We're interested in your hallucinations, Mr. Thompson. Taym, right? What your friends call you.It's a kind of heroism. It will do.
He puts the bow in her hair because April is afraid people will think she is a little boy. All pink frilly onesies and tiny barrettes.
"Look how sweet she is, April."
"She's totally sweet. Get your shoes on, your mom's going to be here in like ten minutes, slacker."
The future is enormous and bright and wonderful.
Harley came running to him after school and demanded justice. Like he could beat anyone up. He had a reputation as a bully, but not that kind.
Never mind. He came home nursing bloodied knuckles and a grin.
He was, he felt, an exceptional human being. It gave him license to do things. He was permitted. He was a means to an end.
This is what he told himself as he casually slid the wallet off the table he was bussing and into his sleeve.
(40 pts)
She was reading Lolita. She was sitting in the hard chairs, in the general misery, and she was reading a well-worn copy of Lolita.
(Love is a chemical reaction)
The dog is not a dog. It is a beast that grins at him across the street, and he walks faster. He tells himself he's seeing things.
Yeah, his own brain retorts. Things that are
there.
He feels her neck as fragile as a dry twig in his fingers and she stares at him with disappointment, but without fear.
happy birthday to you,
happy birthday to you,
happy birthday dear Tuesday--
(that was the night he took the call)
He's wearing his sleeves rolled down past the elbow again. She hasn't noticed yet. He tests the bottle on the inside of his wrist where the veins run like blue ropes.
It's been twenty one days and Tuesday is at home so he says yes.
Be a good dog, Grim.
Valium's running out, he tells him.
"Can you blow smoke rings?"
He can't, not well anyway, not with just a cigarette.
"I'm researching a Great American Novel. It's called Anonymous. It's about the plight of the American poor."
She snorts.
"Taym," she says, voice breaking, "I have something I need to tell you."
The man with the stretched-out shadow says something that Taym is positive isn't the Russian he'd heard him speaking moments before. It doesn't sound like any language on Earth.
"Give me whatever you're arming me with and tell me where to stand."
"Coffee or tea?"
He steals the cigarettes out of his uncle's pockets.
The jacket doesn't smell like someone else's bodily fluids, so he takes it.
He shoved the bottle into the floor and she jumped but didn't stop crying.
He stood beside the bed crying and unashamed because the world was huge and terrifying and he was tiny and weak, and she was tinier and weaker still with her useless flailing tiny hands, and he said: "I still think Tuesday is a stupid name."
(36 points)
40 + 36 = 76TOTAL POINTS TO EXCALIBUR: 326
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