The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier Read Free Book Online Page A

god or a hero. After he has read the assignment to them, he says that he will be happy to answer any questions they have, and Melanie Sparks, who was Celia’s baby-sitter, raises her hand and asks if her folktale can be a work of fiction.
    Mr. Taulbee’s mouth sneaks open in a sort of punctured smile before he seals it off. Yes, he says, the folktales they write can and in fact
should
be fiction. He does this sort of thing all the time, Melanie has noticed—answers her questions as though he were talking to the whole class. Whatever. She shuffles her deck of cards behind the broad shoulders of Danny Ergenbright, quietly folding them together, and lays out another hand of solitaire. When she uncovers the aces, she always fills them in this order: hearts for love, spades for skill, clubs for power, and diamonds for money. She feels like she is making a wish, and if she wins the game it will come true. Danny starts to slouch in his chair, exposing the top of her desk to Mr. Taulbee, and she takes her pen and raps him on that soft spot at the root of his skull. Sit up straight, she whispers, and he does, because he has a thing for her. For a few months after Celia disappeared, Melanie was afraid to leave her house. She imagined that she could be pulled out of her skin at any time, and she refused to go anywhere alone, not even to water the plants in her backyard. She would need every resource she had, she thought, all the power and skill in the world, just to walk safely out her own front door, and for a while she filled her aces in a different order: clubs, spades, hearts, and diamonds. She used to read Celia’s favorite books to her,
Matilda
and
Lizard Music, Frindle
and
Charlotte’s Web,
after they had finished their dinner and before she put her to bed. Melanie was fourteen back then, twice as old as Celia, and in a few years she will be twenty-one, one and a half times as old. When she thinks about her future, about graduating and going to college, getting married and having children, she imagines that she can feel Celia catching up to her, one and a third, one and a quarter, one and an eighth, breathing like a ghost across the soft hairs on the back of her neck. The bell rings on the other side of the courtyard, and the sixth- and seventh-graders come trickling and then pouring out of Springfield Middle School.
    Melanie lays the five of hearts on top of the four, and the six on top of the five. Kristen Lanzetta can see her sitting at her desk, striped with sunlight from the windows at the back of the classroom, and these stripes, along with the bending limpness of her body, make her look like a stick of Juicy Fruit, Kristen’s favorite chewing gum. The middle school lets out five minutes earlier than the high school. Kristen heads straight for the bus and takes her usual seat on the long bench at the back, beside her friend Andrea Onopa. When Kristen asks Andrea whether she’s planning to go to the funeral tonight, Andrea says that she isn’t sure, it depends on what her dad wants her to do. Well, I’m not going, Kristen says. Or at least she doesn’t think she is. Celia was Kristen’s best friend, but that was more than four years ago, an entire lifetime. She was only in the first grade then, and she is in the sixth now. The bus rumbles out of the parking lot, and she watches the telephone lines rise and fall outside the window. Her mother has explained to her how time thins out as you grow older, how the four years between seven and eleven are as long in their way—how they contain as much of your life—as the ten years between thirty and forty. Her mother says that life is like a pitcher filling with water, and unless you’re one of those people who manages to forget her childhood as it passes, the pitcher will already be half-full by the time you’re eighteen. It is an idea that has always frightened Kristen, and so she has tried hard to forget everything she possibly can: the names of her old teachers,