"I did the math, and it's like one hundred to one. All the kids come up the mountain for school, and all the grownups go down it for work—I mean, almost all." Nip shot a look out the open kitchen window, where my aunt's head could be seen bobbing up and down as she worked in her vegetable garden.

"Looks like she's blowing a carrot," Ash said.

I flashed back briefly to Billy Rascoe taunting Nip about his bright orange shirt. "It'd be the first thing she blew."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Ash said, and then, "Oh."

Down at Thunderpaw, Sandy was something of a Holy Grail. All the local guys had been trying to drink of her and failing for years.

"Anyway," Nip said impatiently, "from nine-ish in the morning to three-ish in the afternoon, there's a hundred of us kids for every one grownup in town. And most of those grownup are teachers."

"We should take Honaw for ourselves," Ash said.

Nip twisted one of the Koosh ball's rubbery orange strands around his finger. "And do what?"

"Start our own perfect society. Duh."

"That worked great in Lord of the Flies." Nip tossed the ball at her.

She caught the ball and launched it back at him, harder. "I wasn't in Lord of the Flies."

"Oh, so you'd be the leader then."

"Of course."

I cleared my throat. "Pretty sure the role of leader goes to the guy with the throne."

"What do you mean guy?" said Ash.

"What do you mean throne?" said Nip.

"Guy." I pointed at myself. "Throne." I pointed at the wheelchair sitting by the Nile Goddess statue in the corner of the living room. Bitchmaster had taken a beating on the bleachers, but she was a sturdy lady—something that she would prove again and again in the days to come.

Nip' and Ash's eyes locked.

They scrambled for the corner on a collision course. Ash switched trajectories at the last instant, encircled Nip with her arms, and spun around heavily. She dropped onto Bitchmaster's leather seat, Nip in her lap.

He raised his hands like the muddy Nile Goddess. "Victor!"

To which Ash whispered, "Boner," jabbing her thump up against Nip's butt. He fell off in shock and landed stinkbug on the carpet.

"Bitchmaster has a new master." Ash cupped a hand to her ear. "And what's that? The new master is a girl?"

I coughed. "Not so sure about that."

"I will hit you in the face, Joel Harper, even if you are still concussed."

"It's a good thing I've got padding." I knocked on my bandaged skull and winced as my fading headache gave a reinvigorated, Hellloooooooo.

"As the newly crowned leader of the rebellion," Ash said, leaning back and propping her feet on Nip's shoulders. "I will require a token of good faith from all my subjects."

"How does a kick in the balls sound?"

Ash raised her voice imperiously. "From Nip, I ask only for complete silence unless he is addressed first." Her finger leveled itself at me. "And from you, sir, I will have your ring followed by your kiss upon it."

"You can have my kiss upon your ass."

"That would be most unwise, I think." Ash stroked her chin. "Most unwise."

"Why's that?"

A humongous fart reverberated off of Bitchmaster's seat. "Seriously," she said as Nip crawled away desperately. "I'm going to have that fucking ring."

♫

An hour later, Nip on the couch, Ash meandering around the room in Bitchmaster, and me on the carpet with my head stuck under the glass end table, I said, "It wouldn't work, anyway."

"What wouldn't?" said Nip. He had out a new book. Novels only survived a few days in his hands, if they were lucky.

"Our society. At three the adults get off work, the kids from down the mountain get picked up, and game over."

"Not if we barricaded the highway to the east and west of town. Then nobody gets in. Or out."Ash popped up the chair's smaller front two wheels. They came bouncing back down into the carpet.

"Hey," I said, "be careful."

She snorted. "You can talk, Mr. Bleachers."

Apparently I had been shouting "Again! Again! Again!" when they found me, which probably meant they hadn't been too far behind Billy, wherever he had run off to after giving me the shove.

I glanced up and caught Nip looking at me through the end table. He raised his book to his face. That was how it had been with him all weekend. Any time somebody mentioned the bleachers or called me a daredevil (a nicer way of saying suicidal, I suppose), he started acting like he wished he was wallpaper. I stared at him through the shimmery glass, wondering, then I said, "And what would we block off the highway with? Textbooks?"

Ash performed another wheelie. "The corpses of our teachers, of course."

"Oh. Of course."

My aunt's voice wailed through the kitchen window, drowning out some sultry new tune by Lana del Rey. "What's happening to you? Why are you all dying?" A garden tool clattered on the ground and then footsteps pounded up the stone path to the front door. It flung open and into the house stomped Sandy, dressed in cargo shorts and a lilac-print tee, a clump of mud cupped between her gloved hands. "Will you look at this?"

I pushed my top half up, moving my head to avoid bonking it on the underside of the table.

"What is it, Aunt Sandy?" said Nip. A few days lounging around her cottage house in the woods, 'aiding' my recovery, and my aunt had become his aunt, too. A real adopter, Nip.

She held her handful out to us, looking away from it in disgust or sadness or both. The vegetable was dark purple and as soft-looking as an overripe tomato. An earthworm wriggled out of its side.

"Is that a beet?" Ash said.

"Yes! No. It's supposed to be a beet, but now it's . . . I don't even know what it is now."

"Ash's dinner?" I offered.

If I had been within socking distance, I would have gotten a charley horse for that. But I wasn't, so all I received was a vicious glare.

"What happened to it?" asked Nip.

"I don't know! I don't have a single clue, but it's the same with all my rooties. The parsnips, the turnips, the rutabaga, even the carrots—"

Ash suppressed a smile at this.

"—they're all rotting." Aunt Sandy wiped a cheek with one shoulder. That cheek was over forty years old, and there wasn't a single wrinkle or blemish on it. Besides mud, that is. "They were doing just fine last week, all of them were. You three tell me. What could turn something bad so fast? What could do that?"

I thought of the old football field, bright green one day and browning the next.

The earthworm squirmed in the beet's burst flesh like a maggot inside a wound.

♫

After washing the veggie juice off her hands, Aunt Sandy picked up the phone and ordered a pizza from Honaw Pie. Which was a pretty incredible name, since it translated to Bear Pie. I mentioned this to Nip and asked if he thought a bear pie was similar to a cow pie, and he about died laughing. Really. He laughed so hard and so long I started to worry about him. The two of us were alone for the first time since my crash, Ash and Aunt Sandy having gone off on a walk to chat about 'girl things,' whatever that meant. Considering neither Ash or Aunty Sandy were all that girly, I'm inclined to think what they wanted was a private moment to discuss me, my 'accident,' and whether I was in danger of having another one. Or maybe they were talking tampons. Your guess is as good as mine.

Nip. Laughing on the couch. Turning red.

Me. Watching from the carpet. Imagining blood vessels pop-pop-popping in his brain.

"Hey man," I said, "You all right there?"

He stopped just like that, a switched flipped off inside him. "That's the funniest. My brother would have loved that."

I was scared to ask. "Would have?"

"Yeah. He moved away."

My sigh practically tasted of relief. "Oh yeah? Where to?"

"New York." Nip shifted on the couch, looked away, looked back. "We used to hang out every day after school. My dad poofed right after I was born and my mom has her hours at the hospital and I needed someone around, you know. I was still just this little kid."

"You're still just this little kid."

"Thanks," he said offhandedly. "He could be a real dick sometimes, like when we tossed around a baseball. He was always chucking it as hard as he could and trying to bean me. 'Watch out!' And when he did bean me, it was always, 'Better get that mitt up faster, Kyle,' or 'Too slow there, Kyle.'"

Kyle? It struck me that this was the first time I had heard Nip's real name.

"He was just playing, though. He's my brother." Nip shifted a little more on the cushions. Above his head hung the photograph of the burning house, its eyes yellow and flickering, its mouth howling smoke. "We'd share everything with each other. Stuff we wouldn't tell anybody else. Then he got a girlfriend and moved out to New York, not for school or anything big. Just because. He said he'd come back all the time, but that was two years ago and he hasn't come back once. Why'd you lie?"

I thought I'd heard him wrong. "Why'd I—what?"

"There was a Newport up on the bleachers. Billy Rascoe smokes Newports. It was him, wasn't it? He pushed you down the stairs."

I shrugged.

Nip shook his head. "Why didn't you tell anyone?"

"Why didn't you?"

"I asked you first."

"Okay. Because I didn't feel like it."

"That's not good enough."

"Because . . ." I looked up at the house screaming on the wall, and the ache in my legs made me grit my teeth. "Because we both got what we wanted, Billy and me. His dad was gone. He was hurting. And I . . ."

". . . and you were hurting, too?"

"So what if I was?"

So what? So what?

"You're allowed to, you know. You don't have to hide it all the time."

"I'm not hiding anything. I'm fine. I'm lucky." My lungs and throat were filled with tiny hooks, and my breath kept snagging on them. "Sometimes, I mean, Jesus, but I'm not going to cry about it. I know how lucky I am. I'm here, here I am. I don't have anything to hide."

Our conversation had reached a cliff's edge, and Nip must have sensed that. He stuck his hand in his pocket and then withdrew his fingers slowly. "I do, though."

"What?"

"I have something to hide. And I'm not sure you'll ever be able to forgive me."

I started to ask what he was talking about when his arm whipped and a yellow jelly bean hit me square on my splinted nose. "Oww."

"Too slow."

I picked the bean off the carpet. "How old is this?"

This time Nip shrugged.

I thought about it a second. Then I brushed the lint off the bean and popped it in my mouth. "Gross."

He grinned. "That was the dumbest thing you've done all week."

Two skinny shadows, one tall and one short, appeared on the other side of the living room's glass door. I nearly jumped when I saw them—to actually jump would have been nothing short of a miracle.

". . . a total twatosaurus," Ash grunted as she pushed aside the screen. My aunt followed her in, laughing, then waved at Nip and me.

"What have you two been chatting about?"

I realized that Nip never answered why he kept Billy Rascoe and the Newports a secret. But maybe he had already told me, in a way.

We'd share everything with each other. Stuff we wouldn't tell anybody else.

I winked at him. "Boy things."

Ash glanced between the two of us, perhaps reading something on our faces or in the air. "Jocklords."

The doorbell rang.

"Ooo," said my aunt, "That'll be the pizza."

And what a pizza it was. It got wedged in the doorframe (something I could sympathize with) as the delivery boy stepped into the house.

"Well," he said sheepishly, "this is embarrassing."

My always-helpful aunt was ready to offer assistance. "Try cocking it."

"Yeah," said Ash. "Give that box a good hard cock."

Sandy covered her mouth like her lunch was riding the elevator up. When the delivery boy had been paid and sent off, she turned to Ash and stared at her. Just stared at her, lightly shaking her head.

"What?"

The pizza hogged so much of the table we had no room for our own plates. Melted mozzarella spotted with deep pools of yellow grease. Crisped pepperoni slices. Crust overflowing cheesy goodness. A coma-in-waiting for kids. Death-by heartburn for adults.

I parked Bitchmaster between Ash and Nip. My aunt took her seat, only to shoot back up and walk to the front door. "It's far too nice a night to keep it locked out." She returned to her chair, snapped her fingers and rose again, spring loaded. "Drinks. We need drinks for a toast. Look at me, taking off work for a special evening and nothing special to show for it. 'C'est la vie,' as Mallory would say. 'C'est la vie.'"

"Mallory?" Ash whispered to me as my aunt moved around the kitchen.

"The old lady who owned this house. She rented out a room to Sandy, and I guess she didn't have any family because she left it all to Sandy when she died."

Cupboards opened and shut. Nip twined mozzarella around his pinky finger.

"Were they . . . you know?"

"Together? No way." I paused. "I don't think so. Maybe. I never thought about it."

My aunt came back to the table, carrying three wine glasses upside down by the stems. She passed one to each of us. Nip looked like he'd just been handed a pistol. As she flitted off again, he turned to me and Ash.

"I'm not allowed."

"It's just grape juice," I said. "Basically."

"Yeah." Ash nodded. "It's not as if we're shooting Wild Turkey."

"What does killing turkey have to do with anything?"

She patted his hand. "Oh Nip."

I watched my aunt use a corkscrew to peel the flap on a box of Cabernet Blend, and I felt like my whole life I had been looking at her through a dusty window, and now that window was clear for the first time, for one moment. Sandy Delane, the prettier older sister, the family pariah, the failed photographer. Sandy Delane, who owned more wine glasses than water cups, who only ever wanted to take pictures. Sometimes a person can have a lot of good things but not the right thing, or at least not enough of it. Sometimes passion is like falling in love alone.

The box of wine moved around the table. My aunt raised her glass. She looked from Nip to Ash. "To good timing."

Clink.

♫

Memory is strange.

When I think of all the horror to come, when I search for the beginning of it, my mind pulls up an image of Aunt Sandy covered in mud and holding out a dying rootie in the living room. Each time I shake off the photograph and study it, that beet looks less like a beet and more like a spoiled heart cupped between her hands. It is still beating, that heart. It is crawling in worms and dripping earth and it is still, still beating.

And yet, when I look back to that weekend, my thoughts do not turn to horror at all. They turn to my aunt and us teenagers sitting around a small kitchen table, eating pizza and staining our teeth purple on cheap wine. They turn to a feeling there are no pictures for, the kind of feeling that warms you and leaves you at the same time, like a late-summer wind blowing in through an open door.

____ ____

Author's Note:

Thank you for reading! If you're enjoying Poor Things, please consider hitting the vote button—it will help other readers find the story. Comments are always appreciated, too.

Coming up, school sucks but Iron Maiden doesn't.