The Leap Year Boy by Marc Simon Page B

Alex?”
    Irene gripped her sons by the wrists, and they marched like a drill team across Mellon Street. Benjamin held a chunk of hardened snow to the side of his face, where the bruise was transitioning its way from red to blue to purple.
    Irene banged on the Walsh’s front door with the fury of Grendel’s mother. Her boys cowered beside her.
    The door opened tentatively, as if the occupant was expecting a bill collector. Mrs. Walsh, a graying woman with a matching complexion and a sunken jaw line, thanks to several missing molars, scanned the Miller contingent and said, “What’s the trouble?”
    “My son. Where is he?”
    Mrs. Walsh turned toward the living room. “Jackie! Kevin!”
    Voices from inside said, “What, Ma?”
    Irene was in no mood to wait for an invitation. She swept by Mrs. Walsh and found the boys sitting on a threadbare sofa with Alex propped between them, his snowsuit pulled down to his waist. The twins teased him with a sugar cookie, holding it above his head, just slightly out of his reach. They’d gotten a good fix on the range of his arms.
    Irene said, “Stop it.”
    The twins froze.
    With one swift motion she snatched Alex back and pulled up his snowsuit. As she passed by Mrs. Walsh, who hadn’t moved from the threshold, she said, “In the future I’ll thank you to tell your boys to keep their grubby hands off my son.”
    “They’re just kids. Don’t get so high and mighty, Mrs. Miller.”
    Irene stopped in her tracks. “What?”
    “My boys didn’t do nothing wrong, no harm to him. They was just playing with the little freak.”
    Irene’s lightning left hook would have done heavyweight champion Jack Johnson proud. The force of the blow knocked Mrs. Walsh back through the threshold and onto her rear end some six feet away, landing at her sons’ feet.
    With her hand to her cheek, she said, “You hit me.”
    “Say another word about my son and I’ll hit you again.”
    Irene marched back across the street. Looking over his mother’s shoulders at the twins cowering in their doorway, Alex waved bye-bye. Arthur and Arnold followed, heads downcast, faces grinning.
    The sun had gained momentum, and the snow in the street had mostly turned to brownish slush, exposing an amalgam of cinders and horse manure. Without looking at the boys, Irene admonished her sons. “Destroy that fort.”
    “But, Ma.”
    “You want to get it worse than she did? Wait until your father gets home.”
    Ten minutes later the fort was slush, too.
    Inside, Irene pulled off Alex’s snowsuit. She tried three different shirts and sweaters on him. All of them were way too short in the sleeves. She bit her lip. It was true. It was incredible. His arms really had grown. What was next?
    Much to their surprise, Arthur and Benjamin didn’t “get it worse” that night from their father, as Irene had threatened. Their punishment was limited to the two whacks on the rear end with a broom handle from Irene and an afternoon’s confinement to their room, where they were forced to copy over their homework ten times. At dinner that evening, Abe asked about the purple bruise on Benjamin’s face. Irene told him something about a snowball fight, leaving out the details of the kidnapping, rescue operation and left hook, lest Abe charge next door to extract even more vengeance on Walsh senior, whom Abe had more than once threatened to flatten like a pancake.
    After the dinner dishes were cleared, Irene sent Arthur and Benjamin to their room. She gave Alex some measuring cups to play with while she ran warm water into a washtub for his bath. “Abe,” she said, “we have to talk.”
    From the tone of her voice he thought, look out, here it comes. “Yeah?” he said nervously.
    Irene said, “It’s about Alex.”
    “What about him?”
    “There’s something going on with his body.”
    “What’s wrong with his body?” he asked, feigning concern, although what he really felt was relief that this wasn’t going to be about