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  Oh man, I counted eight hundred thousand links for nothing.

  “Michael!” My mother is shaking me by the shoulder. “Wake up! You’re having a bad dream. There’s no rocket.”

  I roll over in bed, blinking. “Sorry, sorry. I’ll go back to sleep.”

  “Well, no, you can’t,” she tells me. “It’s time to get up for school.”

  In a normal year, I’d be begging and pleading to go in late with a note of excuse. But this year, the school will be packed with volunteers starting at seven a.m. They’ll be making paper chains—and no one will be there to count them. By eight o’clock, the deliveries will start arriving—chains from all over the country and all around the globe. Now that our project has gotten famous, FedEx and UPS are delivering paper links from other schools for free. It’s an avalanche.

  My current tally of links stands at 4,326,718, stored in warehouses, silos, basements, and attics around town. Mr. Brademas was wrong. It isn’t impossible to get to six million links. With the world’s help, it’s practically a slam dunk.

  So I drag myself out of bed, throw on some clothes, and present myself in the kitchen. My mother places in front of me a plate with four fried eggs, hash browns, and a pretty big piece of steak.

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  “Breakfast.”

  “For who?” I demand. “The Marine Corps?”

  “You’ve lost weight,” she accuses. “It’s because of the paper chain.”

  “The paper chain is the best thing that’s ever happened to Chokecherry,” I argue. “The whole world is helping us. And now that the swastikas are a thing of the past, there’s no downside anymore. It’s a win-win for everybody.”

  Some detective I turned out to be. Pamela Bynes—wow. One of our very first paper-chaining volunteers! And now we’re supposed to believe that she didn’t paint the first one.

  Why should we listen to someone rotten enough to do what Pamela did? On the other hand, why would she lie? It’s not like doing one less swastika means she’s in any less trouble.

  Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. I’m pretty sure the other minority kids are sweating that too. We have no choice but to take all this a little more seriously than everybody else.

  “Your health is more important than any paper chain,” Mom lectures. “You’re not getting enough rest, and you’re having bad dreams. Do you know you count in your sleep? And I know it isn’t sheep. No one counts four million sheep.”

  We argue over how much breakfast I should eat, compromising at two eggs and some of the steak. She puts the rest in Tupperware for my “after-school snack.” I agree only because there’s a zero percent chance I’ll make it home before dinner. These days, the paper chain has gone far beyond just ReelTok. Caroline and I have interviews with radio and TV stations, and newspapers and podcasts are interested too.

  The other kid the media’s interested in is Link. As our paper chain gets more and more attention, the word also spreads about the Chokecherry kid who is racing toward an unlikely bar mitzvah on December 4.

  Word of our project is even reaching real Holocaust survivors. They’re old now, and their numbers are dwindling. Some were in the concentration camps, others were hidden and protected by non-Jewish families—like what those French nuns did for Link’s grandma. Most of them were our age and younger during the war. They lost everything and everybody. And even after the fall of the Third Reich, they spent years as refugees.

  That morning, after an hour of paper-chaining, we pack in front of the Smart Board in the library and Zoom with a group of survivors at a Jewish Community Center in Florida. Their stories are so terrible, so heartbreaking, that you want to run out of the library rather than have to listen to another word. But nobody moves. As hard as it is, we all understand that what we’re seeing is super important.

  “I was pulled from the line because I had delicate fingers, which the guards said would be useful in the factory, loading ammunition belts. That was the last time I saw my family alive. I was eleven years old …”

  “My parents left our village in Poland when we heard the Germans were coming. We sheltered in Russia, but there was no food. My father said, ‘What can the Germans do to us that’s worse than this?’ So we went home, and when we got to our village, it was empty. Every man, woman, and child died in the camps …”

  “I was a wrestler. I used to dream of using my strength to fight the Nazis. But they made me a Sonderkommando—it was my job to bring bodies from the gas chambers to the ovens for cremation. Every night, in my dreams, I am still doing this very thing …”

  “My sister died of malnutrition at the camp at Terezín, near Prague. Left to starve, like so many others …”

  “I used to pray every night that I would see my father again. But when I did, he was just loose skin over a skeleton, and his eyes were sunken and blank. When I tried to hug him, he shrank from me, and I knew then that he didn’t recognize me …”

  “My mother was alive when the Americans liberated our camp. But when she learned that all my brothers and sisters were gone, within a week, she was dead of grief …”

  Every single one of us is in tears at this point. Nobody even tries to hide it. The stories go on and on. Each one is a tragedy by itself. I try to multiply them by six million. It’s more than my brain can compute.

  The incredible part is that these people, who have suffered so greatly and been through so much, are fans.

  “We just want you young people to know how much we admire what you’re doing,” says one elderly lady with a European accent.

  “You admire us?” Caroline sniffles. “What we’re doing is nothing compared with what you lived through.”

  “Twenty years from now, none of us will be here to speak for ourselves,” says another member of the Florida group, an old man leaning on a walker. “Your paper chain and your willingness to pass our stories on will be our voice going forward. Humanity can never be allowed to forget what happened.”

  That’s something we’ve been hearing about the paper chain more and more often—the importance of remembering. At first, it made no sense to me. How could anyone ever forget something so enormous? But look at the Night of a Thousand Flames. That was a lot more recent than the Holocaust, and already half the people in Chokecherry claim it never happened.

  The first woman speaks up again. “Is Lincoln Rowley there, by any chance?”

  Cautiously, Link half rises from his chair and holds up one finger. “I’m right here.”

  “I look at you, and I see what could have been from my own family,” she tells him. “Mazel tov on your bar mitzvah, young man. You honor us all by what you’re doing.”

  And then the assembled old-timers give Link a round of applause. Link sits back down, blushing bright red and blinking.

  The man with the walker speaks again. “May I ask one favor?”

  Without even thinking, I blurt, “Yes! Of course! Anything!” It makes no sense—what “favor” can a bunch of Colorado kids possibly do that could have any value to the survivors of such an atrocity? But we all know we have to try.

  “It would mean a lot to me,” the man goes on, “if you could write my mother’s name on one of the links of your chain. She was”—he straightens, standing taller—“she is one of the six million you memorialize.”

  It’s like the spark that ignites a brushfire. Suddenly, the Smart Board audio crackles with voices as the Florida group calls out names of lost loved ones and friends.

  I stand up and wave my arms. “We will. Of course we will. If you give us the names, we’ll make sure every one gets on a link.”

  It takes some doing. The European names are unfamiliar and hard to spell. Dana, Caroline, and I set up shop by the Smart Board, painstakingly listing parents and siblings, relatives and friends. We agonize over every vowel and consonant. We won’t be graded on this, obviously. But it seems vital to get it right.

  Next stop is the art room, where we divvy up these forty-t
wo precious names and transfer them onto strips of colored paper, to be formed into loops and added to the chain. Our crew has never been so silent and solemn.

  I look over at Link, working next to me. Besides the four names assigned to him, he has two more strips. On them, he’s written Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa.

  “My grandmother’s parents,” he explains to me. “Nobody knows their names, not even her.”

  I collect the links, but when I get to Jordie, his are still blank. He’s hunched over in his chair, staring at his list like the names are giving him a stomachache.

  “Take your time,” I advise him gently. “Some of that spelling is next to impossible.”

  He looks at me, his eyes bleak with misery. Then he gets up and storms out into the hall.

  I hesitate. I should probably see what’s bugging him. But is it really any of my business? Besides paper-chaining, I don’t have much to do with the popular kids. Maybe I should send Link or Sophie out there. But I don’t “send” the popular kids either. President of the art club is not a position of authority.

  I scan the room. Everybody’s busy. Everybody except me.

  In the hall, I find Jordie just outside the art room door, his face pressed against the tiles.

  “How can I help?” I ask.

  “I saw Pam last night,” he tells me. “Her parents finally let me stop over.”

  “Oh, wow,” I say. “I guess she feels pretty awful right now.”

  “That’s just it.” He turns to me, and I can see the outline of the bricks etched into his skin. “She thinks what she did was just fine and the only downside was getting caught. And then her dad told me that the town is crazy to make such a big deal out of nothing.”

  I let out my breath and realize I’ve been holding it. Since the news broke, I’ll bet every kid in school has been wondering why Pamela did all those swastikas. Is she a vandal? A sick joker? A defacer of public property?

  Now I have my answer. It’s something worse than all those bad things. Hate, pure and simple. No do-overs, no excuses—except maybe the fact that she comes from a family that’s even worse than she is.

  “When we were on Zoom with the survivors,” Jordie goes on, “I was like: ‘Pam should be here. She should see this. Then she’d understand.’ But when we were writing those names, I knew it would be a waste of time. She’ll never change her mind. She’s set in her thinking—and that kind of thinking is the reason we have things like the Holocaust in the first place.”

  “Do you want me to finish the names on your list?” I offer. “Maybe you should, uh, go relax or something.”

  He gives me a watery smile. “You’re a good dude, Michael.” And he heads back in to finish his links.

  Pamela should see him transcribing names with such exquisite care, like he’s cutting a diamond. None of the others leave, even though they were all finished twenty minutes ago. That’s the impression the Florida survivors made on us.

  It’s a turning point for me, and I think everybody else too. We’ve been working on this chain for weeks, churning out millions of links on our journey to six million. But for the very first time, we don’t see loops of construction paper.

  We see faces.

  The first time Grandma visits since all this started is at Thanksgiving. This year it’s our turn to host, so she and Grandpa drive in from Denver in one of the classic cars they collect. From my room upstairs, I can hear the 1962 engine roaring half a mile away. And when the old Cadillac pulls into our driveway, longer than a pontoon boat, with bigger fins than a great white shark, Mom and I run down to greet them.

  Everything’s the way it always is—the “shave and a haircut, two bits” blast of the horn and Grandpa’s disbelief over how tall I am now. It’s the usual reunion—until my eyes meet my grandmother’s. I’ve seen Grandma a million times, but never before as a Holocaust survivor.

  “Well, what do you know? We’re in the presence of a celebrity,” she says, indicating that she looks at me a little differently now too.

  “We’re reading a lot about you in the newspapers, Link,” Grandpa adds proudly. “You get more coverage than the president, the pope, and the queen of England put together. All good stuff.”

  “Not all,” Grandma counters with just a hint of the French accent that remains from her childhood in the orphanage. “Who is this ReelTok person? I can’t get a sense of him. He seems to be anti-everything.”

  “He’s a vlogger—a video blogger,” I reply. “Our paper chain never could have gotten so famous without him.”

  She sighs. “I suppose that’s always the goal these days. Everything has to be famous or it doesn’t count. We all need our personal business splashed across the media. There’s no such thing as privacy anymore.”

  Translation: Her story about being handed over to nuns to escape the Holocaust was her secret until her grandson exposed it to the world.

  Come to think of it, nobody ever told me exactly how my grandparents reacted to this whole bar mitzvah thing. All Mom said was they were coming to the temple service. I just assumed that meant they were all in. Why wouldn’t they be? They always came to my baseball games and basketball tournaments and soccer matches. They were there for the fifth-grade play and my elementary school graduation. I’m their only grandkid. This is the first time it occurs to me that a couple of lifelong churchgoers might feel pretty weird that their grandson is having a bar mitzvah.

  I grab a suitcase in each arm, and we troop inside the house. Before we can make it to the guest room, Grandma freezes in the hall and I almost rear-end her. She’s peering in the doorway to Dad’s office, and I can already see what’s caught her attention. Ever since news of my bar mitzvah has piggybacked on the paper chain story, Jewish communities from all around the country have been sending me stuff they think I’m going to need for the big day. Actually, I don’t need any of it—Rabbi Gold says Temple Judea will supply everything for me. But it’s pretty amazing how many people want to help me out. I now have sixteen prayer shawls, 158 kippot, two dozen leather-bound Hebrew prayer books, and nine ceremonial wine goblets, all piled on top of Dad’s desk.

  Grandma stares at the prayer shawl—Rabbi Gold told me it’s called a tallit—draped over the back of the swivel chair. I recite the line of silver Hebrew writing embossed on the blue-and-white silk.

  “What does that mean?” she asks.

  “It’s a prayer for when you put it on,” I reply. “The rabbi calls it an ancient Jewish cheat sheet for people who can’t remember the words.”

  “It’s all Greek to me,” puts in Grandpa with a snicker.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” Mom asks pointedly. “Complete strangers are sending these things to Link via the school, just like they’re sending thousands of paper chains.”

  “Amazing,” Grandpa agrees.

  “You’ve certainly got a lot of hats,” Grandma comments. The stacked kippot completely cover Dad’s scale model of the surrounding mountains, showing where Dino-land is supposed to go.

  “They’re called kippot, or yarmulkes,” I tell her. “And that’s nothing. This one guy is lending the temple a Torah that was rescued from the Nazis. He doesn’t trust the mail, so he and his wife are driving it down personally from Toronto, Canada. He emailed last night from a Days Inn outside Indianapolis.”

  Grandma swallows hard. “You’re … having some interesting experiences.”

  “First class!” Grandpa agrees heartily.

  I normally love it when my grandparents visit, but today it’s pretty awkward. I was planning on giving them a bar mitzvah preview, since Dana says I’m getting good. But I don’t think that’s such a hot idea anymore. I can’t really blame Grandma for being thrown by all this. I was pretty weirded out myself when Mom told me about the family history. And Mom was weirder still. So when you’re the actual person it happened to, that has to be rough … even if you can’t remember anything because you were a baby.

  I’m sure it makes my family wonder: Grandma’
s my only connection to being Jewish, so if she’s against it, why am I doing it? Sure, I’m honoring my relatives who died in the Holocaust and the cousins who were never born. But just like Grandma, I never knew those people. I live in the here and now, with friends who say I’m no fun anymore. And a father who’s going along with my plans not because he wants to, but in spite of the fact that he’d rather be doing almost anything else. Worse, he’s convinced that his dream of Dino-land is being ruined by all the focus on the Holocaust, the swastikas, and Chokecherry’s past. And Mom? She’s my biggest booster, but in the end, who knows how she really feels deep down?

  Dad comes home from work early and drops his briefcase beside the desk in his office. “I see the yarmulke express made another delivery,” he comments before greeting Grandma and Grandpa.

  Everybody laughs a little too much at his joke.

  Except Grandma. “I guess you’ve gotten used to all this, George.”

  “Oh, you never get used to it.” Then he adds, “Have you heard Link practice? In the space of a couple of months, he’s picked up what it takes most kids years to learn. It’s a good sign for his future.”

  My father listens to me practice? Since when?

  For dinner we go to Angelino’s, where Grandpa loves the baked ziti. The traffic is slow on Main Street, not because Chokecherry is big enough to have a rush hour, but because the cars have to snake around the parked trucks and plows.

  “This is ridiculous,” Grandpa complains. “It used to take three minutes to get from one side of town to the other.”

  The reason the service vehicles are out on the road looms up on the right—the municipal garage. Even from a distance you can see through the glass doors that the entire building is packed to the rafters with multicolored paper chain.

  Grandma draws in a sharp breath. “Is that—?”

  “That’s only a little bit,” I supply. “The whole thing would be hundreds of miles long. It’s all over town, in warehouses, silos, basements, and attics.”