It was dark where he was, and cold, but he knew that cold was good for burns. He pushed his cheek harder against the icy bricks and pulled his hair to try and focus his thoughts. But he couldn’t, not with the sounds of the fire that had just destroyed his home still roaring outside.
You nearly died, whispered the voice of Eddie’s doubt in his head. You were supposed to die …
Eddie shook his head into the bricks, but the voice went on.
Why else would David make you go home during an air raid? And why did he come back, if not to watch you burn? Kat was right …
“No,” Eddie said aloud. “He helped me. He got me out.”
YOU broke the window. You helped YOURSELF. Kat was right …
Eddie quickly patted down his coat, which was still smoldering in places, and for one awful moment he thought he’d lost his notebook. But no, there it was, still rolled up in his pocket. He took it out, reassured by the soft paper cover. Squatting down against the wall in a chink of light, he opened the book to a new page. He took out his pencil and started to write.
No confusing answers inside his head. The question was out now, on paper, ready to be dealt with in proper order in a place the voice couldn’t reach. He drew a circle around it. Eddie knew that every question was only the start, but this was as good a start as any. After all, what was he going to do now? There was no other choice but to keep writing.
A: Get warm — It’s freezing. But …
Q: Am I seriously hurt? Am I still in danger?
Because …
DAVID
Q: What do I do about David?
Eddie broke out into a sudden fit of coughing, pain shooting through his lungs with each convulsion. After a moment it passed, but when he put the pencil on the paper again he ignored the question about David and went back up to draw a ring around Am I seriously hurt? Then he drew a line off to one side. This had to be dealt with first because everything else depended on whether or not he should see a doctor, especially since blood was smudging the paper as he wrote. But Eddie really didn’t want to see a doctor.
He took himself on a quick mental tour of his aches, asking his body for answers. As they came to him he wrote furiously, willing the answers to be good news:
Pain: right ankle — hurts to walk, but nothing broken.
Pain: chest. I breathed in smoke. Lots of smoke.
Hurts to breathe.
Pain: hands and face. Burns. Water good for
burns …
Eddie stopped writing. He could actually hear running water. He was under a flight of stone steps by the back basement door of a house at the end of his street, and a thin stream of water was pouring down from the brick arch at the entrance. He tucked the book and pencil under his arm and cupped his hands in the water. It had to be from the hoses of the firefighters — Eddie could still hear the clamor they made as they fought the flames. This reminder of the fire almost made him panic, but the water was so cold when he splashed it over his face that it shocked his mind back into focus. With his wet hand he explored his face lightly, then took up the pencil once more.
… burns not serious. Just painful.
Pain: hands — bleeding. Sharp?
Something hard was embedded in the heel of his right hand. He fumbled for it and gasped as he tugged out a sliver of glass. He closed his eyes tightly and shoved his bleeding hand back into the trickle of icy water until it went numb.
Only a fool would make friends with a ghost. Look how much he’s hurt you.
Eddie shook his head and dived back into the security of the page. On the list, he circled Pain: chest, drew a line away to the side, and crossed out the others. Of all his injuries, this was the only one that really worried him. He would have to take that into account when he decided what to do next, and as if to underline that, another coughing fit engulfed him.
When it had passed, Eddie snatched up his pencil and wrote the first thing that came to him.
Mother?
The word triggered vivid visions of home. He recalled it so vividly that he could almost smell it. How could he even begin to accept that it was gone, confined to the past by a brief moment of destruction? In his mind’s eye he saw his room, his books arranged in their proper order, the brown pattern of the wallpaper. He remembered his mother’s sad smile as she watched him from the door. He remembered how he sometimes found her crying …
Then Eddie saw that he’d written Father? without thinking.
He stared at the word for a moment before crossing it out in a smudge of blood and ink. He hated not being able to answer a question, to not even be able to begin answering it. He drew his pencil line away.
Q: What will Mother do?
The answer to this was so obvious that Eddie didn’t even write it down. She’d do what she had been threatening to do for months and send Eddie away from the bombing, to live with his aunt in the country. Now that their home was gone, Eddie’s mother would surely come too, but even this couldn’t make the prospect of his aunt’s house appealing, with its stuffy rooms and ticking clocks. Eddie found he’d almost crushed the end of the pencil between his teeth as he thought of her. His aunt was the rich one in the family, and therefore powerful. She also made no secret of the fact that she thought there was something wrong with Eddie.
Doctors. My aunt will make me see doctors.
Eddie drew hard lines through aunt that were almost as black as the mark he’d made scribbling out Father.
Mother will be safe in the country, but I cannot go.
Then he drew a ring around this and took a line back up to an earlier question:
What should I do about David?
He chewed on his pencil a moment, and then drew fierce lines through most of what he’d written. He circled David and then connected it with a new word.
Kat.
Thinking of Kat made Eddie smile, despite the burns on his face. Kat was the one who had warned him to be careful of David. Eddie hadn’t listened to her — he’d been too busy probing the mystery of his ghostly visitor — but Kat had cared enough to say something, and now she’d been proved right, hadn’t she? Being right was what mattered most to Eddie, and no voice in his head could ever contradict that. He watched his pencil make lazy, affectionate circles around Kat’s name. She was a good friend. His mother always said he should be cautious about having friends, that they wouldn’t understand him, but Kat didn’t seem to have any trouble. He’d kept their friendship secret, though, just in case.
Eddie wrote his own name next to Kat’s and connected them with a single neat line. Then he completed the triangle by connecting his name to David’s too. At what he judged to be the exact center of this triangle, Eddie drew a fat question mark and started a new line from it that went over to the next page. But what he would write there he had no idea. Not until he’d talked to Kat some more.
And now Eddie realized he’d answered his very first question. What he should do now was go to Kat’s place. She would help him work out the rest.
He closed his book, rolled it carefully, and slipped it back into his pocket. He picked up his satchel. Inside he felt the reassuring bulk of a dozen new notebooks, enough to tackle the problems of his world well into the future. Next to them, he knew, were a bunch of pencils in a rubber band, a sharpening knife, a flashlight, glue, stamps and string, and a dozen other things he’d need. He pulled the satchel over his shoulder tight and safe.
Eddie slipped out into the smoke and dark to find Kat.