Boys Life

families of Adams Valley. Then we stood up, sang another hymn, and sat down. Both of my grandfathers had voices like bullfrogs battling in a swamp pond.
    Plump, round-faced Reverend Richmond Lovoy stepped behind the pulpit and began to talk about what a glorious day it was, with Jesus risen from the dead and all. Reverend Lovoy had a comma of brown hair over his left eye, the sides of his hair gone gray, and every Sunday without fail his brushed-back hair pulled loose from its shellacked moorings and slid down over his face like a brown flood as he preached and gestured. His wife was named Esther, their three children Matthew, Luke, and Joni.
    As Reverend Lovoy spoke, his voice competing with the thunder of heaven, I realized who was sitting directly in front of me.
    The Demon.
    She could read minds. That much was an accepted fact. And just as it dawned on me that she was there, her head swiveled and she stared at me with those black eyes that could freeze a witch at midnight. The Demon’s name was Brenda Sutley. She was ten years old, and she had stringy red hair and a pallid face splashed with brown freckles. Her eyebrows were as thick as caterpillars, and the untidy arrangement of her features looked like somebody had tried to beat out a fire on her face with the flat side of a shovel. Her right eye looked larger than the left, her nose was a beak with two gaping holes in it, and her thin-lipped mouth seemed to wander from one side of her face to the other. She couldn’t help her heritage, though; her mother was a fire hydrant with red hair and a brown mustache, and her red-bearded father would’ve made a fence post look brawny. With all those red kinks in her background, it was no wonder Brenda Sutley was spooky.
    The Demon had earned her name because she had once drawn a picture of her father with horns and a forked tail in art class, and had told Mrs. Dixon, the art teacher, and her classmates that her pappy kept at the back of his closet a big stack of magazines that showed boy demons sticking their tails in the holes of girl demons. But the Demon did more than spill her family’s closeted secrets: she had brought a dead cat to school in a shoebox with pennies taped to its eyeballs for show-and-tell; she had made a graveyard out of green and white Play-Doh for her art class project, with the names of her classmates and the dates of their deaths on the headstones, which caused more than one child to go into hysterics when they realized they would not live to see sixteen; she had a fondness for bizarre practical jokes that involved dog manure pressed between sandwich bread; and it was widely rumored that she was behind the explosion of pipes in the girls’ bathroom at Zephyr Elementary last November, when every toilet was clogged with notebook paper.
    She was, in a word, weird.
    And now her royal weirdness was staring at me.
    A slow smile spread across her crooked mouth. I couldn’t look away from those piercing black eyes, and I thought She’s got me. The thing about adults is, when you want them to pay attention to you and intervene, their minds are worlds away; when you want them to be worlds away, they’re sitting on the back of your neck. I wanted my dad or mom or anybody to tell Brenda Sutley to turn around and listen to Reverend Lovoy, but of course it was as if the Demon had willed herself to be invisible. No one could see her but me, her victim of the moment.
    Her right hand rose up like the head of a small white snake with dirty fangs. Slowly, with evil grace, she extended the index finger and aimed it toward one of her gaping nose holes. The finger winnowed deep into that nostril, and I thought she was going to keep pushing it in until her whole finger was gone. Then the finger was withdrawn, and on the tip of it was a glistening green mass as big as a corn kernel.
    Her black eyes were unblinking. Her mouth began to open.
    No, I begged her, mind to mind. No, please don’t do it!
    The Demon slid her green-capped finger toward her wet pink tongue.
    I could do nothing but stare as my stomach drew up into a hard little knot.
    Green against pink. Dirty fingernail. A sticky strand, hanging down.
    The Demon licked her finger, where the green thing had been. I think I must’ve squirmed violently, because Dad gripped my knee and whispered, “Pay attention!” but of course he never saw the invisible Demon or her act of prickly torment. The Demon smiled at me, her black eyes sated, and then she