Milo took his left hand off the controller for a second to punch David in the arm. “Maybe if you didn’t let so many get past you I wouldn’t be back here cleaning up your mess.”
The snake slithered from the room. His Pilot wouldn’t let her distract him, but David and Milo kept talking in that weird aggressive zombie-hunter-speak. She didn’t like when David’s friends were around; he was different with them than he was with family.
Julie rounded the corner. “Sophie! Are you okay? What are you doing on the floor?”
She sighed. “I’m fine, Mom. Just playing.”
Mom gave her a weird look but seemed to take her word for it.
“Are you bothering your brother? Why don’t you go read a book?”
The snake formed legs. Evolved. Rolled its eyes in its most obvious fashion. She would be the most well-read kid in the history of fifth grade. That was all they ever wanted her to do, read books. She couldn’t get hurt reading a book. Actually, she probably could, if the Big One came out to play. It could make her gash her head on the spine of a hardcover, or fall while she reached for a high shelf. If the Big One had its way, she would sit in the middle of a room full of pillows for the rest of her life. Her mothers would probably breathe relieved sighs, too. Maybe she was the only one who cared if she ever got to do anything.
She went to her room, trailing her hand along the smooth coolness of the wall as she walked. She wouldn’t read; she had better things to do. David chased fake monsters in his video games, but she had a real one to kill.
She pulled her sketch pad and colored pencils from her desk. The Big One, as always, needed to be drawn in gray, graphite, 4B soft pencil. It took different shapeless shapes each time. When she figured out what it looked like, it changed again; that was how it kept ahead of her. She drew herself standing on top of it, stabbing it with a sword.
She rummaged in her desk, this time for her geometry compass. She used the sharp point, the one that was supposed to be the circle’s center, to prick her pointer finger. One dot of blood welled up.
She couldn’t remember ever having been squeamish about blood, though she didn’t know which came first, the acceptance that she was a human pincushion or the fact of being a human pincushion. She’d heard other kids screaming and wailing, but it didn’t do any good. They still got poked and prodded; might as well cooperate and earn a reputation as a good trouper.
She stared at the beading blood, trying to see where it ended and medication began. The doctors and nurses and moms always talked about titers and blood levels. They had done it for so long she’d begun to understand some of it. The medication she took every day by mouth somehow found its way into her blood. The right amount of the right medication would banish all her seizures forever, the Big One and the Small Ones and the Ones That Shall Not Be Named, but they hadn’t found the right medication yet, or the right amount, or something.
She smeared blood into the graphite on the page, the skin and the fur and the sword wound, until the Big One was reddish-gray. Someday her blood would kill it dead, just like this. She tore the drawing out of her sketchbook and hid it in her secret box under her bed.
Back to the sketchbook, this time to draw a boy sniffing a rose with a bee in it. She tried to make the boy look like David, and the drawing look like a normal drawing her parents would laugh about if they went snooping. Nothing like the monsters under her bed.
• • •
“Dinner!”
First call meant the food was almost ready, but the first kid to appear got stuck setting the table. Normally Sophie would hang back and hope David beat her to the kitchen. She preferred cleaning afterward, so if she had a seizure and dropped something, she wasn’t wasting any food or making people cranky. Today, because she’d been home all day, she decided it wouldn’t hurt to look conscientious.
She considered slithering all the way downstairs, but she was starting to feel less snakelike, and any points she got for prompt arrival would cancel out if she acted weird. They’d decide she shouldn’t help, and then David would get annoyed with her when he had to do it all. She missed their old chore chart, but David skipped so many dinners these days they’d abandoned the system. She also missed the old David who didn’t get irritated, but her parents said he was just being a teenager.
“Dinner!” Val made the second call.
Sophie bounded into the kitchen before she lost the advantage of volunteering instead of being drafted. “I’m here! Four or five?”
“Four.” Val was transferring pasta from the colander to a serving bowl and didn’t look up. “Milo went home, I’m pretty sure.”
Sophie took advantage of her ma’s inattention and stepped on a chair to reach the plates. For days after a seizure, even a minor one like at the mall the day before, they always got extra protective. No standing on chairs. No reaching for heavy things. If her ma hadn’t been concentrating on the food, she might not have even let Sophie carry plates or glasses to the table.
She did those first, plates and glasses, before anyone said she couldn’t. Then the water pitcher from the fridge, then napkins. She did full silverware, in the proper order, just to show off, even though it was silly to put knives on the table when they were eating penne and salad.
“The table looks lovely, Soph. Thanks for helping.” Ma carried the serving bowl to the dining room herself,
