Free In the Middle of the Night by Robert Cormier Page A

should call her Miss Citrone. He checked her letter. She had addressed him as John Paul.
    Thank you very much for your letter.
    That was safe. And proper.
    It was kind of you to write.
    He frowned, bothered by something. “Kind” seemed too stiff a word. He pondered this a moment, crossed out “kind” and replaced it with “nice,” then crossed out “nice” and resiored “kind.” He would have to copy the letter over. He sighed, troubled. Then found a solution:
    It was nice and kind of you to write to me.
    It was also good of you to pray for the souls of the children. I pray for them, too.
    So far, so good. Next:
    I am glad you were not hurt and escaped from the theater. I am sorry for your nightmares. I have them, too.
    Maybe he should not have mentioned nightmares. But he wanted to show her she was not alone in this. He would not mention his guilt, however. He had not mentioned his guilt to anyone.
    My injuries are all healed now. I will be returning to school in five days, next Monday.
    He paused and put down the pen, unsure about what he would write next. Knew what he wanted to write but did not wish to appear too … he groped for the word and found it: “forward.” Then wrote the sentence anyway:
    I hope we see each other at school.
    He studied the sentence for a while, then let it stand. It wasn’t too forward. It was a polite sentence.
    Thank you again for your letter.
    This sounded too formal, but he could not think of a better ending. He looked at her letter, to see what word she had used above her name. “Sincerely.”
    He then read her entire letter again, oddly moved, finding it difficult to swallow. He had received no get-well cards at the hospital from any of his classmates and understood why. He had only been a student at Wickburg Regional for a few weeks, and did not make friends easily. He was only a name to them. But Nina Citrone had recognized him as a person, had seen kindness in him that he had not known existed.
    He ended the letter with:
    Very sincerely,
    John Paul Colbert
    To the Editor:
    The city of Wickburg should be ashamed of itself for not pursuing further the investigation of the disaster at the Globe Theater on October 31. The probe seemed to die along with the death of the theater owner. But there was another person involved in this needless tragedy, the only person other than the theater owner who was in the theater in the months prior to the collapse of the balcony.
    That person is the young usher. Quotes frominitial stories showed that he was familiar with the balcony. He often went there to store material. He also was in the balcony minutes before the tragedy to check out “a sound.” He lit the match that started the fire that might have initiated the plunging of the balcony on the innocent children below. “We have no evidence that the fire was connected with the balcony’s collapse,” the public safety commissioner reported. What does that mean? Exactly what it says. There is no evidence. This is obvious, because whatever evidence existed has been consumed in the flames and wreckage. If there is no evidence that the boy caused the collapse, there is also no evidence that he did not cause it or did not know about the condition of the balcony. “Case closed,” the commissioner said after the death of Mr. Zarbor. This case will never be closed until justice is served.
    D. C.
Wickburg
    The newspaper trembled in his hands. He was alone in the house. He had heard the thump of the paper against the back door, thrown by the kid who delivered it every day. He brought it into the house, averting his eyes from the front page and the headlines, then told himself that he could not go through life avoiding newspapers. Glancing tentatively at the front page, he was relieved to find no story about the Globe. Same with page 2. He skipped to the sports page but was not interested in the Celtics or the Bruins. He and his father liked baseball, often watched the Red Sox games on