Raising Stony Mayhall Read Online Free PDF Page B

special and God loves me and please don’t go outside. I need someone to tell me the truth.”
    She looked out into the dark fields, lips pursed. Moonlight and shadow carved her angular face into something ancient and severe, an Egyptian sculpture. Mom said Chelsea was the pretty one, but it was Alice whose face he studied, that he loved most.
    “Here’s the truth, John,” she said finally. “We don’t know
what
you are. Those people from the outbreak are nothing like you. They wanted to attack and kill people, and you wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
    “Maybe that’s because Mom found me so early.”
    “That’s another thing—I’m pretty sure the living dead aren’t supposed to grow. They don’t start out as babies and turn into kids.”
    “Really?”
    “Pretty sure. So whatever it is you are, you’re not one of them.”
    He didn’t know if this made him feel better or worse.
    “So does that mean I can die?”
    “Kid, you just took an arrow to the heart.” She grippedhis hand and started walking. “If you can die, I’m highly confident you won’t be checking out tonight.”
    “Where is it?” his mother said under her breath.
    Alice leaned forward, tilting her head to stay out of the path of light. She held a set of tweezers in each hand, keeping the wound open while their mother worked on the internal tissue.
    “Where’s what?” Stony said. They’d already removed the arrowhead, so it couldn’t be that. He lay on his back on a beach towel spread on the kitchen floor. He felt pressure when his mother poked and tugged inside him, but he was otherwise comfortable. Only the bright light bothered his eyes.
    “Nothing,” his mom said. “Lie still.” She’d been furious with him, of course. Stony didn’t mention that his sisters had conspired to hide the wound from her, and in return they didn’t mention that Stony had allowed Kwang to shoot at him. It was, they said, an accident.
    Alice said, “It’s like … meat. Solid meat, all the way down.”
    “Wait a minute,” Stony said. “You can’t find my
heart
?”
    “I’m sure it’s in here somewhere,” his mother said. “How do you feel, John?”
    “I’d feel better if you could find my heart.”
    “He’s fine,” Alice said. “He’s always fine.”
    His mother sighed. “Well, it’s not like it’s ever pumped or anything. All right then, let’s get the fishing line and close up. Are there any of the old wounds we should fix up while we’re here?”
    His wounds never healed. In fact, they only grew larger as he grew. Stitches popped, even those made from the high-testline his mother used. They repaired him like a rag doll with too much sentimental value to throw out.
    He closed his eyes and let them tug and cinch and fasten him back into shape.
    Later, he would think of the next few months as the Summer of Terror. He didn’t tell his mother or sisters that he’d seen the
Time
article, but he thought of it constantly. No matter what Alice said, he knew he’d die someday. And he knew how. The police would find him, and then they would shoot him, and then they would burn him.
    While his mother and sisters slept, he walked the house. Occasionally he would lie down, impersonating a normal person, but his mind would thrash and root, his thoughts tangling into each other like blackberry vines. Sometimes he’d try to distract himself with the Little Big game: He’d stare up into the dark and convince himself that the ceiling was impossibly far away, that he was a speck, an ant in the middle of a huge bed. And then, abruptly, he was gigantic, a mountain range under a dark sky, and the floor was miles away below him. If he relaxed into it he could keep the scales flipping for minutes at a time. Years later, when he picked up a novel titled
Little, Big
, he thought, Hey, somebody else knows about this! But of course the book turned out to be about something else entirely.
    One morning his mother asked him why he looked so tense. Did he