The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer Page A

could be thrown away.
    At least once a week Matt dreamed of the dead man in the field. The man’s eyes were open and staring up at the sun. He was terribly, horribly thirsty. Matt could see how dusty his mouth was, but there was no water anywhere, only the dry, rattling poppies. It got so bad that Matt demanded a pitcher of water by his bed. If only he could take that pitcher into his dreams. If only he could dream it there and pour water into the man’s dusty lips, but he couldn’t. And when he woke up, he drank glass after glass to get rid of the dry, dead feel of the poppy fields. Then, of course, he had to go to the bathroom.
    On such occasions Matt would tiptoe past Celia’s bedroom. He could hear her snores and, across the hall, Tam Lin’s thunderous reply. This should have made him feel safe. But Matt never knew, just before he opened the bathroom door, whether the dead man might be lying on the other side, staring up at the big light in the middle of the ceiling.
    María started bringing Furball on her visits. He was a shrill, rat-sized dog that forgot his house training when he got excited. Tarn Lin often threatened to suck him—and the mess he deposited—up the vacuum cleaner. “He’d fit,” he growled over María’s horrified protests. “Trust me, he’d fit.”
    What Matt hated about the creature was everyone’s assumption that he and Furball were the same. It didn’t matter that Matt had excellent grades and good manners. They were both animals and thus unimportant.
    During Easter vacation Tom said good manners were no harder to learn than rolling over or playing dead. Matt threw himself at him, and María ran shrieking for Tam Lin. Tom was sent to his room without dinner. Matt wasn’t punished at all.
    Which was okay with Matt, except that Furball wasn’t punished for his crimes either. He couldn’t understand the difference between right and wrong. He was a dumb beast and so, apparently, was Matt.
    When María wasn’t visiting, Matt amused himself by exploring the house. He pretended he was El Látigo Negro scouting out an enemy fortress. He had a black cape and a long, thin leather belt for a whip. He skulked behind curtains and furniture, and he hid if he saw one of the Alacráns in the distance.
    Felicia—Benito’s, Stevens, and Tom’s mother—played the piano in the afternoons. Her crashing chords echoed from the music room. She attacked the piano with a fervor completely different from her usual, sluggish self, and Matt liked to hide behind the potted plants to listen.
    Her fingers flew from one end of the keyboard to the other. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was pulled back in a grimace that wasn’t pain, but something close to it. The music was wonderful, though.
    After a while Felicia would run out of energy. Trembling and pale, she would hunch over the keys, and this was the signal for a servant to bring her a brown liquid in a beautiful, cut-glass bottle. The servant would mix a drink—Matt loved the clink of ice—and place it in Felicia’s hand.
    She would drink until the trembling stopped. Then she would wilt over the piano like one of Celia’s spinaches when Tam Lin forgot to water the garden. Maids had to carry her away to her apartment.
    One day Felicia didn’t come at her usual time, and Matt hovered behind the potted plants as he worked up his courage to approach the piano. If she caught him, he knew he’d be banished from the room forever. His fingers tingled with the desire to play. It looked so easy. He could even hear the music in his head.
    Matt crept out of his hiding place. He reached out to touch the keys—and heard Felicia’s listless voice in the hallway. She was telling a servant to bring her a drink. Matt panicked. He darted into a closet behind the piano and shut the door an instant before Felicia came into the room. She immediately started playing. Matt sneezed from all the dust in the closet, but Felicia was making too much noise to hear him.