After Eli by Rebecca Rupp Page B

Who!
    Suddenly I missed Eli so much that my stomach twisted up. I thought how I’d do anything to have him back again, even just for five minutes. Even for two.
    “Danny?” Walter said. “Are you okay?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
    “Let’s dance!” Isabelle said.
    She ran out into the grass and started spinning around and around on her bare feet in the moonlight, with her arms held out and her silky hair flying and her Indian skirt flaring around her knees, so that she looked like a twirling silvery flower.
    So the twins stopped howling and started spinning too, and then so did I, and even geeky Walter, looking like a gawky human windmill, and then we were all spinning around and around together under that huge silver moon. To look at us, you’d think the moonlight had made us all crazy.
    Walter says that in ancient times, people believed that moonlight did make you insane, which is why words like
lunacy
and
lunatic
come from
luna,
which is Latin for “moon.” You even got a lighter sentence for a crime if you committed it while there was a full moon. Which frankly gave me some ideas involving Mr. Engelmann, who teaches Algebra I.
    In this case, though, it wasn’t just the moonlight. It was Isabelle.
    Finally we got so dizzy with all the spinning that we just fell over in the grass, everybody laughing like zanies, and lay there, getting sopped by the dew and staring up at the spinning stars. I could hear the twins, who had fallen over on top of each other next to me, bickering about what stars would taste like if you could eat them, and Journey thought they’d be fizzy like ginger ale and Jasper thought they’d be tangy like lime sherbet, and then Journey said she thought she was going to throw up, but luckily she didn’t.
    Isabelle reached out and touched my hand.
    “Let’s always be like this,” Isabelle said. “Let’s be wild and free and young. Let’s believe in magic and wishing wells and fairy godmothers and love at first sight and doors in closets that take you into Narnia.”
    “If Journey was in Narnia, she would be the White Witch,” Jasper said.
    Isabelle wrapped her fingers around my hand and squeezed.
    “Let’s promise that we’ll come back here to this very spot fifty years from now and we’ll dance in the moonlight again, all of us, because even when we’re old, we won’t have changed. Promise that we’ll never change.”
    “Never,” I said. I would have promised her anything.
    “Let’s always remember this night,” Isabelle said. “Let’s memorize everything about it so that we’ll never ever forget it and all the rest of our lives we’ll be able to close our eyes and it will come back to us just the way it was.”
    So we lay there memorizing, which must have worked, because I can still remember how that night smelled of wet grass and roses and maybe a little whiff of pig manure, with the twins giggling and poking at each other, and Isabelle lying there, gleaming, with one arm behind her head, and Walter with his big bony knees bent up and his glasses white with moonlight.
    The full moon always makes me think of Isabelle.
    But at the same time I think about Li Po from my Book of the Dead. Li Po was an ancient Chinese poet who wrote more than a thousand poems, many of which involved heavy drinking. He was known as one of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. One night, after a whole lot of wine cups, he drowned when he jumped into the Yangtze River, trying to embrace the reflection of the moon.
    Thinking back, I guess that was what I was like with Isabelle, except without the cups of wine.
    The truth is that everything always changes.
    And some things you just can’t have.

W alter’s least favorite period of history is the Dark Ages, due to bubonic plague, lack of computers, general ignorance, and the divine right of kings.
    Isabelle’s least favorite is the Victorian era, due to whalebone corsets, turgid novels, and the unavailability of birth control.
    This last