18 The Meadow banging on lockers and posturing like puffed up toads, the boys seemed both ludicrous and dangerous. After the goose incident, Alannah Walsh became their special project in the annals of junior high cruelty. Gaelan Newman became Alannah’s first experience of blind hate. “What about all those dead people your dad has over there, Elvira? Do you get to see them naked? Do you ever go down on them? Mmmmm, too bad I’m dead, or this would feel soooo good!” It had been the last of many intricately barbed hooks Gaelan had cast. He’d hook and yank and Alannah would tear and bleed. Anyone watching the show would have credited Alannah with the dignity of an ice queen, but her rage had twisted and bucked inside her for months, looking for any outlet that would keep her mind from capsizing completely. She began carrying broken glass in her pocket and her fingers were a bloody mess. She started fantasizing about flying at Gaelan Newman and ripping out his jugular vein with her teeth. But that moment was the end of it, the day that Alannah’s profound anger finally slipped its leash. And Gaelan had had his own seeping wound and a blind spot that made him vulnerable to the attack. She took him out. “No, but I watched my father stuff cotton up your mother’s ass. Maybe she enjoyed that. Maybe that felt soooo good.” The minute the words left her mouth, she watched him cave into himself. It was as if his bones had been removed and his organs savaged with a trocar. She remembered being astounded that two eyes could hold so much astonishment and confused pain. His good time friends had scattered like roaches and Alannah left him standing alone in a hallway so empty that the wall clock echoed. They had assiduously avoided each other through the high school years, not an easy feat in a school with a graduating class of eighty-four. “Can you show me where you first noticed the blood?” He was older, of course, more man than boy. He’d traded gym clothes for a suit and tie and the smog of crankcase oil and recycling testosterone for Old Spice. Either he’d finally shed
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