Crooked by Laura McNeal

you, though thank God I’m not.”
    Amos was surprised how much he liked that idea. “You should, Crook. You should try to make me take it back.”
    â€œTell me what it is and then I’ll probably have to.”
    Amos considered it. “A troglodyte is basically a cave dweller, a subhuman.”
    â€œAnd that’s the most decent sort of troglodyte,” said Big Dave over his shoulder. “That’s a troglodyte from the better part of town.”
    Bruce leaned back amiably. “Oh, well, I thought maybe it was something bad. One of those guys who wear rubber undies or something.”
    At the gym, Bruce and Amos played five or six pickup games, half-court, two on two or three on three. Bruce, who was a half foot taller than everyone else, still preferred to stay outside the lane, looking for opportunities to bring his feet close together, bend the knees, and collect his long, segmented body into the gentle coil that preceded his set shot. Bruce had a nice touch—a calm eye, clean release, perfect backspin—and he was an optimist. He would watch the long arc of the ball while taking a step or two
back,
as if there were no reason in the world to follow it to the basket for a possible rebound.
    Amos was the opposite. Though less hefty than Bruce, he liked working inside, and today, especially, he enjoyed the bumping and shoving that was going on beneath the basket. Amos felt a kind of meanness unfolding within him and was glad there was a way to use it. He leaned heavily into bigger opponents to screen them from the backboard; he crashed through screens that were set against him. It was a funny but good feeling, as if by playing hard enough, he could change the way the world felt about him. And after the last game, when it was just starting to get dark, it gave him a strange satisfaction to tell Crook he’d just walk home, that he didn’t feel much like riding along with him right now.

7
    THIEVING
    Dusty’s Oldtowne Market was crowded with people in wet snow boots, but shopping by herself made Clara forget about Amos a little. Mrs. Harper’s list specified the cheapest brands, so Clara just looked for the bargains her mother usually chose.
    It was while comparing generic oatmeal with the happy Quaker that Clara became uneasily aware of the Tripp brothers. Everyone knew Eddie and Charles Tripp. Even in elementary school, they had been pale and scary, and somehow they had learned early on to enjoy how much they scared people. They shaved their heads and gave themselves tattoos. No one wanted to touch them when learning the Virginia reel in gym, and Eddie started to smoke cigarettes the same year Clara got a pink bicycle. Charles was the older one, the hulking, big-headed, leering one, whose shaven scalp was his one truly revolting physical feature. Its whiteness was mapped with swollen blue veins. It was worse than unpleasant. And yet one day, through the public library shelves, Clara had glimpsed Charles’s face from the forehead down and had been shocked at his rugged good looks. With the veiny scalp out of the picture, he looked almost like Patrick Swayze. So what was especially weird was that instead of letting his hair grow out to cover his grotesque scalp, Charles shaved it so that people would
have
to look at it. For Clara, who would’ve loved to disguise her crooked nose, this was beyond comprehension and made Charles seem not just scary but horrific.
    Eddie, the little brother, was a foot and a half shorter than Charles. Eddie was compact and muscular, with close-set eyes of a shade of blue that made Clara think of swimming pools. Clara didn’t think scariness came as naturally to Eddie, but he seemed willing to learn from his older brother. People said they both had high IQs, but they cut classes and repeated grades. Charles was a senior now, and Eddie was two years older than Clara but in her same grade. When they’d both been seventh graders at