Hush Read Online Free PDF Page A

wouldn’t be happy if we ate it.
    I was about to tell Chani that it was time to leave when a barefooted Leo walked in wearing a blue-and-white-striped bathrobe. His hairy toes stuck out from beneath the long robe, and we were shocked that somehow they strongly resembled our fathers’ toes. Leo bent over Kathy, and she looked up at him and quickly wiped her mouth. He stroked her cheek softly with one hand, and they gently rubbed their faces together.
    Then they kissed.
    It was a short kiss on the lips, but it confused me completely. I knew that goyim kissed, but I thought that was only in the TV box, where there was always a bunch of pretty people who slobbered over one another. Fat people never kissed like that, and definitely not ugly ones, and I could not understand why they had done that. I had never seen any couple kissing each other before and it made me feel funny inside. Then I thought that maybe it was because they didn’t have children. The mothers and fathers I knew never acted that way. They just lived together and were mothers and fathers.
    Kathy never noticed our stunned faces. She chattered on after Leo left, and I decided it was absolutely time to leave. Kathy walked us to the door and told us to please come again. We were such beautiful girls, and next time she would buy us kosher chocolate. I said maybe and quickly ran downstairs with Chani giggling all the way behind me.
    My parents attended a wedding late that night. It was way past my bedtime, and my sister yelled at me to go to sleep, so I didn’t. I wanted to see how late I could stay up. After all, if I ever mistakenly turned into an adult, my bedtime would be in the middle of the night. But really there were more pressing issues keeping me awake. My goyim-in-the-attic secret was out and I knew that I was in trouble.
    There was no way Chani was going to keep Kathy a secret; she had such a big mouth, and by tomorrow morning I must find a solution or everyone would know everything and I would be lost forever. They would all know of the big, white furry cat; of the big black TV; of the statue of Leo’s grandmother and her baby near the sheep and the dreadful goat; and most of all, that they had kissed on the lips together.
    When I finally fled into bed after my parents arrived home, I knew I had no choice. Kathy had to die.

CHAPTER EIGHT
2008
    I didn’t really want to die. Sometimes, though, I wanted to fall asleep and never wake up again. Dying wasn’t the same as sleeping forever. If you just slept forever, you never had to see the dead. You never had to look at them, at their agonizing sorrow, and answer questions they did not know to ask when they were alive.
    - - -
    I told Kathy that I couldn’t do it any longer. The first time I came up to see her after all those years she smiled happily and said, “Gittel, you are a young lady, and even prettier than when you were a baby.”
    “Do you remember me from when I was a baby?”
    “Of course I do.” She laughed, remembering. “You had those green, green eyes, so pretty, and then one day when you were ’bout two months, they jus’ turned a different color. Now you got dark eyes, nice brown dark eyes.”
    “Do you have pictures of when you were a baby?”
    “Me? Oh, my pictures were still black and white.”
    “I’ve never see them. Let’s look at them.”
    “I gotta drag ’em out from that closet.” She pulled a folding chair to the corner closet. “Let me see, here it is, I can’t reach this thing—take it.”
    She stepped clumsily off the chair. A picture fell out of the album. Kathy picked it up, panting lightly. “Oh, look at this—just look at this picture. It got only half of each of us here. See, here’s me and here’s Leo right when we got engaged. Look how nice and thin we were.”
    “Who made your marriage?” I asked.
    “Made it? Nobody made it. We met at a dance on New Year’s Eve in Greece, where he lived, and we fell right in love.”
    “What kind of