Colin Winters didn’t perform badly. This was my second section of composition, and he’d apparently taken in enough to repeat the lesson he’d sat through earlier. I watched from the back of the room as he repeated my words, my hand gestures, the notes I’d written on the board. When Lenin Diaz’s cellphone chirped, as it does at least a couple of times each class, Colin Winters lifted it out of his hand before the kid could answer. 

Davis Octavious and the rest of the crew are throwing me into Mt. Kilauea right before the next eruption.  People say it’s gonna hurt.  I don’t care.  My body, my choice.  I’m kind of into it.  My sister believes in reincarnation.  Maybe I’ll come back as a dinosaur.  

“I don’t know. I’m not everyone.” She shifted and he realized his arm was asleep, tingling dully under her weight. He started to pull it out from under her and he saw the movement made her dissolve in places, gashes of ragged white static spreading across her thigh and shoulder, her neck, the bite marks where she’d been unmade. He resumed his grasp, hoping to undue the damage. 

“I hate this game.” But he stood up and headed for the dance floor anyway. Mercifully, Estelle was already dancing with William Waddell, the English Department’s most recent hire, a specialist in captivity narratives. He moved liquidly through some pelvis-writhing routine. Estelle, by contrast, seemed to be concentrating too hard on looking graceful: she was having difficulty moving her feet, manacled as they were by the stiletto heels.

The night of his discovery, Tooth ran naked as an aphid on a rose bush through our neighborhood. “It’s in the water! It’s in the water!” he shouted, finally giving it a rest at our mailboxes. “We’re percolated, Dunc!” Tooth said as the Krupschanks and Stones gathered around and Virginia Millbauer offered Tooth her robe.