Fallout

Thinking of my friends brings a deep, sick, sad sensation. Freak O’ Nature, Linda, Puddin’ Belly Wright, and Why Can’t You Be Like Johnny? could be lying on the ground above us right now, writhing in pain. Shouldn’t we go up and look for them? But I know what Dad would say. We’d only be exposing ourselves to the radiation. Then we’d die, too.

Still, how would it feel if it was someone else’s bomb shelter and our family were the ones who were locked out? I picture myself crawling through the rubble to the trapdoor, knocking and begging to be let in.

My lungs expand with an involuntary gasp. So far no one’s knocked, but what if someone does?

Ronnie presses his face against his dad’s arm while Mr. Shaw wipes his own eyes with his fingers. Sparky sniffs. Dad stares at the floor. Now I can’t stop the tears from coming. In the past when there’d been tears in my eyes, I’d always gone to Mom for comfort. I never wanted Dad to see me cry because that was what girls and little kids did. But what does that matter now?

Janet wraps Mom’s head in gauze to keep everything in place. It’s so quiet. The loudest sound is Mom’s breathing. Dad hardly takes his eyes off her. Every few moments, he reaches over to feel her forehead, pull her robe a little tighter, brush a few hairs away from her face.

“When’s she going to wake up?” Sparky asks.

“Don’t know,” Dad says.

“What if she never wakes up?”

“Let’s not think about that.”

More time passes. More silence. Dad takes the hammer and raps the pipes again — Clank! Clank! Clank! — then pauses to listen.

Still nothing.

He sighs, puts down the hammer, takes some blankets from a shelf, and offers them around. “Try to make yourselves comfortable.”

Janet is the only one who says thank you. The Shaws and McGoverns spread the blankets on the cold concrete floor. Both Mrs. Shaw and Paula tuck their knees up against their chests and hug their legs. Paula leans tightly against her dad. After making Mom comfortable on the bunk, Janet sits on the bare concrete floor and wraps her blanket around her shoulders. Soon we are four groups, huddled close to one another in the chilly, damp air.

In science we learned that some people could go a month or more without food by living on stored-up fat and then on muscle. But no one can go much more than four days without water.

It’s Sparky who asks the question we’re all thinking: “Dad, what will happen if we can’t get the water?”

12

I went to my room, which I shared with Sparky, whose real name was Edward, but I called him Sparky because his hair grew straight out from his head as if he was always touching something electric.

Wondering how bad the spanking would be, I sat on my bed, tugging at the hair behind my ear, too miserable to look at comics or play with my plastic army men. The paddleball racket was a given. When I was younger, Dad used to spank me, and then Sparky, with his hand, but one day he hurt his wrist and couldn’t play tennis for a few weeks, so now he spanked us with the wooden paddle, which hurt like the dickens.

The bedroom door began to open and I tensed, but it was only Sparky. He pretended to look for a toy on his shelf, but I knew he’d really come in to see how I was coping with the stress. He kept glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.

“Dad’s really gonna give it to you. You’re not supposed to steal.”

“Get lost.” I picked up MAD magazine and pretended to read it. The black and white enemies in “Spy vs. Spy” used the same round black bombs with fizzy fuses that Boris Badenov used against Rocky and Bullwinkle on TV.

“Mom says she doesn’t know what she’s gonna do with you.”

That didn’t sound right. Taking the cheesecake was the first bad thing I’d done in months. “No, she didn’t.”

“Yes, she did,” Sparky insisted.

“Liar.”

“Nuh-uh. She said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ And her eyes got red and watery.”

That sounded ominous. Was it possible that even I didn’t know how bad what I’d done was? I’d done bad stuff before, like the time Puddin’ Belly Wright and I threw dirt bombs at the back of Old Lady Lester’s freshly painted garage, or the time I dropped Sparky’s brand-new rubber football down the storm drain because he wouldn’t share his double-stick cherry ice pop.

But I’d never stolen before. Could stealing mean you’d crossed the line into juvenile delinquency and there was no going back? Could it mean I’d have to be a hood from now on and wear a leather jacket and heavy engineer boots all summer and pretend to be tough even though I knew I wasn’t very tough at all? Would I be the only kid on the block who was a hood, and none of my friends would be allowed to play with me? Just thinking about it made me want to cry.

“Go away or you’re gonna get hurt,” I warned Sparky.

He left and I felt tears of regret slide down my cheeks. Why had I listened to Ronnie?