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I always knew her, of course. She was always here in town. She was always a year ahead of me in school. She always was.
And now she’s not.
It happened this morning.
We were in the playground on a free period. I was there with Benny and Chong, and we were waiting on Morgie, who volunteered to go and get us a big bunch of grapes from the cafeteria. We were in our usual spot, on the edge of the softball diamond. The Gorman twins were tossing an old Frisbee that was patched with duct tape, and our history teacher, Mr. West-Mensch, was playing basketball with some of the juniors and seniors. It wasn’t too sunny, and there were a lot of big clouds up in the blue sky. We were trying to decide what they looked like.
“See that one there?” said Benny. He was lying on the bleachers with his head on my shoes, pointing up to a cloud directly over us. “That’s a parrot.”
“You’ve never seen a parrot,” said Chong.
“Yes, I have. There’s a picture of one in the art room.”
Chong made that face he makes when he doesn’t want to admit he’s wrong but has to. “Fair enough. But that cloud doesn’t look like a parrot.”
“Yes, it does.”
“More like a macaw.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Benny.
I pointed to a little cloud over the trees. “It’s a bunny.”
They both looked.
“How come every cloud looks like a bunny to you?” asked Benny.
“No, they don’t,” I said.
He pointed to another one. “Okay, then what does that look like?”
I didn’t want to answer, because it really looked like a bunny too. Which is not my fault. I don’t make the clouds. I can’t help it if some of them look like bunnies. That’s just Benny being ridiculous.
That’s when we heard the scream.
I read once that sometimes people used to hear screams and pretend they didn’t. Really. They could be walking down the street in one of those old big cities where millions of people used to live, and they’d hear a scream or maybe actually see someone screaming, and they would just walk on by. Mom says it’s because they didn’t want to get involved, but she can’t be right. How could someone not want to get involved if someone was that hurt or scared, or if they were in trouble? I mean . . . who would do that?
So when we heard the scream, we all looked around. We all got up right away. There are a lot of things a scream might mean, but as far as I know, none of them are good.
That’s when we saw Jazz Patel.
She was walking really weird. Half running, half stumbling, and she kept slapping herself. Slapping her face and arms.
And she kept screaming.
We all ran. Everyone did.
Everyone in the school yard.
When someone’s in trouble, you have to do something. You have to find out what’s happening.
I heard someone say it before we even reached her.
“Fire ants! Fire ants!”
That’s when we saw it. Saw them.
Jazz was covered with them. Hundreds of tiny red ants. I could see the bites on her arms and her face. Dozens and dozens of bites.
