The Pricker Boy Read Online Free

Brown gunk splashes toward Ronnie. A bit gets Morangie, but the old cat doesn’t leap out of the way. She just glares at the Cricket, almost challenging him to do it again. Ronnie reaches down to brush off his pants.
    “He didn’t even get you,” I tell him.
    “Cricket, you are one goofy kid,” Ronnie grumbles, and I am about to point out that at least he doesn’t lurk around in people’s bushes, when the Cricket lifts his fist, bends it at the wrist, and nods it in agreement with Ronnie. Ronnie repeats the Cricket’s hand gesture back to him. “I don’t know what this means,” he tells him. He turns to me. “What’s this all about?”
    “He’s just agreeing with you,” I explain.
    “So why not just say so?”
    “It’s our new thing. It’s how we … talk,” I explain.
    “You two are bizarre,” Ronnie protests. “You know how to talk. He’s not deaf. And that’s not even real sign language.” The Cricket takes a handful of mud and plops it on his own head. He snorts at Ronnie and bares his teeth like an angry lion. He hasn’t spoken a word in months. The Cricket’s “speech” has become all pantomime, all cartoon buffoonery, all exaggerated, silly gestures. I told my parents it was because of a game we were playing. I told them we’d seen it in a Marx Brothers movie. We couldn’t stop laughing at Harpo and Chico trying to talk to each other. I told them and I convinced them, and my parents are pretty hands-off kinds of people, preferring to “let the boys find their own way.” I’m sure my mother, a true hippie with the dirt under her nails to prove it, read that phrase in a new-age parenting book somewhere. “Just so long as he’s ‘talking’ to you,” she said to me back in the spring.
    When he feels like it, the Cricket’ll start talking again. Until then, he and I have plenty of fun making up our own language. We build on it day by day. Like Mom said, we don’t have to worry so long as he keeps talking to me. I won’t worry.
    But Ronnie doesn’t need to know about family stuff that started in the winter.
    “Will you teach me how to ‘talk’ like that?” Ronnie asks the Cricket, making quotation marks in the air with hisfingers when he says the word “talk.” The Cricket scowls as he looks back and forth at Ronnie’s hands hanging in the air. He lifts his fist, bends it at the wrist, and shakes it back and forth, then pretends to open an invisible tin can with a can opener. NO CAN DO.
    “I give up,” Ronnie sighs. His nose is still itching. It’s twitching and skipping around on his face like it’s trying to fly away from his cheeks. He sneezes, and his nose settles down. “I think I’ve got a new story all worked out. I was thinking of telling it tonight at the fire.” He reaches into his pocket and produces a white handkerchief. I catch sight of a patch of discolored skin on his right wrist, and an ugly memory twists my stomach. Ronnie wipes his nose. “I also got some fireworks this winter …,” he continues, then pauses. He sees me staring at the scar and tucks his arm down to his hip where I can’t see it. His eyes flinch, and I look away.
    “My grandparents and I, uh, went down south,” he says, “and I got a whole brick of regular fireworks and some whistling bottle rockets. I got a lot of stuff. I could probably give you some, if you wanted. We have to be careful, though. I’m not supposed to light them off without my grandfather around.”
    I feel the urge to be nice to him, to let him know that he’s okay. “I’ve still got some left over from last year,” I offer. “Want to light off a few now? We could try to sink some rocks—”
    Suddenly the hair on Morangie’s back stands straightup, and her back arches like a tiny camel’s hump. Her teeth protrude from curling lips, and she lets out a hiss that sends Ronnie leaping toward the water. Boris steps out of the bushes, the wag in his tail starting just behind his neck and warbling outward