The Talisman

same channel, can you say amen.
    2
    When it happened, it happened fast. At one moment Jack was listening to Ferd Janklow’s usual line of cynical, amusing bullshit. At the next, Ferd was pelting north across the murky field toward the stone wall. Until Ferd went for it, the day had seemed as drearily ordinary as any other at the Sunlight Home. It was cold and overcast; there was a smell of rain, possibly even snow, in the air. Jack looked up to ease his aching back, and also to see if Sonny Singer was around. Sonny enjoyed harassing Jack. Most of the harassment was of the nuisance variety. Jack had his feet stepped on, he was pushed on the stairs, his plate had been knocked out of his hands for three meals running – until he had learned to simultaneously cradle it on the inner side of his body and hold it in a death-grip.
    Jack wasn’t completely sure why Sonny hadn’t organized a mass stomping. Jack thought maybe it was because Sunlight Gardener was interested in the new boy. He didn’t want to think that, it scared him to think that, but it made sense. Sonny Singer was holding off because Sunlight Gardener had told him to, and that was another reason to get out of here in a hurry.
    He looked to his right. Wolf was about twenty yards away, grubbing rocks with his hair in his face. Closer by was a gantry-thin boy with buck teeth – Donald Keegan, his name was. Donny grinned at him worshipfully, baring those amazing buck teeth. Spit dribbled from the end of his lolling tongue. Jack looked away quickly.
    Ferd Janklow was on his left – the boy with the narrow Delftware hands and the deep widow’s peak. In the week since Jack and Wolf had been incarcerated in the Sunlight Home, he and Ferd had become good friends.
    Ferd was grinning cynically.
    ‘Donny’s in love with you,’ he said.
    ‘Blow it out,’ Jack said uncomfortably, feeling a flush rise in his cheeks.
    ‘I bet Donny’d blow it out if you let him,’ Ferd said. ‘Wouldn’t you, Donny?’
    Donny Keegan laughed his big, rusty yuck-yuck, not having the slightest idea of what they were talking about.
    ‘I wish you’d quit it,’ Jack said. He felt more uncomfortable than ever.
    Donny’s in love with you.
    The bloody hell of it was, he thought that maybe poor, retarded Donny Keegan really was in love with him . . . and Donny was maybe not the only one. Oddly, Jack found himself thinking of the nice man who had offered to take him home and who had then settled for dropping him off at the mall exit near Zanesville. He saw it first, Jack thought. Whatever’s new about me, that man saw it first .
    Ferd said, ‘You’ve gotten very popular around here, Jack. Why, I think even old Heck Bast would blow it out for you, if you asked him.’
    ‘Man, that’s sick,’ Jack said, flushing. ‘I mean—’
    Abruptly, Ferd dropped the rock he had been working at and stood up. He looked swiftly around, saw none of the white turtlenecks were looking at him, and then turned back to Jack. ‘And now, my darling,’ he said, ‘it’s been a very dull party, and I really must be going.’
    Ferd made kissing noises at Jack, and then a grin of amazing radiance lit and broadened Ferd’s narrow, pale face. A moment later he was in full flight, running for the rock wall at the end of Far Field, running in big gangling storklike strides.
    He did indeed catch the guards napping – at least to a degree. Pedersen was talking about girls with Warwick and a horse-faced boy named Peabody, an Outside Staffer who had been rotated back to the Home for a while. Heck Bast had been granted the supreme pleasure of accompanying Sunlight Gardener to Muncie on some errand. Ferd got a good head-start before a startled cry went up:
    ‘Hey! Hey, someone’s takin off!’
    Jack gaped after Ferd, who was already six rows over and humping like hell. In spite of seeing his own plan coopted, Jack felt a moment of triumphant excitement, and in his heart he wished him nothing but well. Go! Go, you sarcastic son of a bitch! Go, for Jason’s sake!
    ‘It’s Ferd Janklow,’ Donny Keegan gurgled, and then laughed his big, whooping laugh.
    3
    The boys gathered for confession in the common room that night as they always did, but confession was cancelled. Andy Warwick strode in, announced the cancellation with abrupt baldness, and told them they could have an hour of ‘fellowship’ before dinner. Then he strode out.
    Jack thought Warwick had looked, under his patina of goose-stepping