Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

“It’s too early still.”

“It started. It’s the day, now. It’s the Fourth of July!” Jemma proclaimed all holidays with almost perfect equability; Christmas reigned supreme and drove her into the most fervent tizzy, so she’d run shrieking like a madwoman all over the house as soon as the first blue light of dawn ended her practically sleepless night. But she’d shout and stomp with not much less energy over Thanksgiving, Halloween, the Fourth of July, and Easter. Other holidays she was less familiar with, but she celebrated them as she discovered them in school, and had been known to invent associations and ask her parents why there was no Memorial Day feast upon the table, or why the Labor Day Puppy had left no treats beneath her bed.

“Not yet. I’m still asleep. This is all a dream, right now. It’s still pitch black outside, if you’d just wake up and look. Go back and lie in your bed and count to ten, then open your eyes.”

“Come on,” she said, pulling now both on his leg and Al’s tail. “Come on. It’s right now!”

“This is a dream, and Al is going to bite you, and his poison will make you burst into flame.”

Jemma hesitated then, reaching around with her left hand to pinch herself on the bottom, making it smart but not crying out. Then she jumped up on her brother’s bed and bounced vigorously, her feet touching against him every third or fourth bounce, until she missed her footing and stepped right on his belly, and fell down against him. “The sawdust,” she was saying, “and the turtles and the Red Rover and the fireworks and George Washington, we’re going to miss them if you don’t get up!”

He opened one eye. “Go get me a drink of water and then I’ll get up.” Jemma scrambled off the bed and hurried down to the bathroom. She emptied a cup of a year’s worth of accumulated toothbrushes — she and Calvin each had three or four, because the older models wore out or were superceded by fancier shapes or prettier colors — filled it with water, and hurried back to the room, careful not to spill. But when she arrived the door was closed and locked.

“Hey,” she said, knocking with her foot.

“It’s too early,” Calvin said, and then he would not respond no matter how hard she knocked. She wanted very badly to pour the cup of water over his head, and waited silently at his door for a little while for just that opportunity to present itself, patience losing out eventually to a growing thirst. She drank the water and went downstairs.

Her parents’ door was closed; she did not try the knob but listened at the wood, hearing nothing. She went into the living room, already the warmest and brightest room in the house, the peach walls and carpet glowing, and climbed into the bay window. She could see all the way down to the river. A thin line of mist hung over each of the three ravines; the haze over the river lifted even while she watched a boatful of tiny teenagers leave the docks and go swiftly over the water. She heard their horns, and the other horns echoing overland from every direction, and then the boat passed the bend in the river and all became silent. But still everything, the rising sun, the glare off the water, the thinning mist, seemed ready to shout. Even the air seemed about to proclaim the great day. She went into the dining room, sat at the table, put her fists under her chin, and waited.

She followed Calvin down the hill, walking in the rough of the fourth hole and kicking at dandelion heads. In an aerated shoebox under her arm she carried her racing turtle, #40, Mr. Peepers. Every so often she’d hold the box up, lining up her eye to check on him, watching the steady progress he made consuming the lettuce leaf she’d put in there to keep him happy on the trip. Calvin said eating before the race would make him slow. Her father said he’d race faster because the lettuce would make him happy, and because he’d sprinkled a dash of cayenne pepper on the leaf.

The Nottingham’s new dog leaped out at them. The old one had died in the spring. Now they had a puppy who, chained in the place of his predecessor, inherited and modified his habits. So he whined instead of roaring, and slapped his big paws in the grass instead of beating the air with them. When Jemma bent down next to him he turned on his back and offered her his belly. She scratched it.

“Come on,” said Calvin. “We’ll be late.”

“Now who’s hurrying?” Jemma asked him, but she rose and followed. They wound around the fifth and seventh holes, around the sheriff’s house and past the staircase that led to the deep hidden playground, Jemma now looking in on Mr. Peepers and now smelling her fingers, savoring the lingering odor of maple syrup. Their father had made pancakes for breakfast decorated with strawberry mouths, blueberry eyes, and great masses of whipped cream hair. Standing at the stove in his red-white-and-blue-striped trousers, he’d flipped the cakes halfway to the ceiling, whistling “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and cursing mildly when a bit of hot batter struck his bare chest or belly. Jemma’s mother, dressed in a blue bathing suit, came in and out of the kitchen, stealing bites from her pancakes, more and more green every time she made an appearance, until she was patina’d from her ears to her fingers.

Cars passed them, some open-topped and some not, all full of parents and children dressed in red, white, and blue, all decorated with flags and dragging some sort of red-white-and-blue noisemaker, a few decked out as floats for the parade. Jemma waved with her whole free arm every time someone passed. Calvin, his gaze fixed on his shoes, just kept walking, not looking up until, as they were passing along an empty stretch of road in front of the clubhouse, they were both startled by an explosion in the grass.

Jemma jumped, dropping her box but catching it again before it could hit the ground. She heard a funny whistle before the next explosion. It seemed smaller than the first, just firecracker-sized, but she jumped just as high. Calvin was already looking at the clubhouse roof when the laughter broke out. There were two older boys up there, armed with bottle rockets. Jemma recognized them, but didn’t know their names. Each of them wore a single lacrosse glove to protect their hand while they aimed and launched their rockets.

“Got to pay the toll,” said the one on the left.

“One box of stuff,” said the one on the right, pointing at Mr. Peepers’ box. Jemma held it to her chest.

“You all are morons,” said Calvin, and started walking again. A rocket exploded in front of him before he’d taken five steps. He stopped again and Jemma ran up behind him.

“Got to pay the toll, kiddo,” the two boys said. Calvin just stared at them, even while they lit and leveled another rocket. As far away as they were, Jemma still thought she could see the fuse burning down. She had time to run away, but she just stood there tugging on Calvin’s shirt. They had wonderful aim. Jemma was sure the rocket would have flown just inside the space Calvin made with his arm by putting his hand on his hip, and slide precisely through one of the holes in Mr. Peepers’ box. She imagined the flare of light, the box leaping in her hands and the lid leaping off the box, the turtle parts scattering toward every corner of the ninth tee. In a flash of useless, stupid prescience she knew what would happen, and yet she did nothing, did not move, did not shield innocent Mr. Peepers with her own body, did not even cry out until something happened that she did not expect. Calvin moved his arm, releasing his hand from his hip and waving it in a circle, a gesture of utter dismissal that knocked the rocket out of her path. It fell on the ground and slid through grass still wet with dew to explode some twenty feet from where they stood. My own concern flexes at this same moment in a useless spasm, but it is only your brother’s arm that saves you. In this moment it would not surprise you if he cleared the space from the ground to the roof in one leap and knocked both boys, with two short simultaneous punches to the chest, clear down to the river, or if from that place on the roof he reached up and, tearing the sky from its moorings, wadded it up like so much blue tissue paper to throw at your feet.