Dion stood before the perfect likeness of himself and, amazingly, held his temper. His friends quickly gathered in front of the mural, yelling, “Hey, man, kick his ass!” And more kids arrived on the scene, joining in on the group rage, just wanting to see a fight. But Dion shook his head.

  “What a wonderful ‘work of art,’ ” Dion said with a bitter smile. “I want the principal to see this. I want the cops to see it.” Then his million-dollar smile widened. “Thanks, Micah,” he said. “I couldn’t have done a better job of getting you expelled.”

  Ignoring Dion, Micah turned to Samira, pleading. “I swear I didn’t do it. I threw all my paint away yesterday. See! There’s none left.” He zipped open his backpack all the way open to prove it—but as he did, half a dozen spray-paint cans clattered out. Samira turned and stormed away, leaving Micah alone with his paint and his awful, awful mural.

  * * *

  Samira didn’t stick up for him. Ms. Boyle didn’t stick up for him. Micah was on his own this time, as he faced the principal.

  “You trespassed after school hours, defaced school property—and look at the disruption you’ve caused! We have zero tolerance at this school—it’s one strike and you’re out. Do you know what that means, Mr. Andrus?”

  Micah knew what it meant. “It means I’m expelled.” He held his throbbing head. It felt as if it would blow apart any second.

  “You and your mother will meet with the school board, and we’ll go from there….”

  Suddenly Micah closed his eyes against the searing pain in his brain. He could feel the vein throbbing in his head. It felt as if something in his skull was trying to bang itself out. When Micah opened his eyes, there was a tentacle rising over the chair behind the principal. He wanted to warn the man, but Micah was frozen. He began to breathe in deep, sharp gasps.

  “Are you all right, son? What’s wrong?”

  Tentacles loomed behind Principal Crenshaw, and one of them reached over, grabbed a pencil, and drew a ghoulish caricature of the principal on his own desk blotter. The tentacle signed it, and the beast let loose a deep, wet, slithery laugh.

  But the principal heard nothing—saw nothing. Even when he turned and looked straight at the awful gray tentacle, he didn’t see it.

  Micah got his breathing under control as the tentacles slithered away and disappeared. He knew what he had to do now—everything had suddenly become very clear. The principal turned away to call his mother, and the second he turned, Micah slipped out the door and into the hallway.

  * * *

  A line of silver spray paint trailed down the empty school hall, and Micah followed it. He tracked it to a doorway and down a creaky set of stairs, into the dank basement of the ancient school. It was a place littered with broken-down desks, battered shelves, and mildewed textbooks. Down here, every surface, every wall, every square inch, was covered with graffiti. Micah heard the laughter again—the laughter of the beast.

  “Where are you?” Micah screamed. “Come out so I can see you.” Something touched his face. He whirled to catch it, but there was nothing there. Nothing but a wet trail of slime on his cheek.

  Micah found a fire ax. It was mounted on brackets behind a glass barrier labeled EMERGENCY USE ONLY. Well, he thought, this certainly was an emergency. Micah kicked the glass until it shattered, reached in, and took the ax in both hands.

  “Hey, slimeball!” he shouted. “I’ve got something for you!”

  In the dark recess he could hear the tantalizing hiss of a spray can. He inched forward, looking from side to side, searching for the beast that had grown in the shadow-painted corners of his own head.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he shouted. Micah laughed at his own ridiculousness. The furnace came on and shuddered violently, then let out a deep rumble.

  Something moved! Micah turned and swung, knocking over a pyramid of paint cans. They spilled a rainbow of colors across the floor. Again, he heard the laughter. It only made Micah angrier. Too angry to hold back his fury. He swung the ax in every direction, splintering a desk, cleaving a filing cabinet in two, smashing an old chalkboard until finally he found the monster standing against the round tank of the rusty boiler.

  It was awful. A gray mass of throbbing brain tissue, and from it grew thick tentacles—nerve endings that thrashed and flailed like snakes. But worst of all were its eyes. Two pinpoints of red light in a cloud of gray matter.

  “Don’t do it, Micah,” the creature taunted. Micah raised his ax. “You’ll be sorry!” said the creature. But Micah couldn’t stop himself. He swung the blade in a high arc and brought the ax down with all his might. The blade embedded itself in the boiler with a hollow clang and a blast of white steam.

  The creature had tricked him. What little sanity Micah had held on to was gone. The mocking laughter in his head was now unbearable. He pulled the blade from the boiler.

  “You missed me!” the creature screamed in his head. “Accept it, Micah, you’ll never kill me!” He saw it there again, in the shadows, and he raised his ax to strike it… but then he had a better idea. He threw his ax down, opened his backpack, and pulled out a spray can for each hand.

  “Oh, you’re going to paint me?” taunted the creature. “Be sure to get my good side.” The creature turned to show its profile and smiled that slimy brain smile.

  “Hold that pose,” said Micah. Then he let loose from both spray cans, dousing the creature in a blue-black fog. It laughed again, unbothered by the paint dripping down into the crevices of its cortex—not caring about the jumble of smashed paint cans and spilled enamel that it stood in. But Micah continued spraying. He sprayed a line of paint from the monster to the hot furnace, like a fuse, and as soon as the wet paint touched the furnace, it caught fire.

  The creature realized the danger too late. “No!!!”

  The flame raced down the paint-fuse toward the puddle of flammable enamel, and instantly the creature burst into flames. It let out an awful, dying wail as it burned, and finally it dissolved into the swirls of burning paint. That was the last thing Micah remembered before he lost consciousness.

  * * *

  He woke up in a hospital room with his mother beside him, holding his hand, and Samira on his other side. His head hurt something awful. “Is it gone?” Micah asked weakly.

  “You’re going to be all right,” Samira said. “They got the tumor in time.” Micah had to think very slowly and clearly about what she was saying. Only now did he realize that his head was tightly bandaged.

  “Tumor?”

  “Yes,” said a doctor looking down at him, smiling as doctors do. “One nasty brain tumor,” he said. “The good news is that we got the whole thing, and we took it out without damaging any of the surrounding tissue. You’re a very lucky young man.”

  Micah’s mom burst into tears.

  “You’re going to be all right, Micah,” she said. “You’re going to be all right.”

  “In a way,” said Samira, “you tried to tell us…. Going out and painting those ‘things,’ then not remembering you did it. The doctor said it was your subconscious trying to warn you.”

  Micah took a deep breath. He supposed he could wrestle with himself forever, trying to figure out whether the creature was real or just a hallucination brought on by a tumor. But thinking about that was a sure way to madness. The important thing was that the monster was out of his head, and out of his life for good. It was a memory he was happy to paint over, and lose forever.

  Samira gently held his hand. “I’m sorry about those nasty things I said to you.”

  Micah smiled. “Hold that pose,” he said, never wanting this moment with Samira to end.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, deep down in the hospital basement, a med student tended to the pathology lab. With a sandwich in one hand and a medical instrument in the other, he studied a small, fleshy mass that had settled at the bottom of a jar of formaldehyde. It was a lump of brain tissue, with spidery, tentacle-like dendrites. The label on the jar read: M. ANDRUS.

  “So that’s a brain tumor,” the med student mumbled to himself. “That is one ugly sucker.”

  He put down his sandwich to clean up the table and then picked it up again on his way out. He didn’t notice that the jar of formaldehyde was now empty. He didn’t notice that there was something moving between the slices of his bread as he took a bite of his sandwich.

  But a few minutes later, he did notice a sudden headache coming on.

  Boy on a Stoop

  A row of abandoned tenements rots on a neglected city block where few people have reason to tread. There are a million ways to get where you’re going without passing down that ruined street; nevertheless, Olivia takes that path to school every day. The buildings have been that way for years, and Olivia feels a strange sort of affinity toward them. In many ways, they are like her: ignored… forgotten… friendless. Nothing, not even a row of buildings, deserves to be that unloved. So she limps her way down the broken, weed-choked pavement of the condemned street every day.

  That’s where she sees him.

  He sits on the stoop of one of those empty buildings, halfway down the block. It’s the only one without a board nailed over the entrance. There’s no door, just a dark rectangular hole, rimmed in chiseled plaster. Like her, the boy on the stoop seems about fifteen. He has jet-black hair and features so handsome she can’t help but stare at him out of the corner of her eye. She can feel his eyes following her as well, and it embarrasses her—because no boys look at her. More often than not, they just look away. Olivia’s glasses are thick, and one eye is slightly clouded from a childhood accident involving a neighbor boy and a stick. Then of course there’s that horrible leg brace she’s forced to wear on her weak right leg. She has been self-conscious about both her eye and her leg for as long as she can remember, keeping to herself and shying away from other kids. She prefers sticking to her books and her many collections.

  So naturally, when she notices this handsome boy looking at her, her face goes red, and she moves out of his sight as quickly as she can.

  He is there again as she walks home from school, still sitting on that porch as if he has nothing better to do than calmly watch life pass on the city pavement before him—and he is there the next day too, and the next. Each time he follows her with his eyes as she passes, like a portrait that always seems to stare at you, no matter where you stand. It’s easy to deal with being invisible, but being noticed—that is something entirely different.

  Does he look at everyone like that or is it only me? wonders Olivia.

  Her parents are not problem solvers when it comes to talking through Olivia’s troubles. Her father, who works two jobs, is rarely home, and when he is, he’s too exhausted to take much time for her. Olivia’s mom, who works at a day-care center, is always frazzled, and the last thing she wants to hear at the end of the day is another voice—even her own daughter’s.

  One night she approaches her mom, who sits up in bed, reading a sappy romance novel. “Mom, am I a good person?” she asks.

  Her mother answers without hesitation, “Of course you are, honey.”

  “Then why don’t more people like me?”

  This time her mother does hesitate and begins to rub her forehead as if the question has given her a headache. “It’s not that they don’t like you,” she answers, “it’s that they don’t know you. If you let people know you a little better, then they’ll like you a whole lot.”

  It’s easy for her mother to say, but it just doesn’t work that way at school. There’s a cruel pecking order, and once you find yourself at the bottom, the other kids won’t let you rise above it.

  But the boy on the stoop isn’t a classmate. He doesn’t know her place in the pecking order.

  Olivia knows these are dangerous thoughts, because they fill her with the kind of hope that could be her ruin. So she returns to her room and tries to drive thoughts of the boy out of her mind. She reads a book, re-catalogs her various collections—rare coins, stamps, even exotic insects, pinned and labeled in a glass case. But not even her insect collection can keep thoughts of the boy away. In the end, she gives up and closes the case on her tiny impaled bugs, locking it with a shiny silver key. She wishes she could lock away her thoughts of the boy as easily.

  * * *

  The following Monday, a wind blows through the city, marking the arrival of fall. The leaves have already turned and are dropping to the pavement, where they will soon dry into brittle brown shells crunching underfoot. Olivia wears a coat that is too heavy and out of style as she leaves for school.

  When she peers down the boy’s street, she can see him sitting on the porch again, leaning back on his elbows, relaxed and calm—such a stark contrast to the tension of the city. She approaches him at a slow, steady pace, trying to hide her limp as best she can. Then, when she is in range, she turns to him—looking at him directly, rather than sneaking a glance. He smiles at her and she feels trapped in his deep green eyes. Her heart pounds a mysterious rhythm in her chest—a rhythm of fear and wonderful anticipation—because she knows that today she will say something to him.

  But instead she gags on the gum she is chewing and launches into a coughing fit.

  “Are you all right?” he asks, getting up and taking a step closer to her.

  Feeling like an imbecile, Olivia clears her lungs with a strong, solid cough. The gum flies out and becomes one with the rest of the muck on the broken sidewalk. “I’m fine,” she says.

  “Good,” says the boy. “I wouldn’t want you to die. Not here on the sidewalk, anyway.”

  There is an uncomfortable moment, so Olivia tries to fill it. “Don’t you ever go to school?” she blurts out, and immediately realizes how nasty she must have sounded.

  She thinks he might make a nasty comment back to her, and that would end it forever. But instead he just keeps smiling. “I’m homeschooled,” he answers.

  Now that she has the chance to study his face, she can see how irresistibly perfect it is. It should be illegal, she thinks, for a face to be that perfect. He seems smart, too. Not just smart, but sharp. Sharp as a blade.

  “What’s your name?” he asks her.

  “Olivia.”

  “I’m Forest.” He holds out his hand, and as Olivia reaches forward to shake it, she drops her books. They clatter on the cracked stoop and lie splayed and limp, like accident victims, on the sidewalk.

  Olivia tries to kneel to pick them up, but her brace doesn’t afford her such quick movements. Forest helps her, and when the books have all been collected, she finds herself sitting beside him on the stoop, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

  “Why do you sit here?” she asks him.

  Forest shrugs. “It’s where I live.”

  Olivia looks up at the ugly tenement. Five floors of windows, either broken or boarded over, graffiti scrawled on the soot-stained bricks—and if she listens, Olivia imagines she can hear the scuttle of rats. “I’m sorry,” says Olivia.

  He gives her his strange, enigmatic smile again, and it penetrates her like a sudden blast of radiation. “It’s not what you think,” he says. “Would you like to see?” He gestures toward the entrance.

  Olivia turns to look into it. It’s a dark cavity, and the wind echoes inside it, making it sound as if it’s breathing. A heavy vine grows out of the darkness disappearing off the edge of the stoop, and she wonders what could possibly grow in a place like that.

  “Uh… I’ll be late for school,” she answers, suddenly afraid of his friendship and the place in which he lives.

  He grabs one of her books before she hurries off. “Maybe I can read this,” he suggests. “And the next time you come, we can talk about it together.”

  She nods, feeling her familiar shyness closing up her throat so she can’t speak. Then she turns and hurries down the street and around the corner to school.

  As luck is no friend of Olivia’s, it turns out the book he borrowed, Oddities of Nature, is the subject of an oral report she is supposed to give that day. Still, she is glad that he took it, because it is one of her favorites, and when she works up the nerve to walk down his street again, they’ll have a lot to talk about.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she tells her mother over dinner that night. “He’s living in an abandoned building—I think all by himself—but he says he’s homeschooled.”

  “Maybe we should talk to the police about him,” her mother says, trying to hide the suspicion in her voice. “He could be a runaway.”

  Olivia fiddles with the spaghetti on her plate. “If he’s a runaway, he wouldn’t be sitting out there like that, for the whole world to see.”

  “Well, whatever he is, I’d leave him alone if I were you.”

  Her mother’s words linger for the rest of the night. Her mom has always pushed Olivia to make more friends, but at the same time injected her with a heavy dose of paranoia. Here is someone who seems to welcome her friendship. Is she going to throw that away?

  As Olivia prepares for bed, she studies her face in the bathroom mirror and wonders what the boy on the stoop sees when he looks at her that could possibly make him smile.

  * * *

  “It’s a really interesting book,” says Forest as they sit together after school the next day. Always on the stoop—never moving from the stoop. Together they flip through the pages of Oddities of Nature. “It’s full of weird things.”

  “I know, isn’t it great?” Olivia flashes him a rare smile.

  They turn to a page that features a bird with both of its eyes on the same side of its head, then Forest points out his favorite—a frog that can freeze solid as a rock, but comes back to life when defrosted. Olivia turns to a dog-eared page toward the back of the book.