Scorpion Shards

to call me when I lived in Florida.”

“Where’d you live, the Everglades?” jabbed Winston. “Are you a swamp thing?”

Tory didn’t answer. Even in the dim light Winston could see her puffy eyes filling with tears.

“Okay,” said Winston. “Truce?”

“Truce,” echoed Tory, rubbing the tears from her eyes before they had a chance to fall. Tears would probably make her face sting, thought Winston.

“You always go looking in people’s windows at night, scarin’ ’em half to death?” he asked, wiping his bloody nose.

“Sun’s bad for my delicate complexion,” said Tory, “so I do all my exploring at night. People don’t see me that way. Suits me just fine.”

“Does your face . . . hurt?”

“All the time.” She leaned a bit closer to him, whisper­ing. “Is it true you’re growing backward?”

“What do you care?” snapped Winston.

“I came looking for you because I heard what people said about you. I wanted you to touch my face . . . para­lyze it so I couldn’t feel it at all, and maybe it would stop hurting.”

Winston shook his head. “But you don’t paralyze like the others. . . . Why?”

Just then their faces were lit by a light in the sky, shin­ing brighter than the crescent moon. The cotton around them glowed green for a moment and then pink. At first Winston took it to be the sheriff’s spotlight, but the color was wrong—and it was too high up.

They stood up to get a better look. It was an uneven ball of light, maybe a fourth the size of the moon. It hurt their eyes to look at it.

Winston backed up to a fence post leaning on it for bal­ance. The light had triggered something inside of him, and he thought he might pass out. All at once, his brain was firing like crazy, and he was filled with an overpower­ing sense of wonder and confusion, as if all his life he had been sleeping and was just waking up. But of all the con­fused feelings and thoughts that rocketed through his head, the most overwhelming feeling of all was the sense that this light in the sky, whatever it was, was meant for him.

“It’s incredible,” said Tory. “I’ve never . . . felt any­thing like it.”

Winston looked over at Tory and could see in her rapid breathing and wonder-filled eyes that she was hit by the same devastating wave of emotion that he felt. She had the same revelation that this odd light in the sky did not just hit their eyes, it ignited their souls.

It made Winston furious!

Whatever that light was, it was for him and him alone. He didn’t want to have to share such a special thing with this hideous girl beside him. It would mean that they didn’t meet tonight by accident—they were drawn to­ gether—somehow bound like soulmates. Winston found the thought unbearable.

“I . . . know you, don’t I?” asked Tory. “We’re the same, you and me!” She said it with such excitement, it made Winston cringe.

“We might both be freaks,” growled Winston, “but I ain’t nothin’ like you! We got nothin’ in common, do you hear me?!”

It was then that Winston noticed the noise. It had been growing all around both of them since the light had ap­peared in the sky, and now its volume grew and multi­plied until it buzzed in the brush like an air-raid siren. Winston knew right then that the sound was aimed at the two of them, and no one else in all of Alabama—and he knew that it was a sign he could not deny. The sound was nature itself, screaming out to tell him that this torturously ugly girl was more his sister than anyone born to his fam­ily. More like him than anyone he had known.

“What is it?” asked Tory, holding her ears. Winston tried to squeeze out the sound as well, but couldn’t.

“Crickets,” answered Winston. “Millions of’em.”

3. A Planetoid, The Full Moon And The Scorpion Star

Earlier that same day, and a thousand miles northeast, the south fork of eastern Long Island was set upon by an unseasonably warm fog. It brooded dense and round on the weather maps like a gray cataract—an un­seeing eye surrounded by cold, clear skies. Shrouded in the center of the fog stood Hampton Bays High School, where things had been normal until third period. That’s when the chase began for Lourdes Hidalgo.

It started in the science lab, and the chase spread through the school as Lourdes tried to escape from the teachers who chased her. She had lost them by ducking into a broom closet, and now she descended the south stairwell, hoping that everyone would be thrown off track just long enough for her to burst out into the foggy Octo­ ber day and freedom.

As Lourdes lumbered down the worn metal stairs of the old school, the stairs rang out in dull, heavy tolls, like an ancient mission bell. The bolts creaked, and the steel steps themselves seemed like cardboard, ready to give way under her immense weight.

Lourdes, however, had grown used to that. She was used to chairs buckling beneath her when she sat. She was used to the way her hips would brush past both sides of a door frame when she entered a room, as if the entire room was a tight pair of pants she was trying to squeeze her way into. But she would never get used to the cruel teasing.

Now Lourdes was bounding down the metal stairs, two steps at a time, running from teachers, the guidance coun­selor and the principal. Ralphy Sherman had deserved what Lourdes had done to him, and so she fought back her tears, and fought the remorse that was trying to take hold of her.

Ralphy had been whispering lies about Lourdes in sci­ence lab, as if he himself believed they were true. Did you hear that Lourdes was offered ten grand to join the circus? Did you hear that Lurdes donates fat to the Southampton Candle Factory? Did you hear they found some loose change and a VCR remote in Lourdes’s belly button? Lourdes tried to control herself. She bit her tongue and gritted her teeth, but there’s only so much abuse a person can take. She wanted to hurt him as much as he hurt her—as much as they all hurt her, and so she pushed Ralphy up against the wall, held her hand firmly on his chest, and felt his chest begin to crush in­ward. Ralphy tried to scream, but couldn’t. His face turned red, purple, then blue. By then the teacher had taken notice, and came running, so Lourdes stepped away from the limp blue kid, and he fell to the floor. Lourdes ran.

Now, as she lumbered down the stairs she cursed the steps and the way they rang out every time her bursting orthopedic shoes hit them.

It was at the first floor landing that Lourdes encoun­tered Mrs. Conroy, the principal of Hampton Bays High.

“Hold it right there, Lourdes.” She stood ten steps be­neath Lourdes, and her voice was well trained to wield power—power enough to stop the grossly obese girl in her tracks. Lourdes swayed just a bit, and the steps creaked like the hinges of a rusty door. There wasn’t any sympathy from anyone in school this year—not even the principal. It was as if sympathy and understanding were limited to a certain waist size, and if a person grew beyond that limit, they were fair game for all forms of cruelty.

“You are coming to the office,” said Mrs. Conroy, “and we’re calling your parents. What you’ve done is very serious, do you understand?”

“Of course I understand,” said Lourdes. “I’m fat, not stupid.” Her voice was thick and seemed to be wrapped within heavy, wet layers of cotton. When Lourdes spoke, it sounded as if she was shouting from inside the belly of a whale.

“I didn’t kill him, did I?” asked Lourdes.

“No,” said Mrs. Conroy, “but you could have.”

Lourdes was relieved and disappointed at the same time.

“This school has had about enough of you,” growled Conroy.

“Does that mean I’m expelled?”

“We’ll talk about it in my office.”