The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. by Kate Messner Page A

her eyes like a curtain over a window and she doesn’t look back at me. She reaches the end of a line in the notebook and twirls her pencil in her fingers.
    “I guess you’ve already spent a lot of time at the casket, huh?” Ellen says.
    Ruby looks up from her notebook with shiny eyes and shakes her head.
    “I can’t,” she says, looking down and flipping through the pages. They’re almost all full. “I keep remembering her at lunch yesterday, standing up with her bowl and then dropping it and falling on the floor. It was so loud and awful. I see it over and over in my head. Mom on top of her doing CPR and those rescue guys with the shock paddles.” She closes her notebook. “I don’t want to see any more.”
    I take her hand because that’s what Nonna always does, and I think about the woman I just saw, laid out in the casket. There’s nothing chaotic or scary about her. She’s wearing her blue-and-white daisy dress with her gold hoop earrings. Her eyes are closed, and her face is relaxed and peaceful. Her cheeks are rosy, and it doesn’t look like strawberry bronze shimmer blush. It looks like she had a good life, and she’s off somewhere, dreaming about it now.
    And then I know what to say.
    “Ruby, your grandma wouldn’t want you to remember yesterday morning. That’s not what she was all about.” She sniffles and nods, so I keep going. “You and your mom are hurting right now, but she’s not. She’s someplace else— someplace good and quiet and peaceful. You should—I mean—I think you need to—I think it might help you to see her now.”
    “I don’t know.” She bends down to pick up Warren’s dump truck and spins the front wheels.
    “My dad made her look really pretty, just like in the picture at our fifth-grade graduation.”
    “You saw that?” Ruby looks up at me. I nod. “That was one of my favorite days with her ever. She told me how proud she was, and we went for chocolate chip ice cream at Nelligan’s Dairy.”
    “She’d be proud of you today too,” Ellen says quietly.
    Ruby glances over at the casket, puts down her notebook, and takes a deep breath. “Will you come with me?”
    I take one of Ruby’s hands. Ellen takes the other, and we walk to the casket. At first, Ruby just stares at her grandmother in the big oak box, and I think I might have made a mistake. But then she kneels down. I start to kneel too, but she puts up her hand. Ellen and I step back.
    Across the room, Ellen’s mom says something that makes Ruby’s mom laugh a little. Nonna offers Mrs. Kinsella a cookie. She takes it.
    Behind me, I hear Ruby’s voice.
    “Hi, Grandma . . . It’s me.”

CHAPTER 11
    M om’s waiting at the counter with her purse over her shoulder when Nonna and I come back upstairs with our empty cookie plate.
    “Where have you been?”
    “We were downstairs,” I start to explain.
    “I know where you were.”
    Then why did she ask? I start to argue, but Nonna pokes a pointy, eighty-three-year-old elbow into my ribs, so I shut up. Mom sighs.
    “I told you we were going to go to Crafty Cats to get supplies for your leaf project this afternoon. I only have an hour now because I need to be back to help Dad wrap things up downstairs, and we can’t go tomorrow because I have a Junior League meeting, so after school, you and Dad need to run Nonna to the doctor for her checkup .” She emphasizes the word “checkup,” daring us to suggest it’s anything else.
    “Tomorrow already?” Nonna puts down the cookie platter. Ian swoops into the room and licks his finger to pick up the crumbs left on the plate.
    “Yes, well, he had a cancellation and I figured the sooner the better.” Mom fishes car keys out of her purse. “Let’s go.”
    “Just let me change.” I pull my arms out of her sweater and drape it over the railing on my way upstairs. Two minutes later, I’m in jeans and my Picasso T-shirt. It’s a little wrinkled from being scrunched up on my closet floor, but it’s