Crawlers Read Free Page A

to do,” Waylon said, “is walk around at night and try to guess what people are watching on TV, just by the lights you see in their windows.”
    He said it in a nervous way, like he was wondering,
Will she think
I’m a geek?
    “How do you do that?” Adair asked. They were walking down Pinecrest Street, which meandered along the little defile between Pinecrest Ridge and the high, deer-trammeled grassy hills of the protected watershed.
    Adair took the little glow tube out of her mouth and looked at it lighting up the palm of her hand in soft green. It was a souvenir from the rave her big brother had taken her to—glowing like the TV lights in the living room windows.
    Waylon glanced at it. “That’s hella weird shit, people putting glow sticks in their mouths and little blinking things in their ears at raves.”
    “I know. And vibrators in their pockets.” She tossed the little light-stick in the air and watched him effortlessly catch it. Good hand-eye coordination.
    Waylon was tall, too, and leanly muscular, but she was guessing he wasn’t a team type. Too bad: the Quiebra Cougars could’ve used the help on the basketball court.
    He was cute, all right, though it was a bit spoiled by the perpetual scowl, the harshness of a pig-shave haircut relieved only by a few Day-Glo blue spikes; just now they seemed to go with the light-stick.
    He held the small light-stick up between two fingers to watch it glow against the backdrop of the night. It was the color of cemetery fox fire.
    Just to see how he’d react, she said, “Ooh, yuck. It’s still got my spit on it.”
    He permitted himself a brief grin. “Gross. Here, take it back with your, like, DNA samples all over it. That came from a rave? We didn’t have any raves where I lived in New York. They got some on Long Island, I heard, over by the Sound, but we were alla way upstate.”
    Adair found herself looking around—unsure what she was looking for. It was like she could feel the night itself, waiting for something, and that made her wait for it, too.
    Mostly she looked over her shoulder, at the sky. She could see lots of stars, out here, since there weren’t really enough streetlights.
    Something else is coming.
She could definitely feel it.
    It wasn’t like she was psychic; she never really knew what was going to happen. But sometimes—maybe once or twice a year—a kind of
weight
was in the air, a feeling of bigness impending. The feelings weren’t frequent. But now and then, only that much, she’d feel something she could never identify till it happened:
Oh, that’s
what that feeling was about.
    She’d felt something was going to happen the day before her dad had his breakdown. Sometimes—just sometimes—she could feel changes coming the way animals supposedly could feel a storm about to break.
    She felt a tightening right now. It was like the night air was something you could roll onto a spindle, stretch it up like a guitar string, tighter and tighter.
    “What you lookin’ at?” he said, following her gaze into the sky.
    “Nothing.” What
was
she looking for? She didn’t know. “Um, you glad your mom moved to California?”
    “I don’t know, ask me after I’ve been here more’n a month.” He stared off into the dark hills. Adding, “I can’t see my dad much, living out here.” He seemed to realize he’d exposed himself a little, and blurted a change of subject. “And I mean, fuck,
Quiebra, California,
it’s sort of embarrassing—”
    “Oh, thanks, my town is all embarrassing!”
    “Just the name. Quiebra. It’s, like, Spanish for queer-bait.”
    She snorted, not quite laughing. “Don’t say that at school, you’ll get your butt kicked.”
    “Ooh, I’m all scared of that. What the fuck’s that mean,
Quiebra
?”
    “I think it means like broken or . . . a crack in the ground or something. It has to do with they had an earthquake once, in this area, when the Spanish people were here, like before the white people, and there