The Monster Variations Read Online Free

waffle ice cream cones; that’s how happy they were, all of them, everyone in town, in seed company hats and farmer’s tans and dresses so new you could still see the dimples where they had hung all spring on store racks.
    It was summer, finally summer, eight weeks later—he’d made it!—and the days, how perfectly terrible
hot
they were. Days like these made it practically a punishable crime to be a girl, and twelve-year-old boys everywhere were thrilled to be off the hook. The sun, everyone swore it, was closer that year and sagged lower, tickling tree leaves and roasting the skin of the three ofthem, Willie and Reggie and James, as they ran, which they were always doing—through infield dirt, playground blacktop, or scratchy, overgrown ditch weeds—arms pin-wheeling and knee holes yawning ever wider; Willie in stripes, his arm stump still bandaged, James in something uncomfortable with buttons, and Reggie, as always, bringing up the rear.
    Reggie was confident enough to let the other two go first, and often wore almost nothing at all, having already set his shirt on fire and thrown it into the pond, just for fun, and another time used one to catch a frog, and another one to wipe the caked soot from the windows of that creepy, abandoned shed, something he had been dying to do all winter—hell, for longer than any of the boys could remember. Willie had a theory: Reggie’s mother—Ms. Fielder, Call-Me-Kay—must have spoken of that shed while Reggie still slept in her belly. Or that wonderful tire yard. Or that giant sewer pipe so big you could stand up in it. Or that spot beneath the railroad tracks where each passing train showered you with cool flakes of dirt and rust. Reggie’s mother must have spoken of these places constantly, because Reggie somehow knew of them, or was drawn to them by a secret frequency inaudible to Willie and James. Reggie never got lost on the way to anywhere forbidden, not that Willie could tell, nor was he ever afraid.
    “Martians will invade,” he promised some afternoons. “And our families will be killed dead in their shoes.”
    The fair always came to town on the first week of summer, right after school let out, when the green lawn of the fairgrounds suddenly gave rise to tents, food trailers, and carnival rides. The men who worked the rides were beyond men. They were fatter than the boys’ fathers (except Reggie, who had no father) and wore fuller beards and longer hair. Their forearms were thick and blue with illustrations and their hands smelled sharply of kerosene. Though Willie sensed that the men were less offended by his missing limb than normal people, they were also without pity. They stood with arms crossed and looked at the boys with something between amusement and murder.
    The boys kept running.
    “We will all marry girls,” promised Reggie. “And we’ll be there when they die.”
    They tried to pop two balloons with three darts and failed. They tried to toss one basketball through a hoop and failed. They tried to toss one plastic ring around one soda bottle—
any
bottle, come
on
. Willie’s face was sticky with cotton candy because he didn’t have a second arm to pull off the wispy remainders. James emptied his pockets to buy a one-dollar mirror etched with the contour of a sexy lady, but later gave it to Reggie, conceding that his own parents would never allow something so lewd and impractical inside a house already sparkling with three floors of clean, inoffensive mirrors. The Wahls’ housekeeper, Louise, was directed to clean all of the mirrors weekly, and the floors and windows and light switches,too. James claimed that he found this routine needlessly thorough, but Willie and Reggie had both caught him staring intently into the mirrors as if searching for some kind of barely camouflaged flaw. Sometimes he would press his thumbnail into his upper lip for a full minute and then remove it, and show the temporary white slash to one of his friends.