Tory couldn’t watch, so she left, pulling Max along with her.
The Sunday-morning streets of the neighborhood were full of people walking hand in hand. Children played games, the elderly sat on benches feeding exceptionally healthy pigeons. A Cuban couple smiled at a group of African-American teens on the corner, and they waved back. A Korean man walked a little Anglo girl across the street.
“It’s a nice morning,” Max said.
“Yes,” said Tory. “Nice.” The fact was, every morning was “nice” in her neighborhood. The streets were clean, the alleys were free of grunge, and anyone who didn’t pick up after their dog was reported by the Neighborhood Watch—which everyone belonged to. The neighborhood was safe, spotless, and uncorrupted. Strange, because this part of town was called “the Miami Miasma” and was the worst neighborhood of the notorious Floridian metropolis.
“What happened back there?” asked Max.
What happened? thought Tory. I think I got a wake- up call from an old friend. But all she said was, “I guess I slipped on the floor wax.”
A policeman strolled past them, grinning. But when he took a look at Tory’s feet, his expression changed to one of suspicion.
“Hmpf,” he said, eyeing Tory warily as she passed.
“Maybe you ought to roll down your socks,” whispered Max, “so people won’t see how dirty they are.”
Tory glanced down to see a few stray spots of egg yolk splattered on her socks and Nikes. Normal people, she knew, wouldn’t care about how clean her socks were, but the people who now resided within her extended aura were not exactly normal. They were . . . clean.
“I don’t care if people see,” she muttered.
Max bristled. “Whatever.”
They turned down an alley that had once been full of fetid cardboard and rags—a place where the destitute took shelter. But there were no homeless here anymore. No one was exactly sure what happened to them, and apparently no one in the neighborhood cared.
Tory stopped walking, overcome by a wave of cold nausea that dragged her back to her vision of Dillon. She leaned against the brick of the alley, and Max looked at her with concern, trying to make sense of her odd behavior. He gently touched the smooth skin of her face. “You’re cold,” he remarked. “Tory, are you sure you’re okay?”
Tory closed her eyes and thought back to the day she arrived here, in November—almost a year ago—in search of her mother, who had vanished from her life years before. Back then, this part of town had been the armpit of civilization, aspiring to even less attractive regions of the anatomy. There was no discrimination in the Miami Miasma. The dregs from all nationalities were drawn here equally.
She had found her mother in a welfare hotel, destitute and wheezing with bronchitis. Tory had nursed her back to health remarkably quickly. And, amazingly, the woman began to find in herself the qualities of a good mother. Before long, Tory noticed other things changing around her as well. Actions and attitudes of the neighbors began to slowly shift. The evidence of it surrounded her even now as she walked with Max. A group of small children ran through the street picking up litter as if it was the best game to play. From across the street came the caustic hiss of a shop owner sandblasting decades of soot from his building. Strolling all around them were sparkling-clean men and women oozing an almost Victorian refinement. The whole neighborhood had become a strange mix of accidental übermenschen—an anomalous set of people suddenly rising above the random violence and lewd behavior that had once been a part of their lives, repulsed and mortified by the sights and smells of urban decay. Turns out, the Miami Miasma cleaned up real good; now, not even the garbage smelled.
It was still hard for Tory to understand and accept that she was the cause of all this. Not by anything she did, but by her mere presence. It was an aura that penetrated the streets around her like radiation, cleansing it, body and soul.
Of course, just a few blocks away, the wretchedness still lived on in the places where her light did not reach.
“Tory, are you sick? Do you have a fever or something?” asked Max. “Maybe you’re getting the flu.” It obviously hadn’t occurred to him that no one in this part of Miami had come down with the flu this year.
“Max,” Tory dared to ask, “do you remember what you were like before?”
Max blinked at her in total innocence. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, when I first met you?”
Max’s shoulders twisted in a shiver. “I was awful. Let’s not talk about it.”
The fact was, he had been worse than awful. He was a gang-banger with neither conscience nor remorse for any of the brutal things he did. He bragged about his gun, and longed for the day it would take a life. Tory had despised him. The way he and his cohorts would hang out on the corner, shouting rude, lusty comments at her as she passed had made Tory hate leaving the small apartment she and her mother shared. She had feared that one day the verbal assaults might turn physical when those thugs were too drunk or aroused to care.
But then Max began to change. The gun went away first. Then his attitude. He became caring, and good, without even noticing the change in himself. His gang slowly turned as innocuous as a team of eagle scouts, and their street-corner greetings became a caress rather than an assault.
There was a time several months ago, when Max’s hair was still long, and his spirit still untamed, that Tory loved him deeply. That’s when the newfound goodness of his heart was tempered by mischievous unpredictability.
But the changes continued. He cut his hair short and neat. His fun-loving grin became the blank smile of total innocence. And every single word he thought to utter was pure and wholesome. Tory had sanitized him.
Tory realized she was crying. She wondered if Dillon, wherever he was, could feel her cry, the way she had felt him scream. She thought of the other shards, who were suddenly at the forefront of her mind, and for the first time in many months, began to feel herself being pulled toward them, as she had been pulled that first time, when the light of the supernova had filled the night sky, filling them all with the overwhelming need to find each other. But this time it was Dillon’s call beckoning her to come west.
Max regarded her tears with deep concern. He was so clean it made her feel dirty. It made her feel like slipping into a scalding bath.
“Tory, I’m worried about you,” he said.
Tory looked deep into the eyes of this handsome, wholesome boy. There was no question he was better off than before—after all, it was far worse to be unconscionably bad, than to be pathetically good. Still it saddened her.
Tory leaned toward him, wanting to kiss him, but he leaned away, shocked and embarrassed.
“Tory, no! We’re in public!”
“Please,” begged Tory. “Just this once.”
“Oh, all right.” Max leaned forward and endured the public kiss. There was tenderness in the kiss, but nothing more. No passion or urgency. No hint of mystery. No spice of unknown intentions. His thoughts were as pure as the smell of his breath and taste of his kiss— flavorless as distilled water.
“Good-bye, Max,” she said sadly, then strode away from him without looking back, heading west toward Dillon Cole, and to escape the effects of her own scouring presence.