Dread Locks

by Neal Shusterman

  Suddenly there were no words. The pot had boiled over with anger. Anger like I had never felt before. It exploded through the tips of my fingers, filling the aluminum bat, and I swung, taking off the head of a Roman soldier. A second swing crumbled his torso, then I turned and swung wildly, tearing loose the wing of a flying horse. Over and over. Sounds bellowed from my mouth—screams of rage. Rage at my life, so comfortable and plastic; rage at the world, so twisted and confusing; rage at the universe, so large and uncaring. I had opened up a doorway in myself that I didn’t know existed, and the rage blinded me to everything but the brutal, battering swing of the bat. I turned and swung again and again. Tara had to duck to avoid getting hit as well. Either the stone was softer than marble or I was stronger, or both, because it fractured and crumbled with every swing. Then, at last, with a guttural wail that felt like a war cry, I dropped the bat, and it clattered on the ground.

  Fine stone dust settled all around, filling my lungs, sticking to the roof of my mouth, leaving behind a bitter, chalky taste. We were in darkness again. I had smashed the candles, too. I heard the flick of a match, and Tara lit the candle in her hand again, to reveal the ruins. Not a single statue remained. Stone arms, legs, and heads littered the ground. Cold eyes looked up from the ruins. A hundred statues, maybe more—they were all gone. Destroyed by my hand. I must have been at it for the better part of an hour, but it seemed like minutes. I knew my muscles should have been sore from it, but they felt strong. Invigorated. As for the bat, it now lay on the ground, dented and worthless.

  I was breathing heavily, but I couldn’t catch my breath, because the stone dust kept filling my lungs. My hair was heavy with it. I shook my head to get rid of some of the chalky dust, but then I realized it wasn’t dust that made my hair heavy. It was my hair itself.

  I reached up to find I now had a full head of twisting curls, and every one of them writhed ever so slowly, like the tentacles of a sea anemone. I was too numb now to feel anything about that, although I knew that I should have felt something.

  “There,” Tara said. “All better now” Then she reached down into the rubble and picked up a stone hand that had fractured at the wrist and gave it to me, like a trophy for my efforts. “Save this, so you can always remember your triumph today.”

  I went home in a daze, put the stone hand on my desk, and fell into a sound sleep.

  12

  DARWIN’S CURVE

  I takes seven years to change, according to my science teacher. We shed layer after layer of skin; we lose cells each time we go to the bathroom; we breath out our substance with every breath, and after seven years, not a single molecule in our body is the same. You could say we become different people.

  Sometimes, though, change comes much faster. It comes like a chemical reaction, like bone dissolving in sulfuric acid. Like the explosive reaction of nitroglycerin. I know it was that way for me.

  When I went into school on Monday, it was like I was looking at the world through different eyes. Certain things seemed dull and colorless. The brightly painted mural on the side of the gym looked washed out. The sky, though I knew it was a bright, clear blue, seemed fundamentally gray ... but the trees, the grass, and the flowers in the garden stood out for me like I was seeing them in a different dimension. It felt like I was perceiving them through a new sense I couldn’t understand. It was sharp and not all that pleasant, like coming out of a movie theater into the bright light of day In this new, strange light, people stood out the most, and I felt a certain craving I couldn’t name. While passing between classes I was overwhelmed by this new sense as kids bumped past me in the halls, but I found that not everyone had the same effect on me. There were certain kids who seemed as colorless as the walls and floors. These were the ones who walked more slowly, their eyes cast down. By third period I came to understand that these were also the ones Tara had already befriended. Nils Lundgren, Leticia Hernandez, Josh Weinstein, and a whole lot of others.

  At lunch, I felt a strange urge to sit with other kids-kids I barely even knew. I felt a need to “schmooze” the way Tara did. I had always had my own clique and wasn’t very social beyond my friends. Now I found myself barging into other kids’ conversations, sitting down with them like I’d been invited.

  “Hey—you’re in my English class, right?” I would say Or, “That’s a cool watch you’re wearing.” Or, “I still don’t get quadratic equations—do you?” Anything to start a conversation. At first they treated me like I was some sort of weirdo, saying things like “Whatever,” trying to dismiss me. But I was not dismissed so easily. And soon I became part of whatever conversation the group was having, and they didn’t mind. This would have been great. It would have been amazing if it weren’t for that glaring change in me; that new, painful sense that pulled me toward them. It made me want to intrude into their lives. I felt I could barge my way into their conversations—even into their homes, sitting in their chairs, eating their food.

  Just like Tara.

  It wasn’t just that—I could sense things about people, too. In some weird way I could sense what they were like on the inside. It’s hard to put into words. The closest I can come to explaining it is that some kids kind of felt too hard, while others felt too soft. Then there were other kids who felt ... well... just right. I wanted to ask Tara about it, but at the same time didn’t want to talk about it at all.

  Tara was in school that day, but she kept her distance. Still, I noticed her noticing me. In all the conversations I shouldered my way into that day, one thing became clear: not a single person met my eyes. They would look away, or at each other, but no one could make eye contact. No one but Dante.

  “If you’re gonna stare at people like a ghoul, at least smile when you do it.”

  “Huh?”

  It was the start of history Mr. Usher was late, as usual. Dante sat next to me. “You’re staring at people like you want to eat them.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You are. And by the way ...” He pointed at my hair. “Your new ‘do’ is a ‘don’t’.”

  I reached up and brushed the tangled, dangling curls back from my face. I actually liked the way they felt. Like silky, coiled springs.

  “Most people like it,” I said, not really knowing or caring what most people thought.

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  Then he studied me. He looked at my eyes, then he shivered. “What’s happening to you, Parker?”

  I answered him honestly. “I’m not sure ... but I think I kind of like it.”

  Then he looked away “Man, if you’re gonna stare like that, at least have the decency to hide it.” He reached into his backpack and scrounged around for a few seconds until he pulled out an old pair of sunglasses, all scratched and crusty from being in the bottom of his pack. “Here.” He tossed them on my desk, and they wobbled themselves still.

  I picked them up and slipped them on. Even though they were dark, they didn’t change my vision of things at all. They might as well have been clear. But I guess they did hide my eyes. “Better?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Now you look just like Tara.”

  I was unlocking my dirt bike, preparing to go home, when Tara finally came up to me.

  “Give me a ride home?” she asked.

  “I don’t have the extra helmet,” I told her.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t need one.”

  “Everyone needs one,” I told her. “It’s a law.”

  “Laws were made for people like them,” she said, tossing her gaze toward the many kids funneling out of the school. “Not for us.”

  The fact that she included me in that statement made me feel both deeply chilled and deeply warm. It was like that with everything nowadays. My life was this jumble of opposites that couldn’t possibly fit in the same body, but did. I was feeling terrified, yet somehow I was at peace. Feeling revolted, yet somehow attracted to this strange thing I was becoming.

  “What did you do to me?” I asked her.


  Tara shook her head. “I didn’t do much at all. Most of it was your doing. I just planted a seed in your heart. But you’ve been making it grow better than I ever thought you would.” Then she flicked back her hair, and I found myself doing the same. “So are you giving me a ride, or not?”

  “Sure.”

  I started to put on my helmet, but it hurt when I tried to yank it down over my hair.

  “I told you,” she said. “You don’t need that anymore.”

  “That’s crazy—of course I do.” I tried one more time to force the helmet on, then Tara grabbed it away from me and tossed it. But she didn’t just toss it, she hurled it. I watched it disappear like a baseball flying over a ballpark fence. No one had the strength to throw something that far.

  “How did you—”

  She climbed onto the bike. “Let’s get going.”

  And so, with no helmet and no chance of tracking it down, I climbed on the dirt bike, started the engine, and took off. The wind pulled our long tendrils of hair, making them whip out behind us like streamers.

  I never expected what Tara did next. It came as a sudden, horrific surprise, so unexpected that I didn’t react fast enough to stop it. We were up on Ridgeline Road—the path that led out from the valley into the exclusive neighborhood where we lived.

  As we were about to make the turn on Darwin’s Curve, right above the deadly cliff, Tara leaned forward, grabbed my hands, and locked her elbows. I tried to turn the handlebars, but couldn’t—Tara’s grip was too strong.

  “What are you doing?!”

  “Making a point.”

  We were heading straight for the gap in the railing!

  “Tara, no! Are you nuts?!”

  “You’re gonna love this, Baby Baer!”

  “Nooooo!!”

  We hit the edge of the road and were airborne. I screamed, not understanding why Tara had done this. There was nothing beneath us now but a hundred feet of air and the sharp jagged rocks below. The bike fell away first, then I felt Tara’s hands slip away from me; and I was alone, falling to a painful, sorry end.

  That feeling came—the feeling of the first drop on a roller coaster. The nasty tingle of free fall. Two seconds ... three seconds ... then contact!

  I hit a jagged rock on my side and bounced off it. My skull connected with another rock, and I went spinning in the other direction, tumbling against the jagged stones, my arms and legs flailing with each impact, bones breaking—shattering—with every boulder I hit. I could feel the force of every single impact, yet no pain accompanied it, and I thought, Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to die before I have to feel the pain.

  But the pain never came.

  When I finally came to rest at the bottom of the cliff, my jeans and shirt were torn to shreds—even the soles of my sneakers had been ripped apart, but there wasn’t a single scratch on my body I stood up, flexed my arms, and touched my face. Nothing! No cuts, no bruises, no blood! It was impossible. I had felt my bones break and my flesh tear, yet I showed no signs of the injuries. It was as if I had healed in an instant.

  “See, I told you!” Tara came strolling up behind me. “Wanna do it again?”

  “No!”

  And even if I had wanted to, we couldn’t, because a few yards away lay my dirt bike, a useless mass of twisted metal and rubber.

  “But how ... how did ... how could ...”

  “Shhh,” Tara said. “Never ask how.” And she winked at me, making me feel like we were in our own special club. A club of two. Secret and superior. You can’t imagine how intoxicating that felt.

  Never ask how. At that moment, it felt like the wisest advice I had ever gotten.

  We walked all the way home and didn’t say a word to each other, but that was all right. I took her to her front door, said a simple good-bye, then went home. I didn’t even notice if anyone else was home. I think parts of my brain had shut down that afternoon. Maybe it was shock, I don’t know, but instead I went straight up to my room, changed out of my shredded clothes, and did my homework like nothing had happened. And when I was done, I went downstairs and sat at the dinner table, eating, not listening or hearing what everyone talked about, ignoring the fact that the food didn’t seem to fill me in the least. And when dinner was over, I shot some hoops alone on the court, sinking every single one. And then I went to bed.

  Simple. Just like any other evening. Except for the fact that I should have been dead, and I wasn’t. Never ask how. But if I couldn’t die, then “never” seemed like a very long time.

  13

  NEW HUNGERS

  I did my best to put the trip off Darwin’s Curve out of my mind. Believe it or not, it wasn’t all that hard to do, because there were other things more pressing. Like the hunger. It grew with each passing day—it seemed worst when I was at school surrounded by others. It was not a hunger for food—I knew that much. It wasn’t a hunger for mud, either—I actually tested that possibility and gagged on it. Deep down I knew I had an appetite for something very different, but I could not figure out what it was.

  It was four in the morning, at the end of that strange week. I had woken up famished, as usual, but I knew there was no food in the house that would satisfy my hunger.

  When I came downstairs and into the kitchen, I found Garrett sitting there in the dark. I jumped when I turned on the light—I wasn’t expecting to see him sitting there, so silent, so still. He had no such reaction, though. He didn’t flinch from the light. Even in the dim fluorescents of the kitchen, I could see that the sickly pallor of his skin was getting worse. It had turned grainy, like a photo blown up too large. I wondered how Mom and Dad could see him every day and not notice. Then again, maybe they did but were afraid to say anything—as if speaking it aloud would somehow make it real.

  Garrett sat there at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal in front of him, staring down into the bowl. Grape-Nuts, it looked like.

  “Midnight snack?” I asked as I grabbed myself some juice from the fridge.

  He didn’t move for the longest time. Then he turned his head slightly toward me. “I can’t cry, Parker.”

  It was such a strange thing for him to say—so out of character.

  “Wh-why would you want to cry?”

  Again it took him a long time to answer, as if moving the thought from his mind to his mouth was like trying to start a freight train.

  “The cereal,” he finally answered.

  “What about it?”

  “Look closer.”

  And so I did. I looked close enough to see that it didn’t really look like cereal. Plus, there was no cereal box on the table, just the bowl, a spoon, and the container of milk. Still Garrett stared down into the bowl, not moving. Not crying. But in a moment I discovered he shouldn’t have been crying at all. He should have been screaming ... because the door to the pantry was open just enough to reveal an open ten-pound bag on the floor. A bag of Petfit Kitty Litter.

  My stomach heaved, but I drank a huge gulp of orange juice to chase the feeling away.

  “Why do I want to eat this, Parker? Why am I so hungry for it? Why? Why?” I could see him working his eyes, trying to make tears come out, but they wouldn’t come. “Why don’t I feel anymore? Why don’t I care?”

  “You care enough to know something’s wrong,” I said to him gently. I put my hand on his, gripping it, hoping to give him comfort. His hand was cold. No, not cold ... it was ... room temperature. Like a snake.

  “But soon I won’t care,” he said. “Very soon I won’t care at all. It’ll be like everything else. I don’t care about my grades. I don’t care about my friends. I don’t care about Mom and Dad. About Katrina. About you. I don’t care about myself.”

  Tara did this to him, I thought. But then something else occurred to me. She had done it for me. She had done it because I had been so angry at Garrett that day And suddenly I knew that Garrett’s condition was my fault and my fault alone.

  ... Na...

  I had cursed him, and
somehow Tara had followed through on the curse.

  “I’m scared,” he whispered.

  “I know,” I told him. “Don’t be. It’ll be okay.”

  “No ... I want to be scared. It’s a feeling. I want to hold on to that feeling. Please, Parker. Please let me be scared. Help me to be scared....”

  It went against every fiber in my body, but I had to respect his wishes, and so I dug down as deep as I could to find something that would keep him scared. All I had to do was tell him the truth, based on what I had heard about Ernest.

  “It’s going to get worse,” I told him. “Your bones are going to get thicker. Your joints are going to grow stiff, and no doctors will be able to figure out what’s wrong. The only good thing about it is that you won’t be able to feel how much you’re suffering.”

  He blinked. His lids went slowly down, then slowly up. Not a bit of moisture slipped from his glazed, graying eyes.

  “Are you scared, Garrett?” I asked.

  Garrett breathed in. Garrett breathed out. “Not enough, bro. Not enough.”

  We sat there in silence for a good ten minutes. Then finally he said, “Go back to bed, Parker.” And so I did. Just before I left, I turned to catch sight of him lifting his spoon to his mouth, eating the kitty litter. I went to my bed, put my head beneath my pillow, and I began to cry I cried for both of us.

  I couldn’t get back to sleep. My head was full of thoughts as twisted as Tara’s twirling locks. As twisted as my own. Before dawn I decided to do something about it.

  I went to the bathroom. I didn’t look in Garrett’s room, because I didn’t want to know if he was there or still downstairs having his fancy feast. I remembered that there was a pair of scissors in a drawer still childproofed from when Katrina was small. I reached in, undid the latch, and pulled out the scissors. As I raised them toward my head, my curls pulled back. It was more than a twitch. It was a squirm. I could see the eerie way they moved. With the scissors shaking in my hand, I caught one of the curls between the blades and began to snip.