“Mother, can I die? Let me die first. Let me get even with her, don’t let her do this!”

“Clarisse!” A heart whirled like the egg-beater beneath the calico apron. “Don’t you ever talk like that again! You don’t know what you’re saying! My land, oh, my land!”

“Why can’t I talk like this? I guess I can talk if Aggie Lou can.”

“Well, you don’t know anything about death, in the first place. It’s not like what you think it is.”

“What is it like?”

“Well, it’s—it’s—well. Goodness, Clarisse, what a silly question. There’s—nothing wrong with it. It’s quite natural really. Yes, it’s quite natural.”

Her mother felt herself caught between two philosophies. The philosophy of children, so unknowing, so one-dimensional, and her own full-blown beliefs which were too raw, dark and all-consuming to descend upon the sweet little ginghamed things who skirted through their ten year era with soprano laughter. It was a delicate subject. And, as with many mothers, she did not take the realist’s way out, she simply built upon the fantasy. Heaven knows it was easier to look on the bright side, and what little girls don’t know can’t hurt them. So she simply told Clarisse what Clarisse didn’t want to hear. She told her, “Death is a long sweet sleep, with maybe different kinds of nice dreams. That’s all it is.”

Therefore she was dismayed when Clarisse broke into a new storm of rebellion. “That’s the trouble! I’ll never be able to talk to kids at school, after this. Aggie Lou’ll laugh at me!”

The mother suddenly got up. “Go up to your room, Clarisse, and don’t bother me. You can ask questions later, but for heavens sake leave me alone to think now! If Aggie Lou’s going to die, I have to see her mother right away!”

“Will you do something to stop Aggie Lou from dying?”

The mother looked down into the child’s face. There was no compassion or understanding there, just the bright ignorance and primitive jealousy and emotion of a child wanting something and not understanding what degree of something it wants.

“Yes,” said the mother strangely. “We’ll try to stop Aggie Lou from dying.”

“Oh, thank you, Mother!” cried Clarisse in triumph. “I guess we’ll show her!”

The mother smiled weakly, vaguely, closing her eyes. “Yes, I guess we will!”

MRS. SHEPHERD knocked at the back of the Partridge house. Mrs. Partridge answered. “Oh, hello, Helen.”

Mrs. Shepherd murmured something and stepped into the kitchen, thinking to herself. Then when she was seated in the kitchen eating nook she looked up at Mrs. Partridge and said, “I didn’t know about Aggie Lou.”

The carefully assembled smile on Mrs. Partridge’s face fell apart. She sat down, too, slowly. “I don’t like to talk about it.”

“No, of course you don’t, but I’ve been wondering...”

“About what?”

“It seems silly. But somehow I think we’ve raised our children wrong. I think we’ve told them the wrong things, or else we haven’t told them enough.”

“I don’t see what you mean,” said Mrs. Partridge.

“It’s just that Clarisse is jealous of Aggie Lou.”

“But that seems so strange. Why should she be jealous?”

“You know how children are. Sometimes one of them gets something, something neither good nor bad nor worth wanting, and they build it into something shining and wonderful so all other children are jealous. Children have the most inexplicable methods of obtaining their ends. They promote jealousy with the most peculiar weapons, even Death. Clarisse doesn’t really want—want to be sick. She just—well—she just thinks she does. She doesn’t really know what Death is. She hasn’t been touched by it. Our family has been lucky. Her grandparents and cousins and uncles and aunts are all alive. There hasn’t been a death among us in twenty years at least.”

Mrs. Partridge drew into herself, and turned over Aggie Lou’s life as if it were a doll to be examined. “We’ve fed Aggie Lou on pretty dreams, too. She’s so young, and now with the illness, well, we thought we would make it easier for her if anything should happen.

“Yes, but don’t you see that it’s causing complications.”

“It’s making my daughter’s life bearable. I don’t know how she’d go on otherwise,” said Mrs. Partridge.

Mrs. Shepherd said, “Well, I’m going to tell my daughter tonight that it’s all nonsense, that she’s not to believe one more word of it.”

“But how thoughtless,” came back Mrs. Partridge. “She would only rush over and tell Aggie Lou, and Aggie Lou would—well—it just wouldn’t be right. You see?”

“But Clarisse is unhappy.”

“She has her health, at least. She can bear being unhappy awhile. Poor Aggie Lou, she deserves what little joy she can find.”

Mrs. Partridge had a good point and stuck to it. Mrs. Shepherd had to agree that it might be wise to let it go a while longer, “Except that Clarisse is so disturbed.”

IN THE next few days from her window Aggie Lou saw Clarisse all dressed up and going down the street and when she called to ask over the distance where Clarisse was going, Clarisse pivoted and with a shining white look, which was alien to her face, replied that she was going to church to pray for Aggie Lou to get well.

“Clarisse, you come back here, come back!” shouted Aggie Lou.

“Why, Aggie Lou,” said her parents to her, “how can you be so cross towards Clarisse, she’s so considerate, bothering to go all the way to church that way.”

Aggie Lou thumped over in bed, muttering into the pillow.

And when the new doctor appeared, Aggie Lou stared at him and his silver hypodermic and said, “Where’d he come from?”

The doctor, it turned out, was a cousin of Mr. Partridge’s who had experimented with some new injections which he promptly gave to Aggie Lou with a smile and only a little prickling pain to her arm.

“I suppose Clarisse had something to do with this?” asked Aggie Lou.

“Yes, she kept talking to her father and her father finally telegraphed the doctor.”

Aggie Lou rubbed her injection mark fiercely and said, “I knew it, I knew it!”

At night, in the cool darkness, Aggie kneeled upon her bed and looked at the ceiling. “God, if you’re listening to Clarisse, don’t any more. She spoils everything. After all, it’s up to me, isn’t it, to ask for what happens to me? Yes. Then, don’t pay no attention to Clarisse, she’s mean. Thank you, God.”

Late that night she tried her very hardest to die. She gritted her teeth and sweat rolled down and tasted of salt in her mouth. She clenched her fists and held them taut at her sides and stretched her body like a steel spring. Inside, she tried to catch the beat of her heart, using her ribs and lungs as hands to clutch it with and stop it, as you stop a clock in the night when its ticking keeps you awake.

Finally, too warm, she threw back the covers and lay moist and panting. Much later she went and stood by the window and looked over at the other house where the lights burned until dawn. She practiced lying on the floor and dying. And she practiced sitting in a chair and dying. She tried it in many postures, but nothing happened, her heart ticked merrily on.

At other times Clarisse would come stand under her window. “I’m going to jump in the river,” she said, tauntingly. Or, “I’m going to eat until I bust.”

“Shut up!” Aggie Lou would reply.

Clarisse would bounce her red ball and pass her little curve of leg over over over it, one two three four, over over. And while doing it she would sing, “Gonna jump in the river, gonna leap off a hotel, gonna eat till I bah-ust, gonna jump in the rih-ver.” Bounce, bounce, bounce rubber.

Slam, would go Aggie Lou’s windows!

Aggie Lou scowled in bed. Supposing Clarisse did what she said? It would be spoiled. There would be no use dying then. Aggie Lou hated to be second comer for anything. She always wanted something her very own. Clarisse had just better not try anything!