Apocalypse by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online Page B

lot of my stuff in the trunk of my car, and the welder’s mask was in there too. I got it and gave it to her. “Thanks, Bar,” she says, and she looked at me kind of strange. Like she was taking a picture of me with her eyes. “I’ll get this thing back to you,” she says.
    I didn’t have no reason to disbelieve her. I never took notice till afterwards that she didn’t say she’d give it back. She just said she’d get it back to me.
    â€œWell, I got to go home and get my supper,” I says. Dumb. Here I’d just loaned her enough money to leave me and that mean little town behind, and I says I got to go home and get supper. Dumb! She just nodded, still looking at me funny, and I went on home.
    And like a moron I watched the feature movie on TV, then went to bed, then went to work in the morning. And I guess she took the noon bus. Because when I stopped by that night she was gone. All the way gone. Took her name off the mailbox even. I never heard no more about Joanie Musser, not by that name. Me or anybody else in that town.
    Anybody who asked, her mom told them she guessed the girl had run off to be a prostitute. The girl had always been bad news.
    A few weeks later I got a box in the mail with that dumb welder’s mask in it. The thing looked like it had been through a fire. There wasn’t nothing else. No letter, no nothing. And no return address.

CHAPTER THREE
    When Cally got to the school, a bit early, to pick up Tammy and Owen, the children were undergoing the weekly lice check. It was a small, informal school; Cally walked in and chatted with the teachers and watched as the nurse, who resembled a white sausage, lifted the neck hair of one youngster after another, each time with a fresh popsicle stick. Never did she touch a child with her hands.
    Cally kept up a wincing smile, scratched herself reflexively, and watched. Odd, how children always managed to look sweet and pretty, no matter where they came from. In all the assembled children there were no truly ugly ones, except perhaps the boy called Slug, the hefty one with the buzz haircut—but even he had petal-fresh skin on his pudgy cheeks. And the girls, the little Irish or Polish or Italian girls in their long soft beribboned or barretted hair and their sweet petulance—knowing their parents and their older sisters, Cally understood that they would grow into breathtaking young beauties, all dark eyes and boyfriends and bone structure, until they married and turned nearly overnight into cows, beefy, bovine, dull and beautyless cows. Hard to believe it, looking at the ethereal little girls, one of whom the nurse was screening for lice at that moment.
    The child sat in the designated chair, head bowed in a semblance of penitence, while the nurse pushed her heavy hair to one side and combed with her wooden implement the fine strands at the nape of her neck. The nurse wore white plastic gloves; they glistened on her strong, bulging hands like gut on fresh pork.
    â€œThere’s nits,” the nurse announced. “Look here.”
    All the teachers and waiting parents stepped forward—the community, validating the find—but not too near, stretching their necks to look at the small thickenings, like specks of bread dough, adhering to the hair strands. They nodded and murmured agreement, and several started to scratch.
    â€œMakes me itch just to think of lice!” exclaimed the kindergarten teacher.
    â€œHey, we found a live one on a kid last week!” The fifth-grade teacher, a man, seemed to have acquired some of the bumptious volume of his students. “We put it on a slide, put it under the microscope. Want to see?”
    â€œNo, thank you!”
    â€œI’d like to see,” Cally offered. She did not want to watch the nurse give the child the requisite paperwork to take home, quarantine her from the other children, call her parents. Lice were a shame on the family, no matter