Finding the Worm (27 page)

“I guess I’m all right.”

“Life’s tough to figure out, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“Just hold on to what’s important.”

I didn’t want to keep looking him in the eye, so I nodded and said, “All right.”

He shook my hand again and headed into the chapel.

As soon as Murcer was gone, Lonnie started in on me again. “C’mon, Jules, you’re the obvious one to get up and talk.”

“I think
you’re
the obvious one to get up and talk. I don’t know what to say.”

“You’re not supposed to think about it,” he said. “Just speak from the heart.”

Shlomo was nodding. “It doesn’t matter what you say. You say whatever you feel like saying. When my
bubbe
died, people got up and told stories about her, or they talked about what a nice person she was, or they just said how much they were going to miss her. It’s not a big deal. You say something, and then you sit back down.”

“Then why don’t
you
do it?” I said.

He shook his head. “Not going to happen.”

Lonnie said, “Be logical, Jules. It’s got to be you.”

“What if I say the wrong thing?”

“You’re not listening. There’s no right or wrong.”

I took a deep breath. “All right, fine, I’ll do it.”

“So what are you going to say?”

“Lonnie!”

“It’s a
joke
. I’m just trying to break the mood.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Danley Dimmel and his mom walking up the path from the parking lot. It took me a second to realize it was the same guy we egged last year. Danley towered over his mom, who was maybe five feet tall. The sight of him in a dark blazer and a tie was strange. He looked like a grown-up, like a guy who worked on Wall Street. Except the closer he got, the less
grown-up he looked. He looked like a guy who wasn’t used to wearing a blazer. It was too tight on his shoulders and too short on his arms. Also, his tie was crooked, and he kept fidgeting with his hearing aid.

I gave a quick wave to Danley, but he didn’t notice me. Which you could understand. He was sobbing, and his mom was sobbing even worse, so he was kind of distracted.

The next car to drive up and park was a clunky green Rambler. Out of it stepped Principal Salvatore and Miss Medina. The two of them saw us standing off to the side. They walked over and told us how sorry they were for our loss. Their voices were different outside of school. “We’re so sorry for your loss” were the exact words Principal Salvatore said, and then Miss Medina said, “So sorry.” That was it. But it was real dignified, the way they said it. Like they really and truly were sorry for our loss.

As we watched them head through the front door of the chapel, a tall guy in a dark suit poked his head out and called to us, “You boys need to come inside. We’re about to start.”

The service was pretty much what you’d expect: a blur of Hebrew words, lots of standing up and sitting back down, with sobbing and weeping in the background. From the
second it started, I wanted it to be over. But Rabbi Salzberg dragged it out, getting in his two cents about how none of us can know God’s purpose, how we have to accept God’s wisdom. Like I said, it was pretty much what you’d expect.

After the last “amen,” the tall dark-suited guy who’d called us into the chapel cracked open the side door, and sunlight blazed into the room. Rabbi Salzberg stepped off the stage, and the rest of us followed him out to the cemetery. It was maybe a hundred-yard walk to the grave site, which was where Quentin’s coffin was.

That thing was beautiful. I just stared at it. I mean, you take wood shop, and you make a two-foot bookshelf, and you step back and look at it, and you feel kind of proud. But then you see something like that coffin, and you realize how rinky-dink your bookshelf was. The way that thing was put together, the way the wood was polished—I mean, it was gleaming in the sun. So were the brass handles. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, even when Rabbi Salzberg started to speak.

We were sitting in metal folding chairs on the grass next to the grave. I was sitting between Lonnie and Howie, staring at the coffin, and not much listening to the rabbi. I knew there were prayers going on, and more sobbing and weeping, but I wasn’t paying attention. I did hear him winding down, though. I looked back at him right as he
was asking if anyone had anything to say about Quentin. But for some reason, it didn’t register. I just sat there.

Lonnie gave me a quick elbow, and I stood up.

Rabbi Salzberg smiled at me. “Yes, Mr. Twerski?”

“I just wanted to say …” I swallowed hard, twice.

“Yes?”

“I mean, I just don’t …”

That was it. That was all I could get out. There was a long, painful silence as I tried to say something else. Words kept buzzing and fluttering around in my head, but I couldn’t get hold of them and put them together into sentences and make them come out of my mouth.

It was maybe a half minute after I stood up that Lonnie pulled me back down. Then he stood up. His legs were shaking as he started to speak. “I just wanted to say that Quentin was the greatest guy. He was just the greatest guy I ever knew. I always tried to be nice to him, and I think … I remember the time he got his eyebrows burned off on the Fourth of July. Except it was the fifth of July. That was real funny. Not because of what happened. But because of
how
it happened. The way he took it. I remember it so clear.…” Then, suddenly, Lonnie started to cry. It was the first time, the
only
time, I’d ever seen him cry, in all the years I’d known him. But you could understand it, getting up in front of all those people, staring at Quentin’s coffin. What I mean is you
couldn’t hold it against him. I sure couldn’t, because I was doing it too.

Plus, by that time, pretty much everyone there was bawling their eyes out. But you know who was bawling the loudest? Danley Dimmel! He was the next guy who got up and spoke. He did a better job than I did. It turns out, before Quentin got sick, he’d been going over to Danley’s stoop and playing cards with him. I guess he wanted to make up for how bad we egged Danley. That’s how come it got to him, Quentin’s dying. Quentin was that kind of guy. The only person who wasn’t bawling her eyes out, or at least the only one
I
saw, was Mrs. Fine. That was another thing I couldn’t figure out. With how emotional she got about other stuff, you’d figure she’d be going through Kleenexes about a mile a minute. But she was just sitting there, a couple of rows behind us, taking the entire thing in, and not even batting an eye.

Maybe ten people got up and said stuff. Except for Lonnie and Danley, I didn’t know any of them. I’m guessing the rest were Quentin’s aunts and uncles and maybe a couple of older cousins. They just kept saying again and again, in different words, what a sweet kid he was—which no one was arguing about in the first place. Really, looking back, Danley’s saying how Quentin used to play cards with him was the most interesting thing anybody said.

Once the talking part of the funeral was over, Rabbi
Salzberg gave a signal, and four large guys in dark suits lifted Quentin’s coffin onto a machine that lowered it into the grave. That started another wave of loud bawling. Mr. and Mrs. Selig leaned forward and kissed the coffin on its way down. Then Rabbi Salzberg asked the rest of us to pick up a handful of dirt from the mound next to the grave and toss it onto the coffin.

Lots of people backed away when they heard that. They couldn’t do it. But I did it. I figured after messing up the talking part, I owed Quentin the tossing-dirt part. The dirt was wetter than I’d thought. Flecks of it stuck to my palm, but I got most of it onto the middle of the coffin. After I did it, Beverly did it. Then the rest of them came forward and did it. First Lonnie, then Howie, then Shlomo, then Eric.

Each one of us tossed a handful of dirt onto Quentin’s coffin.

It’s the never-ness that gets you.
The thing is, it doesn’t hit you right in the face. It comes in waves

Beverly stopped by late in the afternoon
, around five o’clock. She didn’t tell me during school she was going to stop by. She didn’t even call first. She rang the doorbell, came upstairs, and said she wanted to go for a walk. We had just enough time before dinner to walk over to the Bowne House. We sat down on the grass behind the house, next to the oak tree. We didn’t talk much. But we kissed six times. It was pretty good. I mean, it was pretty good

When you think about it, it was a
beautiful coffin. Why would you bury something like that? I know you’re not supposed to think about stuff like that, but the thing is

Addleeoonee:
the topsy-turvy way the world is, with bad things happening to good people, and good things happening to bad people, and guys like Quentin dying.

Fiffle:
the stuff that distracts you from what you should be thinking about.

Horgonk:
the white paste that sticks to the cover of a composition book after you peel off the price tag.

Quilby:
how your heart feels when you’re carrying your friend on your back.

Zeetoosk:
the back-and-forth sound shovels make in the dirt.

It wrecked me that I never came up
with those definitions while Quentin was still here, that I never got a chance to show them to him. I stared at them in the composition book afterward, and I teared up. How could I have been distracted by all the
fiffle
when I could’ve been figuring out Quentin’s definitions?

Beverly and I walked home from school together this afternoon, and I told her about the words. She just listened and didn’t say much. Except then, as we turned the corner onto Thirty-Fourth Avenue, she came up with an idea … maybe the greatest idea I’d ever heard.

We arranged to meet up again after dinner, in front of the Hampshire House. That gave me enough time to copy
Quentin’s words and their definitions onto my mom’s good stationery. I mean, you should’ve felt that paper. It was as thick as a bar mitzvah invitation, and it had classy ruffled edges.

I wrote out the words and definitions as neat as I could. Not in cursive. I printed the entire thing. It took a few tries. I did it twice before dinner, but the lines came out slightly crooked. I guess maybe I needed food, because after dinner, the third time I tried, my hand was steadier, and the lines came out almost perfect. They were as straight as I could get them.

Beverly was waiting for me at the Hampshire House. It was eight o’clock and real dark. No one was outside on the block except the two of us. The wind was blowing hard, and it was whipping her hair a thousand ways at once. I showed her the paper, and she nodded at it. That meant a lot, given how good she was at art.

Then we started to climb the tree.

Quentin’s sneakers were dangling by their shoelaces four stories up, right below his window on the fifth floor. Four stories might not sound like a lot, but it
feels
like a lot when the branches get thinner and thinner, and the wind is roaring in your ears, and you know there’s just sidewalk underneath you. The old oak at the Bowne House is a higher climb, but at least there you’re climbing over grass.

I started getting jittery about three stories up. Beverly
was out in front of me by then. From where she was sitting, she could reach up and grab the branch the sneakers were hanging from. She glanced back at me, and I shook my head. I couldn’t go any higher. I pulled the folded paper from my pocket and held it out, and she shinnied down the branch, took it from me, and stuffed it into her pocket. Then she shinnied back and caught hold of the branch with the sneakers. She chinned herself up and shinnied out. It scared the daylights out of me, how thin that branch was, and how much it drooped. But I figured she’d gotten out that far before to hang the sneakers, so she could do it again. Sure enough, she got to the sneakers and took the folded-up paper from her pocket.

I felt my eyes welling up as she slid the paper into the right sneaker. But I fought it off. I didn’t bawl.

Neither did she.

“I hope Quentin’s got a good view of it,” Beverly whispered.

“I hope so too.”

After that, we started the long climb down.

My bar mitzvah was last week. I figure
I should mention that. I’m tired of writing stuff down, but I didn’t want to end this thing without a real ending. I’m not going to say much about it, though. It was a bar mitzvah. I got dressed up in the same blazer I wore to Quentin’s funeral. I did what I had to do. I said my haftarah. I said the words. I didn’t glance down even once at the crib sheet. I could’ve recited it with my eyes closed, standing on one foot. After I was done, while I was still at the podium, Rabbi Salzberg walked up behind me, grabbed me by the shoulders, and said to the congregation, “Today, Julian Twerski is a man.”

The congregation applauded and filed out to the
reception in the banquet room at the end of the main hall. I wanted to climb down from the stage at that point, get done with the hugs from my mom and dad and Amelia, get razzed by Lonnie and the guys, maybe get a kiss or two from Beverly. But Rabbi Salzberg didn’t let go of my shoulders. He led me back behind the stage, out the back door, and then through the side hallway to his office.

As he sat down behind his desk, he smiled at me in a satisfied way. He said, “You have a question you want to ask, Mr. Twerski. I suggest this is the right moment to ask it.”