The Book of One Hundred Truths (13 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I
t didn’t seem like a regular amount of blood—like the amount you usually see when someone gets injured. It seemed like a lot more than that. And it was sliding down Jocelyn’s forehead and staining the cottony yellow of her hair.

“I hurt myself, Thea.”

I dragged myself off the pavement, brushing some broken glass and gravel from my leg. Jocelyn was leaning against the curb. She touched her forehead and looked at her fingers, bright with blood.

She isn’t dead,
I told myself.
She can’t be dead if she’s talking.

“I got something on my shirt.” She rubbed at a patch of grease on her shoulder. A narrow ribbon of blood led from the cut on her forehead, down the side of her face, into her ear. She was so calm.

“Jocelyn, don’t move,” I said. “Can you stay right here? Right here in this spot?”

She looked at the blood on her fingers.

“I’ll be right back,” I said. “We need someone to help us. But you’ll be okay. Everything’s fine. You’re going to be fine.” I turned around, ready to run in any direction. The street was empty. The man and his dog had disappeared.

“I want to come with you,” Jocelyn said.

“No, you need to stay here.” I tried to wipe the blood from her face, but there was too much of it. How much blood did a person have? “I’m just going to knock on the door of that house over there. Do you see it? I’ll be right back. You can sit here and watch me.”

“I think I cut myself,” she said. “Will you really come back?”

I wiped her face with my T-shirt and remembered how fast the temperature dropped at Three Mile Creek. “I’m sorry, Jocelyn.” I stood up as if in a daze.
It can’t be happening again,
I thought.

“Thea, wait,” Jocelyn said.

But I turned around and started running. I felt the frozen creek closing in on me, and the weight of a thousand lies above my head.

Up the street, a car turned the corner. I sprinted toward it, waving my arms; I was screaming and shouting. The car pulled over. Celia was driving, and Ellen was beside her in the passenger seat. A few seconds later, they were running toward us as fast as they could.

At the tiny Port Harbor Clinic, they put Jocelyn in one room and me in another. Nenna and Phoebe (carrying Ralph) had somehow appeared and were both with Jocelyn; Celia and Ellen were filling out medical forms in the hall. (“You’re using a pencil for that?” Celia asked. “Do you think this is elementary school?”)

For a while I sat in the examining room by myself and counted stripes in the carpet; then a nurse came in and took my blood pressure and my temperature (“Normal,” she said) and cleaned Jocelyn’s blood off my arm. She also gave me a blanket because I was shivering. I didn’t feel cold, but my entire body was shaking; there were little earthquakes happening up and down my spine.

Jocelyn had seemed okay during the trip to the clinic: Celia and Ellen had been talking to her. But what if she
seemed
fine, and then later she went into a coma?

If anything happened to her, it would be my fault: instead of babysitting the way a normal person would, I had perched a seven-year-old on the front of a giant tricycle, without a helmet, and strapped her in place with a bungee cord. And even though Celia and Ellen had warned me not to take her past the nursing home, the place where my Nenna and Granda were probably going to be shipped off to die, I’d done it anyway, and of course Jocelyn had gotten upset and tried to leap off the trike. And now my Grumman relatives would all hate me, and the house would be sold, and I would never be able to set foot in Port Harbor again.

I sat on the paper-covered table and shook.

“So. Let’s see here. You’re Theodore. Or Theodora.” A white-jacketed doctor had breezed into the room, followed by the nurse, who was holding a tray. “Can I see that arm?”

“What arm?” I asked.

He smiled, took hold of my wrist, and turned it over. There was a jagged cut below my elbow. I hadn’t known it was there, but now that I saw it, it hurt. I made the mistake of looking at it when he bent my elbow; the skin on my arm opened like an ugly mouth.

“Do you know how Jocelyn is?” I asked. “Have you seen her?”

“Hold still. This might sting for a minute.” The doctor unwrapped a needle that looked like it was long enough to go through my entire body twice.

“I don’t need any shots,” I said, pulling away. “I just want to see Jocelyn.”

“You don’t want stitches without anesthetic.” The doctor seemed to be debating with himself:
Should I give her stitches without anesthetic?

“I don’t want stitches at all.” The world as I knew it was falling apart, and now this perfect stranger was determined to stab me with a needle.

I didn’t like needles. I didn’t like the needly way they looked—their terrible, pointed, glinting shape.

“Just try to relax,” the doctor said. He made some sort of gesture to the nurse, something that probably meant
You strap her down and I’ll stick this thing through her.
Maybe it was a truth serum, I thought. It would serve me right. I wouldn’t be able to lie anymore.

The nurse stood beside me and blocked my view as something horrible and sharp pierced the cut on my arm. “Is your whole family here?” the doctor asked. “Don’t make a fist.”

I could hear someone arguing in the hall. Was it Austin? Or Liam? Whose family was the doctor talking about?

A few minutes later I felt a tugging near my elbow, as if someone was sewing me, actually stitching through my skin with a needle and thread. I saw puckers of light around the edges of the room.

Someone knocked on the door, and the nurse answered. “I don’t think we’re ready for visitors yet,” she said, but Nenna probably didn’t hear her.

She was pushing Jocelyn toward us in a wheelchair. Phoebe and Liam were behind them. Jocelyn had a circle of gauze around her forehead. She almost looked like the man who painted names on rice.

I stared at the wheelchair. This was what I had done to her. “Jocelyn, are you paralyzed?” I asked.

“No.” She moved her legs. “They just want me to sit here.”

Celia and Ellen crowded into the doorway. I thought I saw Austin somewhere behind them.

Jocelyn wheeled herself toward me. “I’m sorry about your notebook,” she said. “I only meant to read a page.”

“We still need a few stitches here,” the doctor said.

“But then I wanted to find out what happened.” Everyone was quiet for at least fifteen seconds. It was probably a Grumman world record.

“Tell me the truth,” Jocelyn said. “What happened to your friend? How did she die?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Truth #52: Three Mile Creek is fifteen feet wide, and it cuts through a tangle of poplar trees.

Truth #53: The water in the creek isn’t very deep. When the weather was hot, in the summer, I used to sit on a wide, flat rock and let my legs dangle in the current.

Truth #54: I used to love the way the water curled along the bank like liquid silver. On the bottom of the creek there are strange green plants like boneless fingers, and the underwater stones are round and slippery with moss.

Truth #55: This is a story I don’t want to tell. I promised Gwen that I would never tell it.

Truth #56: Some days in the winter, after school, the ice was full of little kids playing hockey. The creek was wide enough to play three kids on a side. But when Gwen and I climbed down the bank that day, the ice was empty, a fat white snake.

Truth #57: Of course I was the one who invented the game.

Truth #58: The game went like this: I took the bag of Monopoly markers from my jacket pocket, where I always kept them, and Gwen and I lined ourselves up beside the big gray rock.

Truth #59: My favorite marker was the shoe. Gwen’s was the race car. The idea was to lose something you loved and then find it again.

Truth #60: The sun had been out all day. Gwen wasn’t wearing a scarf or a hat.

Truth #61: I reached into the bag and counted the pieces: the shoe, the race car, the hat, the dog, the iron, the ship, the thimble, the cannon, the soldier, and the wheelbarrow. Ten. It had to be ten. I closed my eyes and threw them. They made a quiet clattering sound when they hit the ice.

Truth #62: Ice always has cracks in it. Even ice in the ice cube tray, if you look at it closely, is full of cracks.

Truth #63: “Come on, let’s start,” Gwen said. The object was to be the first person to find five of the markers and make it back to the big gray rock. And we had to touch the rock every time we found a marker.

Truth #64: I stole the markers from Nenna’s Monopoly game after losing to Liam about two years before. I never told her. (I’m sorry, Nenna.)

Truth #65: Sliding on outdoor ice isn’t easy. The ice on Three Mile Creek is bumpy and uneven, full of frozen snow. Sometimes you’ll find pennies that Richard Lemon and his younger brothers have dropped and spat on, creating copper constellations under their feet.

Truth #66: Gwen said, “Go!” and we started running. It wasn’t getting dark yet, but the color in the day had faded. The sky was gray and looked as if someone had draped it over the trees like a giant tarp.

Truth #67: Even before we reached the first markers, I could feel someone watching us.

Truth #68: Gwen had been my friend since kindergarten. Her parents liked me. Her mother used to say I was “full of beans.”

Truth #69: I found the hat, and Gwen found the race car. We both turned around and ran back to the rock, dodging tree roots and low-hanging branches. I skidded toward the opposite bank and grabbed the iron (where was the shoe?) while Gwen found the soldier. Laughing and slamming into each other, we both touched the rock. I found the thimble and Gwen found the ship. We still had to look for the wheelbarrow and the cannon, the dog and the shoe.

Truth #70: That’s the last good memory I have of Gwen.

Truth #71: Gwen’s sister, Marie, was supposed to be sick that day; she had stayed home from school. But there she was on the ice behind us.

Truth #72: I used to wish I had a sister. But Gwen always said I shouldn’t wish for a younger one.

Truth #73: Marie was nine.

Truth #74: We should have just finished our game and gone home.

Truth #75: “You’re not supposed to be here, Marie,” Gwen said.

Truth #76: A drowning person, because she is desperate, can easily drown somebody else.

Truth #77: Marie stuck out her tongue and picked up a pine branch and started using it like a broom. She was sweeping the ice, scattering twigs and stones and dirt and the four metal markers we still needed to find. I saw one of the markers zip past and tried to grab it but missed.

Truth #78: “You have to pick those up,” Gwen said. She grabbed Marie by the collar of her jacket.

Truth #79: I found the wheelbarrow right away. Then in a clump of leaves downstream, I found the cannon and the dog. The shoe—it was really a tiny silver boot, with a wrinkle just above the heel—was about three feet from the drainage pipe. “Marie has to go get it,” Gwen said. “Tell her, Thea.” I looked at the pipe.

Truth #80: I could have bought a new Monopoly game. I could have borrowed someone else’s pieces.

Truth #81: But I wanted that shoe. Marie looked at me. “You’d better go get it,” I said. Somehow I knew she would do what I asked her. Marie probably weighed about seventy pounds.

Truth #82: Like a crack of thunder but sharper and quicker. Like a giant pop-top opening.

Truth #83: Even though I had never heard that sound before, I knew what it was.

Truth #84: Marie disappeared into the ice, the gray water surging up around her. One minute she was standing on the creek in front of us; the next she was a blur of freezing water, ice, and mud. I knew that her shoes and her heavy jacket would weigh her down.

Truth #85: My mother had signed me up several months earlier for the Red Cross first aid and emergency class. That was the first thought that came to me:
I have taken the Red Cross emergency class.

Truth #86: I knew how to stop, drop, and roll. I knew how to perform the Heimlich maneuver. Gwen was screaming. I knew that
ABC
stood for
airway, breathing, and circulation.

Truth #87: Marie came up through the ice several times, flailing her arms, but she couldn’t find anything to hold on to. Her hands clawed the surface. I couldn’t move.

Truth #88: What is the myth about the Greek or Roman girl who gets stolen into the underworld, and because she is missing, spring will never come?

Truth #89:
She just needs to put her feet on the bottom,
I thought.
The water is shallow.

Truth #90: I still wasn’t moving.
Persephone,
I thought. That was the Greek girl’s name. We had read about her in Mr. Hermes’ class the year before.

Truth #91: We needed a rope. Gwen was shouting that it was all my fault. “It was your idea to go to the creek,” she screamed. “It was your stupid game.”

Truth #92: I should have been looking for tree limbs or boards—something we could use as a life preserver.
I have just killed a person,
I thought.

Truth #93: In my nightmares Marie is still flailing underneath us, her dark hair tangling like a mermaid’s. Her eyes are searching for the surface. The world is a silver smear above her head.

Truth #94: “You can never tell anyone what happened,” Gwen sobbed. Her face was white. “This was your fault, Thea. You have to promise.” We were splattered with mud and freezing water.

“But it was an accident,” Jocelyn said. “You couldn’t save her.”

Truth #95: I promised.

“Did you go to her funeral?” The room was crowded but quiet. Even the doctor and the nurse were listening.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

Truth #96: Marie is alive.