Every town got a witch, don’t it? said Davis, who was standing in line behind him. Well, that up there is ours. Don’t worry. He don’t bite.
Break was over. Davis shoved him forward, and Max stumbled toward the orange cone that marked the start of the sprint.
Impress me, Coach yelled as they ran. Show me you’re faster than I think you are. Impress yourselves. Show that boy next to you how bad you want it! Show yourself how bad you want it.
When Max finished running, he scanned the parking lot for the witch, but it was gone.
Someone named Knox came up to Max as they walked to the locker room after practice. His eyes wouldn’t focus when he talked, a side effect Max attributed to the continual collision of helmet on helmet at high gait. Knox was missing a tooth. Not one of the front ones, but a noticeable one in the back of his mouth.
You fast as a Cheeto, Knox said. A goddamn Cheeto Puff. He sounded pleased. Goddamn, he said. Now we just need to see if you have soft hands.
Max stared at his hands. What did Knox know about his hands?
It’s another figure of speech, Max assured himself. It’s about catching a football.
You all right, Cheeto Puff? You look spooked.
A patch of hair fuzzed above Knox’s lip. He licked the sweat from it. The fading light lit up his acne scars, which were driven like craters into his skin. He cares, thought Max, about how I am. Max glanced again at Knox’s missing tooth, at the black nothing between his molars, and Knox snapped his mouth shut. Max felt he’d done something he shouldn’t.
A group of boys hollered past them and took off running up the embankment behind the metal backs of the bleachers. Knox jogged ahead to catch them. The boys’ butts flexed beneath their dirty football tights as they ran. Max averted his eyes. The scoreboard’s bulbs were off, but the presence of the dimmed lights standing sentinel along the field reminded Max of the stakes of each tackle. The gravity of each yard.
MAX WOKE UP WITH HIVES. The headache behind his eyes pulsed white each time he blinked. He took a handful of Skittles from his bedside table and swallowed them. Running helped. He could travel through the pain. It healed him. He took off toward the highway behind his house, but he stayed on the shoulder. Cars yelled their horns at him as if running on the road was so weird, they had to comment on it, scare the impulse out of him. It worked. One truck drove so close he thought the side mirror might clip his arm.
Get off the road! bellowed a man from the truck’s open window.
The vehicle careened away, leaving Max in a cough of mean smoke. He jogged from the main road, down the side of the shoulder into a slant of land where something like a sewage drain carried sludge and leaves in a slow trickle. It looked almost like a creek. Beyond the creek, a wooded area thickened with spindly bushes and pine needles and tallish trees.
He sat down on a slab of concrete and caught his breath and stared at the forestlike thing in front of him. Stuff grew everywhere. Really, everywhere. Heat pulled life out of the cracks in the concrete, gashes in tree trunks, putrid planks of wood. A purple bloom grew out of a rubber tire. But a bunch of things were dead, too, burned up and withered. Max moved his gaze over the death uneasily. The wilted azaleas, trampled clovers, a cat with a bouquet of flies buzzing above its mashed brain. People here did not take care of the land or the creatures in it. He popped every knuckle on his hand and tried to push down the urge clawing its way up from some hidden place.
Death had begun calling out to him years ago, when puberty mounted his body. It had come as suddenly as the new creak and boom that thickened his voice. That winter had been lonely and long-shadowed. Max had been walking behind his house in Hamburg, under the naked arms of the trees when he discovered a dead mouse. Steam had lifted up from the tuft of fur, and bright blood stained the white ground. The year had been filled with sadness, and Max couldn’t take another inch of it. Not even the dead mouse. He had knelt before it and let out a sob. Snow had drenched the corduroy of his knees. That’s when the feeling had gotten into him. Like a voice whispering in his ear: Touch the body. Eat the death. Max could taste it even now in the heat of Alabama, like a flake of snow melting into his gums.
The mouse’s life had been hovering somewhere nearby, caught in the air just outside of its body, and Max had known that he could guide the life back into the mouse if he tried. It would be like pointing the way. Max remembered taking off his mitten and directing one finger toward the mouse’s belly. He had touched it, slowly, as if to pet it. A warm blue had spilled into the back of Max’s throat. The mouse’s life had tasted like a slow stroll through a garden at sundown. The tail had twitched, and Max had watched as the guts wiggled back in as if the animal were eating its intestines. Max’s tongue had turned into a blueberry. A burst of ice. He had continued to stroke the body, and as he did, it repaired itself.
Max had wanted to tell Nils immediately, to climb through the window of his friend’s bedroom and confess what he had discovered, his terrifying new ability, but they had stopped seeing each other by then. Max had been standing in the yard between his house and Nils’s. He had looked toward Nils’s room half expecting to see the gaunt face, pale as a plate of salt, watching him. But no one had been watching. The window had been empty and the curtains inside were drawn.
Max had wondered at first if the mouse had just been sleeping. But he tested his ability again on a beetle and then a rose. Both burst back to life. Both left stains of sweetness in his mouth. He had felt chosen, but for what, he hadn’t known. For days after, he had sought out death and had delighted in what he could do to it. His hands were magic. They could save. The new power thrilled him until it didn’t.
The chosen feeling turned to fear. Where did the power come from and what did it want?
Max stood up from the log. He shook the memory away and walked toward the dead cat. Whose cat was this? Max wondered. He knelt down. It looked so dead. Maybe the cat belonged to a girl, a small girl who buried a shoe box filled with torn paper and no body. The girl must miss her cat. How evil was he, Max wondered, if he did not bring the animal to life for the sake of this catless girl? He pictured her discovering her pet returned—alive and purring.
No, Max thought. He grabbed his right hand and shoved it into his pocket.
Clips of memory came colliding back.
His mom at Nils’s funeral.
His hand a thing he hated.
What happened to your hand, honey?
I saw him punch a window threaded with steel.
That’s ridiculous.
Max had told himself: Be normal in America; watch someone kill a cockroach, walk past roadkill, let the butterfly stay withered between two panes of glass. The curse could stay in Germany along with the rest of his strangeness and darkness and shame. Max held his right hand down with his left and trudged back up the hill. A dead bush withered before him. He saw this new landscape, and he couldn’t help himself.
He ran his hands over his arms like he was cold. He ran his hands over his face and down his neck, trying to keep them busy. Maybe it was worse to leave the things dead, Max thought. No cars charged down the road behind him, a lull in traffic. He was alone. It was so quiet now. No one would see him. He walked to the brain-smashed cat. He picked it up and felt a warm body purr in his arms. He tossed it back to the ground. It landed on all fours and meowed. He struck his hand through the dead twist of shrunken, budless branches. It felt so good.