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they from Brooklyn? It is not as though Brooklyn and California are the same thing. Do they even play baseball in California? Don’t they all have blond hair and smiles? No one on the Dodgers looks like he is from California. I am certain that Sal Maglie and Roy Campanella don’t surf.
    No. Kathy wouldn’t understand. I could have talked to Angela about that, but not Kathy, and it is Kathy I want to talk to. Could I talk to her about my fear of nuclear war, something I am thinking about all the time now? No, she would not like someone who is afraid, even though it seems to me that an exception should be allowed for being scared of the total destruction of the planet.
    Maybe I can talk to her about the Kennedys. We all like talking about Jack and Jackie. This is Massachusetts.
    But when I start to talk to Kathy she looks at me with her jade eyes. The LePines went on a car trip to the Rocky Mountains and Donnie came back with these dark green stones—one for him, one for Stanley, and one for me—for Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. It was jade, Montana jade, and the rocks were to be the symbol of our special bond.
    Kathy’s eyes were the color of Montana jade and when she looked at me, I couldn’t speak. One time Tony Scaratini took my pen. I was going to tell him to give it back but before I could say a word he punched me in the stomach and I felt so sick I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even breathe for a few seconds. Kathy Pedrosky’s green eyes have the same effect on me.

    This morning the siren is sounding. It often does and we know exactly what to do. We all get under our desks. Or anyone’s desk. It is a quick scramble like when the music stops in Musical Chairs. But you don’t want to be the one who’s out because it might be a nuclear war. So we all dive pretty hard for a spot.
    We are preparing for the day when the Russians hate us so much that they decide to come over and drop a nuclear bomb on our school. I am not sure why, of all the schools in America, they would pick ours, but it is better to be ready. Mr. Shaker says, “In the next war, the front line could be right here!” Why would Haley be the front line? It wasn’t the front line in anything. Even in the French and Indian War Martin Haley had to go up to Canada.
    We know what nuclear weapons could do. We have seen films of that sickeningly slow mushroom spreading upward—something evil eating up the sky. We see films over and over again about the Nazi concentration camps and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. It is a little strange, these two subjects, because the one had been done by Nazis and the other by us. But we have to do it—because of Pearl Harbor, my birthday.
    Because we have seen these films of the bombed cities in Japan, we do not think hiding under desks with our hands over our heads is really going to work. It is hard to see how this is a safe hiding place from the destruction of the entire planet. We don’t talk about this, but somebody must be lying to us, and it is probably the school.
    There is a lot of talk about being ready to hide in the basements of our houses with enough food and supplies to wait it out until the radiation is gone. The Panicellis built an elaborate shelter with a door that can be shut so tight, Dickey says radiation cannot get in. Popeye and Dickey built it. And Mrs. Panicelli filled the shelves with gallon jugs of water and cans of food, especially tomato sauce and boxes of dried spaghetti. They are prepared to live on spaghetti and survive the destruction of the planet.
    It bothers me a little that my family is not prepared. We have not built anything in the basement though there is a closet there, where my parents store canned food and wine. We had always called it the “cold storage” but when I ask my parents about a shelter, they claim that this is it and we all start calling the cold storage