Body Surfing

was literally touching his breastplate.
    Jasper kicked the cracked glass out of one of the rear windows, but before he hoisted himself through he pulled the necklace off the driver’s neck. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe he wanted a trophy. A memento, to remind him of the first person he’d killed. It occurred to him that a more useful item might be the man’s wallet, so he fished around his pockets till he found it. But the only thing in the large billfold were ten crisp hundred-dollar bills, which Jasper pocketed along with the necklace, then shimmied out the broken window. He turned around to look at the car he’d just been in. It was some kind of antique, with flared wheel wells and running boards and a huge mesh grille like the front of a locomotive. It was also…twisted somehow, like a cruller or a washrag being wrung dry.
    “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”
    Jasper turned and saw a bulbous man running toward him. The man’s belly was shaking up and down so rapidly that his shirt came untucked and a distended sheet of pink-white skin quivered like rice pudding.
    “Are you, I mean, how did, I mean, I mean, I mean .” The man shook his head and his jowls flapped like a bulldog’s. “Dude. How are you still alive?”
    Jasper looked down at the man. That’s the million-dollar question, he thought.
    In the distance, he heard the sound of an approaching siren. There were horns, the screech of brakes, a lone car alarm, and more shouts as other people got out of their cars, but Jasper’s ears zeroed in on one sound. The ding-ding-ding of an alert indicating someone had left their keys in the ignition.
    He spotted the Dodge with its door open.
    “Is that yours? The red Charger?”
    The man turned, looked. A little smile curled up his face, as he acknowledged the incongruity of someone like him driving a muscle car.
    “Yeah. Traded in my Monte—” He was cut off by a fist to the jaw and crumpled to the ground.
    “Sorry ’bout that,” Jasper said, and ran for the car.

16
    M ichaela Szarko’s room was “in transition.”
    Her mother had decorated it in full princess motif: striped damask wallpaper, swagged lilac curtains, acres and acres of lace. A plaster statue of Cupid stood on a plinth in a corner, a reproduction of a Degas hung over the canopied bed. Mrs. Szarko had chosen the painting primarily because the ballerinas’ pale blue tutus complemented the Wedgwood blue in the wallpaper, but also because the girls’ delicately downcast eyes and rosy cheeks fostered the illusion that the angelic creature who slept beneath them would never do anything unbecoming of their gaze—would never read the kinds of books that had to be hidden under the covers, say, or, those images still present in her mind, tweak her nipples until they grew inflamed, or insert her Sonicare into orifices not specifically recommended by the American Dental Association. And of course she would never, ever spread her pale thighs for some teenaged boy who, often as not, didn’t even wear a clean shirt.
    Well. Jasper hadn’t succeeded in pinning Michaela beneath the Degas ballerinas (or anywhere else for that matter), but Mrs. Szarko’s aesthetic motif had fared little better. The once-pristine enameled frame of the mirror over the vanity table was all but lost beneath a hot-glued archipelago of rhinestones, postcards, fortune cookie slips, beer and soda caps, ticket stubs to movies and concerts, and aboutfifty photobooth strips of Michaela and her friends in various states of dress-up and undress. A big sheet of black fishnet had replaced the flounced silk canopy that once covered the bed, and various articles of clothing—most of them black and all of them torn—littered the three-inch white shag like a second carpet. A mustache shaded the lip of one of the ballerinas in the Degas print; Cupid’s face was smudged with lipstick kisses. It was a room at odds with itself, the maternal ideal of prepubescent chastity subsumed by the adolescent need to rebel.
    Like the room whose occupant he inhabited, the Mogran was also in transition. He’d had so many plans for Jasper. Pranks. Games. Chaos. Short and long plays. Yet somehow he’d never actually asked himself why he’d made a companion in the first place. The fledgling’s parting question had nagged Leo ever since the boy asked it by the river. Why? Such a human question. The kind of question that implied the existence of a subconscious, of a part of the brain not