If It Bleeds

Jared Franck is a Boston street musician who plays the drums. A Julliard dropout, he prefers busking to working his part-time job at a record store. He loses himself in the beat as he begins to play.

Janice Halliday is going home from work, distraught that her boyfriend is breaking up with her via text message. She thinks about how she can cope with the end of her relationship as she approaches Jared’s setup.

Chuck Krantz is in Boston for a conference on contemporary finance. Chuck appreciates that his bank is paying for his trip to Boston, but he dislikes the company of the other accountants. He has become resigned to his ordinary, pleasant life, though he is unaware that he will die of cancer in nine months. While walking down Boylston Street, he remembers The Retros, a band he used to sing for in high school. He recalls the way he used to dance the moonwalk with the lead guitarist’s sister, whose name he forgets. When he hears Jared’s drums, Chuck wishes the sister was there to dance with him.

Jared is dissatisfied with how little he has made while busking. He notices a man in a business suit walking up and starts playing a beat that he thinks would match him. The businessman, whose name is Mac, stops, puts his briefcase down, and starts dancing. The passersby are impressed enough to start throwing coins into Jared’s hat.

Chuck is enjoying his dance when he spots a woman, Janice, in the crowd. Chuck invites her to join him, thinking again of the guitarist’s sister. They do splits and spins, impressing the onlookers. When they finish, Chuck tells Janice that their dance is the best thing to happen to him in a long time. He backs away, wondering if people caught his dance on video. He briefly worries how it might reflect on his reputation at the bank and at home.

After packing up the drumkit, Jared goes to Boston Common with Chuck, Mac, and Janice. Jared splits that day’s earnings of $400 among the four of them. Chuck reveals that he learned to dance from extracurriculars in middle school, which Janice echoes. Jared suggests that they could form an act together. Chuck briefly considers it, but declines.

Jared wonders what made Chuck decide to dance that day. As Chuck thinks again about the Retros and the guitarist’s sister, Janice comments that what happened was magic. They part ways with a group hug. Chuck thanks Janice for the dance, then notices how much his body hurts. He continues to wonder what prompted him to dance. The novella suggests that later on, as he dies, Chuck will realize that moments like that are “why God made the world” (136).

When Chuck is seven years old, he loses both of his parents in a car accident. His mother was pregnant at the time, which means that Chuck has also lost his baby sister, who would have been named Alyssa.

Chuck moves in with his grandparents, Albie and Sarah Krantz. Chuck’s grandparents are struggling with grief, but they are able to move on by staying preoccupied with Chuck’s upbringing. Chuck’s grandmother starts teaching him to dance to her favorite rock and roll songs in the kitchen. She also shows him musical films like the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie Swing Time (1936) and the Gene Kelly film Singin’ in the Rain (1952) to foster his love for dancing.

Chuck is forbidden from entering the cupola in his grandparents’ household, initially because they claim that the floor is too unstable to stand on. Right before Chuck’s 11th birthday, an inebriated Albie reveals that the cupola, which is around a hundred years old, is actually haunted. Albie alludes to two boys—one named Jeffries and the other named Henry Peterson—before hinting that he has seen the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in the cupola. He talks about how difficult it is to wait and how he never went into the cupola again for reasons related to Sarah. When Sarah returns home, he refuses to elaborate any further.

Sarah sends Albie off to the grocery store, then explains to Chuck that the house ghosts are just a story Albie loves to tell. When Chuck asks who the Jeffries boy was, Sarah tells him that Jeffries was a neighbor who had been killed in a drunk driving accident. Albie claimed to have experienced a vision of the accident before it actually happened, but Sarah dismisses it as a joke. Chuck senses that Sarah is lying. He regards the cupola with fear and wonder from that moment on. He continuously attempts to open its locked door but never actually enters.

After Sarah gets Chuck hooked on Agatha Christie novels, he gets the idea to ask his neighbor, Mrs. Stanley, about Albie’s visions in the cupola. He offers to visit her under the pretense that he is bringing her some of Sarah’s blueberry muffins. He mentions Henry Peterson to Mrs. Stanley, which prompts her to recollect how Henry had been a bookkeeper for Chuck’s father. Henry died by suicide after his wife left him for another man. Chuck corroborates this information with what Albie had told him about seeing Henry’s death several years before it happened. He wonders if Albie is afraid to reenter the cupola because he also experienced a vision of Sarah’s death.

Chuck’s sixth grade English teacher, Ms. Richards, reads the Walt Whitman poem, “Song of Myself” to his class. Chuck is struck by the line “I am large, I contain multitudes” (147) and stays behind after class to ask what it means. Ms. Richards explains that his mind holds more than the knowledge of people and memories. Chuck contains within him an entire world, which will only continue to grow as he gets older. Thinking of the Jeffries boy and Henry Peterson, he imagines their worlds suddenly ending with their deaths. He asks Ms. Richards if she believes in ghosts. She expresses her view that “memories are ghosts” (148).

That summer, Sarah dies of a stroke at the grocery store. Chuck and Albie are filled with grief, though Chuck suspects that the burden of dread has been lifted from Albie’s shoulders. Chuck doesn’t enter the cupola, but he visits the grocery to see where Sarah died.

At school, Chuck sees a poster for an extracurricular called Twirlers and Spinners. Thinking of Sarah, he decides to join. He turns out to be the best dancer among the boys. The moderator, Ms. Rohrbacher, pairs him with the girls who are having a harder time learning the dances. By the end of the session, Chuck finally gets to dance with Cat McCoy, who is both pretty and the best dancer among the girls.

Chuck impresses everyone when he does the moonwalk to “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson. He teaches the others, including Cat and Ms. Rohrbacher, how to do it. After the session, Cat suggests doing the moonwalk with Chuck at the Fall Fling. Chuck expresses his worry that everyone will laugh at him for being so short, so Cat offers to lend him her brother’s Cuban heels.

Chuck attends the Fall Fling on his own, allowing him to dance with the girls from Twirlers and Spinners. Cat briefly leaves her date to join Chuck on the floor when “Higher and Higher” by American soul singer Jackie Wilson starts playing. They thrill everyone with their performance and decide not to do a second dance after the first one goes so well. Feeling euphoric, Chuck leaves the gym and delights at the stars in the night sky, believing he has “a right to be wonderful” (155). He spreads his arms out and twirls, accidentally hitting his hand against an exposed wire on a chain-link fence. This gives his hand a scar. Years later, he lies that he had gotten the scar from Cat’s boyfriend. He only tells his wife Ginny the truth a few months before he dies. She wonders why he lied about it for so long. He privately thinks it is because it is part of a much bigger story he cannot tell.

Albie dies while Chuck is in high school. After the funeral, Chuck goes through Albie’s personal effects and finds the house keyring. He takes it up to the cupola and unlocks the door. At first he sees nothing, but then he is granted a vision of his own death. When the vision ends, Chuck realizes he must now wait for his death to come. He resolves to be wonderful.