I ran my plan by Bert, just to see if he thought it would work.
“You don’t think they’ll notice a chopper taking off?” he asked, skeptical. He lay on his bed and flipped through a pin-up book he had traded for a half dozen of my mom’s home-baked cookies, and it wasn’t even a recent issue. A few of the pictures, Marilyn Monroe and Gene Marshall, had been torn out and tacked up on nails above the head of his cot, and the pages were already beginning to curl and tear. “I don’t know about you,” he was saying as he turned the page, “but I think that’s something you can’t just cover up with a noisy cough, you know?”
“Tell me what I should do then,” I challenged. I sat on the edge of my cot and stared at a picture Tommy had sent me of himself—his hair was getting long, almost unruly, curls all
