Different people believe in different things. I'm not one to say who's right or wrong. In fact, in seventh grade, you kind of believe what your parents tell you to believe. You don't actually get your own mind until later. I remembered my grandma telling me a long ways back, before she died of lung cancer on my tenth birthday, that anything can seem real if you believe in it strongly enough. So sometimes I'm not sure what exactly happened to make things seem real. All I know is that some really bizarre stuff started happening after I began to seriously wonder if I'd been struck by lightning, if that story had truly been about me. Let me give you an example.

It was a couple of days after Adam's mom got those flowers that I actually saw my friend again. I was heading over toward his house, meandering in the basic direction of it, when I realized I was walking too slowly past the home of Dylan Doyle. Letting my curiosity get the better of me (which isn't a wise thing to do so close to the home of a vile enemy), I sneaked up to the fence and peered through the board slats. What I saw was his yard, and, as always, it was filled with tons of dolls. Girl dolls, boy dolls, dolls with missing eyes, dolls with no hair. All of them had clothes on at least, but I'm telling you—not only was it just plain unexpected, it was creepy. There was no reason a kid my age should play with dolls, and especially a kid like Dylan Doyle.

Remembering the way Dylan had pushed me into my locker, I suddenly wanted to run to school shouting out that he played with dolls in his backyard when no one was looking. Then I realized that school was out for the summer. Or at least, it was out for most of the other kids. I was going to have five more weeks of it come July. Telling a bunch of summer school losers about Dylan's babyish hobbies wasn't really worth thinking about. They'd all be too zoned out to care.

Anyway, as I was standing there thinking about the fun of squealing on that little turd, I heard a voice come from off to my side. With horror, I recognized it as belonging to the very person I was thinking about. "What are you doing looking through my fence, March?" snarled the leprechaun.

Feeling like someone had pulled my guts right out of my body, I slowly, slowly turned to face the little terror. He didn't look like he normally did, all grinning like the devil and holding the glow of trouble in his eyes. In fact, he looked mad. I don't mean annoyed; I mean furious. So furious that it took all of his strength to hold back. His shoulders were kind of shaking and his eyes were narrowed as they stared at me. His moppy red-brown hair practically stood on end, he was so angry.

I felt weird. I'd never seen him in any mood but obnoxious. He was hard to picture any other way. Sometimes you don't really look at your enemies as human beings. You don't see them different than you want to. I'd always thought of Dylan as scum, so I'd always pictured him as causing trouble. He wasn't supposed to have feelings. But I was pretty sure that I saw some there on his face that day. There was something there, anyway, and I didn't really get how to interpret it.

"I said, what are you doing?"

I shook my head. "N-nothing . . . really. I was just . . . jus—"

"Get lost!" he growled through his teeth.

For some reason my feet were rooted to the pavement. I wanted to run—honest—but I seriously couldn't move. "Look, I'm sorry . . . I . . ." Why was I sorry?

He started toward me. My heart jumped into my throat. Dylan was about a foot shorter than me, but you have to remember: he was tough; I wasn't. I wasn't a fighter. One of Dylan fought harder than five of me would have. I'd looked through his fence on a hundred occasions, but this one afternoon, I'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It just figured. My luck hadn't been holding up lately.

"Get your ugly face away from my fence!" he shouted. He came right up to me and grabbed my shirt collar, shaking me pretty hard. "What are you looking at, huh? You like to play peeping tom or what? You sicko!"

Some sort of alien must have been inhabiting my body, because I found my mouth making funny sounds. I was talking back, and not only that, but you should have heard what I was saying! "You're calling me a sicko? At least there aren't dolls in my backyard. And let go of my shirt, asshole; your breath stinks like a dead animal's stuck between your teeth."

Dylan had to have been about as surprised as I was. His jaw dropped. The anger on him wavered a little as he noticed for once that I was taller than him. His grip loosened a little, but he still held onto my shirt. I crossed my arms. Some sort of new energy pulsed through me, lit my blood on fire. Little prickles swept across my arms, up my shoulders, and down my back. It was like an acupuncturist was standing behind me, putting all those little needles into my skin.

"Let go," I said plainly.

He didn't let go, though. He just stared at me, not knowing what to say. His mouth still hung open, and I noticed that he was wearing braces; they twinkled like Adam's pointless wallet chain. I stared at them, just feeling the heat pulse through me. I was certain I felt warmer. I couldn't just have imagined it.

Dylan regained control of his voice. "Now you listen, albino freak—" he began, but he cut himself off, and I soon figured out why.

Standing there, staring at his impish face, I saw first-hand a spark fly out of his mouth. The little light nearly hit me in the eye, and then, much to my amusement, the brackets on Dylan's two front teeth popped right off. They dangled there on the brace wires. Immediately, his hands went up to his mouth. He could feel what had happened, but even more interesting was what he said after that.

"They're hot . . . they're hot!" he cried, hopping up and down, his hand waving in front of his open lips in an effort to cool off the metal. "It burns! It burns!"

I hadn't a clue what to do or say. I mean, the kid was obviously in some sort of pain, but what could I do? Dylan wouldn't want me to touch him, that was for sure. He wouldn't have appreciated a pat on the back or anything like that. So I just had to stand there staring at him as if he was a purple, bucktoothed warthog. I wasn't feeling awkward for too long, though. Dylan wasn't in too much pain to be embarrassed. He shot me some weird, icy glare, and then, still hollering and waving his hands in front of his lips, he turned and bolted around the side of the house. The sound of a door slamming reached my ears. I knew he'd gone inside.

I wasn't going to wait around. There was no reason for me to be standing at his fence. I'd be an idiot to sit there until Dylan's braces cooled off and he came looking for me. I didn't know what had gotten into my system and made me talk the way I did, but whatever it was, I was praying it didn't come back. I hated trouble. I was used to running away from it, not starting it! Gathering my brain up, I set off at a jog toward Adam's house. By the time I reached it, I was sweating like a pig. I didn't know if the sweat was from my exertion or the shock of my close call with Dylan Doyle.

It was Sunday afternoon, so when I knocked on Adam's door, Mrs. Nyler answered it.

"Hi, Cole," she said. She was real pretty for a mom. Her hair was like Adam's, or I guess Adam's hair was like hers. It was dark and down to her shoulders and as smooth as satin. Sometimes when I saw Adam's mom I thought she looked like an endangered species. That sounds weird. What I mean is that she was almost fragile-looking. I don't know if it was her appearance as much as the way her eyes always seemed distant, like they were watching out for something. She held the door open for me and I felt the cold, air-conditioned air pouring out. "Don't just stand there. Come inside and cool off." She smiled.

I shook my thoughts straight and stepped inside.

"Adam's downstairs in his room," she said, closing the door. Then she walked in the direction of the kitchen. There was a fizzly T.V. sound coming from there, and I guessed she was watching the news while she cooked dinner. That was a mom thing; mine did it, too.

I breathed in. Adam's house always smelled like candles. Mrs. Nyler burned all the good-smelling kind. None of that flowery or fruity stuff. She used good smells like pine trees and spices and gingerbread. I liked it because it wasn't too sweet. Sometimes my mom burned candy-cane candles around Christmas, and those were all right. One time, Adam went through a weird phase where all he wanted to do was buy incense. He'd take the sticks and cram them in an old, green-glass beer bottle. Then he'd light the ends and sit in his room for hours just breathing it in. That had been for about a month out of last summer. I'd started to refer to that time as The Month of a Thousand Smells (and all of them had been real sickening, too). I was glad that had been a short phase, or I might have stopped going over to Adam's house for good.

Starting down the basement stairs, I called out Adam's name. I didn't want to creep up on him. One of the things about the Nyler's house was that it didn't have an upstairs. It was on one floor, except it had a real small basement which was pretty much entirely Adam's room. There was a bathroom and a small couch and T.V. area, and then a door led to a tiny little bedroom. Pretty much the only thing that fit behind the door was Adam's bed and a narrow bureau. Most of the time, the couch in the T.V. room doubled as his closet.

When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I heard some scufflings. Then I rounded the corner. The T.V. wasn't on. "Hey, Adam," I said kind of quietly.

"Yeah, I hear you. I'm not asleep."

I went around to the front of the sofa, where he was curled up into a ball. "But your eyes are closed."

"So? I'm just thinking."

"About what?"

"Stop asking questions."

I just sat down on the coffee table. In Adam's basement, it should've been called the Mountain Dew table, because that was his source of life. He never drank coffee. The place was actually pretty clean. His mom had probably made him pick up his stuff. She did that every once in a while, like any mom would. "I just ran into Doyle," I said.

Adam's eyes cracked open. "And?"

"And his braces popped off before he could do anything."

"His braces popped off?" Now Adam was sitting up.

"Yeah. Weird, huh? I actually told him off, and then he got so mad he snapped some brackets. It was the strangest thing ever." I shook my head.

Adam was completely amazed; I could see it in his dark puppy eyes. "Wait a second . . . you told him off? You—Cole—told off Dylan Doyle?" He saw me nod. "Well it's about time! That punk's been picking on you forever! You needed to say something to him. He's such a little nerd, always thinking he's tough when he's only three feet tall."

I always thought it would feel good to be praised (it was like the taste of a caramel apple: I didn't get it often enough to ever remember what it was like). For some reason, though, I felt bad about Dylan. All of a sudden, I didn't want Adam talking about him anymore. "I've got something else to tell you," I interrupted.

"Oh yeah? What?"

"I read most of the other papers. Took me a long time. But there's some things you should probably know."