On the Day I Died

by Candace Fleming

  “Go ahead,” came a voice from the shadows.

  “Tell him,” urged another.

  The girl turned back to Mike, and she smiled uncertainly. “We want to tell you our stories,” she said. “Our death stories.”

  “Death?” rasped Mike.

  She nodded, her eyes filling with luminous moonlight. “And this one is mine.”

  JUST SO YOU GET the complete picture, I guess I should start by telling you about the Chicago neighborhood I lived in. Mine didn’t have a name like Hyde Park or Roseland or Austin, but it was still a tight-knit place—what my Nonna Rosa, who came over on the boat from Italy, called comunità. A community.

  It was the kind of place where people made Chianti in their basements and grew Roma tomatoes in the tiny yards behind their two-flats.

  The kind of place where my pop—like most of the other men on our block—worked the assembly line over at the Schwinn bicycle plant, while my ma and the other neighbor ladies stayed home to do the dusting and the laundry and the daily shopping. I can still see them, those housewives, dragging their two-wheeled shopping carts along Chicago Avenue. At DiAngelo’s Produce, they’d stop to squeeze the cantaloupes and complain about the price of eggplant. Next door at Mr. Santorelli’s butcher shop they’d gossip and haggle over the chops, hollering stuff like “This time try giving me one that ain’t all fat!”

  The kind of place where kids roller-skated, and played baseball, and stayed outside until the streetlights came on, the signal that it was time to go home.

  And it was the kind of place where, if you earned a certain reputation, it stuck.

  Take Mrs. Gioletti, for instance. She was seventy-eight and sun-dried as a raisin, but in my neighborhood she was still “a great beauty.”

  Or Mr. Bianchi, who had been sober ten years but was still labeled “a stone-cold drunk.”

  Or me.

  In my neighborhood, I would forever be known as a liar.

  But I didn’t tell lies. I swear.

  I told stories.

  They just came to me, stories about ships at sea, or long-ago murders, or how our next-door neighbor, Mr. Gamboni, was really a German spy. They weren’t big stories, or mean stories. They weren’t meant to hurt anyone. They were just stories with the teeniest, tiniest bits of truth buried in them. Fairy tales, really.

  Like the time I turned in a report claiming that President Kennedy had come back from the dead to tell me who’d really shot him. You’ve got to admit it made a better story than sticking to the boring old facts, didn’t it?

  Or the time I bragged to the kids in my social studies class, “I got a record player for Christmas,” when everyone knew my pop couldn’t afford to put that much under the tree. “The Beatles sent it to me themselves,” I added. “There was the sweetest little note from Ringo!” It’s amazing how one detail can make a story so much better.

  So of course I was telling a story that March morning in 1964—the morning when everything changed.

  “You won’t believe who I met coming out of the library last night,” I said to my cousin Annette.

  We were walking to school. Annette, a few steps ahead of me, was trying to act like we weren’t really together.

  “Nick De Rosa.” That much was true, but then I went on, “He offered to carry my books home for me. Isn’t that something? Nick De Rosa, homecoming king, senior class president and Golden Gloves boxing champion, offered to carry my books.”

  Annette stopped and turned around. “Right, Gina. Yeah, I really believe that happened.”

  That’s what Nonna Rosa calls preso con un grano di sale, or taking it with a grain of salt. People took everything I said with a grain of salt.

  “Why can’t you live in this world?” Annette demanded. “You know no one believes you. No one believes anything you ever say. Why do you keep making things up?”

  How could I explain that my stories helped me escape the dreary sameness of my life—the same old TV shows, the same old questions from my parents, the same old mostaccioli on Thursdays and lasagna on Sundays? How could I tell her that for those few moments when I was telling the story, I slipped into a shinier world and lived the life I really wanted?

  I just shrugged.

  “Come on,” she said with an exasperated sigh, “we’re going to be late.”

  The sidewalks around St. Philomena swelled with kids. Patrol boys wearing those silly orange safety belts tooted their whistles and directed traffic while a couple of priests hung around the flagpole, sipping from coffee mugs and watching for fistfights.

  As we passed, Father Frank waved to us. I was tempted to stop and tell him how my three-legged cat, Claudio, had saved a drowning baby, but the rush of students pushing through the front doors kept me moving. Along with the other ninth graders, I climbed the wide wooden staircase to the fourth floor.

  In Sister Mary Henry’s homeroom, Angela Moretti was showing off her add A Pearl necklace again. “This one,” she was saying to a group of girls gathered around her, “was given to me on my last birthday, and this one was for my confirmation, and this one—”

  I couldn’t help myself. Tapping Angela on the shoulder, I said, “I wish I had worn my pearl necklace today.” I didn’t admit it was plastic. “Mine was given to me by my Nonna Rosa, not for any special occasion, but just because.” I paused; then, further inspired, I added, “Actually, to be accurate, I should say it was handed down to me, since it’s been in the family so long. Centuries, really. Ever since one of those old-time popes presented it to us back in the seventeen hundreds. Did you know that in Italy my family was royalty?”

  Angela glared at me.

  Feeling good, I took my seat.

  That’s when I noticed him, standing beside the blackboard—the new boy. Pulito come una nuova spina. That’s what my Nonna Rosa would have said. “Neat as a new pin.” Unlike the other boys in class, the new boy wore the white shirt of his school uniform carefully tucked into blue trousers that were creased as sharp as a razor. His necktie was knotted perfectly, and his black leather shoes shone as if he’d just rubbed them with Vaseline. He reminded me of one of those kids you’d see on the cover of Catholic Family Magazine—too good to be true.

  He looked right at me, and I knew he’d overheard my story. Knew, too, from the way his ice-blue eyes narrowed, that he was sizing me up. Then his lips twitched into a smirky sort of smile.

  Sister Mary Henry clapped her hands for attention. “Class,” she said, “this is Anthony Delvecchio. Anthony comes to us from Our Lady of Mercy School.”

  The room buzzed. We all knew about Our Lady of Mercy. Just last week the school had mysteriously caught fire in the middle of the night. Even though only the annex had burned, it was enough to close the school and scatter its students all across the diocese.

  Poor Anthony, I thought. It must be hard to lose your school.

  As he took the empty desk across from me, I smiled sympathetically at him.

  “Liar,” he said. His voice was soft and a little contemptuous.

  “Wh-wh-what?” I stammered.

  “But I’m better,” he added.

  At the front of the room Sister Mary Henry clapped her hands again. “Gina, you know my rules about talking during class. Stand up, please.”

  I felt myself go hot, but before I could stand, Anthony rose.

  He looked at the nun, his eyes wide and full of innocence. “I’m afraid this is my fault, Sister,” he lied. “I asked … Gina, is it? I asked Gina to remind me of your name.” He managed to blush. “I was too embarrassed to ask you myself. I mean, after all the kindness you’ve shown me, it felt so rude to have forgotten it.” He smiled then, a single dimple appearing in his cheek. “Please forgive me, Sister. It won’t happen again.” He touched his hand to his chest. “I promise.”

  Sister Mary Henry bought every word. “Thank you for your honesty, Anthony.” She practically cooed.

  “That,” Anthony said to me as he sat back down, “is how it’s done.” />
  ***

  Anthony ignored me for the rest of the day, even though we had lunch and religion class together. I watched him, though. Strange, but considering this was his first day at a new school, he didn’t look nervous or confused. Not the teensy-weensiest little bit. In the hall between classes, he whistled at Angela Moretti, and in the cafeteria he went right up to Nick De Rosa and thumped him on the back like they were old friends. He even shook Father Frank’s hand the way my pop always did on Sundays after Mass—two-handed and full of gusto. What kind of teenager did that?

  He’s smooth, I thought. Smooth as the satin trim on my confirmation dress.

  After school, I headed across the street to Mrs. Kostelnic’s store for my daily sugar fix—acne be darned. As I stood in front of the candy counter, deciding whether to blow my entire ten cents on a Hershey’s bar or just buy a nickel’s worth of Atomic Fireballs, Anthony sidled up next to me.

  “I heard a joke about you today,” he said. “Want to hear it?”

  “Not especially,” I said.

  He ignored me. “How can you tell when Gina Sparacino is lying?” He paused before delivering the punch line. “Her lips are moving.” He laughed.

  I studied a box of Milk Duds.

  “What? Are you upset?” he asked.

  I refused to answer. Snapping up the Hershey’s bar and the Milk Duds, I stomped over to the cash register.

  Beside it sat a dish full of matchbooks for the grown-ups who came in to buy cigarettes. Anthony strolled over to the dish and nonchalantly pocketed a couple of the books.

  “I saw that,” I said.

  “Saw what?”

  “You took some matches. They’re right there in your jacket pocket.”

  “So what? They’re free, aren’t they?”

  “But they’re not for kids. I could tell Mrs. Kostelnic.”

  “Will she believe you?”

  I hesitated.

  Anthony stepped close, so close I could feel his breath on my cheek. “Don’t you like the little ploof sound a match makes when it’s lit?” he asked. His expression turned all intense. “Don’t you like that whiff of sulfur?”

  I looked away, trying to hide how frightened I suddenly felt.

  At that moment, Mrs. Kostelnic hollered across the shop. “Can I help you kids?”

  “I got what I came for,” answered Anthony. He pushed out the door and was gone.

  From then on, I made a point of avoiding Anthony. I refused to even glance in his direction during homeroom, much less talk to him. I quit buying candy at Mrs. Kostelnic’s and instead walked home with Annette and her friends every day. I even started sitting with them at lunch, just in case Anthony got the bright idea to share sandwiches or something.

  Annette wasn’t exactly thrilled by my presence. “Can’t you find your own friends?” she complained. But she didn’t tell me to get lost. She couldn’t. I was la famiglia—family.

  As the days passed without any more Anthony incidents, I began to relax. Just like everyone else in my class, he’d forgotten all about me.

  But one night, just before supper, there was a knock at our front door. I answered to find him standing there.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I’m collecting for my paper route,” he answered smoothly.

  “You don’t have a paper route.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “How do you know? You never talk to me.”

  “And I’m not starting now.” I tried to shut the door, but he stuck out his foot, stopping me.

  “Wait,” he said, his voice dead calm. “I have to ask you a question. Does my jacket smell like smoke?”

  I shook my head, confused.

  Anthony pointed across the street. “There’s a fire over there. You better call the fire department.”

  I looked. Sure enough, black smoke billowed out of the Santuccis’ garage.

  “Fire!” I shrieked, dashing into the living room. “Ma! Call the fire department!”

  Ma came to the door, wiping her hands on a dishrag and grumbling. “Honestly, Gina, if this is another one of your stories …”

  Her voice trailed off at the sight of the flames now licking their way through the garage’s tar-paper roof. With a squeak, she dropped the rag and made a dash for the kitchen and the telephone.

  I turned back, but Anthony was gone.

  A cold, hard fear was growing in the pit of my stomach, a suspicion turning into knowledge too awful to put into words. Could Anthony have started that fire?

  It wasn’t long before the entire neighborhood had left their suppers on the table to watch the firemen battle the flames. In the chaos, I saw Annette and Nick and … Anthony! He stood, mesmerized, the red-and-blue fire truck lights flashing eerily across his face.

  It gave me a creepy feeling, the way his eyes were so wide and glassy. He looked like a cat staring at a bird.

  The next afternoon during religion class, Sister Mary Eunice asked us to make a list of our sins. “A written list,” she said.

  Binders around the room snapped open as we reached for notebook paper.

  “The purpose of this exercise is to examine your conscience so you will be prepared for your next confession,” she continued. “Please be honest and earnest.”

  I was just wondering if I could spruce up my list, make a better story by throwing in a plane crash or maybe a movie star, when Anthony squeezed into the seat beside me.

  “I’m here to confess my sins,” he whispered. Glancing around to make sure no one else was looking, he dropped a sheet of paper onto my open binder.

  In his recognizable block handwriting were written three little words: I DID IT.

  Underneath was a drawing of Our Lady of Mercy School. It was being eaten alive by flames.

  I thought I was actually going to scream. I put my fist in my mouth, as if to shove it back … and then just coughed. Dry-mouthed, I reached for his paper.

  But Anthony snatched it back. “No, no, no,” he said, waggling his finger. “This is between me and God.” Then he folded his confession and stuck it between the pages of his Bible.

  For the rest of the period I sat frozen beside him, sick with the knowledge of what he’d done, my heart and stomach crammed up into my throat. I had to tell someone. I had to tell Father Frank.

  When the bell rang, I bolted for the door.

  “What’s your hurry, Gina?” Anthony called after me … taunting me!

  Stifling a cry, I fled.

  The hallway echoed with slamming lockers and kids shouting “Call you later” or “See you at baseball practice.” I pushed my way toward the staircase. Annette and her friends were there, waiting for me. I shoved past them.

  “What’s with you?” Annette hollered after me.

  But I kept going, fighting my way down the crowded stairs and out the front door.

  Yes—thank God—Father Frank was there in his usual spot by the flagpole.

  “Father!” I cried, tears of relief filling my eyes. “Father Frank!”

  “What is it?” he asked. “Gina, has something happened?”

  “Anthony Delvecchio did it,” I blurted as a river of happy, laughing students flowed around us. “He set fire to Our Lady of Mercy.” Then I launched into my story. But I hadn’t gotten any further than the part about Mrs. Kostelnic’s matchbooks when Father Frank stopped me.

  “What is Our Lord’s ninth commandment, Gina?” he asked.

  What did that have to do with Anthony? I fumbled for a moment before answering, “Um … uh … ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbor.’ ”

  “That is correct,” said Father Frank. “And do you know what that commandment means, Gina? It means it is a mortal sin to tell lies. These untruths you are spreading about Anthony will result in your damnation unless you repent.”

  “But I’m not lying!”

  “Storytelling, lying, it’s the same thing,” replied Father Frank. He took my hands in his. “You must ask God’s
forgiveness, Gina. You must confess.”

  “But … but …”

  “Go home now,” he said. “Go home and reflect on your sin.”

  I took a few stumbling steps. Then I stopped and pressed my palms to my flushed cheeks. Why wouldn’t he believe me? Didn’t he know I would never, ever make up a story about something this serious? Panic fluttered in my chest. What should I do? What should I do?

  Anthony was waiting for me at the corner.

  “Go away!” I pushed past him and hurried down the sidewalk.

  He hurried after me.

  Whirling, I cried, “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

  “Because,” he replied calmly.

  “Because why?”

  “Because you’re the only person I can tell without getting in trouble,” he said.

  I understood then. He needed an audience, someone to witness his deeds. If no one knew, then it was almost as if they had never happened. “Stay away from me!” I shouted. “Or I’ll call the police!”

  I ran, sobbing, all the way home.

  “Gina, is that you?” Ma called as I burst through the front door and flung myself into my bedroom. “Gina?”

  “Leave me alone,” I called back. “I’m fine.”

  Of course, I wasn’t. But if I told her what was happening, she probably wouldn’t believe me, either. I dropped onto the edge of my bed, gulping big mouthfuls of air. Hugging myself tightly, I rocked back and forth, back and forth, until finally, slowly, the panic left.

  Still, a sense of dread remained.

  Anthony wasn’t in homeroom the next morning. Looking at the empty seat across from me, I should have felt relief. But I didn’t. Instead, I felt itchy and on edge.

  Halfway through the period, he appeared, making a big show of the Bible in his hand. “Please excuse my tardiness, Sister,” he said as he slid into his chair, his face all false innocence, “but I was so busy memorizing my New Testament verses that I lost all track of time.”

  Sister Mary Henry nodded understandingly. In her world, Anthony Delvecchio could do no wrong.

  I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he smiled at some secret thought. The dimple in his cheek deepened.