drawer and hurried back to bed and sat there with the covers pulled
around his shoulders the way TV Indians wrapped themselves in blankets
when they sat at TV campfires.
The shower stopped. So did the singing. After a while Derek came out
of the bathroom, followed by a cloud of damp, soapy smelling air. He
was dressed for the day. His wet hair was combed back from his
forehead.
He was not a rotting dead person. He was all alive, every part of him,
at least every part you could see, and no bones poked out anywhere.
“Good morning,” Derek said, the words slurred and muffled by his crooked
mouth and too-big tongue. He smiled.
“Good morning.”
“You sleep good?”
“Yeah,” Thomas said.
“Breakfast soon.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe sticky buns.”
“Maybe.” “I like sticky buns.”
“Derek?” ‘Huh?”
“If I ever tell you.
Derek waited, smiling.
Thomas thought out what he wanted to say, then continued:
“If I ever tell you the Bad Thing’s coming, and I tell you to run, don’t
just stand around like a dumb person. You just run.
” Derek stared at him, thinking about it, still smiling, then after a
while he said, “Sure, okay.”
“Promise?”
“Promise. But what’s a bad thing?”
“I don’t know really, for sure, but I’ll feel it when it’s coming, I
think, and tell you, and you’ll run.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. Down the hall. Find some aides, stay with them.”
“Sure. You better wash. Breakfast soon. Maybe sticky buns.”
Thomas unwrapped himself from the blanket and got out of bed. He
stepped into his slippers again and walked to the bathroom.
Just as Thomas was opening the bathroom door, Derek said.
“You mean at breakfast?” Thomas turned.
“Huh?”
“You mean a bad thing might come at breakfast?”
“Might,” Thomas said.
“Could it be… poached eggs?”
“Huh?”
“The bad thing-could it be poached eggs? I don’t like poached eggs, all
slimy, yuck, that’d be real bad, not good all like cereal and bananas
and sticky buns.”
“No, no,” Thomas said.
“The bad thing isn’t poached egg It’s a person, some funny-weird person.
I’ll feel it when it’s coming, and tell you, and you’ll run.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure. A person.”
Thomas went into the bathroom, closed the door. He didn’t have much
beard. He had an electric razor, but he only used it a couple-few times
a month, and today he didn’t need it.
He brushed his teeth, though. And he peed. He made the water start in
the shower. Only then did he let himself laugh, because enough time had
passed so Derek wouldn’t even wonder why Thomas was laughing at him.
Poached eggs!
Though Thomas usually didn’t like seeing himself, see how lumpy and
wrong and dumb his face was, he peeked into the steam-streaked mirror.
One time long ago, past when he could remember, he’d been laughing when
he’d happened to see himself in a mirror, and for once-surprise-he
hadn’t felt so bad about how he looked. When he laughed he looked like
a normal person. Just pretending to laugh didn’t make him look more
normal, it had to be real laughing, and a smile didn’t do it, either,
because a smile wasn’t enough of a laugh to change his face. In fact, a
smile could sometimes look sad, he couldn’t stand seeing himself at all.
Poached eggs.
Thomas shook his head, and when his laughter finished he turned from the
mirror.
To Derek the most worst bad thing he could think of was poached eggs and
no sticky buns, which was very funny ha-ha. You try to tell Derek about
walking dead people and scissors sticking out of bellies and something
that eats little live animals, and old Derek would look at you and smile
and nod and not get it at all.
For as long as he could remember, Thomas had wished he was a normal
person, not dumb, and many times he thanked God for at least making him
not as dumb as poor Derek. But now he half wished he was dumber, so he
could get those ugly nasty vision-pictures out of his mind, so he could
forget about Derek going to die and the Bad Thing coming and Julie being