Whirligig OUT OF PRINT by Paul Fleischman
	ISBN-10:   0440228352 ISBN-13:   9780440228356 Publisher:   Random House [IN]; Laurel Leaf Edition:   Reprint Category:   Young Adults Pub. Date:   November 1999 Pages:   144 Format:   Paperback; Mass Market paperback
Subjects
CHILDREN'S FICTION
Description/Notes
The day's first squirt of sunlight hit the window. The bus changed gears. Brent opened his eyes. They were climbing through mountains now. The other passengers around him were sleeping. Twitched alert by the light, he craned his neck to get a better view, pressed his head to the tinted glass, and raptly observed the sun's rising. After night came another day. And after death another life. Mornings seemed mysterious gifts. He inspected the dawn with fascination. The bus's gears growled. Behind him he heard a faint conversation in another language. This is the afterlife, he told himself. To be crowded in with a collection of strangers, plunging through a foreign landscape, headed toward an unknown destiny. The bus was his ferry across the river Styx. It descended now into an unlit valley. Brent squinted at his map and realized he was in the Cascades. Seattle wasn't far off. He'd been riding for two days, watching new souls board in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Fargo, Bozeman, Butte, Coeur d'Alene, Spokane. He'd speculated on their previous lives. He had surprisingly little interest in his own. His second life had eclipsed his first. Its moment of birth had been the crash. He didn't remember the actual impact. He did recall the ambulance lights, the policeman asking how he felt, the discovery that he'd escaped with only cuts and a minor head injury. Then came the alcohol test. Then the drive to the police station, being booked for drunk driving, the photographs and fingerprints--registering his new birth, he thought now. Then the realization that the ambulance at the scene had been tending someone else, that he'd hit another car. His father had arrived at the station. There was talk of the Chevy, its back end mangled, the car probably totaled. Then the news, delivered by one of the officers, that the woman he'd hit had died. The muteness had begun in that moment. He spoke not at all driving home with his father, slept fourteen hours, and didn't speak the next day. He remembered the party and that he'd tried to kill himself. That he'd ended up killing someone else left him frozen, numb from scalp to soles. Words returned on the second day. His turmoil, though, wasn't translatable into words. His mother got rid of the newspaper that had a story about the crash, but Brent dug it out of the bottom of the trash can. His car had apparently hit the divider, spun, then been struck by the driver behind him. His blood alcohol was 11. The story was brief and gave only the victim's name, age, and residence: Lea Zamora, 18, Chicago. He plumbed those few facts. She was nearly his own age. He was determined to know more. He tried the obituaries, but her name wasn't listed. He rummaged through the trash for the following day's paper, turned to the gravy-stained obituaries--and found her. Daughter of Cesar and Tamara Zamora, senior at Niles North High School, an honor student, member of the student council, the orchestra, the track team, active in the Filipino community, volunteer at Resurrection Hospital. Why did he have to kill someone like that? Then he realized with a surge of relief that he could perhaps go to the funeral. The police had confiscated his license, but he could take a cab, stand in the back, leave an anonymous offering of some kind. He checked the paper. It had been held the day before. He ate little, spoke little, and no longer listened to music. He turned seventeen, an event he scarcely noticed. He heard his parents whisper about the blow to his head and his personality change. He'd been diagnosed with a mild concussion. The headaches, like a wrecking ball working on his skull, came less often, replaced by the endless tolling in his mind of the word murderer. Everyone knew. He refused to go to school and made arrangemeets to finish his classwork at home. He disliked being seen in his neighborhood, where the glances he drew were too long or too short. Among strangers he felt no less an outc Brent Bishop longs to have the popular Brianna strolling around school on his arm. But when she rejects him at a classmate's party, Brent's hopes for popularity are instantly shattered. Devastated, he tries to destroy himself in a car crash... but instead kills an innocent girl named Lea. Instead of sending him to jail, Lea's parents challenge Brent to create four whirligigs modeled on a picture of Lea and position them at the four corners of the United States. Lea's mother hopes that the whirligig that used to delight Lea will be a fitting memorial for her precious daughter. She sends Brent off with an unlimited bus ticket, a few pieces of wood, and the tools to memorialize Lea. On his mission to preserve his victim's memory, Brent ultimately rediscovers his own love of life. New to town, Brent Bishop longs to stroll around school with the popular Brianna on his arm. But when Brianna begs him at a party full of schoolmates to stop hounding her, Brent's hopes are shattered. Trying to escape his humiliation, he attempts to destroy himself in a car crash -- and ends up killing Lea, an innocent teen unfortunate enough to cross his path.Lea's mother asks one thing of Brent: that he create four whirligigs from a picture of Lea and set them up at the four corners of the United States. Lea's mother believes that by spreading the joy that whirligigs gave Lea as a child, Brent will keep Lea's spirit alive.And so Brent goes off with an unlimited bus ticket and the tools he needs to memorialize Lea. On his journey, he rediscovers his own love of life, and he begins to realize how -- like the pieces that form the intricate whirligigs -- people come together to affect each other in surprising ways.