After Eli (8 page)

Then she asked if I’d like another cookie, but I said no, thanks, because I’d had enough flax for one day.

“Jim told me all about what happened, how bad off he was,” Emma said. “He said your brother never gave up on him. Jim thought an awful lot of your brother. He says it’s because of your brother that he’s still alive.”

I think that’s the real reason my dad doesn’t like Jim.

Because Eli’s dead and Jim is still alive.

I
became friends with Walter in the graveyard.

I used to stop by Eli’s grave every once in a while, and if nobody was around, I’d sit down and shoot the breeze and catch him up on stuff.

If you spend enough time in a graveyard, you really get to know the place like you do any other neighborhood. Pretty soon you even have your favorite graves. Mine were Beloved Henry, who got kicked by a horse at the age of six and ended up with a smirky little marble lamb, and Amos Pettigrew, who had a creepy carved skull and a badass epitaph:

Here lies AMOS PETTIGREW

As I am now, so shall you be

Prepare for death and follow me

Gee, thanks, Amos,
I used to think, but I visited him anyway. I bet in life he didn’t have many pals.

The most interesting graves were in the old cemetery, which you could get to from the new one by stepping over the fence, which wasn’t hard, since most of it was lying on its side. That’s where the five little Wheeler kids were, and theirs were some of my favorite graves too. I used to go over and sit on the big Wheeler-parent gravestone and look at all those little stones lined up beside it like a row of granite ducklings.

SAFE IN THE ARMS OF THE ANGELS
, the big parent stone said.

I wondered what the angels had been doing while whatever happened to the little Wheeler kids was happening, like lightning or bears or bubonic plague. Not doing their guardian-angel thing — that was pretty obvious. Maybe they’d all been goofing off at some celestial harp jam.

I was so wrapped up in blasphemous anti-angel thoughts that when this voice behind me said, “Hi, Danny,” I nearly jumped out of my skin. The first thing I thought was
Zombies!
which goes to show the kind of thing you’re primed for if you’ve spent Halloween at Peter Reilly’s house with the lights out, watching
Night of the Living Dead.

But when I turned around, it was just old weird Walter, in a pair of ratty corduroy pants and geeky high-top sneakers and that haircut that made it look like his head had been chewed by squirrels.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Walter said. “I thought you heard me.”

“You didn’t scare me,” I said. Lying slightly.

“I see you up here a lot,” Walter said. “But I figured you wanted to be alone. Most people in a graveyard want to be left alone. I can leave if you want me to. Do you want me to leave you to be alone?”

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “Stick around.”

Walter sat down across from me on Jedediah Kimball, 1857–1904, who was now
IN A BETTER PLACE
. His corduroys rode up to show white socks and some white hairy leg. You could tell Walter was the type who would never get a tan.

I pointed at all the little Wheeler stones.

“What do you suppose they died of, all at once like that?”

“Diphtheria,” Walter said. “Before inoculations, it sometimes killed eighty percent of children under ten.”

His eyes started doing that back-and-forth thing. I know now that it was the cerebral manipulation of information, but at the time I figured he was having an epileptic fit. I’d heard about epileptic fits, and I knew that if somebody had one, you were supposed to put a stick in their mouth to keep them from biting off their tongue. But just as I started looking around for a good strong stick, Walter started talking again.

“It makes you think,” Walter said. “All the scrambling around and worrying and stuff we do. And then we die. We’re gone, just like that. And we think all the time that it matters, all the stuff we do, when the truth is that we’re all nothing anyway. Mathematically speaking.”

I realized right then that I’d been hanging around with the twins too much because the first thing I thought was that if Walter was a Pooh character, he’d be that depressing donkey. Eeyore.

“What do you mean, we’re all nothing?” I said.

Walter said, “The universe has maybe a hundred billion galaxies in it. And each of those galaxies has somewhere between a billion and a trillion stars.”

“Yeah?” I said.

Walter said, “And orbiting around just one of those trillions and trillions of stars is our planet, which has six billion people on it. We’re like dust spots on a dust spot in the middle of a dust spot. Mathematically speaking, we average out to absolutely nothing.”

Mathematically speaking
is one of Walter’s expressions.

I knew there was a good reason I hated math.

“You know what else?” Walter said. “There’s a philosopher who thinks maybe we’re not even here at all. He says our whole reality might be a computer game played by some incredibly advanced civilization. You know, like we’re the Sims.”

“That’s nuts,” I said.

But I could feel myself starting to worry about the time when I took the ladder out of the Sims’ little swimming pool and just left them to swim back and forth until they croaked.

Then I thought how pissed I’d be if that turned out to be true and Eli died because some dumb-ass Little Green Kid from Alpha Centauri got bored and clicked
DELETE
.

Walter got down off Jedediah, walked over, and started poking with his high-top sneaker at the little Wheeler graves.

“What do you think happens after we die?” I said.

Walter got that struggle expression people get when you’ve asked them an awkward question and they’re about to give you an answer you don’t want to hear.

“Nothing,” Walter said finally. “I think once the brain stops working, we cease to exist and all the molecules and atoms that we’re made of drift off to become part of something else.”

“Like what kind of something else?” I said. “Like reincarnation?”

Walter rolled his eyes and kept poking the grass with his toe.

“Like recycling,” he said. “Like grass. Squirrels. Worms.”

I thought Eli might like to be part of a squirrel. Or maybe a bird. Eli always said if he could have one X-gene mutant superpower, he’d like to be able to fly.

“What about your soul?” I said. “Don’t you believe in souls?”

Pastor Jay and the Methodist Sunday School had been pretty definitive on the subject of souls.

“Look, you asked me,” Walter said. “I’m not saying there’s no heaven full of people running through fields of flowers. I’m just saying what I think, is all.”

“Hey. That’s cool,” I said.

“Not usually, it isn’t,” Walter said.

He grinned at me suddenly, and I saw that he had this crookedy grin that went up a little bit more on one side than the other, just like Eli’s. I realized I’d never seen Walter smile before.

I guess that was when Walter and I became friends.

Things Walter loves are irrational numbers, Big Bang theory, Rube Goldberg machines, chess, licorice, Linux, the Grand Canyon, the M13 galaxy, octopuses, graphing calculators, Dr Pepper, and the Periodic Table of Elements. Things he hates are nonserious people, astrology, baseball caps on people who aren’t playing baseball, Mickey Mouse, the British royal family, Twinkies, lima beans, social events, homeopathy, and preemptive war. The people he admires are Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell.

And the guy who wrote
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I know that because in his Facebook picture he’s got two heads and he claims his name is Zaphod Beeblebrox.

W
alter and Isabelle and I started hanging out together that summer because of the twins and werewolves and the full moon.

Once I started working at the Blue Potato, the twins would come out to the farm every day and eat Emma’s weird cookies and hang around with the goats and the chickens and try to con Jim into letting them drive his secondhand John Deere. Jim never fell for it, even though Jasper was pretty convincing about being an expert with heavy machinery, which I think proves that Jim’s brain isn’t as fried as my dad says it is.

“Will those potatoes turn your tongue blue when you eat them?” Journey said, hanging over the fence where I was hoeing. “Like drinking grape Kool-Aid turns your tongue purple?”

Journey was wearing rhinestone sunglasses, overall shorts, and pink ballet slippers. Jasper was wearing cowboy boots and a T-shirt that said
COME TO THE DARK SIDE. WE HAVE COOKIES
.

Journey stuck out her tongue at Jasper, who stuck out his tongue back.

“No,” I said. “They do not turn your tongue blue.”

“I thought they’d turn your tongue blue,” Journey said mournfully.

“Well, they don’t,” I said.

I turned around so that my back was to the twins and hoed harder, but they didn’t take the hint and go away.

“We wondered if you might want to come over to our house tomorrow night,” Jasper said. “Isabelle said to ask you.”

My heart gave a sort of electric thunk.

“She said to ask you day before yesterday,” Journey said. “But Jasper forgot to tell you. Jasper is very forgetful. If you could see the inside of Jasper’s brain, it would be full of soft, fluffy balls of wool.”

In microseconds I thought of several creative awful things I’d like to do to Jasper’s soft woolly forgetful brain.

“If you could see the inside of
Journey’
s brain,” Jasper said, “it would be full of razor blades.”

Walter says that the twins are the conversational equivalent of a computer virus.

“Our parents think it’s good that Isabelle is showing social interests,” Jasper said. “When our dad said we were spending the summer here, she said oh, no, she wasn’t. She said she wasn’t going to go to some stupid little podunk town that didn’t even have a symphony or an art museum. She wanted to stay in New York and live by herself in a hotel.”

“Like Eloise,” Journey said. “Eloise is a girl in a famous picture book. She lived in the Plaza Hotel in New York and got her meals from room service and had a pet turtle who ate raisins. But Isabelle couldn’t do that because we don’t have enough money for a hotel.”

“Have you ever had a pet turtle?” asked Jasper.

“No,” I said.

“So are you going to come over tomorrow?” Jasper said.

“It’s because of the full moon,” Journey said, bouncing up and down on the fence. “There’s a full moon tomorrow night. Isabelle has a thing about the full moon.”

“If Journey was in outer space,” Jasper said, “she would not be the moon. She would be an Apollo object. That’s an asteroid that’s aimed at smashing into the Earth and destroying all life as we know it.”

“If
Jasper
was in outer space,” Journey said, “he would be puny pathetic cosmic dust.”

“What
time
tomorrow?” I said. Resisting a natural impulse to hit them with the hoe.

“Seven thirty,” Journey said. “I’ll give Isabelle your R.S.V.P. That’s how you answer an invitation. It stands for
Répondez, s’il vous plaît.
That means ‘Answer, please,’ in French. Did I say that I can speak French?”

“You said it,” Jasper said. “You say it a lot. But you can’t.”

“Also Jasper might turn into a werewolf,” Journey said.

“I have all the signs,” Jasper said. “Like I have unusually long middle fingers.” He showed me his hands and spread out his fingers. “See?”

“No,” I said.

“And my ears are a little pointed, and I’m pale,” Jasper said. “Werewolves are always pale.”

“That’s vampires,” I said. “Vampires are always pale. Werewolves are toothy and hairy. Nobody wants to be around a werewolf.”

I thought of Valya Starikova, this Russian kid in my Book of the Dead. She was dragged into the forest and eaten by wolves. Nothing was left but pieces of her shoes.

“Yeah,” Journey said. “Because werewolves bite. Like this.” And she started to gnaw on Jasper’s arm.