Hearts in Atlantis

by Stephen King

What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn’t be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.

God, if You’re there, please help me now. Help me to be brave . . . and help me to be lucky.

“I’m sorry, Ted. I wanted to come with you. I meant to come with you. But I can’t. I’m so sorry.” “You shouldn’t be hard on yourself.” But Ted’s look was heavy, as if he knew that from tonight on Bobby would be able to be nothing else.

He’d gotten used to feeling old; feeling young again—knowing he could feel young again—was a terrible disorienting shock.

We almost always see where our best interest lies, I think, but sometimes what we see means very little compared to what we feel. Tough but true.

When people talk about student activism in the sixties, I have to remind myself that the majority of kids went through that mad season the way Nate did. They kept their heads down and their eyes on their history books while history happened all around them.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

Bobby was there, and he carried me all the way up the hill. He did what was right. It’s the best thing, the most important thing, anyone has ever done for me in my life. Do you see that, Pete?” “Yeah. I do.” I saw something else, too: she was saying almost exactly what Nate had said not an hour before . . . only she had marched. Had taken one of the signs and marched with it. Of course Nate Hoppenstand had never been beaten up by three boys who started out joking and then decided they were serious. And maybe that was the difference.

Time passes and everything gets bigger except us.

“Maybe you love me and maybe you don’t. I’d never try to talk anyone out of loving me, I can tell you that much, because there’s never enough loving to go around. But you’re confused, Pete. About school, about Hearts, about Annmarie, and about me, too.”

He’s still carrying the chip. I’m glad. Like he said, it’s what he’s got.

Hearts can break. Yes. Hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t.

It had been in their hands then; he was quite sure of it. But kids lose everything, kids have slippery fingers and holes in their pockets and they lose everything.

“You know the price of selling out the future, Sully-John? You can never really leave the past. You can never get over. My thesis is that you’re really not in New York at all. You’re in the Delta, leaning back against a tree, stoned and rubbing bug-dope on the back of your neck.

It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed—not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.

There were the rose petals, of course, the ones which had come by way of Carol . . . but had they meant anything? Once it had seemed so—to the lonely, almost lost boy he had been, it had seemed so—but the rose petals were long gone. He had lost them right around the time he’d seen the photograph of that burned-out house in Los Angeles and realized that Carol Gerber was dead. Her death cancelled not only the idea of magic but, it seemed to Bobby, the very purpose of childhood. What good was it if it brought you to such things?

“A carpenter,” she mused. “I always thought you’d wind up a writer, or something.” “I did, too. But I also went through a period when I thought I’d wind up in Connecticut State Prison and that never happened, so I guess things have a way of balancing out.”

Forty years is a long time. People grow up, they grow up and leave the kids they were behind.” “Do they?”