Forever Freaky by Tom Upton Page B

him see that I can’t be fixed.
This is the way I am. I’m never going to be the perky, loving
daughter that other people have. He got stuck with a freak.”
    “Oh, Julie,” she murmured, but that was all
she could say. She could never find the words to make things better
for me, because there were no such words in any language.
    I pushed away from the table. Before I left
the room, I paused at the doorway for a long time. “Mom… I love
you,” I said, but the words didn’t sound very convincing, not even
to me.
     
    ***************
     
     
    At school Monday all anybody could talk about
was how some dude on the baseball team had burst into flames.
    I sat across the lunchroom table from Melody,
my best friend. She always got caught up in school gossip, every
little tidbit that was floating around. She could go on for hours
about how so-and-so had broken up with her boyfriend. Or how
somebody got suspended for doing something stupid. It was hard to
shut her up—she just babbled on and on. Today she was twice as bad,
because of the guy on the baseball team who caught fire last Friday
during a game.
    “Can you imagine that!” she said, between
bites of her pizza slice. “Suddenly, it’s like, poof, you’re
burning. I wonder what that would be like.”
    “If you want, I’ll find some lighter fluid
and matches. We can experiment,” I said.
    But it was as though she couldn’t even hear
me. “I wonder if he felt it burning first, or did he see the flames
first. Your dad’s a fireman, right? What did he say about it? I
mean, about what might cause something like that to happen.”
    Before I could answer, Jack Kilgore set his
tray on the table.
    “Spontaneous human combustion,” he said,
sitting next to Melody.
    “Oh, hey, Jack,” Melody said, running her
fingers through her long hair. She had a crush on Jack for weeks
now. It would have been nice if they could get together. At least
that way Jack would leave me alone. Sadly he found Melody boring
and shallow, which showed at least he had a good grip on reality as
far as Melody was concerned.
    “I said it weeks ago,” Jack said to me, as
though Melody wasn’t even there, “after the first Mount Olive guy
got torched.”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I droned. Since I met
him, and told him my secrets, Jack’s purpose in life seemed to be
to convince me I should use my abilities to help people. And my dad
thought I needed to see a psychiatrist?
    “I saw a cable show on that—spontaneous—you
know… what you mentioned,” Melody said to Jack, playing up to him.
“I was wondering why it was when people burn up like that they are
always alone. It’s always some old lady, sitting in her lounge
chair, watching game shows. Or some old guy locked in the bathroom,
getting ready to take a shower. Why doesn’t a newscaster burst into
flames on live television?”
    “Hey, I’d like to see that,” I put in.
    “Or a baseball player in front of a couple
hundred spectators?” Jack said.
    “Exactly,” Melody piped. “Oh, that really did
happen, didn’t it. You think it was that spontaneous human
combustion?” she asked Jack.
    “What do you think?” Jack asked me.
    “Just leave me out of it, huh?” I was already
stressing. I nibbled at my garden salad. The only other things on
my tray were a hunk of corn bread and a large cube of green gelatin
that was so solid it would probably bounce like a rubber ball. I
started to play with the green cube, with my mind, pressing down on
the top of it so that its sides bulged out and then letting go so
that it went back to its original shape. I continued to do that,
and I started to feel better. Not even Jack could bother me
now.
    “Jules, stop playing with your food,” he
said.
    But I kept pressing down on the cube and
letting go, press and release, press and release. Pretty soon I
felt like giggling. It just seemed so funny—I didn’t know why.

“Just don’t try to con me into something,” I
told him.
    “Come on,