boots. I would take my little red shovel and, using my legendary artistic talents, I would trench-dig the world’s biggest double-heart emoji in the snow. And big it would be because they have a massive front yard.”

  “What about the present?” says Worm.

  She pokes him. “Thanks for the reminder. The present I would put in the middle of the big heart. Guess what it was.”

  “A puppy.”

  “Duct tape.”

  He snaps his fingers. “Yeah, dumb me. What else?”

  “I’m serious,” she says. “Remember I told you he said we needed some duct tape to shut us up that first night?”

  He gets it. “A joke present.”

  “A joke present. The serious one was back in my room. An oatmeal-colored Irish wool cable-knit cardigan with a shawl collar.”

  “Impressive,” he says, not that he would know one sweater from another.

  “But the snow emoji, that was the thing.” She laughs. “I kept picturing how it was probably going to go. As they pull in the driveway, one of his parents says, ‘Hey, somebody was sledding in our yard.’ And Pooter looks…and he knows…he knows instantly. He knows no way was I gonna let some cell phone problem stop me from sending the emoji. And he laughs and laughs, and maybe he tells his parents and maybe he doesn’t, but whatever, he jumps out of the car and walks around the lopsided hearts, laughing and loving his lopsided girlfriend more than ever.”

  She says nothing now. They walk for blocks. Worm’s tempted to turn his head and look at her, but he can’t. He wants to hold her hand, but he knows she’s with somebody else now. He knows she’s probably in the last good moment of her life and she doesn’t want to leave.

  But she does.

  “So I’m crunching along, only car out, and about halfway to his house the road is blocked. Flashing lights. A guy in a yellow vest is waving two red-capped flashlights crosswise. I stop. I roll down the window. He looks at me funny.

  “ ‘Do you absolutely have to be out, miss?’ he says.

  “ ‘Yes, I do,’ I tell him.

  “ ‘Well,’ he says. He shifts his eyes and tilts his head down the street, and for the first time I notice a car upside down on the sidewalk. Not to mention an ambulance and a bunch of police cars. For some reason what really strikes me is that the upside-down car’s headlights are still on. The vest man clears his throat and he goes, ‘I think the best thing now is to turn around and go back home, miss, and stay there.’ He puts both hands on the roof and practically leans into the window. ‘Please.’

  “ ‘OK,’ I say. I back up and turn around. This was the worst part of my driver’s test. It takes me about ten back-and-forths. Embarrassing.

  “So I drive off, but I don’t go home. I take a turn first chance I get. After all this, no way Pooter is not gonna get that emoji. There’s not much else I’m sure of. Until now I’ve been drunk on my incredible idea….”

  Which is when, brilliantly, Worm’s mother decides it’s a good time to text him:

  Where are you?????

  I cant do it all!!!!

  NOW!!!!!­!!!!!­!!!!!­!

  Yeah, Mom, I’m gonna give up the most unbelievable experience in human history for a toilet brush. He shuts down his cell.

  “The salty crunch is gone and there’s no streetlights out here and the road no longer feels connected to the steering wheel. I’m more skating than driving. And I don’t know where I am. I’m all turned around.

  “OK…” She takes a deep breath, blinks, swallows. She’s reliving it, she’s back in the car. “OK—the house is over there”—she flaps her left arm—“somewhere. I gotta keep that in mind. Keep my bearings. I know the name of his street. I know the address. I just need to keep turning left, and sooner or later I’ll circle back to it.”

  She kicks a mailbox post. “But it’s not happening. The road keeps taking me right, and when it finally dead-ends at a crossroad at the bottom of a hill, I go sailing right through the stop sign because there’s no salt”—she punches him—“there’s no salt. You understand, Worm?” Another punch. He understands, but he can’t speak. “There’s no salt and no light and it’s all hills and the nose of my father’s car is sticking into a snowbank.

  “I do the only three things I can. I put the car in reverse, I press the gas pedal, and I pray. It works. I back out. I’m on the road again, loster than ever. Up, down. Up, down. Never saw so many hills. I’m using the brakes as little and as gently as possible. I know about that. I’m even using the trick my father told me: for better traction I’m driving with the right tires off the road, where it’s crunchier.

  “I’m feeling pretty good about my snow-driving skills when I find myself at the top of a hill that isn’t curvy at all. It’s perfectly straight. But long. My high beams don’t reach the bottom. I stop. My foot’s on the brake. And the car starts moving anyway. It’s on its own, weaving, pirouetting, dancing with the ice….” She laughs. “There shoulda been waltz music.” She waves her hands back and forth. “La-dah-dah-de-dah…turning and turning and going faster and faster, and I’m thinking, ‘Screw what they say, I’m hitting the brake,’ and I’m practically standing on the pedal with both feet, and now the car isn’t dancing, it’s decided it’s just gonna go straight down—backward—and suddenly right there on the windshield is the man in the yellow vest, and he’s crying and he’s saying to me, ‘Please…please…,’ and I’m turning the wheel like a NASCAR driver and pounding the brakes, and it works and now the car is turning…turning…and just as it finishes turning and the man in the yell
ow vest goes away, here comes the tree.”

  * * *

  —

  They walk. Many blocks pass. He hears birds. He thinks someday he should get a DVD or go online and find out what calls belong to what birds. Because he can never see them.

  * * *

  —

  She wanders away from him. Back and forth across the street. Across front yards. Once she disappears down an alley and doesn’t show up for another ten minutes. He just keeps walking.

  Eventually she comes back to him.

  “It was my fault. Say it, Worm.”

  Is this a game?

  “Say it. ‘It was your fault, Becca Finch.’ ”

  “It was your fault.”

  “Becca Finch.”

  “Becca Finch.”

  “You stupid jackass.”

  “You stupid jackass.” He means it.

  She punches him. His left shoulder is getting sore. “Look what I did.” Another punch. “Do you understand?”

  He punches her back. “I understand.”

  “I left three people at the grave. Two parents and a boyfriend. Devastated. Because of me. Because I wouldn’t listen. To the warnings. To the ice. To the upside-down car. To the man in the yellow vest. To my own common sense.” She stops, faces him, shakes him by the shoulders, yells. “Why, Worm? Why? Why did I destroy three lives? Four, counting me.”