ragged. It was a nervous habit born out of quitting smoking. Any time she looked at her nails, she thought maybe lung cancer was preferable to the complaints she got when she tried to get her manicurist to fix them.
'C'mon,' she told him, opening her door. 'We're going to be late.'
She slammed the driver side door closed but the sixteen- year old did not move. Dan just sat there, sweatshirt hood pulled up over his head, arms folded across his chest. His skateboard was on the floor in the back and her eyes flickered to it. The skate punk thing was just the latest identity he'd tried on, and she wondered how long it would be before he shed this one. Every time she saw him in those baggy pants she shivered. To her eyes, he looked like a criminal. That was a terrible thought, but there was no escaping it. It was difficult for her to conceive that these kids looked at one another — or at each other — and thought that they looked good.
The one thing that never changed was the music. Whether it was Taking Back Sunday or Rancid — and wasn't that band name apropos? — it was much the same as the clothes he wore. Julia simply could not understand the attraction. She wasn't a fool. She didn't expect him to listen to things she liked, old Peter Gabriel and David Bowie, or Genesis. Music was a personal thing. It spoke to your heart, or it didn't. But with a couple of exceptions, the sort of thing Danny listened to was just… it was awful. Ugly. How could he not see that?
Julia knew that he'd had a rough year — his father walking out on them, the condition that gave his skin a weathered, leathery texture — and she wished she could make it all go away, give him the perfect life she'd hoped for since he was a baby. But life threw you curves. No way could she have predicted his medical problem. Trying to balance her sympathy for him with her frustration at his behavior was enough to drive her to drink… or at least to run back to her cigarette habit and beg a pack of Winston Lights to forgive her.
Things were bound to get better. That's what she told herself while she was biting her nails. Things had to get better. She was determined to help Dan in any way she could and had begun home schooling him with the finest tutors and making appointments with the best dermatologists and psychologists. Julia still remembered the loving little boy he had been. He had filled her with so much happiness. She wanted that boy back.
No matter what it cost.
'Daniel Ferrick, get out of that car right now,' she yelled, her voice reverberating against the low concrete ceiling of the garage. There was a quaver in it, but she promised herself she would not break down.
Slowly, he turned to look at her through the glass and scowled. His skin was getting worse right along with his attitude. They had first diagnosed it as a unique form of eczema, but she soon came to realize that none of them really had the first clue what it was. They kept going for tests and various special medications, and pills were prescribed, but nothing seemed to help. When the two pronounced bumps appeared just above his temples last week, he had nearly had a breakdown. And in private, in her bathroom with the shower running, Julia had wept for him. She'd snuck a cigarette and blown the smoke out her bedroom window, hoping he wouldn't smell it. Whatever else might be done for him, Julia knew they both needed to see the family psychologist.
'Doctor Sundin is going to be really ticked if we're late again,' she said, tapping the glass with the knuckle of her hand. 'Let's go.'
She couldn't even remember the last time she'd heard him laugh or seen him smile. It tore her up inside, but at the same time, it was becoming increasingly difficult to live with.
The passenger door popped open and Dan slunk from the vehicle. The hood of his sweatshirt was pulled so far down over his head that it completely hid his face in shadows. Over the last week or so he had begun wearing gloves in public to conceal his skin condition, and the way his fingernails had started to grow tough and jagged. The way other kids dressed these days, nobody had seemed to notice.
Julia reached out to her son and rubbed his head through the heavy cotton hood. She remembered her teenage bout with acne but could not even begin to imagine what it must be like for the boy. He roughly jerked away from her affections.
'Don't do that,' he spat at her. 'It hurts me.'
The boy's mother bit her tongue and walked toward the garage's Boylston Street exit. She glanced at her watch. If they hurried they would only be a few minutes late. Julia hoped Daniel would speak to Doctor Sundin about his self-image problems, and how they affected his relationship with her and his father. She planned to avoid any mention of his clothes or his music. Those things got under her skin, but they were superficial. The real problems were so much deeper.
As she glanced back to confirm that Daniel was indeed following, she wondered how much of his personality change could be attributed to Roger walking out on them. Irreconcilable differences, he'd told his lawyer. The son of a bitch took the coward's exit, she thought, remembering all the sleepless nights as her son yowled in his bed, the skin condition so irritating that he scratched himself bloody trying to stop the itch. Then there were the violent mood swings, and the complete change in the boy's personality. Yeah, she thought. Roger got off easy. There was a small part of her that envied him. The bastard.
Julia Ferrick pushed the disturbing thoughts from her mind and turned to wait for her son to catch up. She was standing in front of a high, wrought iron fence and beyond it she could see children at play in the yard of the daycare facility headquartered there. The kids squealed and laughed as they ran about under the supervision of their minders. It was a nice sound, one that she hadn't heard in a very long time.
'I'm coming,' Dan mumbled, head down, gloved hands shoved deep into his sweatshirt pockets.
'I know,' she told him, trying her best to keep her temper in check. 'I just thought I'd wait for you.'
Dan kicked at a piece of gum, crushed flat upon the sidewalk. 'Don't do me any favors,' he mumbled as he scuffed at the pink refuse with the toe of his sneaker.
Julia Ferrick was about to say something she was sure to regret when she noticed that a little girl, no older than five, now stood on the other side of the metal gate watching them. The child sniffled, her hand slowly rising to her face to rub at her eyes. The little girl began to cry.
'What's the matter, sweetie?' Julia asked.
'Don't feel good,' the small child whined, beginning to cry all the harder. Julia moved closer to the gate, wanting to get the attention of one of the daycare workers, when the child in front of her began to retch. Thick streams of milky white vomit poured from her mouth to splash upon the sidewalk, spattering her shiny, black patent leather shoes.
Julia was about to comfort the little girl through the thick bars of the metal gate when motion at the periphery of her vision caught her attention. She glanced down upon the puddle of vomit at the child's feet.
It was moving.
Now matter how badly she wanted to, Julia Ferrick could not pull her eyes away from the horrific sight. The child had regurgitated maggots; not just one or five or even twenty, but hundreds of them.
'I trew up bugs,' the child whined over and over again in a dazed chorus. 'I trew up bugs. I trew up bugs. I trew up bugs.'
Julia felt that she might be sick as well, and finally tore her gaze away to look upon the playground for help.
'Could somebody — anybody — help here please!' she cried out, on the verge of panic. Then she saw that the staff was in a panic of activity, the other children sick as well, all of them throwing up as the little girl at the fence had done.
One of the staff members fainted, hitting the ground dangerously close to an undulating pile of maggot infested sick.
'Got to call 911,' she mumbled, reaching into her bag for her cell phone. 'This isn't right. It isn't right at all.'
Julia hit the emergency button that would immediately dial for help and brought the phone up to her ear, gazing into the playground at the children all in the grip of sickness. They were all crying, some curled into convulsing balls on the ground. Even the little girl at the fence now lay at the base of the gate, trembling as if freezing.
This was a nightmare, she thought as the voice on the other end of the phone asked her to state her emergency.
The worlds were about to leave her mouth when she noticed that her son now gripped the black iron bars of the gate in his gloved hands. His hood had fallen away to reveal his closely cropped hair and the condition that had changed his face and the skin of his entire body. The bumps upon his forehead seemed more pronounced, red and angry as though ready to burst.
As he stared intensely through the bars at the children overcome with illness, Daniel Ferrick made a sound
