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by John David Anderson

“We aren’t here to judge, Rosalind,” Wolf said. “Just roll the die.”

  “Fine—just don’t ever come near me with a pair of scissors,” she warned. Rose rolled again. Seven. I felt for sure I was next, but she turned to Wolf instead. “Your turn.”

  Wolf crossed his arms in front of him. “I don’t have any secrets,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Everybody has secrets,” she insisted.

  “Tell her about the time you caught your house on fire microwaving a can of SpaghettiOs,” I prompted. I was there. He managed to find the opener and get the lid off, but he didn’t bother to take them out of the can. We learned a valuable—and fiery—lesson in radioactive metallurgy that day.

  “She already knows about that,” Wolf said. Which made me wonder when, exactly, the two of them found time to talk so much. She’d only been here for three days. They had to have talked outside of school. Maybe they texted. Maybe he actually called her. Maybe that’s how she got my email address.

  “All right. Here’s one,” Wolf said. “When I was four, my parents abandoned me at the grocery store. They were arguing—”

  “Breaking news,” I interjected.

  Wolf nodded and continued. “Right? And I guess I got distracted by the candy in one of the checkout lanes. They made it all the way to the car before they noticed I was gone. When they came back, I had already eaten two Kit Kats and was unwrapping a Baby Ruth, and nobody at the checkout was paying the slightest attention.”

  “Were you scared?” Rose asked. Her voice was suddenly serious. Much more serious than when she found out Deedee’s cat lived without half of his whiskers for a while.

  “Are you kidding?” Wolf said. “A four-year-old with no parents and all the chocolate he could eat? I wish they’d left me there for good.”

  Nobody said anything for a moment, then Wolf reached over and nabbed the die from Rose’s hand, rolling it before she could snatch it back. Four. We all stared at her, waiting.

  “Doesn’t count,” Rose said. “I have to roll it. It’s my game. I invented it.”

  “It’s my die,” Deedee said.

  “And it’s a four,” Wolf insisted. “So spill it.”

  Rose’s shoulders slumped. “All right. Fine. It’s another name thing. I bet you can’t guess what they used to call me in elementary school?”

  And suddenly there it was, Bench’s voice in my head. I pictured the antlers. The flaring nostrils. The big, melancholy eyes. I nearly blurted it out. Moose.

  Deedee shrank in his seat—maybe he’d heard too. Or maybe he’d heard other things. It couldn’t be that, though. She was from Chicago. There’s no way something like that could have followed her all the way here.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” Rose said, then she rubbed her cheeks vigorously with her hands, smiling real big so they stretched and puffed.

  “Chipmunk Cheeks?” Wolf asked.

  “Close,” she said. She rubbed again and I watched the sides of her face pink up like two giant strawberry muffins. I had it.

  “Rosy Cheeks.”

  Rose pointed. “Score one for the snowman, who, so far, has managed to escape the penetrating inquisition of the all-knowing die. You can bet you’re next.”

  She snatched Deedee’s lucky die back from Wolf and gave it a spin in her tray, the dragon doing pirouettes, Deedee shifting to block anyone not at our table from seeing it. I held my breath, hoping for an even number. Not that I cared to hear any more of Rose’s names. I was just afraid of what I might say.

  The die came up nine. Rose put out a hand as if she was asking me to dance.

  Then the bell rang.

  “I guess you’re off the hook,” Rose said.

  But the look in her eyes suggested otherwise.

  Looking back on that first lunch without Bench, I wonder what secret I might have shared. What I might have admitted to. I’d never cut the whiskers off a cat, but I’d said and done plenty of things I wasn’t proud of. I wonder if I would have made a confession.

  That’s what a secret is. It’s a confession in disguise. Well, sort of. The whole power of a secret is in the keeping—the power of knowing something that nobody else does. But the whole point of confession is letting go. You’re supposed to feel better afterward. Like the weight has been lifted and your soul is suddenly free to fly or whatever.

  But what if it isn’t? What if, after telling someone, you feel just as bad as you did before, except now everybody else knows? And you can see it in their eyes as you walk down the hall? Your secrets staring right back at you? Wasn’t it better, sometimes, to not say anything at all?

  I’d made a habit of keeping things to myself.

  I think back to that lunch, and Bench walking away, and Rose Holland rolling that die, and the bell ringing, saving me from having to make something up. Because if I’d had to say something true, at that very moment, it would have had something to do with her, and the things they were saying about her, and what it was starting to do to us—to the tribe. And I would have ended up admitting something about myself too.

  And yet, the thing I remember most from that game isn’t being saved by the bell, or the guilty look on Deedee’s face when he told us about the cat, or the mischievous grin on Rose’s face every time she rolled the die, so eager, it seemed, to tell us everything about her.

  It’s Wolf. Shrugging nonchalantly that moment his own number came up.

  Insisting that he didn’t have any secrets to tell.

  THE BOMB

  THERE’S THIS OTHER POEM BY ROBERT FROST THAT I LIKE A LOT, about the end of the world. It’s only fifty words or so, but you can do a lot with fifty words. Heck, you can do a lot with just one or two. I should know.

  The poem’s called “Fire and Ice,” and it basically asks if the world will end with the planet turning into a giant ice cube or with us all being burnt to a crisp. I guess it just assumes the end is coming regardless and maybe we’ll at least get to choose how we bite it, like the Ghostbusters did when they picked the Marshmallow Man. Most of the time when I picture the end of the world, it’s like the first one: fire and brimstone, explosions and collapsed bridges and everything up in smoke. Then again, I’ve seen a lot of alien invasion movies.

  Except I know that most things don’t end in a big fireball. They just wither and fade, like a leaf curling brown at the start of winter only to be crunched under your foot.

  Or like when your parents spend their last year not talking to each other, spending all their time in separate rooms.

  Toward the end, Mom usually slept on the couch in the living room instead of the guest bed, and I’d sometimes wander downstairs to the kitchen late on a Saturday night to find her staring at a book but never turning the pages. She’d ask me if I was okay, if I needed anything. I was sort of afraid to tell her yes. I was even more afraid to ask her the same thing back.

  Some say the world will end in fire. Some say ice. That’s how Bobby Frost puts it. Truth is, things rarely end so suddenly. And you definitely don’t get to choose.

  And when it does finally come to an end, it totally sucks, whether you saw it coming or not.

  That afternoon I was supposed to meet Wolf to discuss the apocalypse. It was for a grade.

  Mr. Hostler had paired our social studies class up earlier that week and given us each a major twentieth-century war/calamity/atrocity/human rights struggle to research and report on. He pulled them out of a hat, one of those black bowlers from a time when wearing hats was part of dressing up, and we unfolded them and read them to each other. The Great Depression. School segregation. The AIDS epidemic. A whole bowler full of misery and pain. By the time we finished drawing, everybody in class felt oddly fortunate to have been born in the twenty-first century, with its terrorists, global warming, mortgage crises, and standardized tests, though it’s even more depressing to realize things haven’t changed that much.

  Wolf and I drew second-to-last and got the nuclear arms race. It could have been worse. At least we would ge
t to read about bombs. Still, all I knew about the arms race was that it was the US versus the USSR, which I was pretty sure stood for “United, something, something, Russia.” Wolf knew that there was something called the Bay of Pigs, which he guessed was where the Russians kept all the Americans they captured but also sounded like something you could order off the menu at Bob Evans. We also both knew that we were the only country to ever use atomic weapons on anyone, which didn’t seem like something to be proud of.

  It wasn’t enough to fill a posterboard, though, so Wolf agreed to borrow his mom’s laptop and meet me at You Old Smoothie’s after school. Bench had practice that afternoon, so I didn’t have anyone to ride the bus home with anyway.

  Besides, I didn’t mind hanging out with just Wolf. In some ways, he was the easiest to just be with. With Deedee you hardly ever got a word in, and with Bench you sometimes had to pretend to be interested in some of the same things he was interested in, like batting averages or fantasy football rankings. But Wolf and I knew how to just shut up and chill.

  Except it wasn’t just Wolf waiting for me outside Smoothie’s.

  Rose was wearing a green army jacket with big pouch pockets and her hair pulled back. She and Wolf stood next to the entrance looking and laughing at something on Wolf’s phone. She spotted me and waved me over.

  “Hey there, Snowman. Wolf said you guys needed help with your social studies project.”

  Wolf smiled like it was some genius move on his part, inviting her along, like having Rose Holland’s assistance gave us the edge we needed to win the Pulitzer Prize in Middle School Historical Research Projects. I stuffed my hands in my pockets as a mild sign of my dissatisfaction. “I’m pretty sure we can handle it,” I said. “This is Mr. Hostler’s class. Write down a few facts, slap a picture of a mushroom cloud underneath, and you’re gold.”

  Rose crossed her arms. The better to challenge you with, I thought. “Do you even know what Star Wars is?” she asked.

  I derred her. Out loud. “Derr.” I couldn’t help it. It was more than she deserved for what might be the most ignorant question asked of a thirteen-year-old boy ever.

  She derred me right back. “Not the movie, dinglefart. The plan to put lasers into outer space to shoot down nuclear missiles. Do either of you know who Mikhail Gorbachev was?”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about Rose Holland calling me a dinglefart. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing you call someone you’ve only known for less than a week. If Cameron or Noah had called me that I would have thought about punching them. I wouldn’t have actually punched them, of course, but I would have fantasized about it. I’m sure they’d called me worse behind my back. And I know Jason had said worse about Wolf. “Gorbachev. Isn’t he the bad guy in Iron Man?” I guessed.

  Rose shook her head. “I’m definitely going to need a shot of ginkgo biloba for this.” She turned and went inside. I grabbed Wolf by the shoulder, holding him back.

  “Why is she here?”

  Wolf brushed my arm off, the same as Bench had done before. “I invited her. She’s smart. Smarter than either of us. Did you know about that Star Wars thing?”

  “No. But I’m pretty sure Mr. Google does,” I said. And how did Wolf know how smart Rose was? Were they comparing grades now?

  “She just wants to help,” Wolf said. “Besides. I don’t think she likes hanging out at home much. Her dad works late and her mom sleeps most of the day. Sometimes you just have to get out of the house, you know?”

  Wolf stared me down. He knew exactly what to use against me. We both went through periods when home wasn’t the cheeriest place on earth. Now that I had two different homes a thousand miles apart, it wasn’t so much a big deal for me, but his drama was still all under the same roof. “Besides, with her help we are guaranteed an A.”

  “We’re already guaranteed an A,” I said. Still, I nodded and followed Wolf inside. Rose was already at the counter, ordering. She paid for her and Wolf’s drinks and offered to pay for mine, but I said no. I might sport a ten-dollar backpack and Bench’s old sneaks, but I could swing three bucks for a strawberry-banana juice. Besides, judging by the hand-me-down clothes and the scuffed boots, Rose Holland didn’t have wads of cash to throw around either.

  We found a table in the corner by the fireplace and sat and sipped our drinks and worked quietly for a while, mostly reading online articles about Ronald Reagan and Fidel Castro and ICBMs, occasionally sidetracking to watch humorous videos of cats on treadmills or music videos from bands Wolf said we had to like. Every few minutes I would pan the room, looking for someone I knew. Kids from school. Anyone who might make a note of me being here. Of the three of us here together. There were a couple of other kids our age, and some older, but nobody from BMS.

  And Wolf was right. Rose was smart. Scary smart. Knew exactly what we should be looking for. She said it came from having a lot of time to read. She used to live within walking distance of the public library back in Chicago, she said, and was there every three days checking out something new. The librarians took to calling her “Worm.” Short for bookworm, I guess.

  Worm. Moose. Rosy Cheeks.

  Wolf. Deedee. Bench. Frost.

  She had almost as many nicknames as we did put together.

  Over the course of two hours I learned that our government spent billions of dollars on giant, rocket-propelled instruments of death that they would later just throw away. I learned that Salt I and Salt II were not at all what they sounded like. I learned all about Gorbachev, though he still reminded me of a villain in a superhero movie.

  And I learned that there was something about Rose Holland, something that I guess Wolf had already seen in her but that I was just starting to. A kind of surety. I think it was her laugh—high-pitched and a little annoying, but always full and loud, never clipped short, never held back. I hadn’t really noticed it at the lunch table where the din of a hundred conversation-starved middle schoolers could drown out a nuclear bomb test, but there in the restaurant she made no attempt to stifle it, not even when other people turned and gave her looks. It was a determined laugh. Totally in-your-face. And it was growing on me.

  After an hour and a half of research (or maybe thirty solid minutes of research and an hour of goofing around) we called it quits, having gathered enough information to fill six posterboards if we’d wanted. Wolf asked Rose if she needed a ride home.

  “I don’t live far,” she said. “I’ll walk. It’s no problem.”

  Then she gave Wolf a quick hug, chin barely touching shoulder, but still a hug. I’d been friends with Wolf for two years and I’d never seen him hug anybody, not even his parents or his older brother, Simon. I figured he was just the type who didn’t want to get too close to people. Same as when he started wearing his shorts and T-shirt underneath his street clothes on gym days to avoid being in the locker room longer than necessary. It fit with his personality. Closed off. Quiet. Untouchable.

  Yet here Wolf was, standing on tiptoe to make the hug even. Rose turned to me and smiled. I kept my hands at my sides just in case. “See you guys tomorrow,” she said.

  “Yeah. See ya,” I said.

  I watched her leave, circling around the smoothie shop and growing steadily smaller. Wolf found a spot on the curb and texted his mom to come pick us up.

  I sat down next to him and studied the cracks in the street, the dark, hard, bubbly patches from last year’s road construction, the plumes of coughed exhaust from passing cars. A man and a woman passed by with elbows locked, bumping into each other, smiling. It was a little sickening. I’m sure Wolf noticed it too.

  I waited for him to start talking, say something about that afternoon, and Rose, and the hug, and all that. Or maybe about lunch and Bench. But instead he said, “Did you see all those notes today?”

  “Yeah.” You really couldn’t miss them by the afternoon. There were probably twenty in the hallway by the end of the day. Maybe thirty. Most of them were stupid, hardly worth reading—though that hadn’
t stopped me. Like sneaking a peek at someone else’s diary. You feel bad, but not bad enough to quit.

  “It’s catching on,” Wolf said. He was starting to sound like Deedee.

  “If you think about it, it’s no different than people posting stuff online or sending a text. Except this just wastes more paper.”

  “And you don’t always know who’s saying it.” Wolf’s glassy green eyes focused on the tin roofs of the building across the street. I wondered if he was talking about Rose. Maybe he’d heard about her nickname too.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  Wolf drew an imaginary picture on the curb with his finger, tracing and retracing patterns only he could see. “It can’t be easy for her,” he said. “Coming to a new school. Being on the outside.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We did it.”

  “And it wasn’t easy,” Wolf countered. “Still isn’t, some days. Besides. I had Deedee and you had Bench. And it didn’t take us that long to find each other.” He finished his imaginary drawing and then erased it with his foot, kicking the loose gravel. I could tell by the look in his eyes that something was gnawing at him. It wasn’t as easy as it was with Deedee, but every now and then Wolf would let his guard down.

  “You ever think about starting over completely? Like, going to a whole new school and being somebody different?”

  I squinted at him. It was an intense out-of-left-field kind of question. But I guess sitting on a sun-dappled curb after learning about the end of the world for an hour can put you in that kind of mood.

  “There’s always high school,” I said. “One more year.”

  “Right. Branton High. Go Cougars.” Wolf made a less-than-enthusiastic yay-rah fist pump. “Don’t tell Deedee I said this, but I think their band sucks even worse than ours somehow. And they don’t even have an orchestra.”

  “Yeah—but their meat loaf is supposed to be excellent,” I said.

  “Great. Something else to look forward to.”

  Wolf and I had talked about this before. Neither of us was really looking forward to high school. More work, more stress, and the same jerks who gave us a hard time here would follow us there. The only saving grace was that we would all go together. “It might not be that bad,” I said.