Vassa in the Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

sitting balled up in the middle of the parking lot with tears dripping off her chin. At school everyone said his family couldn’t even get his body back. He’ll never have a grave. Someone had tied a few pink daisies to his stake, because what else could they do?
    It’s probably easier for the police to ignore since the people who get offed are mostly on the margins: immigrants who don’t know better, tough local teenagers, older women on heavy medication who go shopping in their nightgowns. Chelsea says that BY’s would never open a branch in Manhattan, for example, because the potential customers there would be too well-connected to kill. The wrong people would get upset.
    Some kids picked on Joel. He was kind of introverted and awkward, an easy target for the jerks. People barely had to look at him to think they knew exactly who he was: that kid who always wore the school uniform, which most of us blow off; who spoke even less than I do; who held doors for teachers. I pretty much went on the default assumption that that stuff summed him up, too. For years. I mean, when I’m all withdrawn and distant, I know it’s because I have too many secrets to risk getting close to anyone. But I saw Joel acting basically the same way I do, and for some reason I thought it meant that there wasn’t much to him.
    So how did I start to understand I was wrong? It was maybe January when we were all squeezing down the hallway between classes, and this guy Andre started harassing him: not pushing him physically, but just pressing sideways to drive him toward the tile wall. In the crowd Joel couldn’t get away, and when he stumbled into the tiles Andre laughed. “See, that’s the difference between us,” Andre said, like he was picking up some conversation they’d had earlier. “You have to take shit, and I don’t.”
    I was three rows back, jostling along in the flow of arms and legs and book bags, half-wondering if I should say something. But as it turned out I didn’t have to, because Joel actually talked back, though his voice was so soft I could barely make it out. “No. The difference is that you’ll always be exactly what you are now. And I won’t.” There was something in his tone, self-conscious but also knowing, like he could see Andre’s entire future right there. It was enough of a surprise that I started straining to hear them over the clamor, because who just comes out and says something like that? “And you’ll always belong in the same place, but I’ll be far away.” It had a weirdly authoritative sound, like Joel was sentencing him to be boring for the rest of his life. Andre’s jaw was hanging, like a bubble of shocked silence was inflating in his mouth and he couldn’t speak.
    They’d stopped dead against the wall so that everyone eddied out around them, and I was shoved against Andre’s arm. He saw me there and twitched, then started scrambling to save face. “Yeah, you don’t belong here. You should try a different planet.”
    It would have been a pretty weak comeback even if Joel hadn’t smiled, obviously not insulted at all. He smiled like his spaceship was parked right outside and Andre was just too dumb to realize it. And then the moment was over and we all slipped into our classrooms, but after that I didn’t look at Joel the same way; I knew now that he wasn’t quiet because he didn’t have anything to say. It was because in a way he was already somewhere else, reaching for some beyond, and he’d left the everyday crap at our school behind him. When I heard he’d died at BY’s it made a queasy kind of sense that he would have wanted to try going in there: it’s the closest thing to beyond that we have in the neighborhood, even if it’s horrible.
    But is it possible he tried to rip off BY’s on a dare, striving to seem cool? Maybe, though it feels