“Well, it doesn’t look like a game to me,” Miss Herrick said. “You and your friends run along now, Mary Helen, and leave Pia alone.”
Mary Helen harrumphed, but did as she was told. The other girls followed, their faces pinched.
“Are you all right, Pia?” Miss Herrick said. She bent down to help her up, reaching for her arm.
“Don’t touch me,” Pia said, louder than intended.
Miss Herrick gasped and clapped a hand to her chest.
Pia instantly regretted her outburst. The last thing she needed was to get in trouble at school. Mutti would never understand. She got up and brushed off her dress. “I’m sorry, Miss Herrick,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I was frightened, that’s all.”
Miss Herrick sighed. “That’s understandable, I suppose. I know Mary Helen likes to start trouble, and everyone is feeling anxious these days, but are you sure you’re all right? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
Pia mustered a weak smile. “I’m fine. Thank you, Miss Herrick.” She wasn’t anywhere near fine, but how could she explain to the teacher what she’d felt when she grabbed Mary Helen’s wrist? She’d think she was crazy.
The next day, Mary Helen was absent from school and Selma Jones fainted while unpacking her sandwich during lunch. Miss Herrick rushed over to Selma and shook her while the class watched, mouths agape, but Selma didn’t move. Miss Herrick ran out into the hall yelling, and two teachers carried Selma away. Beverly Hansom’s mother pulled her out of class shortly afterward, scurrying into the room and wrapping a protective arm around her daughter, her face pale. On the playground that afternoon, the teachers spoke in hushed voices behind their hands, their brows lined with worry. Rumors flew that Mary Helen and Selma had the flu and Mary Helen was already dead.
After the last lesson of the day, Pia hurried out of the building and started for home, her books held to her chest, her head down. Normally she would have waited for Finn on the school steps, but she had to get away from there. She needed to go back to her family’s rooms, where she could close the door and hide from everyone and everything. A block from the school, a Red Cross ambulance sped by, and a man on a bench was reading a newspaper with the headline: ALL CITIZENS ORDERED TO WEAR GAUZE MASKS IN PUBLIC. On the streetlamp above him, an advertisement for masks read: “Obey the laws and wear the gauze, protect your jaws from septic paws.”
Deciding she didn’t want to walk the rest of the way alone, she ducked into a landing to wait for Finn, away from the congested sidewalks, and leaned against the doorframe, wishing she could disappear. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry. Two women with scarves over their mouths darted by arm in arm, walking as fast as they could without running. A gray-haired couple wearing gauze masks and carrying suitcases rushed out of a building and hailed a cab, the old man practically pushing other pedestrians aside with his cane. Even the motorcars and horse-drawn wagons seemed to go by faster than normal. A strange awareness seemed to fill the air, like the lightheartedness on the day before Christmas, or the shared excitement she’d felt before the fireworks display on her first Independence Day in Philadelphia. Except this awareness felt ominous and full of menace, like the sensation she felt at the parade, but ten times worse. And now everyone could feel it.
When Finn came walking down the block, her shoulders dropped in relief. She stepped out of the landing onto the sidewalk in front of him.
“Hey,” he said, surprised. “Why didn’t you wait for me?”
“I did,” she said. “I’m right here, aren’t I?” She started walking and he fell in beside her.
“Ye are, but I didn’t know where you were. I thought . . .”
“You thought what?”
He shrugged and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Everyone’s getting sick. Remember we heard Tommy Costa and his family left town?”
She nodded.
“Aye, well, his best pal, Skip, said he died last night.”
Pia stopped in her tracks. Tommy was the boy who had put his hands over her eyes at the parade. “Was it the flu?”
“I can’t think of anything else that’d take him that quick.”
She hugged her books to her chest and started walking again. Tommy and Mary Helen were young and strong. How could they be dead from influenza? How could Selma Jones be fine one day and fainting the next? And why had she felt pain when she’d touched them? Was it the flu she’d felt? No. She couldn’t feel sickness in another person. It had to be a coincidence. Or maybe her shyness really was starting to become a physical ailment. More than anything, she wanted to tell Finn what was going on, to ask him what he thought. But she couldn’t. Not yet.
At the end of the fourth block, they turned left into Jacob’s Alley, a cart path lined with bakers, shoe cobblers, tailors, and cigar makers working out of storefronts in brick houses, their families’ apartments above. Some of the homes had been turned into boardinghouses, or rented-out rooms to sailors. Crepe ribbons hung from several doorknobs, black and gray and white, swirling in the afternoon breeze. Some doors were marked with signs that read: “QUARANTINE INFLUENZA: Keep out of this house.” At the end of the alley, a woman in a black dress came out of the silversmith’s shop and tied a piece of white crepe to the doorknob, sobbing uncontrollably.
Pia couldn’t help staring, new tremors of fear climbing up her back. She knew what the different colors of crepe meant; she’d seen enough of it in the mining village after cave-ins and explosions, and during the wave of tuberculosis that hit the village when she was seven. Black meant the death of an adult; gray an elderly person; white a child. She and Finn looked at each other. A silent alarm passed between them and they started walking faster. When they turned the corner onto Lombard Street, they slowed. Dozens of policemen, all wearing gauze masks, patrolled the sidewalks, telling people to keep moving. A line of people snaked out the door of the pharmacy, holding empty glass bottles and barely speaking. Their faces were drawn by worry, their eyes hollowed out by fear. Some of these anxious souls wore white masks and kept their distance from others and the pedestrians pushing by on the sidewalk, newspapers held over their mouths. A sign in the pharmacy window read: “Formaldehyde tablets. Melt under your tongue. Proven to kill germs and prevent infection and contagion. Fifty tablets for fifty cents.”
“What kind of medicine do you think they’re waiting for?” Pia asked Finn.
“Anything they can get, I suppose,” he said. “But whiskey, mostly.”
In the window of a sporting goods store next door, an advertisement for phonographs read: “This machine is guaranteed to drive away Spanish flu. Stay at home. Keep away from crowds and theaters. Doctor’s Orders. Hear the new October records on your new phonograph and you’ll never know you had to stay in nights or miss gasless Sundays.” Across the road, people holding sacks and baskets crowded around a truck with a sign that said: “Eat More Onions, One of the Best Preventatives for Influenza.” A gathering of colored people stood to one side, waiting to see if there would be any onions left over for them.
Seeing the onion truck, Pia thought of what Mutti had said that morning—they were short on supplies and she needed to go to the market but didn’t want to have to take the twins, so she might wait until Pia came home from school. Hopefully Mutti had stayed home. Pia needed to tell her it wasn’t a good idea to go out, not until things returned to normal.