We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier Read Free Book Online Page A

encounter someone face-to-face. “What do you want to know for?” he asked.
    “Just curious.”
    Mickey said: “I don’t read so much since we got television.”
    Weird, Jane thought. Television began thirty, forty years ago.
    “Television is for morons,” Amos said, a middle-aged scowl on his face.
    Mickey recoiled, stepping backward.
“Jeopardy!’s
my favorite program,” he said, not looking at Jane. Or Amos.
    “Hey, Amos,” Jane said, “I watch television. Millions of people watch it. We’re not all morons. I like
Jeopardy!
too.”
    Amos hugged his books closer to his chest. Turned away, then turned back, grimacing. “I hope your sister’s getting better,” he said, his voice rusty, as if it hurt him to speak.
    Still clutching his books, Amos marched away, a lonesome parade of one, while Mickey began to fuss with his tools at the back of the truck.
    “Time to go to work,” he said, tugging at his baseball cap.
    Jane resumed jogging, not really jogging but a quickstep kind of walking. Going down the street and turning the corner, she felt somehow cheered up by the meeting with these odd people. Maybe because the man and the boy, both so very different, had mentioned Karen. Everyone else avoided speaking about her, as if she had ceased to exist, had passed out of people’s lives.
    She herself had passed out of people’s lives. She seldomsaw Patti or Leslie anymore. They nodded when they met in the corridors at school and sometimes endured awkward lunch hours at the same table, the conversation stilted and superficial, broken by prolonged silences. Jane did not blame them for not continuing the friendship they had enjoyed, if indeed it had been friendship. She was the one who had first withdrawn, avoiding them, sensing that she had become an embarrassment, a feeling that began that morning on the porch. Her separation from Patti and Leslie meant that she did not have to playact anymore, did not have to pretend that everything was fine, did not have to be on the defensive about her house and family and Karen. Yet, sometimes, when she saw the two girls walking down the corridor, easy with each other, laughing, casual, she was filled with a longing, a yearning for—she was not sure what—perhaps simply a friend to talk to.
    But all of this was minor, of course, compared with what had happened to Karen, although sometimes she almost envied Karen as she slept on that high hospital bed.
    The death of Vaughn Masterson was reported as an accident in the newspaper. The story noted that the weapon had been stolen from the apartment of retired police sergeant Louis Kendrick a month earlier. Allowing the victim the benefit of the doubt, police deduced that the boy probably found the weapon after it had been either lost or discarded by the thief. Vaughn Masterson evidently took the weapon home, hid it away somewhere in his house or in his father’s garage, and had taken it out to play with on that fatal day, not realizing it was loaded. The boy died instantly when the weapon was discharged. The newspaper did not sensationalize the story, ran the boy’s picture—one taken by a school photographer the year before—but did not go into great detail about the fatal shooting.
    The Avenger read the story avidly, his heart pumping joyously, his eyes bright and his head warm as if he had a fever. But a nice fever. He studied Vaughn’s face in the picture, his neatly combed hair, the big smile that revealed small sharp teeth.
    Although he felt an immense satisfaction as he read the story, he did not make the mistake of cutting it out of the newspaper, to save as a souvenir. He had seen a movie in which the killer was apprehended when a yellowed newspaper clipping about the murder was found years later in his attic.
    The entire fifth grade attended the funeral at the First Congregational church. The Avenger was amazed at the hypocrisy of his classmates, especially the girls who cried and sniffled and blew their noses. Even