I wanted to tell her that Safta second-guessed everybody, even the rabbi. But I kept my mouth shut.
“We are really short on time,” my father said. “Let her keep helping. It would be—”
“A gift,” my mother said. “I know.”
Wai Po sat at the table, smiling a little. Then she frowned. “I think Bao Bao is looking a little heavy,” she said.
Now that she mentioned it, he did seem to be getting bigger. I wondered if that meant his poop was getting bigger, too. She smiled at him. “Xiao pangzi.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Little fatso.” I’d never heard the word fatso said so lovingly. I wondered if she had a similarly flattering nickname for me that I didn’t know about.
The phone rang. Mom picked it up. I hoped it was Hector.
“David,” she said, putting her hand over the receiver. “Have you seen Scott? Did he say what he was doing after school today?”
I kept chewing my dinner and shook my head. Maybe he was hanging out with Kelli Ann, but I wasn’t going to say that.
“I’m sorry, Marie. David hasn’t seen him. We’ll let you know if he shows up here.” Mom set the phone back in the cradle. “Marie said Scott never showed up for dinner.”
“He’s fine,” I said. “He’s pretty good at looking out for himself.”
When Hector came over, Mom said we could go out for forty-five minutes.
“Forty-five minutes? Why not an hour?” I asked.
“It’s a school night, and it’ll be pitch-black in forty-five minutes,” Mom said, as if the fifteen minutes really mattered. “Maybe you can check some of the places Scott usually goes. His mother sounded really worried.”
I grabbed my jacket and a flashlight.
“What’s up with Scott?” Hector asked as soon as we got out of the house.
“Who knows?” I said.
“Where are we going?” Hector asked.
“Just trust me.” We hurried down the road. The sun was mostly down, and though it was easy to see Hector and cars and trees and stuff, it was hard to make out the colors of anything. Dusk was one of those words like cricket knees. When you said it over and over, it didn’t sound like anything.
“But Scott’s missing?” Hector said.
“He probably went to Kelli Ann’s.” I could say it to Hector, though it still hurt.
“Are they together?” He sounded surprised. “Together together?”
I shrugged and kept walking. A plan started to form in my mind. Hector and I would dig our own survival hole and leave out Scott. Our hole would be better because neither of us were jerks. And we could include anyone we wanted.
“Where are we?” Hector asked as we reached Scott’s property and started up the driveway.
“So, remember that movie The Day After?”
“I wish I could forget it.” Hector kicked the gravel. “Uh, do you know who lives here?”
“Sort of.” It occurred to me that if I was mad at Scott, I probably shouldn’t be trespassing on his family’s property. But then again, Scott didn’t play by the rules; maybe I shouldn’t worry about them, either.
“So Scott and I had this idea about what to do, you know, if an actual bomb goes off. And, well …” At this point, my intention was to say something like ta-da! and show Hector the shelter. But when I flicked my flashlight toward the hole, like a spotlight, all the words flew out of my head.
Next to the hole leading down to the tunnel was a large, dirt-covered rock. And next to the rock, spread out like a puddle on the dark earth, was Scott’s Members Only jacket.
“Scott!”
I was speaking to him again. I yelled his name but I didn’t hear an answer.
“Come on,” I told Hector. I ran toward the hole. In the dusk, it was hard to see the exact contour of the ground, but something was wrong.
“Scott, come on, your mom’s looking for you!” I shouted.
“Where is he?” Hector asked. Then he spotted the hole.
We slowed down as we approached the edge. Usually, it was like looking into a manhole, with our tunnel extending out like a sewer pipe. I shined my flashlight down there, and caught, in the beam, Scott Dursky. All we could see was his head, turned to the side, and one arm stretching out. The rest of him was covered in dirt.
“Scott?”
The hand moved. I think. “Dave?” Usually he called me David. It was as if he didn’t have the strength to get out the second syllable.
“Hector’s here, too,” I said. “Come on. Get out of there.” I tried to use the same tone of voice that Scott sometimes used with us. Tough with an edge of I-don’t-care.
“Can’t.”
“Just crawl out,” Hector said.
Scott pushed against the ground awkwardly with his free hand. Nothing happened. I heard another sound, like breathing, only not.
“Stop fooling around.” I looked at Hector. “He’s just messing around.”
But then another sound came, a real one, the kind that let me know he wasn’t fooling.
Scott Dursky was crying. Or at least, trying to cry between little gasps, like an untied balloon running out of air.
“Help me,” he said.
I squatted so I could climb down, too, but Hector grabbed my arm. “Careful!” he warned. “The hole could go. It could all go.” Even as his words hung in the air, a trickle of dirt fell like rain—or hail—and hit Scott’s head.
I took another step back. “We’ve got to get some help.” I looked at the house, but the windows were all dark. And then, even though I really had been sure I wasn’t speaking to him anymore, I added, “Don’t worry. You’re going to be okay.”
“No!” Scott turned his head slightly, trying to see me out of the corner of his eye. “Don’t leave.” Then he added, “Please.” It was not a Scott Dursky sort of word.
“Okay,” I told him. “I’ll stay here, and Hector will go for help.”
Hector looked at me, wide-eyed. “I was following you. I’m not sure I can even find my way back.” He whispered so Scott wouldn’t hear him.
I talked louder. It’s a trick I learned from Rabbi Doug: Your voice doesn’t shake as much when it’s loud. “Oops, reverse that. Hector will stay here, and I’ll go get some help.”
“NO!” Scott said. “If I’m going to die …”
“Nobody is dying, okay?” I swallowed hard and looked at the dirt we’d cleared out of the hole and piled into a mound a few feet away. I remembered how heavy each load was. If each bucket of dirt weighed eight to ten pounds, how much did the dirt weigh that was left? I was good at math, but I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to do the calculations. I couldn’t even think of how many loads were trapping Scott in the ground. “I won’t be gone that long.”
Scott curled his hand into a fist and thumped it into the ground. “Should have supported it,” he said. “Happened fast.” He choked back a sob.
Yes, we should have supported it. I knew it, too. I knew the cave-in was possible. Probable, even, according to The Great Escape. But I hadn’t pushed harder. I hadn’t said anything at all, after Scott said Virginia clay was safe. I hadn’t said anything, even though I’d worried about the rock. I’d just dipped the shovel into the dirt and dug, because I didn’t want Scott to think I was a wimp.
I zipped my jacket. “I’m going to make a run for it,” I told Hector. “I’ll stop at the first house with a light and call 911. Keep talking to him so he doesn’t lose it.”
“What are we going to talk about?” Hector asked. That stopped me. What would Scott and Hector talk about? The fact that Scott cheated on the science experiment? Or that Scott and I had been digging a shelter without Hector, leaving him to die if there was a nuclear disaster? That we were supposed to be a team?
I slipped my hand in my jacket pocket, and my fingers touched the edge of a stack of Trivial Pursuit cards. I’d started carrying them instead of my trivia book since they were even smaller. I pulled them out.
“Here,” I said, slapping the pack into his hand. “Ask him these.”
I started running, trying to avoid branches that kept slapping me in the face. I mentally mapped the street in my head. Where was the closest occupied house? At the corner of Armistead and Trotter? Or was that one still empty?
Once I hit the gravel driveway, the running got a bit easier. It took forever to reach the road. In the distance, I could see the headlights of a car.
I screamed as loud as I could and raised my hands. “Hey! Help! HELP!” It felt as though my words were disappearing into the air, but amazingly, the car turned and started up the driveway. The headlights temporarily blinded me.
Suddenly, I had this weird thought, that maybe this could be a psycho killer who prowled rural roads, searching for panicky-looking kids.
But a man I recognized as Scott’s dad jumped out of the car. They had the same face, though Mr. Dursky was taller.
“David! What are you doing here?”
I wanted to ask him the same question, but then I remembered, they owned the house. “Scott’s trapped in a hole in the back.”
If Scott’s dad was surprised by this, he didn’t show it. “Take me to him.”
“We can’t get him out,” I said. “Even with you. We need more help. We’ve got to get to a phone.” The words couldn’t come out fast enough. Somehow, I didn’t mess any of them up.
Mr. Dursky reached into his car and pulled out a big rectangular object. “I’ll call 911.”
“We need a phone,” I repeated wildly. Time seemed to be going in slow motion. I wanted Mr. Dursky to move faster, to run to the house, unlock the door, and make the call.
Mr. Dursky pulled a thin wire from the boxy-looking thing. An antenna. “David, this is a phone.”
It took six firemen to get Scott out. They said that if we had taken any longer to get help it could’ve been really bad.
Scott was already moaning a lot, so I didn’t want to know how much worse “really bad” could be. I had my suspicions, though.
“What were you thinking?” Mr. Dursky kept asking. “What were you kids doing?”
I couldn’t blame Mr. Dursky for thinking it was the three of us. I felt bad for Hector, who was getting blamed for this when he wasn’t even a part of the digging. And for Scott, who might have been able to answer, but who didn’t because of the moaning and because he was having trouble breathing. That left me to say that we were trying to save ourselves. But I didn’t say it, because by trying to save ourselves, we had nearly killed Scott.
Scott was on the stretcher being loaded into the ambulance when his mom raced up in her car.
“Scott!” she cried, bending down to hug him, even though the paramedics said to watch out for his ribs. Mrs. Dursky had one of those huge perms, and it looked like a cloud of hair was attacking Scott.
After she had decided that Scott was not going to die, Mrs. Dursky turned on Mr. Dursky. “Is this what you’ve been letting him do all these weeks when you have visitation?”
Visitation?
“For Pete’s sake, Marie, he’s almost thirteen. I’m not going to watch him every minute.” Mr. Dursky didn’t look at her when he spoke.
“Well, that worked out really well, didn’t it? Your only son nearly got himself killed.” Mrs. Dursky’s voice went up an octave, piercing the air. “He was supposed to be with me tonight.”
Nearly killed, I kept saying in my head. Nearly. Now that didn’t sound like a real word, either.
“Let’s all calm down,” said the paramedic. He had a reassuring voice, like my dad’s.
“He’s going to be okay,” Mr. Dursky said. Then he added, “The cellular phone came in handy.”
Scott’s mom snorted. “You’d think that if you have money for a cellular telephone you could pay your child support.”
Visitation. Child support. Those words meant divorce, which Scott had never managed to mention to me during all the hours we were digging.
I looked over at Scott in the back of the ambulance. He had one of those shiny emergency blankets wrapped around him, and it crinkled every time he moved. But there was no way he couldn’t hear them. Everyone could.
Mrs. Dursky turned to me and Hector.
“I’m so glad you found him,” she said. It was like we really had gone looking for him after she called our house. “You’re real heroes. You saved him.”
Except I didn’t feel like a hero. It wasn’t like the poison ivy. I’d almost killed him by being too chicken to argue with him about the rock. And we wouldn’t have come out here at all if I hadn’t wanted to come clean to Hector.
Mr. and Mrs. Dursky said they would follow the ambulance to the hospital. They took separate cars and left Hector and me standing alone in the empty driveway of what I now knew was not a rental property; it was where Mr. Dursky lived.
“Wow,” said Hector.
“Yeah,” I said. “Wow.”
We started walking back to my house. Mr. Dursky had let me use his phone to call my parents, who said they would call Hector’s parents. The connection was a little crackly, like when you talk into a walkie-talkie. Dad had offered to pick us up, but this was one of those times when walking seemed better. I wanted to talk to Hector.
“The hole,” I said, not sure where to start. I never did get a chance to tell Hector what was going on with the hole.
“You guys have been digging for a while, I guess.”
I didn’t think I could feel worse about lying to Hector all of those weeks. I was wrong.
“Yeah.”
Hector kicked a rock. It bounced under a streetlight and then into the darkness. “Clubhouse?” he asked.
“It was supposed to be a fallout shelter,” I said. “But it fell in instead.” Hector didn’t laugh. I didn’t blame him.
“A fallout shelter,” he repeated.
“Just in case,” I said.
“So you’d be safe.” The way he said it, I knew he saw the whole picture, and not just part of it. He hadn’t been invited to dig. He had definitely not been invited to live in the hole. It would have just been me, Scott Dursky, and the cockroaches.
“You know, I was never sure about Scott,” Hector said. “I used to be sure about you, though. We were best friends.” Hector has always said how he really felt about things.
Sometimes I liked that about him. But not always. Not now. He took a deep breath. “We’ve always done stuff together. Always. And now I don’t even know you anymore.”
I would have felt better if Hector had sounded angry. Instead, he just sounded sad.
It looked as though our friendship wasn’t going to survive a nuclear war; it wasn’t even going to survive the preparation for one.
When the Emergency Broadcast System told us this was just a test, it was saying, this didn’t count. And I guess you could argue that everything we were doing, digging the hole and trying out food, didn’t matter unless the Russians actually attacked—until then, it was all practice. But it didn’t feel that way. It was the other way around—the way we acted now mattered most.
We turned the corner to my street, and I could see the lights on in my house.
“I guess you knew about Scott’s parents,” he said.
“No,” I said. “I had no idea.” Maybe that’s why Scott started to hang out with us; because we didn’t know the difference, and he could pretend everything was normal. “You want to come in? My dad’ll drive you home.”
Hector shook his head. “No, thanks. I can make it on my own.”
“You can have my flashlight,” I told him.
“No, thanks,” said Hector, a little too politely.
“No, really.” I held it out to him. “You should take it. You can give it back later.” I had this weird thought, which was that if Hector took the flashlight, it meant he wouldn’t stay mad at me. He’d have to talk to me again.
Hector made a face and took the flashlight, and then I stood at the front door and watched Hector walk down the street as t
he light from the flashlight got smaller and smaller. I felt just like that flashlight.
When I got inside, Mom and Dad were waiting for me. Mom hugged me first. “We were so worried!” she said. “Are you okay?”
“What’s the word on Scott?” said Dad.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.” The image of Scott on the stretcher flashed in front of me.
“If he’s at Commonwealth, I can find out,” said Dad.
“So, Scott got trapped in a hole? I don’t understand. Was this a hole from construction? A hole for … bears?” asked Mom. “What were you even doing out there?”
I didn’t know how to begin to answer, so I didn’t.
The next day at school, everyone was talking about Scott and the fallout shelter. Heather Roberts came up to me in English and told me that she’d heard that we had a television in the shelter and that we’d wired our tunnel for electricity. It was the first time she’d ever spoken to me voluntarily.
“What are you guys going to do about the trivia contest?” she asked. “Can Scott even play, now that he’s, you know?” She talked about him like he was dead instead of temporarily injured.
“His brain isn’t hurt,” I said. “Just ribs and stuff.”
I wondered if people were talking to Hector about the shelter, except Hector didn’t wait for me at the track in PE. We kept running on opposite sides of the oval, no matter how much I sped up or slowed down. He didn’t show up at our regular lunch table, either. He must have gone to the library.
When I got home from school, Safta started bugging me—again—for my list of friends for the bar mitzvah. “Including those girls from the mall.” She’d already mailed the invitations to out-of-town guests, the people who had to make plane reservations. She’d even mailed Seal an invitation.
I wanted to say what’s the point? What was the point of even having a big bar mitzvah, if the only two friends I had weren’t going to be there? But I didn’t. I just told her that I’d get her a list.
I checked the mail. Alexi hadn’t written back, so he didn’t even feel like a real person. But he was the only friend I had left.
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