All Rivers Flow to the Sea Read Free Page B

made plank bridges across Nine Mile Creek, built forts in the haymow. I blow my nose on a piece of notebook paper, which is one of the worst things you can blow your nose on. A dead dried-up leaf is better than a piece of notebook paper. Back to the combination.
    11-5-36. Nothing.
    11-5-36. Nothing.
    Names are being called behind the closed doors of the hall.
Here. Hey. Present. Yo.
Behind the closed door of Wars, Mr. Trehorn might be calling my name:
Rose Latham?
    Tracy Benova might be raising her hand, wanting to be first with the news. Tracy Benova, bearer of news.
    I saw her. I saw her. I saw her in the hall. She’s here.
    She’s not here, though, or she’d be here, right?
    I don’t know,
Tracy might be saying, retreating into Tracyworld.
All I know, Mr. Trehorn, is that she slept with Jimmy Wilson up at the gorge.
    Was Tracy Benova saying that to Mr. Trehorn? No. They were saying it in the hall, though. Did I care? No. I did not care. Why should I? They had called my sister a human vegetable. They were stupid, stupid people.
    Twirl. Twirl. Twirl. Yank.
    “Rose.”
    Tom Miller’s hand is on my fingers, which are on the combination lock. He pries them off.
    “What’s the combination?”
    “11-5-36.”
    His fingers twirl the knob. My head hurts. History waits with its wars, down the hall in 107. Tom Miller twirls the knob again. Nothing.
    BANG!
    He slams the lock against the locker.
    BANG!
    BANG!
    CRACK
    It springs open. He pulls the lock free of the door and hands it to me: released.
    Later, I sit in the green chair by Ivy’s bed. Our neighbor William T. Jones, who lives up the road on top of Jones Hill, sits in the blue chair in the corner behind me. I open up the Pompeii book I checked out in March, when I was planning to do Pompeii for the Destination Imagination project that I’m no longer planning to do.
    Let me read to you, Ivy, sister — let me read to you about Pompeii, that lost city.
    I lean in close. Hearing is the last to go, is what they say. Somewhere in there, is Ivy listening to me?
    “She’s not capable of hearing,” the doctor said. “She’s got no vestibulo-ocular reflex.”
    But how does he know? Does he know for absolutely sure? Consider the Higgs boson, which was my Destination Imagination project last year. For twenty years, physicists have searched for it. They believe it to be a vibrating chunk of the unseen vacuum that underlies everything in the universe. Can the Higgs boson be seen? No, it cannot. And yet the physicists believe it exists. If the Higgs boson, then why not Ivy’s hearing, locked away where no one can find it?
    “‘On August 24, AD 79,’” I read, “‘Pompeii looked like any other busy, prosperous city. People walked the streets of their town, trading goods, news, and friendly talk amongst themselves.’”
    “What kind of goods were they trading?” William T. says from behind me, from his blue chair in the corner. “Clay vessels full of olive oil? Flagons of wine, whatever a flagon might actually be?”
    His big hands play with my mother’s potholders, piled in his lap. He arranges them first in a crisscross pattern, then in a neat stack.
    “Potholders, perhaps?”
    Every afternoon William T. picks me up after the school bus drops me off at home, and he drives me down here, to the Rosewood Convalescent Home, and after three hours he drives me back to North Sterns. He drops me off at the side door of my house, which is the only door anyone ever uses, including William T. when he comes down the hill to check on us. To make sure that we have enough wood. That we have enough air in our tires. That our furnace isn’t going to blow up on us or poison us with carbon monoxide. That we’ll live to survive another day.
    Sometimes his girlfriend, Crystal, comes with him. She brings us muffins that she makes at her diner, or a container filled with tuna salad. Once she brought a strawberry rhubarb pie that William T. ate half of.
    Why does William T. check on us?