Being Dead by Vivian Vande Velde Page A

because he would have slowed them down. And they couldn't leave him behind, because if he was captured the Germans would surely torture him until he revealed the men's hiding place. So Dad had to shoot him. His own man.
    I hoped I would never find myself in a position where I had to kill one of my friends, but I also hoped that—if I had to—I could be as strong as my father.
    But when I made the mistake of sharing this profound thought with Kevin, he called me a ninny. The women, he pointed out, stayed home and kept the factories going, except for the Wacs and Waves, who were mostly nurses, and nobody expected them to shoot anybody.
    "In France," I pointed out, "the women fought."
    "Oh, good heavens!" Kevin gasped, an expression he normally did
not
use. "I
thought
you might be turning French, Sarah, but I wasn't sure. We'll have to keep you away from French bread and frogs' legs until you get over it."
    Kevin never seemed to be interested in hearing what he called "the old war stories"—our parents' or our aunts' and uncles'. Not even Aunt Lise's, who was born in Germany and had different stories from everybody else's. Like how by the end of the war she and her mother were eating grass from what had been their front yard, because all the supplies went to support the German military, not the civilians. She claimed Uncle Jack had saved her life by marrying her and bringing her to America after his tour of duty was up. And that was despite the fact that, when she first got here, Americans who recognized her accent sometimes spat at her, even though she was barely eighteen and too young to have had anything to do with the war.
    I thought all this stuff was fascinating. While I would stay indoors after dinners with the aunts and uncles, lapping it all up, Kevin would go play basketball with his friends.
    Would a disinterest in the past be a sign that Kevin was not likely to ever turn into a ghost? Exhibit C? Or at least Exhibit B and a half?
    One time, when I was ten and Kevin was fifteen, Dad wouldn't let Kevin escape. Kevin made some comment criticizing the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and that made Dad mad. "Fascists, Nazis, Communists; they're all the same," Dad said, and the next Sunday he asked Uncle Jack to "Bring those pictures." "Those pictures" were ones Uncle Jack had taken when he had been with a group that had liberated one of the concentration camps where the Nazis used to keep Jews. Dad felt Kevin should see them.
    Kevin, but not me. And not Uncle Jack and Aunt Lise's son, Dwight, who was one year younger than me. (Dwight was
exactly
the kind of boy who if he died would come back and haunt his family. He would be the sort of ghost who would rattle chains in the attic and who would sneak up behind you and breathe on your neck.)
    "Go out and play," Dad told us.
    Aunt Lise agreed with him. "These pictures are disturbing. They are not for you to see."
    Well, all right. Be that way.
    Dwight and I could wait.
    We went up to Kevin's room and played Monopoly, but we listened until we heard Uncle Jack open the hall closet door to return the pictures to his coat pocket. Then I sent Dwight downstairs to fetch a glass of milk, and on his way back he stopped at the closet.
    The pictures were worse than disturbing. I felt scummy, as though I was looking at dirty pictures, as though—by looking at those pictures—I was responsible for what was in them. I'd never seen such skinny people, not even in the pictures of starving African kids that the nuns would show us on Mission Sunday.
    "They don't even look real," I said.
    "Maybe they're actors," Dwight suggested. With Dwight it was sometimes hard to tell if he was joking or being stupid.
    The men all had shaven heads; the women all had scarves to hide that their heads had been shaved, too. And there were kids, as bald and dull-eyed as the grown-ups. I'd seen pictures of other people—French and Belgian and Egyptian—welcoming the liberating troops. They were always