Текст книги "The End Is Nigh"

Автор книги: Jack McDevitt

Соавторы: Nancy Kress
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

And enforcers, of course.

• • • •

The next morning I woke with dark circles under my eyes. I’d stayed awake too long, obsessing about Sara Grace and imagining a way out of all this. As far as I could tell, there was none.

I showered, made myself presentable, and headed to the nearby diner where Sara Grace and I met for breakfast every morning. The local clientele was pretty depleted, so service was fast, and we always got our waffles for free.

Sara Grace was late. Maybe she’d had a rough night too.

I was sitting there sipping my coffee when a guy I’d never seen before strolled in. He was tall and craggy, wearing tight blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a leather jacket that had seen better days. He obviously hadn’t encountered the inside of a barbershop in some time. He slid into a booth and ordered the number five.

My first check-in was in thirty-two minutes, and I hadn’t enforced anyone yet, so I went over to see what was up. “You mind?” I asked.

“Not at all,” he boomed, and I slid into the booth across from him. He stank of cigarettes and the open road.

“So what brings you to the neighborhood?” I asked idly, taking one of his sugar packets and dumping it into my own coffee.

He laughed, a big laugh that filled the diner. The other patrons glanced over, then quickly averted their eyes. “I stick out that much, do I?” he said. “Like a sore thumb, I bet.”

I shrugged in a noncommittal way. “Hey,” I said. “I’m sure I’d stick out in your hometown, too.”

“That you would,” he agreed. “Well, it’s kind of a funny story. I’m from Oklahoma, you see. Place called Muskogee. You probably wouldn’t have heard of it. Anyway, spent most of my life working on a warehouse floor, stacking crates. Got married, got divorced, got married again, divorced again. Had a couple of kids. Always one thing or another. I went on this road trip when I was real young, a couple of buddies and me, right before Susie, that’s my first wife, got knocked up. After that, you know, life happens. So when the news came down, I figured, it’s now or never, right? Quit the job, bought a Harley, hit the road.”

I wondered idly how he’d made it this far. Sounded as if the team in Muskogee was slacking off.

He told me about his trip, and I listened. His eyes shone as he described the breathtaking vastness of the Grand Canyon, the stunning beauty of the Nebraska plains. The St. Louis arch, that gateway to the west. The mist hanging spectral and ghostly over the Smoky Mountains, and the twisting, narrow roads winding their way through the foothills. The Carolina low country, the sun rising like a tangerine over the glittering ocean and the Outer Banks.

“It’s been a life-changing experience,” he said, mist in his eyes. “I’ll tell you what. I just wish I had more time.”

“I think we all do,” I said.

I let him finish his breakfast and pay his check. He’d made it this far, and I still had a few minutes before my first check in. It was the least I could do.

I enforced him on my way out the door.

“Epic road trip?” Sara Grace asked. We’d developed a sixth sense for these kinds of things.

“Yeah.”

“I always wanted to go to Newfoundland,” she said. “And see the whales. A blue whale. Can you imagine? This vast, majestic creature. You’d feel so small. But at the same time, so meaningful. To be part of all of this.”

“Yeah. It’s a trip, all right.”

We both dialed the number and checked in. She had enforced someone on the way over, so we were in the clear.

“You know what I was thinking,” Sara Grace said. “And this just sort of occurred to me. But isn’t it kind of funny how we’re basically getting rid of all the people who want to ask questions? Who don’t follow directions? Who, you know, have like, a mind of their own?”

“Weeding out the troublemakers.”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah. It’s funny, alright,” I said. “Sara Grace? I know you were raised in Bible school and all that shit.”

“You were, too.”

“Yeah, I know.” (It was true: church every Sunday, sitting on the hard pew, sandwiched between my mother and

her

mother, who still gave me a hard time that I refused to go anymore.) “So when did you start thinking, this whole God thing, maybe it’s all made up? Maybe there’s no such place as heaven, or hell, except for the one we manage to make for ourselves here on Earth?”

“I don’t know, actually,” she said, uncomfortable. “I guess I’m just not sure.”

Part of her, I think, still believed in all that: baby Jesus, right and wrong, redemption and faith.

And crucially, she still believed that whatever long look or tense moment or charged laugh we shared was just circumstance, just the pressure of surfing the harshest days in history and being the most hated people alive.

Because she wasn’t raised that way, and maybe it wouldn’t be right.

Neither was I.

But I’d given up on all that a long time ago.

• • • •

It was 2:11 p.m. on Wednesday.

We took a long walk through Prospect Park. It was a good place to find people who’d given up.

A man lying on his back in the grass looked like a good candidate. He was dressed in slacks and a button-down, hands interwoven behind his head, as he stared up at the blue skies and the rustling leaves. His shoes and socks lay haphazardly beside him.

We sat down.

“Hello,” he said, without looking at us, still staring up at the sky. “You must be enforcers. You’re probably wondering if I do this every day, or if I’m currently having some kind of nervous break.”

We didn’t say anything. Sometimes, it was better to just let them talk.

“Well, as a matter of fact,” he said, with a little chuckle, “I’m a scientist. So I’ve been overwhelmed with despair for the last ten years at least. It’s all seemed pretty hopeless for a while now.”

“A scientist! Where do you work?” Sara Grace asked eagerly.

“Columbia,” he said. “Physics department. Astronomy, actually.”

“Columbia? Me too! I’m in the nursing program. Or I was. I had to quit in order to fulfill my enforcing duties.”

“You know,” he said, musing. “It’s funny how you guys are the only ones allowed to make those breaks with your former lives. In fact, you were actually forced to. Ever think about that?”

“Well,” she said, rehearsed. She’d been over all this before. “It may seem that way, and we did have to stop doing our old jobs, but in everything else, we’re held to the same strict requirements as the rest of you. No calling up old friends, no making up with old enemies, no visiting family members one last time. No crazy spending sprees, no desperate partying. No out-of-character romances.”

I felt like her eyes met mine when she said this last part, but I wasn’t quite sure.

“Interesting,” he said. “I’m Paul, by the way,” and he shook our hands without sitting up. “Don’t let me keep you from your work. I know I look suspicious, but the truth is I’ve been coming here for years, both day and night. I like to lay in the grass and look up at the sky and think about everything that’s out there. It’s so endless, space… so full of promise and mystery. All the things we just don’t know. Now we know a little more, of course, or at least we think we do. But this is my routine, so I like to keep it up. You know, it clears the mind.”

“What do you mean, ‘

At least we think we do

’?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing,” he said, and chuckled, again. “It’s just—my colleagues and I, we’ve had our telescopes trained at the sky for a long time. A long time. A lot of telescopes. If someone was out there… if those

laser cannons

were out there… I think we would have seen them. Maybe. You know? But governments don’t listen to scientists. They never have. And like I said, there are a lot of things we just don’t know. Like how it’s possible that billions of souls could instantly be transported to another location within our physical plane. That would seem to defy the laws of physics. But there’s always more. If we know one thing, it’s that there’s always more.”

“Do you believe in God, Paul?” Sara Grace asked.

He brushed away the wispy brown hair from his receding hairline. “I’m not really sure,” he said, after a long pause. “I can’t one hundred percent rule out the existence of a deity. I would say, at this point, that it strikes me as a very low possibility.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Hmm.” She was thinking deeply about all this.

I was thinking about the empty skies.

“We should probably keep moving,” I said. “Next check in is in twenty-three minutes.”

• • • •

Sara Grace was wrong, though.

We weren’t like everyone else. Everyone else was supposed to go about their business, pretending like the end of the world wasn’t right around the corner.

But for us, it was the opposite. It was all we thought about, day and night. Because the only way that we could do what we were doing—the obscene, revolting, monstrous thing we were doing—was to remind ourselves constantly that this was not Real Life. None of this had anything to do with reality. For us, life as we knew it was already over.

The end was nigh, except it had already come and gone.

Otherwise it was too terrible. You couldn’t live with that kind of thing. That horror. That brutality. That inhumanity. You had to disconnect. You had to turn off.

And another thing, too. Everyone else was supposed to maintain their same old routines. See the same people. Say the same things. But thanks to some random lottery, the two of us—people who never would have had any particular reason to meet—we’d been thrown together into the most intense experience of our lives.

So for us everything had changed. And they were the ones who changed it.

• • • •

Last week—which seemed like another lifetime—when the enforcing first began, we’d each had our own kind of breakdown.

For Sara Grace, it was when she enforced a nineteen-year-old girl who’d showed up in the city looking for her mother. The girl had been put up for adoption as an infant, had never met her biological mom, and now she was afraid she’d never have the chance. “What if I get to the paradise planet, and everyone looks different, we’re all in different bodies, we all have amnesia, whatever, nothing is the same. I’ll never find her. I just had to take a chance,” she’d said. (Sara Grace recounted this whole thing to me later, sobbing so hard she could hardly talk.)

“Maybe,” the girl had said, “maybe all this time she’s been wondering about me, too. What happened to me. How I look. How I grew up. All I have is her name. There’s a lot of people with her name here. I was just going to go down the phonebook and see what I can find. I think, when I hear her voice, I’ll know.”

“She said that,” Sara Grace screamed and hiccupped at me, crying hysterically, the tears and snot running down her face and mixing together in her mouth. “She said, ‘

When I hear her voice, I’ll know

.’ Just like that.”

Sara Grace’s own mother had passed away two years before, dead of breast cancer at age 53, nine months before Sara Grace applied for nursing school.

This meant one of two things.

The first possibility was that Sara Grace’s mother would never make it to Planet Xyrxiconia, because only those who were alive and breathing at the moment of transition—the moment the laser cannons fired—would be reincarnated in this distant place.

The second possibility was that she was already on Planet X, that all our lost loved ones from eon after eon were already there, that they’d gone before us to prepare the way and would be there to greet us when we arrived.

The aliens had been somewhat unclear on this point, perhaps intentionally.

All we could do was wait and see.

For me, the breakdown was when I had a talk with my brother. He told me he was going to North Carolina. His ex-wife lived there now, with their kid, who was only three; she’d moved back there to be near her family when the marriage fell apart. My brother kept saying maybe he should have tried harder, maybe

they

should have tried harder, maybe they could have made it work. In the face of everything, whatever stupid arguments they’d had, those just didn’t really matter anymore, did they? She was the love of his life—she’d always been—and that was his son, and if these were the last days of his life on Earth he was going to spend it with the two of them.

He cried as he told me this and I cried too.

I should have enforced him.

But I couldn’t. How could I? My own brother?

I should have called for backup. I should have called Sara Grace.

But I didn’t.

On the off-fucking-chance that there was a paradise planet, I wanted to spend eternity there with my brother. And his wife. And their kid. So I let him go.

Other people’s brothers weren’t so lucky. And that’s how I knew that no one was actually headed to paradise.

Because if there is a heaven, that’s not how it works.

I stood on the Brooklyn Bridge for a long time after that, staring off into the distance. I stood there with the wind in my face and the roar and groan and exhaust of traffic to my back. It was chaotic, loud. The water yawned hungrily below. The reason I couldn’t enforce my brother was the same reason I couldn’t jump.

Some ragged, wild-eyed guy showed up after a while and stood beside me. We were quiet, companions in misery.

“You know what I think is funny?” he said after a while.

“What’s that?”

“All these bridges. All these tall buildings. All these train tracks. So inviting.”

“What do you mean?”

“They never even tried to make it difficult. It’s like all along, they’ve just been saying, ‘

Go ahead, we dare you

.’”

“I guess I don’t understand.”

“They said ‘

Don’t do this, don’t do that

.’ But somehow… I dunno. I get the feeling I’m doing them a favor. Anyway, sister, good luck to you. Wherever you end up.”

He jumped and disappeared into the waves below.

When I was a kid, my grandma used to say: “Cassie, if all your friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it too?”

I know, I know, everyone’s grandparents said that. Sometimes our parents said it as well, echoing the lectures they’d been hearing since childhood themselves.

You have to think for yourself; that’s what it meant. Someone has to stand up. Someone has to refuse to follow the crowd.

I didn’t jump. I didn’t do it too. Instead, I went home and sat in the bath and drank until I couldn’t see straight.

The next day at headquarters, they handed out thousands of bottles of Xanax. After that it all got a whole lot easier.

• • • •

It was 9:17 p.m. on Wednesday… almost the end of the world.

We met at headquarters to go over the numbers. We’d had an okay day, but our stats were still down. Everyone’s stats were down.

What I thought—and maybe what a lot of people thought, although no one said it aloud—is that maybe the reason our numbers were down was that we’d already enforced so many people. And, of course, plenty of people had decided to off themselves.

The daring ones, the impulsive ones, the yearning ones, the emotionally unstable ones—they were all gone. The ones who were willing to hold out for paradise, they were the only ones left.

The streets felt awfully empty.

• • • •

11:02 a.m. on Thursday. We enforced a lady euthanizing her six cats, just in case. We enforced a florist standing in the street in front of his shop, liquidating all his stock by handing out flowers to anyone who passed. We enforced an old couple, two women sitting side-by-side and hand-in-hand on the steps of a church, praying for mercy and grace for themselves and everyone they knew.

2:47 p.m. on Thursday. We enforced a young man scattering his father’s ashes. We enforced a young woman taking a dive into the East River. We enforced a young couple making love under a bench in the park and we enforced another young couple locked in a drinking contest.

5:22 p.m. on Thursday. “Less than twenty-four hours to go,” Sara Grace said, and we stood together looking out across the water, watching the sun as it sank toward the Manhattan skyline. “It was a beautiful world,” she said. “This world. It had a lot to offer.”

“Not really,” I said, but maybe that was just a tired old pose, that same old cynicism that made it easier not to get hurt. Now that it was ending, I did feel a pang of loss.

“I just wish we had more time.”

“I think we all do,” I said.

The sun glared red and glinted off the skyscrapers and Sara Grace snuck her tiny hand into mine.

• • • •

That night at headquarters there was something in the air: darkness and restlessness and relief and jubilation all mixed together. It was our last nightly meeting. We were almost done. We were almost there.

There were long, rambling speeches and lots of hand-offs of the mic. There were congratulations and thanks all around. There were midlevel city employees and local politicians. All the managers came out on stage and did a dance routine to show their appreciation for our service.

There was a low rushing undercurrent of whispers and laughter and mumbling at all times, echoing against the concrete floors and walls like the ocean in a seashell. The room felt hot and sweaty, and it stank of beer and cigarettes and human sweat, except I could smell Sara Grace beside me too and she smelled like eucalyptus and jasmine and herself.

They showed us a slideshow with some facts about what we’d accomplished in the past two weeks. They’d coordinated at the highest levels of the project to put this together for us, gathering data from all North American offices. They’d set it to music.

The most active enforcers were in metropolitan areas (no surprise there): Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, New York. Here in New York, we hadn’t done quite as well as L.A., but we couldn’t let that get us down, could we?

Overall enforcement numbers for the United States stacked up surprisingly well against other western countries, demonstrating that despite all the doom and gloom, we Americans really could get organized and pull together when circumstances demanded. One out of every thousand people everywhere had been called to enforce and, of all these, nearly 83% had completed their service to the end, with each enforcer completing an average of about fifteen enforcements per day. Not bad, not bad at all.

We could have done the back-of-the-envelope calculations for ourselves, but they did it for us: almost a billion people vaporized in just eleven days. Talk about efficiency.

And of course, there were all the people who’d gone ahead and taken care of matters themselves.

You’d think there would have been vomiting and sobbing all around, but the music played on, and everyone clapped and cheered.

“Thanks to your hard work and vigilance,” said our top-top manager, who reported directly to the Department of Transition, “We’ve provided real incentives for our citizens to respect the guidelines established by our interstellar visitors. Because of you, we can expect to see nearly eighty percent of our pre-contact population make a successful transition to Xyrxiconia! Give yourself one more round of applause, folks!”

We’d done it.

We were almost there.

• • • •

After the last headquarters meeting of all time, we flooded into the nearby bars for drinks.

Sara Grace and I found ourselves sitting across from two guys, partners like us. We shouted over the noise of the bar and we drank and drank and drank. “Here’s what I think,” the one guy said. He leaned in close to us, partly because what he was saying was controversial, and partly because it was the only way he could make himself heard. We could see the pores on his nose, the crinkles around his eyes. “Here’s what I think. I think they’re conmen. Intergalactic fraudsters. How many aliens actually landed? Didn’t we hear it was something like a few hundred thousand? Maybe half a mil? It was just one ship, right?”

“It was a

generation ship

,” Sara Grace corrected him. “They’d been living on that thing for ages. It was huge.”

“But still,” he said. “Say it was a million, tops. They’ve got ray guns, right? They’ve got those universal translators, whatever. We’ve practically got that shit ourselves. They’ve got technology and weapons. But we could still take them. We’ve got numbers. We’re spread out.”

“But they don’t want to fight us. They’re here to help.”

“Or maybe that’s just what they said. You know the number one rule of being a conman? Offer the mark something he really, really

wants

.”

“Like heaven.”

“But maybe they’re really here to help themselves to a new planet. Maybe their whole goal was to trick us into getting rid of ourselves, do the work for them. Decimate our own fucking population so they can move on in, help themselves.”

Sara Grace was staring at him in open-mouthed horror. I wasn’t. I’d thought of this already.

His partner wasn’t appalled, either. He looked bored. Irritated. “You know what I think?” he said. “I think there aren’t any aliens. Alien conmen? It’s ridiculous. Aliens don’t understand human psychology. Humans do. I think it’s a government plot. Eliminate excess population. Exert control.”

“But of course there are aliens,” Sara Grace said. “People have seen them.”

“People? What people? Do you know anyone who’s actually seen one? Or is it all just rumor and somebody-who-knows-somebody-who-said?”

“There was that one in the picture.

Everyone

saw that.”

“Photos can be faked. They wanted a world full of scared, docile, delusional bootlickers. Well, congratulations everyone, it’s finally here.”

We clinked our glasses and drank.

• • • •

On Friday at 11:55 a.m. the aliens held a press conference. Or rather, their human mouthpieces held a press conference, speaking on behalf of the aliens, who were hunkered down somewhere cool, dark, and safe.

They thanked us effusively for our cooperation and congratulated us on a successful interplanetary transition period. They suggested that at least thirty minutes prior to the appointed hour all citizens should retreat to their homes, where they should wait calmly and quietly for the final transition to begin.

“Congratulations, once again,” transmitted the human avatar. “There will be no further instructions. This is our final message.”

• • • •

The Department of Transition rented a vast convention center where we could spend the final hours. We did our last check-in at 2 p.m., then headed over. They herded us into infinite ballrooms stuffed with big screen televisions and an endless spread of hors d’oeuvres.

Sara Grace and I found a spot on the sidelines. It was 3:27 p.m., and it was almost the end of the world—very soon now. We sat on folding chairs and I watched the talking heads on the television babble about the moment to come and Sara Grace nibbled at a small plate of cheese and crackers and tried not to throw up. She was still disturbed by last night’s conversation. She hadn’t slept at all.

“I miss my family,” she said. “I wish I was home.”

It went on and on. In other places it was night. The citizens sat in their darkened living rooms with one candle lit. In other places it was morning. The city streets were as silent and deserted as they’d ever been. From around the world, the video feeds flooded in.

Around 4 p.m. the anchors started going off the air. By 4:30 p.m. all the channels were static and the screens went dark.

“I need some air,” Sara Grace said. She put her uneaten plate of cheese and crackers on the floor and left it; I’d never seen her do anything like that before. “Come on,” she said, and took my hand and dragged me out through the crowded ballroom and into a frigid hallway.

We found a secluded spot, a tiny conference room with a table for eight. It was empty. The clock on the wall read 4:39.

“It might be fast,” I said, looking at it.

Tick-tock, tick-tock

.

“Or slow,” she countered. We sat on the ugly carpet, backs against the wall, out of sight of the glass panel set into the door.

“If we get there,” she said, “to Planet Xyrxiconia, do you think we’ll recognize each other? Different bodies and all?”

“Yes. I like to think so.”

“I guess the real challenge would be finding each other. What if everyone reincarnates on their own private island?”

“Be a hell of a lot of private islands. A planet of archipelagos.”

She giggled. “Oh well,” she said. “I guess we never get as much time as we want, no matter how long it is.” She looked at me, long and wistful, and I don’t know who started it, but we were kissing. Kissing hard. Gasping for breath. Unbuttoning each other’s shirts, groping blindly, crying a little and still kissing and touching as hard as we could, stretched out on the floor beneath the whiteboard, longing for more.

I think I knew in my heart of hearts that I could’ve been anyone, that it didn’t matter, that we weren’t in love or anything—at least she wasn’t in love with me; I just happened to be there.

I didn’t care.

There was a burst and clatter at the door, and we pulled away from each other, quickly, guiltily. The door came swinging open and another enforcer strode in.

We licked our lips, wiped our mouths, moved to button our shirts, and she stared at us, her hand moving uncertainly toward the mister hanging at her side. There was a long, tense, unbearable moment.

Then she pointed at the clock.

It was Friday and it was 5:13 p.m.

We straightened our clothes and followed her out into the hallway where the enforcers were congregating in anguished, heaving clusters around the windows and gesticulating toward the ground below. We could only see their backs, but we could hear: the clatter of gunfire, the moan and wail and scream of sirens, the low rumble of tanks.

It was 5:15 p.m. on a Friday, and it was

almost

the end of the world.

Almost. But not quite. We still had a long, long way to go.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Desirina Boskovich has published fiction in

Lightspeed

,

Nightmare

,

Realms of Fantasy

,

Fantasy Magazine

, and

Clarkesworld

, and in the anthologies

The Way of the Wizard

,

Aliens: Recent Encounters

, and

Last Drink Bird Head

. She is also the editor of the anthology

It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction

and is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Find her online at desirinaboskovich.com.

Charlie Jane Anders – BREAK! BREAK! BREAK!

Earliest I remember, Daddy threw me off the roof of our split-level house. “Boy’s gotta learn to fall sometime,” he told my mom just before he slung my pants-seat and let go. As I dropped, Dad called out instructions, but they tangled in my ears. I was four or five. My brother caught me one-handed, gave me a spank, and dropped me on the lawn. Then up to the roof for another go round, with my body more slack this time.

From my dad, I learned there were just two kinds of bodies: falling, and falling on fire.

My dad was a stuntman with a left-field resemblance to an actor named Jared Gilmore who’d been in some TV show before I was born, and he’d gotten it in his head Jared was going to be the next big action movie star. My father wanted to be Jared’s personal stunt double and “prosthetic acting device,” but Jared never responded to the letters, emails, and websites, and Dad got a smidge persistent, which led to some restraining orders and blacklisting. Now he was stuck in the boonies doing stunts for TV movies about people who survive accidents. My mama did data entry to cover the rest of the rent. My dad was determined that my brother Holman and I would know the difference between a real and a fake punch, and how to roll with either kind.

My life was pretty boring until I went to school. School was so great! Slippery just-waxed hallways, dodgeball, sandboxplosions, bullies with big elbows, food fights. Food fights! If I could have gone to school for twenty hours a day, I would have signed up. No, twenty-three! I only ever really needed one hour of sleep per day. I didn’t know who I was and why I was here until I went to school. And did I mention authority figures? School had authority figures! It was so great!

I love authority figures. I never get tired of pulling when they push, or pushing when they pull. In school, grown-ups were always telling me to write on the board, and then I’d fall down or drop the eraser down my pants by mistake, or misunderstand and knock over a pile of giant molecules. Erasers are comedy gold! I was kind of a hyper kid. They tried giving me ritalin ritalin ritalin ritalin riiiitaliiiiin, but I was one of the kids who only gets more hyper-hyper on that stuff. Falling, in the seconds between up and down—you know what’s going on. People say something is as easy as falling off a log, but really it’s easy to fall off anything. Really, try it. Falling rules!

Bullies learned there was no point in trying to fuck me up, because I would fuck myself up faster than they could keep up with. They tried to trip me up in the hallways, and it was just an excuse for a massive set piece involving mops, stray book bags, audio/video carts, and skateboards. Limbs flailing, up and down trading places, ten fingers of mayhem. Crude stuff. I barely had a sense of composition. Every night until 3 a.m., I sucked up another stack of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, or Jackie Chan movies on the ancient laptop my parents didn’t know I had, hiding under my quilt. Safety Last!

Ricky Artesian took me as a personal challenge. A huge guy with a beachball jaw—he put a kid in the hospital for a month in fifth grade for saying anybody who didn’t ace this one chemistry quiz had to be a moron. Some time after that, Ricky stepped to me with a Sharpie in the locker room and slashed at my arms and ribcage, marking the bones he wanted to break. Then he walked away, leaving the whole school whispering, “Ricky Sharpied Rock Manning!”

I hid when I didn’t have class, and when school ended, I ran home three miles to avoid the bus. I figured Ricky would try to get me in an enclosed space where I couldn’t duck and weave, so I stayed wide open. If I needed the toilet, I swung into the stall through a ventilator shaft and got out the same way, so nobody saw me enter or leave. The whole time in the airshaft, my heart cascaded. This went on for months, and my whole life became not letting Ricky Artesian mangle me.

One day I got careless and went out to the playground with the other kids during recess, because some teacher was looking. I tried to watch for trouble, but a giant hand swooped down from the swing set and hauled me up. I dangled a moment, then the hand let me fall to the sand. I fell on my back and started to get up, but Ricky told me not to move. For some reason, I did what he said, even though I saw twenty-seven easy ways out of that jungle-gym cage, and then Ricky stood over me. He told me again to hold still, then brought one boot down hard on the long bone of my upper arm, a clean snap—my reward for staying put. “Finally got that kid to quit hopping,” I heard him say as he walked across the playground. Once my arm healed up, I became a crazy frog again, and Ricky didn’t bother me.