One Death, Nine Stories Read online

  Then he made me try on the suits. At first I protested, but you don’t say no to Kev. He brought them out—armloads—even called out one of the salesmen, whose eyes went narrow, but then Kevin explained I had a bunch of interviews lined up for internships, and my sister’s confirmation besides.

  Kev was in a different area, eyeballing suits seven hundred, eight hundred a pop. “Kevin, I can’t!” I whispered.

  He didn’t listen. He made the guy unlock those beauts and slide them right off the clacking wood hangers. Boy, that shit felt good. Like putting my arms into a cloud. Some dude brushing me down, making me step up on the platform, tucking and nicking here and there. Nobody ever did that for me before. And it worked: I saw myself a thousand times over in the three-way mirror. I saw shoulders and a collar, the lean angle of a waist. I saw me walking right through glass. Striding off the tarmac, steam blowing right up my pant legs like a big man. Showing Mami it wasn’t a mistake. I wasn’t a mistake.

  “Awesome,” Kev said. He set his big hands on my shoulders, spun me around. The tag twinkled. Eight hundred ninety-five.

  “Make your stepmother buy that for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do.”

  His gaze stayed on me, like a wan electric current. He looked sicker than ever. His cheekbones seemed to quiver. “You make people show what you are to them,” he added. “Make them pay.”

  As I watched the salesman slide on the plastic cover, I felt a raw hunger scrape up against my ribs. Like nothing I’d felt since I’d come north. Nothing I’d ever known. I wanted everything. I wanted the suit, I wanted to get back to school, I wanted to make good on my life. I could have eaten those shirts and ties and shoes.

  Then I turned around and realized Kevin was gone.

  I can see the sign for the Eternal Rest Funeral Home from the bus stop. It’s a short walk over, the only real house on a block of low brick commercial fronts, red shingles with a peeling, white-banistered porch. A worn strip of green outdoor carpet arrows down the stairs and across the pavement to the curb, where the cars are still pulling up. For once I wish I smoked. I squint at the various people pushing through the doors, try to see if I recognize anyone. Then I tug on my jacket, swallow a few times. I check my watch for about the fiftieth time.

  That hot afternoon at the mall, I found Kev outside, leaned up against a car, flashing a bleary grin. A security guard scooted us along—a guy probably not much older than either of us, just doing his job.

  We collapsed onto a strip of hedged grass, at the end of the parking lot. Kevin flung himself down. The sun needled down hard. Still he wore that crazy flannel shirt buttoned to his wrists. He looked worse than before. A shade of fear tapped my heart. Was he sick?

  “Hey,” I ribbed. “Why don’t you take that thing off?”

  “Shut up,” he snapped. But he was sweating like crazy, so he did strip off his shirt, and that’s when I saw it—the scar on a tender stretch of his forearm. My stomach did a little quiver. I could just make out the letters, shiny white beads stitched on the skin: SC.

  Sweat streamed off him now, glazed him in a pale hue. His hair was plastered thick as gum on his forehead.

  “He just went and offed himself, you know,” he whispered.

  “Who?”

  Then I felt stupid. What a thickhead I am sometimes. I didn’t make a move, a sound. All the molecules in the air gathered around Kevin. He glittered. He shone. It was the most he ever said. Not that it was much. Just what I hadn’t seen before. The hole his father disappeared into. The phone call from the police in the middle of the night. His mother wasn’t even sure how they had her number, it had been so many years. An ocean of broken glass beneath his skin.

  He turned. “You ever think about that?”

  “What?”

  But I knew what he meant. I just couldn’t get a word up through my throat. I was plugged deep with terror.

  He slapped the grass, gathered up his shirt. The scar letters glinted on his arm. “Forget it. You got a lot to look forward to, man. That’s why you got to get that suit.”

  Next thing I know, dude’s running across the lot. For a sick guy, he hauled over that fence something quick.

  Two days later, I got the news. An update came floating to the top banner on my new phone. I swept my fingers on the screen, widened the little bubble of letters. Read it again. The air around my eyes buzzed. I couldn’t even feel my own fingertips. Realized it was the girl Natalie, from the bookstore, who posted first. WT—? she’d scrawled.

  The guy who stands at the front of the funeral parlor, instructing people to sign the guest book, looks about my age. Kind of chubby, an overgrown kid squeezed into a dress shirt and tie, not commanding and somber, as he should be in a place like this.

  Then a girl approaches me—she has the same eyes as Kev, the same tawny skin.

  “You’re a friend?”

  I nod, feeling like a fraud. I shouldn’t even be here. “From York College.”

  She cracks a rueful smile. “Sometimes he went to classes.” Pointing to the casket, she steps aside. “Please, go ahead. They did a great job.”

  “Nadira,” someone pipes up from behind.

  We both turn, puzzled. It’s the pudgy guy, looking flushed and pleased, squeezing his fingers in front. “She’s our cosmetologist.”

  “Yeah, right,” Kevin’s sister says, a snarl in her voice.

  I don’t blame her. Who boasts about the makeup girl at a time like this?

  “Get back to your book,” I hiss to Mr. Upbeat.

  The last thing I want to do is make a move toward that casket. I hang back behind a skinny girl weeping so hard she’s carrying a whole tissue box under her arm. Her extravagance annoys me. Kind of like Alicia. Everything done up like some stupid housewife reality show. Keep it chill, Kev would say.

  Before I know it, I’m right up front on the line, staring down at a rubber-faced guy who once was Kev. I can see the clay edge of makeup where they folded his dark hair over his cheek.

  “That’s one beautiful suit,” I murmur. And it is: the fabric’s made of some finely dyed wool—slate blue with tiny bits of darker blue. The lapels angle down clean, even with him lying straight out. He looks slick as can be, GQ sly.

  “He picked it out.”

  To my surprise, his sister has stayed by my elbow. She shakes her head. “Don’t know how he did it, but he scraped the money together and bought it. Had it spread out on a chair, right where they—” She looks away.

  “When did he . . . ?”

  She’s still talking with her face turned, so I can see only her trembling profile. “For two days, he didn’t answer his phone. He shut himself into his place. No one heard from him.”

  I feel as if the whole room, the ceiling, has crashed right down on my head.

  I was nothing. But I was the last.

  The one who helped him pick his burial suit.

  It all makes sense: that day at the mall, sprawled out on the grass, Kev sweating, sick as a dog. He was talking not to me, but to himself. All I complained about, my family, my stepmother and half sister, it wasn’t the same. Maybe I wanted it to be the same, but it wasn’t. My papi is a two-timing liar who can’t even own up to what he did, but he didn’t off himself. Didn’t put the cold muzzle of a gun to his mouth. Didn’t leave a crater growing hairy and big as a cancer inside.

  I walk the whole way back to the church, all forty blocks, clouds scudding loose and jumbly overhead. It’s as if I never breathed the whole time I was in that funeral parlor and this is the only way I’m ever going to get air inside me again.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I hiss at Papi.

  He looks at me, puzzled. “About what?”

  I make a face, nod toward Alicia and Benny, who are following my stepmother through the huge doorway. She’s wearing a brand-new silk dress, and it makes a shushing sound against her stockinged thighs. “About them.”

  He hesitates. “I couldn’t.”

&
nbsp; “Why?”

  He rubs his palm back and forth on the back of his neck.

  “I was scared, hijo. That’s why.”

  This is the most conversation that we’ve had in three years.

  We step into the church, where the organ is sounding out. I slide down next to Alicia on the pew. She smells of shampoo, tangy apple. I lean over and do something I’ve never done before. I kiss my sister on the top of her hair. She looks up at me, puzzled. Then her little furrow of anger gives way to surprise. She grins, taps her shoes together. She’s just a girl, I realize. A little girl.

  I never bought that eight-hundred-ninety-five-dollar suit. Instead I let my stepmother take me to the Queens Mall. And it wasn’t such a bad day, either. She zigzagged her way from the parking lot, up the escalators, into Macy’s. She knew her way around that place, for sure. She guided me right past the crappy suits for old men, right to the snappy Calvin Klein and Hugo Boss ones on sale. She jerked the salesman around, too, told him how to hem the pants, just so, next evening if you please. It was the first time we’d been alone, the first time I let a complete stranger know that we were connected. At the cashier’s, she touched the rim of the credit card to my cheek, crisp as a blade, and whispered, “You don’t tell your father, okay? You deserve it. You’ll get a job. I know you will.”

  The priest steps up to the front. His vestments, two bands of red and yellow, gleam on his chest. He lifts his fingers, and all the girls and boys, including Alicia, file up the aisle. Everyone seems to have taken a breath, waiting. We can feel it. Me too. My arms, my shoulders, even my legs.

  We can all tell something’s about to begin.

  Charles and I had a blast working with our team of authors putting together Pick-Up Game, a cross between an anthology and a novel. What could we do next? We—and, we hope, readers—especially enjoyed the braid, as individual stories written by different authors shifted characters and story lines, making each one both a piece in itself and part of a larger whole. How else could we use that format? Pick-Up Game was set in one spot, the West 4th Street basketball courts in Manhattan, on one day. Could we find a new weave with a new challenge?

  Charles knew, almost at once, where to go next: initiation. The word comes from the Latin for “to begin,” but it can also carry the meaning of “to go through the proper rite or ceremony to be admitted into a group, or to become a member of a secret society.” So much of being a teenager is about crossing lines, reaching a new status or standing, and gaining previously hidden knowledge, whether that is in the socially sanctioned steps of communion, bar/bat mitzvah, quinceañera, or graduation; the intimate bonds of friendship, secrets, and sexuality; or the dark vows of gangs, guns, and crime. You could fairly define all of teenage as a sequence of initiations dreamed about, yearned for, accomplished, regretted, found marvelous, found disappointing, found life-changing, passed, all the way along. We had a theme. Now, how to use that theme in our weave of authors?

  We turned to Rita to start us off, and she cleverly and carefully laid out her lines, giving enough character and setting for other authors to explore, all around a funeral home and a corpse. Death would start the life of this book. We didn’t know where the authors would take the stories. Their instructions were to link, in some way, to the first story and to work with the theme of initiation. The wonder of the process was how their stories built and how two key characters began to emerge: Kevin, and, well, I’ll leave you to decide the other. Before photographers had digital cameras, they used film, and the negatives had to be developed in a darkroom, where they went through various chemical baths. As the sheet of images emerged, you began to see, for the first time, what the photo would look like printed. That’s what this book was like: slowly characters and stories, linked but separate, began to reveal themselves.

  But it wasn’t easy. We owe a big—no, a huge—shout-out to our authors, who accepted the kaleidoscopic nature of creating a book like this. Each new story slightly—or significantly—changed the others. That sent ripples all through the chain, even back to Rita’s first story. And then as she and others revised, changes rippled through once again, and again. We were so grateful to the authors who went back, and back, and back again to iron out the creases and tie the book together. And this went beyond lonely revisions; authors began sending notes to each other, being extra sets of eyes or guiding hands, helping build our joint book, helping weave the braid we’d envisioned from the start.

  But where would it end? Where does a novel that begins with a death and weaves through many dark initiations go? Marina’s story answered that for us. We were thrilled: our novel-in-stories had the true arc of initiation, of transformation, of change, hard-won. And perhaps on another level, that is what this book meant for all of us: we know the initiations of being a teenager can be terrifying as well as thrilling and can have the most extreme consequences. Every author, I sensed, had a personal need to honor young people finding their way, negotiating choices, deciding which lines to cross. It can be okay, they seemed to want to say, even when for now it is not. Because ultimately what the initiate gains is knowledge, wisdom about the world and its ways. The Norse god Odin gave up an eye to gain wisdom. In a sense we all do. This is a novel-in-short-stories about the bargains we make to cross lines, to join in, to be accepted, to begin to know, at whatever cost, who we are. Scarred—no, graced—with the knowledge we have earned, the next phase of our lives begins.

  MARC ARONSON enjoyed working with Charles and all of the authors on this book. He began his career in books for younger readers working as an editor and finds the weave between writing his own books and working on the writing of others ever challenging and ever fascinating. He is now a full-time faculty member at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University.

  CHRIS BARTON grew up in Texas, lives there still, and knows about those telephone poles and two-a-days from personal experience. He won a Sibert Honor for The Day-Glo Brothers. His extensive knowledge of putting up false fronts comes (mostly) from researching and writing the young adult nonfiction thriller Can I See Your I.D.? True Stories of False Identities.

  NORA RALEIGH BASKIN is the author of ten novels for young readers. She has won several awards, including a Schneider Family Book Award for Anything But Typical. A 2001 Publishers Weekly “Flying Start” selectee, Nora Raleigh Baskin has also published short stories and personal narrative essays that have appeared in the Boston Globe magazine and The Writer magazine. She teaches creative writing at schools and libraries across the country, as well as through the Gotham Writers’ Workshop and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. Her most recent young adult novel is Subway Love.

  Nora’s story is yet another iteration of her own autobiographical history given to a fictional character from a childhood of dysfunctional memories. In other words: the gift that keeps on giving.

  MARINA BUDHOS grew up in Queens, a setting she revisited while researching her nonfiction book REMIX: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers and her award-winning young adult novel Ask Me No Questions. She is currently working on an adult novel, a second nonfiction book co-written with Marc Aronson, and a young adult novel that was inspired in part by the voice and characters she created for her story, “Connections.”

  ELLEN HOPKINS is the award-winning author of ten New York Times best-selling young adult novels-in-verse, including Crank, plus two adult verse novels. She lives near Carson City, Nevada, where she recently founded Ventana Sierra, a nonprofit organization that helps youth in need obtain safe housing and assists them in working toward career goals through higher education, mentorship, and the arts.

  A.S. KING is an award-winning author of young adult books, including the highly acclaimed Reality Boy, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Ask the Passengers, the Michael L. Printz Honor Book Please Ignore Vera Dietz, Everybody Sees the Ants, and the upcoming Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future. Her short fiction for adults has been widely published and nominated for Best New American V
oices. After fifteen years teaching literacy to adults in Ireland, she now lives in Pennsylvania.

  TORREY MALDONADO was voted a 2012 Top 10 New Latino Author to Watch (and Read) by LatinoStories.com. His debut young adult novel, Secret Saturdays, was an American Library Association Quick Pick and has been featured on CNN and other media outlets. Praised for its current feel and timeless themes, Secret Saturdays has found a place on both state and college reading lists alongside classics. Born and raised in a Brooklyn project, Torrey overcame neighborhood poverty and violence to be the first member of his immediate family to attend college. A graduate of Vassar College and veteran teacher, Torrey also trained schools to implement conflict resolution programs through the country’s largest victim-services agency.

  CHARLES R. SMITH JR. is the author and photographer of more than twenty books for children. He has won numerous awards, including a Coretta Scott King Author Honor for Twelve Rounds to Glory: The Story of Muhammad Ali and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for My People. He has shown his versatility with a novel, short-story collections, poetry, biography, and nonfiction. This is his second anthology as an editor and contributor. His first, Pick-Up Game, was also co-edited with Marc Aronson. Charles R. Smith Jr. lives in Poughkeepsie with his wife and their three kids.

  WILL WEAVER’s novel Memory Boy is read widely in schools across America. An outdoorsman from Minnesota, he owns several long guns for hunting. His most recent book is a memoir, The Last Hunter: An American Family Album.