The Troop by Nick Cutter Page A

what’s the most obvious conclusion?” Shelley asked, his vapid face oriented on Kent. “His skin looked like it was . . . melting. ”
The boys fell silent.
“I just think the guy is sick, is all,” max said after a while. “And I’ve been thinking about it.”
“So have I,” said ephraim.
“And me,” newt said.
Kent snorted. “Tim’s a doctor, isn’t he? That’s his job, isn’t it? By the time we get back, he’d better have everything sorted out.”
He kicked the fire apart, scattering bits of flaming driftwood.
Before departing, newton gathered the still-glowing sticks and doused them in the ocean. Scout’s law number four: Honor and protect Nature in all her abundance.
    EVIDENCE LOG, CASE 518C

PIECE E-11 (Personal Effects)

Counseling Diary of Newton Thornton

Recovered from SITE T (34 Skylark Road, North Point,
    Prince Edward Island) by Officer Brian Skelly, badge #908

Dear Dr. Harley,
    I’ll compose this like a letter, because I write a lot—I’ve got pen pals in Australia, England, and Dubuque, Iowa. Who doesn’t like opening the mailbox and finding a letter from a friend, even one you’ve never met in person?
    So  .  .  . a confession, huh? You think I keep things bottled up, and confession’s good for the soul. Right? I’d talk more if people—I mean the other kids at school— gave two cruds what I have to say. Most times they’ll just laugh, call me a nerd, a geek, call me fat, call me a nerdy fatty-fat geek (which is overkill, right? Nerds and geeks are pretty much the same . . .). So I don’t talk much, except to my teachers and my mom. And now you.
    The thing is, you can be a different person in letters. On the Internet, too. Because there, you’re not YOU. Okay so yes, you are, but not the physical you. So not fat (it’s glandular), sweaty (it’s also glandular), weird (for North Point, anyway. I don’t like bow hunting or spearfishing or killing things, I’m too clumsy for stickball and I actually
LIKE
Anne of Green Gables . . . so yeah, weird!) and awkward and gawky and according to Ephraim Elliot sometimes I smell like rotten corn, like when you shuck an ear and it’s all black inside? (By the way, I hear you’re counseling Eef, too; you’re doing a good job—he hasn’t given me a Wet Willy, a Rooster Peck, or a Titty Twister in like a month.)
    But online I’m not that person. I can be my very best self. According to Mom I’m a sensitive boy. Also, I’m a polymath, which means I know a little bit about everything (which, okay, IS nerdy). Online I can be my brain without my body.
    So . . . the confession. Forgive me, Father . . . hah! Anyway, you won’t tell anyone. Patient-doctor confidentiality. I read about it.
    A year ago my cousin Sherwood died. He lived in Manitoba. He fell asleep in a field and a combine ran him over. He tried to run but those combines are like forty feet of whirring blades. At his funeral the coffin stayed closed.
    I loved Sherwood. We hardly got to see each other—we don’t have a lot of money (I don’t even know how Mom affords you) and Sherwood’s parents are farmers. But every summer they came for a visit. I’d take Sher to the ocean. No ocean in Manitoba, right? We got along great. When I told him a little nugget of info, Sher was genuinely interested.
    We stuck to the out-of-the-way places, the ones only I knew. I didn’t want to run across any kids from school— they’d call me lardbucket or tub-a-guts. I was scared that if Sher saw that he wouldn’t like me anymore. Which wasn’t really fair to him. Sher would’ve helped me, because blood is thicker than water, right?
    Sher was tall with wide shoulders and lots of muscle— farmboy muscles, he called them, laughing and telling me everyone had them back home, he wasn’t so special. But Sher WAS special. Handsome (I can say that about another boy, it’s not weird) and people just  .  .  . they gravitated to him, is I think the word. Like a magnet