I added helpfully.
“And Mignon Emanuel, the woman driving the car, and Mr. Bigshot—they’re like us, too.”
Myron said, “Benson looked like an Indian, an American Indian.”
“Of course he did, where do you think bison are from?” Alice said. “I’m from Burma, or it’s Myanmar now. Arthur’s from Indochina, probably around Cambodia. It’s hard to tell where you’re from.”
“With a map like that,” I muttered. By map I meant pan—I meant his face.
“Why won’t I hit puberty?” Myron said. You couldn’t distract him from the important stuff.
I said, “You haven’t hit puberty yet, have you? And everyone else you knew did, I bet.”
“The doctor said I was slow to develop.”
Alice said, “I don’t know how you can’t know this stuff. Surely you’ve noticed that you don’t age. You’re stuck at that age, just like I’ll be twenty-three and Arthur will be seventeen forever.”
“I’m more like twenty, twenty-one really,” I said.
“Forever?” Myron said.
“Of course, you fool! Haven’t you noticed?” I was squirming all over my seat, I couldn’t stand it. Also, I was cold. “You’re immortal.”
“I can’t be immortal, I’m only thirteen years old!”
“You can’t be thirteen years old, you’re immortal.” I felt something like an itch inside my nose, but I chalked it up to nerves. “The only thing that can kill you is one of us. In animal form. With the claws and the teeth.”
“You could kill me?”
“Well, probably not, I’m a binturong. We’re pretty harmless. But for all I know, you could be a vole. I could kill a vole.”
“What’s a vole?”
“Like a field mouse, stop asking quest—”
But Alice interrupted me. “Someone’s nearby.”
And they came up the ramp, onto the highway, the station wagon with Mignon Emanuel and Benson. I floored it and they floored it, and I said, “How did they find us?”
“They must’ve known we were going to see Gloria,” Alice said. Her head was turned around, her eyes glued on the station wagon as it slowly gained on us.
“How could they possibly know that?”
“She’s in Shoreditch, that’s pretty close to here.”
“Who’s Gloria?” Myron asked. But just then there was a loud, sharp noise, and he cried, “They’re shooting at me!”
“They’re not shooting at you,” I replied, with calm assurance and nerves of steel. “They’re shooting at the tires.”
“What, so they don’t want to kill me?”
I checked the rearview. Benson had his arm out the window, carelessly blasting away with a pistol. With his other hand he was attempting to manipulate a CB radio. What an idiot. I considered telling Alice to get my own pistol from the glove compartment, but I didn’t want her to end up looking as stupid as Benson did. Instead, I said to Myron, “Anyone wants to kill you, I told you, bullets won’t do the job.”
“So they do want to kill me?”
“How the devil would I know? Jeez Louise, kid, I’m driving here. Now hold on, I’m going to try something tricky.”
I yanked the wheel left, crashed over the median, skidded backwards on the wet road, whipped around, bounced in a shower of sparks off a stone embankment, and drove the wrong way under a bridge and down an on-ramp. We threaded around a descending railroad gate, made a U-turn that involved at least two people’s lawns, and cut through a city park to avoid a red light. Alice screamed and laughed, and, frankly, I was screaming and laughing, too. I was impressed with the kid, that he never made a peep. Fifteen minutes later, after a half-dozen other moving violations, we pulled into a gas station, and noticed that Myron Horowitz was no longer in the flatbed.
“I told him to hold on,” I said, but Alice put her hand on my arm and shut me up. Inside his backpack, which he had left behind, was a book I had written sixty years ago.
II. The Derailing: PART TWO
As for me, it was only by thinking how the late Baron Trenck would have conducted himself under similar circumstances that I was able to restrain my tears.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, The Story of a Bad Boy
1.
Myron Horowitz regained consciousness in a soggy ditch. Two black children were looking down at him and speaking French. He was in so much pain he passed out again. When he came back, he was on a couch, wrapped in a blanket. A very broad man was looking down at him.
“What did they tell you?” the man asked.
“They told me I was an immortal lycanthrope,” Myron said.
“You’re in shock—drink this,” the man said. Myron drank it and passed out.
It would