One Friday after lunch in November, Paul, Morris and Leonard sat on the floor in the hallway by the boiler room, soaking in the warmth and comparing scars.“I have these two new this winter,” said Leonard proudly. He displayed a pink line on the inside of his wrist and another hovering an inch above his elbow.
“Wow, how did you get them?” said Morris, hiding his disappointedly unblemished forearms in his lap.
“This one here,” said Leonard, tapping the one on his wrist, “barbed wire, sledding backwards down Glory Hill. “This one my big brother pushed me down on the ice. My dad murdered him.”
“Are they all stitch jobs?” Morris asked.
“All,” said Leonard. “I took them out with my own teeth.” He jawed his elbow to demonstrate.
“Do they itch?” asked Paul.
“Nah,” said Leonard, scratching one at the idea.
“What about you, Paul?” said Morris. “Got any new ones?”
“No, I still just have the one from two summers ago.” Paul tapped the white dash above his left eyebrow where the oak branch had cut. “And this chicken pox scar.” He brushed his cheek.
“Chicken pox don’t count,” said Leonard incredulously.
Paul nodded. He understood the rules, but to him it was still a scar.
“What’s that?” Morris said, pointing at Paul.
“What’s what?” said Paul. He followed Morris’ finger to where it appeared to be pointing: his left hush puppy. “My shoe?” Paul cuffed a scuff of dust with the back of his hand. He hoped there wasn’t a glob of sheep manure stuck somewhere he couldn’t see. He’d tracked some into school two winters ago and nearly died of embarrassment when it started to stink during math problems.
“No,” Morris said, “on your leg.”
Paul strained forward to hitch up the leg of his chocolate-brown corduroys. He was now concerned some of the hairs his dad had had a talk with him about were already beginning to sprout. Paul followed the pale gooseflesh of his leg up into the darkness of his pant leg.
“I really don’t see anything,” he said.
“There, look,” said Morris. “Leonard, you see it, don’t you? So faint you almost can’t see it. But a perfect scar by any measure. The winner of the contest, if you ask me.”
Leonard dove in for a look, getting on his stomach and squinting severely. Paul felt Leonard’s eyelashes tickle his ankle he was so close.
“Yeah, I see it,” he said after what seemed like 10 minutes. “You’ve got a good one there. I’ll give you the prize.”
Paul didn’t know which was harder to believe: that Leonard was conceding defeat or that he possessed this marvelous scar and didn’t know it.
Paul strained backward, craning painfully and upside down through the space of his armpit, to see what his friends were talking about. For the life of him, though, he couldn’t make anything out, aside from a mole or two. Paul’s legs had not seen much sun in their lives, and this, for better or worse, preserved their baby pale appearance. Wearing shorts for him was a mortifying experience.
“How’d you get it?” Leonard intoned, now clearly amazed. “It’s silver.”
“I don’t know,” said Paul, growing irritated. “I don’t see anything at all.”
“You have to look beside it a little in order to see it,” offered Morris. “Kind of like trying to spot the Milky Way at night.”
“What could have caused it, though?” asked Leonard. “That’s the question.”
“Something real sharp, had to be,” said Morris. “So sharp he probably didn’t even feel it.”
“But there would have been blood,” said Leonard, sitting up again. “Buckets of it. I mean, even Myron Floren is human.”
“Nothing happened to my leg,” said Paul sharply. He slapped down his pant leg and stood. His head swam. He staggered two steps in the direction of the boiler room door.
“Something happened,” said Morris. “We saw it with our own two eyes.”
“Your own two eyes can’t see.” Paul was nearly shrieking, quivering the little asbestos balls that hung precariously from the ceiling above their heads.
Kelly McCloskey then stepped into the cone of light that fell from two round lights in the ceiling. Paul sensed from the look on her face that she had been standing there in the shadows for some time.
“I know what happened,” she said. “I know what it’s from.” Her voice was steady and serious, not shaky like when she spoke on the first day of school.
Kelly’s seriousness and fire-engine hair brought a burst of laughter from Morris and Leonard that ricocheted up and down the hallway. The glare Kelly shot back was meaner than the meanest teacher in school could not have conjured. It silenced Paul’s friends and withered them backward down the hallway like a burst of fire. Kelly’s certainty and might caused Paul to believe what Kelly McCloskey had said. He believed she knew the reason behind this thing his friends had found on his leg.
Paul turned to see that they were alone. The hallway was empty. Morris and Leonard had fled.
