The Troop

Nobody made too big a deal of it. Touching was just Shelley’s thing, the way eating boogers was Neil Caruso’s thing or filching cigarettes behind the utility shed was Ephraim’s thing or playing pocket pool under the trampoline was Benjamin Rimmer’s thing. Every boy had his thing and on the grand spectrum Shelley’s wasn’t so bad—it indicated a future badness, perhaps, a “signpost” as that quack Dr. Harley might say, but right now it was harmless, if slightly troubling. His fellow Scouts didn’t give Shelley grief over it. For one, many of them probably wanted to touch Trudy Dennison’s flowing honey-scented hair, too—they simply didn’t take the next logical step. And two, the boys avoided picking on Shelley out of the sense, inexpressible yet tangible, that he might do something very wrong in retaliation. The worst they’d ever called Shelley was dumb. A real dumb bunny, as Eef would say… well, used to say, anyway.

Shelley was happy as a person such as himself could be with this perception. Let everyone think he was dull. Let their eyes fall on his beanpole body and sluggish limbs and feel nothing but a vague revulsion that they were unable to properly account for. Revulsion mixed with an odd sense of disquiet.

“Someone’s laughing, my Lord, kumbaya; someone’s laughing, my Lord, kumbaya; someone’s laughing, my Lord, kumbaya; O Lord, kumbaya…”

Without his being consciously aware of it, Shelley’s mouth dipped to the raw pine floor. He gnawed on it. His teeth skriiiitched on the wood. Splinters drove deep into his gums. Blood flowed.

Shelley used to be the Toucher. Now he was the touched, thanks to the twitchy-squirmy things inside him now. Making a home.

“Hear me crying and laughing, my Lord, kumbaya,” Shelley warbled. “Hear me crying, my Lord, kumbaya; hear me crying, my Lord, kumbaya… O Lord, kumbaya…”

And Shelley had begun to cry. Tears squeezed from the sides of his eyes—but they ceased quickly. His body was dehydrated as a banana chip. Yesterday he’d urinated against the side of the cabin. What came was just a thin dribble, clear as spring water. Not even the slightest yellow tinge—the yellow color was from the extra vitamins and minerals he usually pissed away. But now he understood the things inside of him were helping themselves to all that extra—and more.

The feeble light of the moon cast through the shattered roof, through the sodden mattresses making up Shelley’s awful nest, falling upon his body. His trousers hung low, divulging a half inch of ass crack. His shirt was rucked up. The knobs of his spine were visible.

Had anyone been watching, that person would have seen the flesh ringing Shelley’s spine begin to lift. Something was tunneling its way through—through and up. Climbing the drainpipe of his spine, corkscrewing higher and higher.

There came a series of dim pops, like weak firecrackers going off: trapped air popping between Shelley’s vertebrae. The tunneling thing looped round the spine, tightening, burrowing through the lacework of tissue and muscle, around again, and again, and again.

Shelley did not scream. Did not move. At one point, he did reach around and scratch at his back, as if under the belief he’d been bitten by a mosquito.

“Ug,” he said—a Neanderthal note. “Ug… uh-ug.”

The tube threaded up his spine, between the sharp wings of Shelley’s scapula. Upon reaching his neck, it thinned out, appearing to struggle—then it flexed convulsively, fattening into a bulging cord up the nape of Shelley’s neck, its scolex fat at his hairline…

“UG,” Shelley said breathlessly. His mouth opened. A clotted rope of blood jetted between his teeth.

It entered his cranial vault. Shelley was immediately suffused with comforting warmth. He sighed, curling deeper into himself. He shut his eyes.

LATER THAT night, Shelley would awake from a familiar dream—they all shared the same palette: shifting browns and blacks and olive greens, half-formed shapes melting into one another—shivering and feverish with a hammer-hard erection tepeeing his shorts. A booming voice followed him out of his dreamscape:

Rock and roll, Shelley m’man—THAT’S how it eats.

That’s the ONLY way it eats.

35

MAX AND Newton rose with the drowsy half-light of dawn. The sun hummed over the sea, an orange sine wave radiating heat-shimmers against the leavening dark.