Mike Sweeney stood in the shop doorway and looked back into the store, his eyes roving over every aisle and rack of the Crow’s Nest. Ever since he could remember he’d been coming into the store to spend his allowance—when he hadn’t lost it as a penalty for accidentally breaking one of Vic’s many household rules—or his paper-route money on the stuff Crow sold. Mostly comics and half-priced old paperbacks, but also model kits and posters and science fiction novelties. One summer he had managed to score the entire Ace Books run of Edgar Rice Burroughs—the ones with the Frank Frazetta or Roy Krenkel covers. The store had always been the single most fun place in town, and one of the few places where he didn’t feel like a geek or an outsider. Hell, no one was a bigger geek than Crow.
Now he was standing in the doorway with a ring of keys in his hand, ready to lock the place up after having worked there all day. He was now a part of the place, and just thinking about made his head a little swimmy and his feet feel like they weren’t really touching the ground. He was grinning so hard his face hurt, though considering the bruises he still had, that wasn’t saying as much as it should. At that moment he wouldn’t have cared all that much if he knew he was going home to another of Vic’s beatings. Now he had somewhere to be, and some
Mike stepped out and pulled the door shut, locked both of the locks, and pocketed the keys. He’d taken care of the re-stocking, counted out the till, and put the cash drawer with the day’s take in Crow’s apartment, fed his cats, and shut the place down. It was Little Halloween, and though there had been brisk traffic through the store all day, Crow had said that it would die by sunset because there were so many things going on just outside of the town proper—the movie marathon at the Dead End Drive-In, parties on the campus, fireworks up by the Crescent Bridge, and a rock concert at the Hayride. Crow told him that he could close at five tonight, which left him four whole hours before he had to be home. He wanted to be on his bike—the War Machine—and be out flying along the roads, feeling the wind and feeling the freedom. He walked down the alley beside the store and unchained his bike from the chain-link fence, rolled it back to the street, and swung his leg carefully over it, though his wince was more a reflex than a reaction. Though he still hurt in a hundred little places, the aches were small and dull and fading. All of the big pains, even his broken rib, had vanished over the last few nights.
Mike thought that this speeded-up healing was due to puberty. He was almost fifteen and he was aware of the changes in his body, the thickening of his muscles, the hair growing under his arms and on his crotch, the broadening of his palms and the soles of his feet, the shadowy faintness of a red-gold mustache. He figured that as you got older you healed faster. Why else could pro ballplayers shake off those train-wreck collisions on the gridiron? Why else could boxers take hit after hit in the ring? It made sense to him.
He had no idea at all that each night he was taking a short trip sideways out of his body, or perhaps just
Walking the bike to the top of Corn Hill, he paused for a moment, enjoying as always the colorful complexity of Pine Deep’s many stores and galleries and shops, and then he kicked off and swooped down the hill and up the other side, banked hard right onto Orenda Street, and rolled past the Dark Hollow Inn and Corn Dolly’s Bar, both bright with lights and activity, the usual late weekend crowd swollen with scores of people from out of town. He rocketed by Dragon’s Lair Games, which was still packed with kids, and past the darkened windows of the town’s biggest store, Gordon Python’s Fine Antiques, closed now for the day. Little Halloween revelers were never known for antiquing of a Friday evening. Feeling happy for the first time in a long time, he kicked the War Machine into action again and stopped at Half-Baked to buy a couple of pumpkin muffins, still hot from the oven.
“Hey, Mike,” said Hillary MacPeake, leaning out of the little sales window cut into the side of the store, “what happened to you?”
Mike constructed a sheepish smile. “Oh, I fell off my bike.”
“Ooo, looks painful.”
“It’s not that bad,” he said, his tone light, and in truth the bruises hardly hurt at all.
“Well, just be careful.”
