Voodoo Heart by Scott Snyder Page B

day before, a girl I liked had passed me a note—Stephanie Leroux, I still remember her name. The note said that tomorrow she’d pass me a romance note, and so on that morning I was taking my time getting to school, enjoying my own anticipation. The day was perfect. Warm, with a glowing blue sky.
    I remember hearing a faint static in the atmosphere, a kind of electric crackle. The next thing I knew I was lying on the ground, staring up at the clouds with a metal pebble lodged and cooling in my skull.
    I learned later that there had been a race nearby, a charity marathon, and that the man in charge had mistakenly fired an actual bullet into the air to get things started. He came to the hospital almost every day I was there and cried into the rumpled edge of my bed. The woman who won the race also came by once, and gave me a trophy with a man on top, a man painted gold holding a ring of laurels over his head like a shield.
    The doctors said that I was lucky, that if the bullet had been falling even a fraction faster, it would have pierced my skull, instead of sticking in the bone, and likely caused serious brain damage, if not death. As it was, the injury, while painful, wasn’t all that serious. “It’s that thick skull of yours that saved you,” said one doctor. He chuckled, then gave me a little punch in the arm. I had a seam of staples down the front of my head. Metal wires ran through my face like whiskers.
    I was in the hospital only a month and a half, but when I left, I found that I was afraid to go outside. I developed an irrational fear of lightning—I thought I could sense it coiled in the air all the time, even on sunny days—and if I had to travel anywhere uncovered, I’d start to shake and sweat and stutter. My parents walked me around town day after day to help, but nothing changed. Children picked on me at school because of my jumpiness and my new white hair. They called me “skunk,” even after I dyed the white patch brown. They beat me up. I became afraid. My parents bought me a trumpet, which I played alone in my room. I was left back once, then twice. After that I left school altogether.
    It’s funny how a hit like that can be all it takes to knock you off course. Hardly more than a tap or nudge, and suddenly you find that you’ve become someone entirely new, some dark version of yourself you never thought possible. One minute you’re a boy with promise, you’re an honors student, you have friends, a future; and the next you’re twenty-nine and living in the basement of your cousin’s house. Where has your chance at happiness gone? You don’t know. Whenever people talk about how the neighborhood has gone downhill, it feels like they’re talking about you.
    I worked at my father’s comic book store. I delivered tanks of carbonated water for a soda company. I played the trumpet around town for extra money. I landscaped. I worked at a warehouse where they used pig fat to make fireplace logs that could burn all day. At night, I often traveled to Albany and drove up and down the fanciest streets, the ones with the most expensive houses, and watched the lighted windows slide by through the darkness like trays displaying all the things I didn’t have. Now and then I thought about stealing, about hurting people, but more often I wanted to be the one to catch someone else doing things like that. As I drove, I often fantasized about spotting some catastrophe I could prevent—spying a prowler creeping through the hedge; catching sight of the fire just now starting in the kitchen of that house. I wanted to be there to save someone else from the kind of disaster that had happened to me, because I felt that if I did, maybe I’d get another chance at things. Maybe someone would help steer me back to where I was supposed to be.
    Every morning I tell myself that things will turn around, that today will be a new start. I lean in close to the bathroom mirror and say, “Ready. Set. Go.”

    Though most of