Nicholas was the first one to run toward the scream. Mom ran too. I stayed back but could see that the shrieking was coming from Nicholas’s mom.
“Help us, please!” she cried, holding Nicholas’s dad around the waist while he limped toward us. “My husband is injured! Somebody! Please!”
His face was covered in blood. If I didn’t already know the truth, I might actually think werewolf aliens had attacked him. That’s how much blood there was.
Mom helped him back over to us and into an empty chair. She pressed a cloth to his head and held it there.
“He was walking out of Building Two when the explosion hit,” Nicholas’s mom explained. “It’s a miracle he wasn’t buried under the rubble.”
Mom knocked three times. I knew she would. Then she said, “He needs stitches.” She reached into the tray of supplies on the cart next to her.
“No,” Nicholas’s mom said, grasping Mom’s arm to stop her. “Isn’t there someone else who can do it?”
Nicholas’s dad moaned. Mom pulled her arm back and gave him some water to sip. Then she started to clean his cut.
“He needs care now. He’s losing blood,” Mom calmly told Nicholas’s mother. “A doctor will be by, but I don’t know how long that could take.”
Nicholas’s mother scanned the jammed-packed room. Tears filled her eyes. “Are you sure there’s no one else?”
Mom pulled a second chair over for her. “I’ve been an emergency room nurse for over twenty years and have stitched up thousands of patients. Everything will be fine.”
Nicholas’s mom sighed. “Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I understand,” Mom told her. “This is frightening for all of us. Danny,” she added, “why don’t you take the kids to the cafeteria? Maybe you can help out over there.”
I was just about to leave when Nicholas’s mom reached for my arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m grateful, truly.”
Mom nodded. “Go ahead,” she said to me with the needle and thread in her hand.
She didn’t have to ask me a third time. Seeing all that blood was making me queasy. Nicholas looked a little green too. But he also seemed relieved. When I got to the hallway, I noticed that Alice hadn’t come with us, but Joey had. He kept his eyes on the ground but stayed with us as we headed into the cafeteria.
There were even more people in there than in the gym. Some were packed into lines, waiting for a turn to talk to the people with clipboards. Some were standing around talking, some were crying, and some were just sitting at the tables with glazed-over expressions. Frank and his family stood in the far corner with a person I didn’t recognize.
I started to make my way toward them but stopped when Joey tapped my shoulder.
“Is your mom really gonna fix up all those people?” he asked.
Those were the first words Joey Simone had spoken to me since he told me not to leave my stuff so close to the edge of the table in art class. Unless you counted the you’re next note he wrote. Maybe he was wondering if my mom could save me after he tried to kill me.
“She’s pretty good,” I replied.
He looked up at the ceiling. “And the other people at the hospital are good too? The docs and the nurses?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“She seems really nice. Your mom, I mean. The way she’s helping all those people.”
“It’s kind of her job.”
“But some of those people in there . . .” He paused, then went on, “I wouldn’t think she’d wanna help them. After the way they . . . you know.”
I shrugged. “My mom says none of that matters when someone needs help.”
“Good thing,” Nicholas said, “because she’s fixing up my dad right now. And if your dad was here, she’d fix him up too.”
Joey nodded. Then he mumbled something I couldn’t hear.
Nicholas asked, “What? What did you just say?”
Joey shoved his hands in his pockets again and kept looking at the ceiling. I looked up too in case there was something actually interesting up there. Sometimes, in the cafeteria at our school, we’d throw pencils like arrows, and they’d get stuck hanging there for days until a janitor pulled them out.
“Sorry I smashed your art project,” Joey said a little more clearly. “And you know, that other stuff at school. I messed up.”
“Oh,” I said.
“My dad was saying stuff ’cause he was mad at your dad, so I said it too. I didn’t really mean . . .” His eyes met mine for a split second. “I’m just sorry.”
“Yeah, okay,” I told him, because he actually did sound sorry. I tried to think of something else to say, but one of the clipboard-carrying women pushed through the crowd to get to us.
“Do you boys need help?” she asked. She nervously started flipping through her pages before she even knew what we were about to say to her. “Are you trying to find someone?”
“No,” I told her. “My mom’s a nurse. She’s in the gym right now. She sent us over to see if you needed help here.”
“Oh.” She did one of those smile-sigh things Mrs. Greely always did whenever someone finally gave her a correct answer to a question that I guess she thought would be easy. “Yes,” the lady said. “They could use some help in the kitchen. Some of our volunteers have brought food.”
“Okay, sure,” I told her. It seemed like an easy way to be helpful. Plus, I was hungry.
The first person I saw when I walked into the kitchen was Mrs. Albertini. She stood behind the counter next to Anthony with her pans of food that smelled like lasagna but were really made from that weird purple vegetable. For a second, I forgot about our fight. It seemed like a really long time ago, except it wasn’t at all.
“Danny,” she called. She said it the same exact way as two weeks ago when she was half-hanging out her window ’cause she needed help getting noodles out of the cabinet. That was the day I found out she was Jewish.
She smiled, and the wrinkles around her mouth reached up toward her ears, no longer looking sad and angry. I smiled back at her.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Anthony brought me,” she said. “He always brings me. For our Friday night dinner. I figured the workers could use it now more than ever.” She lined up her trays of food, making room for bowls of pasta and salad and platters of garlic bread that Anthony carried over to the counter.
“Here you go, Ma,” Anthony said when he’d finished setting up the meal. In one hand, he carried her cup of tea, and in the other, he carried a challah from Scholly’s.
“Thank you, sweetie,” she said. “Make sure Mr. Wexler gets a piece of challah, will you? He’s in the gym.”
“You saw my dad?” I asked.
“Of course. As soon as I arrived, I asked about him. I’m so glad he’s all right.”
“I’m sorry I got mad,” I told her. “You were only trying to help. I shouldn’t have said that stuff.”
She put her free hand on top of mine, and I didn’t pull it away this time. “There’s no need to apologize.” Then she glanced at Nicholas and Joey standing next to me. “Are these the backyard boys you’ve been telling me about?”
“Nicholas is,” I said. “This is Joey—we go to school together. He’s waiting for a ride to the hospital. His dad’s there.” I’d never mentioned Joey by name to Mrs. Albertini, but even if I had, I knew she’d be nice to him. She was just like that.
“Is your dad okay?” she asked him.
“Don’t know,” he replied, keeping his eyes focused on his shoes.
“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Albertini said. “I’ll keep him in my prayers.”
“Thanks,” he mumbled.
“Well,” she said, handing Nicholas and me each a large serving spoon. “You’re here to help, yes? The crowd will be heading in any moment. Nicholas, you can dish out salad. Danny, you’re on pasta.” Her kind eyes moved to Joey. “Why don’t you take a seat? I can bring some food out to you while you wait for your ride.”
Joey nodded but didn’t move. Alice rushed into the kitchen.
“Here you are,” she said to him. “We have news about your dad. He’s okay!”
Joey looked like he might pass out right there in the tray of cheese-covered eggplant.
Mrs. Albertini knocked three times on the wood table behind us and said, “What a relief.”
“Mom called the hospital to check on him,” Alice said. “He’s got a broken leg, but he should heal just fine.”
“That’s great,” I said. “I mean, not the broken leg part, but . . . you know. Hey, I’ll bet he’ll let you sign his cast.”
“So he’s going to be okay,” Joey said as if he was in a trance.
“Right,” Alice told him. “We’re still trying to find you a ride, but that shouldn’t take much longer. Anyway, I need to get back to the gym to help.” She placed three plates of food on a tray to take back with her and said she’d let the people in the gym know there was food here if they were hungry.
Joey stayed standing with us even though Mrs. Albertini had told him again he could go sit down to wait.
As people wandered into the kitchen from the cafeteria and the gym, Mrs. Albertini sipped her tea, said hello to each person, and filled their plates with food. I did the same, minus the sipping tea part. A million conversations floated through the room as people passed through.
“We even felt it in Oxly. I thought we were having an earthquake.”
“Did you hear Ginny is finally getting married?”
“I’ll bet someone did it on purpose. There’s a lot of insurance money wrapped up in that place.”
“They found that boy from Mayson.”
“Wait. What?” I asked as I overfilled the woman’s plate with pasta. “Oh, sorry.” I took a scoop out and handed her an extra napkin. “What did you say? About the boy from Mayson?”
“They found him,” she said. “A runaway. He was hiding in a shed on a farm. Poor thing.”
“Whoa.” I turned to see if Nicholas had heard, but Joey was now standing between us.
“Do you need help?” he asked.
“Sure.” I handed him another serving spoon for the other bowl of pasta. “Thanks.”
“What’s this backyard thing?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It’s just where we hang out. Sometimes we look at the stars and stuff with Frank’s telescope.”
“I’ve never used a telescope,” he said. “Maybe I could come try it sometime?”
“Yeah, okay,” I told him. I placed a spoonful of pasta on the next person’s plate. “Hey, have you ever heard of the Bermuda Triangle?”
“Aliens caused it, right?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I think too.”