Every Single Second (7 page)

“No! He—”

“Oh my God, I get chills just thinking about it. What if the person’s not really dead, and they wake up inside the coffin and start banging on the lid, but no one can hear them? They’re already in the ground! Buried alive.”

“That never happens!” cried Nella.

“I watched this show where they explained what happens to dead bodies. They ooze out this green slime and flesh-eating flies lay their eggs in it.” Megan looked more excited than she had all day. “They can eat a whole entire corpse in like ten days.”

“Not these corpses,” said Nella. “They get embalmed. That stops them rotting.”

“Wow.” Megan grinned. “You’re definitely a corpse expert.”

“Death is the flip side of life.” Dad always said that when people asked about his job. “It’s a natural part of the cycle.”

“Does he sleep in a coffin?” Megan asked, making Victoria dissolve into giggles. A second later, Kimmy did too.

“Don’t be an idiot!” said Nella.

It was all over, she could tell. Whatever had made Victoria invite her wasn’t going to last. If she’d had any sense, she’d have stomped away right then and avoided what happened next. But something stupid in her made her stand there, digging her stiff fingers deeper inside her pockets.

“Nella’s father’s pretty normal,” Victoria blurted. “Except for the jail thing.”

“Jail?” Now Megan really looked interested. “What’d he do?”

The wind was picking up. Nella’s hands had gone numb. Her feet were lumps of ice attached to her legs. She couldn’t move if she wanted to. She was a prisoner, waiting to hear her sentence read out.

“A car accident,” Victoria said.

“He went to jail for a car accident?” Megan’s brow wrinkled. “I think you’re telling one of your whoppers, Vickie.”

Victoria hesitated, like she was trying to decide something. With a sudden, quick twist of her shoulders, she made up her mind.

(Later, Nella would think the reason she hadn’t run away was she wanted to hear. She wanted to hear what Victoria said next, to finally know this thing she’d suspected
in some dark, buried part of her.)

“He hit a little girl and she died.”

The ground shifted beneath Nella’s feet. A crack opened wide, and she almost lost her balance. She had one foot here, one there. One in before, one in after. When she gasped, the air stayed cold in her mouth, in her throat, all the way down into her lungs.

“No!” It was a reflex, like holding up your hand when someone tried to slap you. “No.”

“That’s so terrible.” Megan licked her lips. “That’s like a huge, terrible tragedy. How old was the little girl?”

“Seven.”

Kimmy pressed her mittens to her cheeks.

Vocabulary. The million stupid, useless words they’d learned. None of them fit this.

“Her whole life was ahead of her,” Megan whispered. “Like how can he even live with himself?”

“How . . . how can
you
?” Nella flung the words into the empty air, where they hung for an instant and disappeared like smoke. She spun away, slipping on a patch of ice.

“How can he work in a cemetery? Isn’t he scared vengeful ghosts will get him? Oh my God. Is
she
buried here?”

Nella ran, the cruel wind nipping her face, biting her heart.

He hit a little girl and she died.

What the Statue of Jeptha A. Stone Would Say if It Could

D
ead is dead.

Another common misconception.

Hark unto me, Jeptha A. Stone. The dead live on in infinite ways. From beyond the grave, they comfort, they accuse. They nourish, they destroy. The reason ghosts do not exist is simple: they are not necessary.

For the living to be haunted, all that is required is a memory.

It is a fact that no living being remembers me.

Not that I mind, I hasten to add. Not at all. Not the least bit.

Monuments do not get lonely.

The very notion is undignified.

As is the feathered creature now nestled in my capacious lap. What a racket she and her chums make each dawn and dusk! You’d think they were trying to wake the dead.

YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT

now

T
he main reason people believed in God, Clem said, was they didn’t want to feel alone. They wanted to believe Someone was watching over them. When Nella protested that there had to be Something Bigger than us in this world, Clem agreed. Of course there was!

“Music’s bigger than us,” she said. “Those emperor penguins that don’t eat for a hundred and twenty days because they’re faithfully guarding their eggs? They are colossal.”

Nella liked penguins all right. But she could never pray to one.

Not that her prayers got results, anyway. No matter how many pleas and promises she made to heaven, the bishop didn’t change his mind. At recess, Nella helped pack books into boxes that Sister Rosa labeled in her perfect handwriting.
First Grade Readers
.
Baltimore Catechisms
. The storage closet was so dusty, they both kept sneezing. Tears ran down their cheeks, and Sister dabbed them both with her endless supply of snow-white, rose-scented handkerchiefs.

“Are you all right?” Nella asked.

Sister’s watery gaze wandered the shelves of books. She looked a little scared, as if it wasn’t just books getting packed away. The other nuns had gotten new teaching assignments, but Sister Rosa was going to the rest home.

“Sometimes the Lord tests us,” she said. “He wants to see what we’re made of.” She flexed a scrawny bicep. Sister had a scar over one eye, the same place as Anthony did. When she was little, she’d jumped out of a tree, certain she could fly. Now she smiled and patted Nella’s arm. “His will be done.”

Dad’s favorite song had the line: “You can’t always get what you want.” The words sang inside Nella’s head now. They seemed a lot like “His will be done,” though it was probably a sin to think so.

IN COMMON

then

M
urder. The worst, most unthinkable sin of all.

Nella slipped and slid down the hill from the cemetery, trying to escape Megan’s words. Escape the look on Victoria’s face. Did Kimmy already know too? Did everyone know except her?

Who could trust Victoria? Who’d believe that poisonous snake of a girl over Dad?

He’d graduated first in his high school class but mysteriously never gone to college.

Nella pitched forward, hands out, and landed on all fours. Scrambling up, she slipped again and this time fell
on her butt. Peering over her shoulder, afraid the other girls were following and would laugh, instead she saw Angela.

“You look froze! Here.” Angela pulled off a glove and gave it to Nella. They pushed their bare hands into their pockets. “Where are you going in such a rush?”

At home Nella’s father would be watching the basketball game, the little brothers crawling over him like he was a human playground, while Salvatore sat upright and serious beside him, trying to be a Dad-replica.
Dad.
He was the sun. The center. Nella was sick. She leaned against the wall.

“Are you hurt?” Angela asked.

“Can I come to your house?”

By that time, they never went there anymore. But of course Angela said okay.

The DeMarcos’ house had no smell. No smell of cooking, no dirty socks or baby spit-up or old-lady mildew. Even the air was afraid to offend Mr. DeMarco.

“Yo!” Anthony’s head poked out of his room. “Secret sister!”

He held weights and curled one toward his chest. With another boy it would’ve looked manly and macho, but with Anthony it looked . . . silly. Nella giggled.

“Laugh at your own risk,” he said. “Mock the Iron Man and suffer the consequences.”

“Papa calls him a puny weakling,” said Angela. “He says a girl could take Anthony down.”

Anthony started doing push-ups. After half a minute his arms collapsed and his face mashed into the rug.

“Crap! Snap!”

Nella couldn’t stop giggling. It felt weird, like parts of her were shaking loose. She was a tree and the wind was stripping off her leaves. Anthony and Angela stared at her.

“What’s the matter?”

Nella tried to give her head a casual shake, but once she started shaking it she couldn’t stop.

“Hey! Easy!” They sat on either side of her, bookends propping her up. “What’s going on?”

“Victoria said my father killed a girl.”

How could something so big—bigger than the whole world—fit into so few words?

She waited. Neither of them said anything. That was how Nella knew it was true.

“Talk to him,” Anthony said at last. “He’ll tell you what happened.”

“But he won’t! All this time he didn’t!” Nella didn’t want to cry. Crying would make it true all over again.

Anthony folded his hand over hers. It was the warm glove she’d been wishing for all day.

“He was trying to protect you,” Anthony said.

“No! He was lying!”

Downstairs a door slammed.

“Anthony!” Mr. Demarco hollered. “Angela!”

Angela bolted to her feet. “You better go,” she told Nella. “I can tell from his voice. You need to go.”

Reluctantly, Nella drew her hand from Anthony’s. She followed Angela out onto the landing.

“That stupid Victoria!” Angela made a face. “She’s poison!”

“At least she told me the truth,” Nella heard herself say. “Not like some people.” Craziness roared up inside her. She let it. She didn’t even try to stop it. “Why didn’t you tell me? You . . . you jellyfish! You wimp!”

Downstairs, cupboard doors slammed. Angela gripped the railing. “Because,” she said evenly, “it doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter?” Nella wanted to push her. Push her right down the stairs. “You’re so stupid I can’t stand it!”

“What your father did, it’s awful.” Angela’s mouth made a harsh, straight line. For a moment, Nella hardly recognized her. “But so what. It’s too late. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

My father killed people. In the war.

This thing so terrible, it scared away words. This thing neither of their fathers would talk about. They had it in common.

P2F2

now

A
ccording to the laws of physics,” Clem said, “electrons and photons can occupy an
infinite
number of locations at the same time. All I’m asking for is
two
. Humans are composed of subatomic particles, so what is the problem? Why can’t
we
be in two places at once?”

They were trudging up the hill after school. These trudges were numbered now. In less than a month, Clem and her parents would go away to Cape Cod, which was the inspiration for her ranting and raving.

“It’s like time travel.” She rummaged through her hair, making it stick up even more. Hedgehog Girl. “The physics
support it, but when I ask my father why we still can’t do it, he just laughs.
You
are
a time traveler,
he says.
You’ve traveled forward twelve years since I met you!
”

Clem paused to try to unhook a blue plastic bag caught in a sidewalk tree. She was too short, so Nella had to give her a boost. Victory! CRAPP was another of their two-member societies. Crusaders Raging Against Pukey Plastic.

Tomorrow they would take the magnet school admission test. Nella was definitely not thinking about that.

“Then he launches into wormholes and traveling at the speed of light and other inconvenient ways to move through space-time. And says someday we’ll travel into the future, for sure.” Clem stuffed the bag into the garbage pail outside Franny’s. They paused again, this time to pay homage to the Sacred Scent of Doughnuts. “But travel to the past is more complicated and difficult, for some reason. Patch says we still can’t grasp the science for that.”

They reached Clem’s door. Her spiky hair caught the light. Her glasses tilted on her nose. Even standing still, Clem was in motion. Hummingbird Girl.

“That’s fine with me. I mean,
who’d want to go
backward
anyway?” Up on her toes, Clem cried, “Onward! GAD! Papaya juice and hedgehogs!”

“I can’t. It’s a Nonni afternoon.”

Clem sank back down. She never offered to come to Nonni’s, but who could blame her? It wasn’t as if Nella made it sound like Fun Headquarters over there. Really, who could blame her one bit?

“So I’ll see you tomorrow at the—”

“Don’t say it. Just the word gives me a heart attack.”

“I’ll see you at the-thing-that-must-not-be-named. And afterward we’ll plan the Leap Second celebration. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Clem unlocked her door but didn’t go inside. Her face turned suddenly, strangely anxious. What was happening? Clem never worried, except about things like whether there were other universes we’d never get to discover.

“Nell? Do you think you’ll . . . We’ll still be friends when I get back from the Cape, right?”

Nella took a step back. Clem had voiced her own fear, one that had lurked inside her since they first met. What if Clem got tired of her? What if Clem found a brainier, richer, more interesting friend? What if Clem finally realized they were the world’s most unlikely friend combination?