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not sure, but I’m working on it. Stay cool.”
    Beth worked on it, all right. One of the orderlies on our ward was the older brother of a girl Beth knew from school, and was easily talked into taking us there. (I remember that he and Beth had gone into one of the little rooms down the hall to talk about it and were in there an awfully long time.)
    The Sunday morning we took off on our little excursion was incredibly warm, even for mid-May in Ohio. All of the windows were open but they offered no relief. My gown clung to me as I slipped out of bed (with Beth’s help, of course) and put on my slippers and the light hospital robe.
    “I know the robe’s uncomfortable,” Beth said, “but I don’t want you catching a cold or anything worse—God, I’d just freak out if that happened. Just to be safe, here—put on your pajama bottoms. And don’t look at me like that, you.”
    The IV bottle was tricky, a big, heavy thing made of thick glass that clinked against the metal pole from which it hung. At least the pole was on wheels so I could pull it along behind me, but the clinking noise drove me nuts. Beth remedied that by stealing some medical tape from a supply cart and wrapping it around the bottle so that it was attached to the pole. Thankfully, the wheels didn’t squeak.
    Once I’d gotten myself out into the hallway, Beth, the orderly (whose name I never knew), and I headed for the elevators.
    “We gotta go down to one of the sub-basements in order to get to the other elevators,” said the orderly, putting his hand in the middle of Beth’s back. “Hope you aren’t afraid of dim places.”
    “I’m not afraid of much,” replied Bath, pulling his hand away from her. “Except maybe having my time wasted.”
    I knew there was a basement but had no idea there were floors beneath even that. We went all the way down to sub-basement #3. Just seeing that light up above the elevator door gave me the creeps; this was deeper than they buried you after you died.
    Yeech.
    The doors opened to reveal a long hallway with concrete walls and bare bulbs cradled in bell-shaped wire cages dangling from the ceiling. It was damp and cold, and I was suddenly grateful that Beth had insisted that I wear the bathrobe and pajama bottoms.
    I remember the walls clearly. It was easy to see the boards that had been used as forms for the concrete because several of them had warped before the concrete had set properly; they looked like ghosts trapped in the walls, stuck forever between this world and the one they’d come from and now wished they had never tried to leave.
    Double yeech.
    Beth leaned over and whispered in my ear, “This is where they bring the dead bodies.”
    “Huh- uh! ”
    “Uh- huh! I heard the nurses say so.”
    The “yeech” factor was tripled with the notion that at any moment we could see a dead body being rolled down the hallway. I wondered if any of the bodies from Kent State had been brought here, if they’d been covered up and rolled over the very spot where I was standing. The thought frightened me so much that my fingers went numb. I shook them, confused by the effect. Usually when I got scared, my stomach got all tight and hurt; this was the first time I’d had anything happen with my fingers. Maybe fingers had something to do with real fear, and the stomach stuff was just with pretend fear, like with Godzilla or The Fly or The Incredible Shrinking Man . I’d have to think on that. Later.
    The orderly took hold of one of Beth’s hands and guided us out of there in a hurry. The feeling began to return to my fingers as I heard Beth breathe a sigh of relief. I looked at her and she smiled and took hold of my hand with her free one, the three of us forming an unbreakable chain.
    I felt as if someone really liked me. I wondered what the kids at school would say if they could see me now, on an adventure with a girl, a 16-year-old girl who wore love beads and bell-bottomed hip-huggers and had friends who thought