Mercy

in real life so I asked quietly and intelligently w hy we couldn’t

talk and they said we might miss important instructions. I

mean: important instructions; do you grasp it? I didn’t scream

because I knew there might be a tom orrow but one day there

wouldn’t and I would be as big an asshole as the teachers not to

have screamed, a shithead hypocrite because I didn’t believe

tom orrow was coming, one day it wouldn’t come, but I

would die pretending like them, acting nice, not screaming. I

wanted to scream at them and make them tell me the truth—

would there be a tomorrow or not? When I was a child they

made us hide under our desks, crawl under them on our knees

and keep our heads down and cover our ears with our elbows

and keep our hands clasped behind our heads. I use to pray to

God not to have it hurt when the bomb came. They said it was

practice for when the Russians bombed us so we would live

after it and I was as scared as anyone else and I did what they

said, although I wondered why the Russians hated us so much

and I was thinking there must be a Russian child like me,

scared to die. You can’t help being scared when you are so

little and all the adults say the same thing. Y ou have to believe

them. You had to stay there for a long time and be quiet and

your shoulders would hurt because you had to stay under your

desk which was tiny even compared to how little you were

and you didn’t know what the bomb was yet so you thought

they were telling the truth and the Russians wanted to hurt

you but if you stayed absolutely still and quiet on your knees

and covered your ears underneath your desk the Russians

couldn’t. I wondered if your skin just burned o ff but you

stayed on your knees, dead. Everyone had nightmares but the

adults didn’t care because it kept you obedient and that was

what they wanted; they liked keeping you scared and making

you hide all the time from the bomb under your desk. Adults

told terrible lies, not regular lies; ridiculous, stupid lies that

made you have to hate them. They would say anything to

make you do what they wanted and they would make you

afraid o f anything. N o one ever told so many lies before,

probably. When the Bay o f Pigs came, all the girls at school

talked together in the halls and in the lunchrooms and said the

same thing: we didn’t want to die virgins. N o one said anyone

else was lying because we thought we were all probably going

to die that day and there w asn’t any point in saying someone

wasn’t a virgin and you couldn’t know , really, because boys

talked dirty, and no one said they w eren’t because then you

would be low-life, a dirty girl, and no one would talk to you

again and you would have to die alone and if the bomb didn’t

come you might as well be dead. Girls were on the verge o f