After the First Death by Robert Cormier Read Free Book Online Page A

lips like crushed strawberries. Ridiculous? Maybe. But, God, Nettie Halversham was—is—beautiful. And her heart was also black like the color of those classic cars.
    Edge the postcard with guilt because guilt whistles through the tunnel in my chest. Guilt of all shades and colors plus the guilt that sends me to Brimmler’s Bridge when I should be directing snowballs at Martingale andDonateli or contemplating the amber brew in the township of Pompey.
    The guilt, however, really starts with Nettie Halversham.
    Because.
    Because, all during the time of the seizure of the bus, when those kids were being held as hostages and the television stations were giving out all kinds of bulletins, and Fort Delta was in a state of emergency—a bodyguard was even assigned to me and Jackie Brenner and other kids whose fathers were in positions of authority at Delta—anyway, during all that time, the headlines and the sirens screaming, I could think only of myself and how miserable I was, and I’d sit and stare at the telephone for hours. Or what seemed like hours. Once, I put my hand on the phone to pick it up and the guard came alert and said: “Who are you calling?”
    He was a big guy. He looked like a former football player, or maybe a boxer. His ears were smashed and his nose was twisted. He was the original on which the cliché was based. He made me nervous because he just didn’t guard the house and all; he stayed with me, in the same room, every minute. He’d watch me when I ate, and he never wanted anything to eat himself. I figured if he ate with me I wouldn’t feel so self-conscious. At least he didn’t stare. He seemed to be contemplating something very distant and amusing. Anyway, he asked who I was calling and I shrugged and didn’t say anything. Because I knew a phone call would be useless, a futile gesture.
    Why?
    Because I wanted to call Nettie Halversham.
    And yet I didn’t want to call her.
    There’s an old song that goes “What Is This Thing Called Love?” What is it, anyway? I had never givenmuch thought to love before I met Nettie Halversham. And if I had, I would have figured that love was an instant emotion between two people, that if you fell in love with a girl she automatically fell in love with you. Something mutual. As if the universe had been ordered to be that way. All during the time I was a kid, a real kid, like eleven or twelve, I hardly thought above love. I thought it was loving your mother and father. I’d see love stories on television and find them dull and boring. Same with love stories in books and magazines. Later, of course, I’d read love stories to track down the horny parts and they made me wonder how it would be to touch a girl and if being horny was part of being in love, although it seemed to me you needed ultimate respect toward the girl you loved. Like my father’s attitude toward my mother: gentle, considerate.
    Anyway.
    I met Nettie and fell in love with her. Like lightning striking and the thunder was the boom of my heart—talk about song lyrics. I met her when Jackie Brenner and I went to the Hallowell Y one Saturday morning. Fort Delta has the same facilities as the Y, of course, but it was a treat to take a bus into Hallowell and get away from the post. Until a few years ago, my existence and my activities were confined to Delta, which is not as limited as it sounds since Delta is a self-sufficient and self-sustaining community. But I began to get a kind of claustrophobia about two years ago. Unlike some Delta kids who went to school in Hallowell, either at public or private schools, I attended schools on the post: small classes, much individual attention, and educational monitoring my father himself had instituted. So there was a sense of freedom when I went to Hallowell on the bus, not the same old kids, not the same old streets named for famous battles (Tarawa Road, ChâteauThierry Avenue), not the same old barracks buildings. That Saturday last August, I met