The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell Read Online Free PDF Page A

was good, strong stuff, but it wasn’t meant to last forever in the Seattle weather, and the rain was weakening it just enough that it was breaking around the posts that anchored the slide to the ground. He’d started out by digging his fingers into the cracks, peeling back the rubber until—o wonder!—he could see the equally cracked surface of the blacktop beneath. The new blacktop had been poured in a hurry, to meet the sudden need for higher safety standards. They hadn’t installed the playground equipment on the dirt, but had bolted it straight to the blacktop.
    It had taken Scott three whole months, not counting the days when snow had kept them all inside, but he had managed to work a large enough chunk of rubber loose, and now he could get his whole hand into the hole he’d created. Since then, he’d been wiggling the broken pieces of blacktop, shifting them a little bit at a time, like he was working a puzzle. They were getting looser all the time. He could feel it, measuring his progress in the increased give and lessening resistance of the artificial stone. Soon, he’d be able to pull a piece out to keep forever, and then he could stop keeping secrets from Miss Oldenburg, who was very strict about things like digging in the dirt and messing with the play structures. Technically, he was doing both at the same time, which meant she would be doubly strict, and probably doubly disappointed if she ever found out.
    Some of the other kids knew about his digging—it was impossible to keep anything completely secret when you spent so much time with the same sixteen people, all of them bored and scared and poking their noses into your business—but they all thought it was one of those weird but harmless things that everybody had. Nobody tattled about those things. Someone who told on how Scott liked to dig when the teacher wasn’t looking might get told on in turn, and their thing might be bigger and worse than a little dirt. There were nose pickers and butt sniffers and hair lickers in the class, all of them trying their best not to get caught, which meant not setting anyone else up to get caught, either.
    Elaine Oldenburg’s class was a complicated web of social connections and uneasy alliances, all of them watching each other with the wary suspicion of a Cold War American military, none of them willing to strike the first blow. All of which led, inexorably, to Scott Ribar digging in the rubber surfacing under the slide, unremarked upon and unbetrayed by his classmates, who weren’t willing to put themselves into the line of fire.
    Scott was so intent on working at his chunks of blacktop that he didn’t notice when John—probably his closest friend in the class, which wasn’t saying much, since they were both tagged “the weird kid” and left mostly to their own devices—loomed up behind him and asked, brightly, “How’s it coming?”
    â€œShh!” Scott yanked his hand out of the hole so fast that he scraped the side of his wrist on the edge of the hole. Bright blood immediately beaded up along the line of torn skin. His eyes widened when he saw it. “Shit. Shit. ” Saying the forbidden word made him feel a little better, but not much. He knew that blood was bad. Blood meant no more classes for the rest of the day, and not in the fun way, like when they went to the chocolate factory to watch the machines or when there was an assembly and everyone watched movies on the big screen that stretched the length of the gymnasium wall. This would be the kind of no-more-classes that meant needles, and quarantine, and interrogation, and being weighed a dozen times to make sure he hadn’t magically gained ten pounds between the start of the day and the moment when he’d started bleeding. Blood was the worst thing.
    John didn’t move away. He actually leaned a little closer. “Whoa, you’re bleeding,” he said.