Scorpion Shards

Michael shrugged and looked away. “She kissed me. So?”

“Don’t you mean you kissed her?”

Michael smiled slyly. “What makes you so sure?”

Fleiderman grunted slightly. Michael could see irrita­tion building in the mild-mannered man.

“I want to understand where you’re coming from, Mi­chael.”

“Baltimore.”

“No, inside. I want to understand you.”

That made Michael laugh out loud. “Good luck.”

“I know you keep yourself pretty busy with the girls in school. I know you’re . . . shall we say . . . ‘active.’ '

“Active?” said Michael. “Like a volcano?”

“Sexually active.”

“Oh,” said Michael. “That.” He looked away again and paced around to the other side of the sycamore. Fleiderman followed, and Michael noted how the guid­ance counselor’s irritation had already built into frustra­ tion.

“I make out a lot,” explained Michael. “I don’t go much past that. Second base, maybe. You know.”

“Am I supposed to believe that?”

“Believe what you want,” said Michael. And then Mi­chael smiled again, “but to tell you the truth, sex scares me.

“Why?” asked Fleiderman. “Afraid you might ex­plode?”

Michael shrugged. “Yeah. Or that the girl might.”

Fleiderman laughed uncomfortably, but Michael didn’t. He became dead serious and noticed that Fleiderman’s hands had involuntarily tightened into fists.

“Let’s get back to Miss Benson,” said Fleiderman. He reached up to wipe steam from his glasses.

“What happened wasn’t all my fault, okay?” said Mi­chael, beginning to say more than he had really wanted to. “She didn’t have to keep me after class to talk about my book report. She didn’t have to come up to me and touch my shoulder like that—and she didn’t have to kiss me back when I kissed her.”

Fleiderman gritted his teeth. Michael could see his anger heading toward meltdown. There was no logical reason for it; Michael wasn’t antagonizing him—Michael was, in fact, being honest and spilling his guts, just like Fleiderman wanted. Still the guidance counselor seethed with anger. “Miss Benson will be dealt with,” Fleiderman said. “But now we’re talking about you and your problem of self-control!”

“How the hell am I supposed to control myself when all the girls in school are after me, and all the guys want to beat the crap out of me?”

Fleiderman’s whole face seemed clenched as he spat his words out. “Oh, I see. Everyone either loves you or hates you. You’re the center of the universe and everyone’s ac­tions revolve around you.”

“Yeah,” said Michael. “That’s it!”

“Delusions!” shouted Fleiderman. He was furious, and Fleiderman never got furious at anything. Staying calm was his job. “It’s all in your head!” he shouted.

“Oh yeah?” Michael took a step closer to Fleiderman. Michael was five-seven, Fleiderman closer to six feet. “What do you feel now, Mr. Fleiderman? Do you feel re­ally pissed off? Do you want to grab me and rip my head off? It’s like you’re turning into a werewolf inside, isn’t it? An animal. Everyone who hangs around me long enough starts acting like an animal out of control. They either want to kill me or kiss me. Actually I’m glad that you’d rather kill me.”

Meltdown! Fleiderman lost it, and he lunged at Mi­chael, grabbing him by the throat. Michael pushed him away, but Fleiderman lunged again, growling—baring his teeth like a mad dog. Fleiderman smashed the boy with the back of his hand, then threw Michael to the ground; Michael tried to scramble away, but Fleiderman was too fast. He was on Michael, pinning him to the ground; he raised his heavy fist, ready to bring it across Michael’s jaw with a blow that would surely break it.

“Stop!” said Michael. “They’re watching!”

Fleiderman’s wild uneven breath gave way to a whine as he looked up to see that the fog had lifted just enough for the school windows to be seen all around them. Faces peered out from classrooms on all sides, as if this was a Roman circus and Michael was fodder for the lion.

“Kill him, Fleiderman,” shouted some kid from the third floor. “Kill the creep!”

Fleiderman could have—it was in his power, and it was certainly in his eyes; instead, the guidance counselor bit his own lip and continued biting it until it bled. Then he fell off of Michael and crouched in a humiliated heap, try­ ing to find himself once more.

“My God!” muttered Fleiderman. “What am I doing? What’s wrong with me?”

“It’s not you,” said Michael, refusing to let his own tears out. “It’s me. I turn people crazy. I’m like . . . a full moon, only worse.”

Fleiderman wiped blood from his lips as he crouched low, still unable to look up at Michael.

“You won’t be going to this school anymore,” he told Michael, finally getting to the bottom line.

“I’m being expelled?”

“Transferred.” Which to Michael was the same thing.

Fleiderman began to breathe hard, fighting back words of anger. Michael could tell because his face was turning red, and although Michael felt like kicking Fleiderman in the gut, he didn’t. Instead he dug deep within himself, to find a feeling that was decent, and when he found it, Michael took his hand and gently rested it on Fleiderman’s hunched shoulder.

“It’s all right,” said Michael. “You can say it if it makes you feel better—it doesn’t bother me.”

“I hate you!” screamed Fleiderman. “I hate your guts!”

“Say it again.”

“I hate you . . .'Just saying the words seem to release some of Fleiderman’s steam. He quivered the tiniest bit.

Although those words hurt, they also gave Michael a sense of control. He could bring people down to their knees in love or hate, altering their very nature. He could turn a bright, sunny disposition into a storming fury. He could turn the heart of an ice-queen into hot steam. Such awesome power must be worth something.

Michael patted Fleiderman’s shoulder and turned to leave. As Michael crossed the quad, his thoughts became a bit clearer and what fog was left in his own mind began to lift, along with the fog in the quad. Now that the worst was over, he felt relieved as he went back into school to clear out his locker.

As Michael left the quad, Fleiderman began to feel his fury fading. In a moment, Fleiderman’s humanity came crawling back to him, and he began to condemn himself and obsess over this awful thing he had just done—for no reason he could figure out. He felt ashamed and terrified.

Love and hate being two sides of the same coin, Fleid­erman began to wonder if the unfortunate Miss Benson also felt this way once Michael Lipranski had been removed from her company.

***

That night, while the rest of the Eastern seaboard was densely padded with storm systems, a patch of clear sky stalled over eastern Long Island, making it a perfect night for the annual star-watch. After sunset, four dozen kids gathered to spend an evening on Montauk Point with their science teacher, peering through his telescope, draw­ing star maps by flashlight, and calculating the speed of the Earth’s rotation.

Both Michael and Lourdes were advised not to come, which was more certain to assure their attendance than giving them a printed invitation. Michael, who had been sporting a fake license for almost a year now, drove up in his father’s van, and no one was quite sure how or when Lourdes got there; at times she was amazingly stealthy for a girl of her size.

Montauk Point was a state park surrounded by cold, rough ocean on three sides, and the bluff beyond the light­house was the farthest east one could get in the state of New York. It was the tip of Long Island and simply as far as you could go. Unless, of course, you chose to take one step further east—off the cliff and into the sea.

It was around eleven that night that Michael Lipranski stood at the tip of the lighthouse bluff, contemplating that final step east that would send him plunging to his death in the cold breakers.