Free The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma

crossed directly over to us. His owlish face was as darkly lined as it had been on the day of Sokol’s little speech in our class, and he looked me in the eye.
    “Do you have a moment? Julian’s asking if he can speak with you privately. We’re having a bit of a dilemma.”
    Happy to get away from Shelly and from Evelyn’s line of sight, I followed Morrissey down the hallway to our old classroom. Sokol was standing inside the door of the payphone booth, yelling excitedly in Czech into the receiver.
    “Random House bought his novel,” Morrissey explained tersely, as we skirted the exuberant man.
    “I thought you’d said they turned it down?”
    He expelled a long, wavering sigh. “They had. Until Haslett & Grouse said they wanted it. Then S&S got in. Finally Random wound up paying almost twice as much for it as they would have before.”
    Morrissey seemed crankier than I’d ever seen him, so I let it go. From the looks of Sokol staggering down the hall, the man’s success hadn’t stemmed his drunkenness, but he did look much less miserable.
    In our old classroom, Julian was sitting at his usual place at the table, staring up at the raised windows again, now half covered with snow.
    “I can’t do it,” he said with no trace of hysteria. He said it plain, like a fact. Like the truth.
    “What? Read? What’s the big deal? I think your parents are here . . . ”
    Julian groaned. “The dean’s probably trying to weasel some sort of donation out of them. Christ!”
    “Evelyn’s here, too.”
    “Fantastic. You can sleep with her again , then,” Julian snapped. Professor Morrissey made an awkward noise of surprise, then rapidly apologized and stepped outside.
    “I didn’t realize you’d mind,” I said. Though we’d never discussed it explicitly, my understanding had been that Julian was not exactly interested in the opposite sex, much to the disappointment of the girls in our class.
    He waved his hand dismissively, as if this were all well beside the point.
    “I can’t do it. I can’t read the story,” he said.
    “Why?” I asked, taking a seat across from him. Julian’s breath reeked of whiskey, and I wondered if it was Epiphany whiskey, or if there even was such a thing.
    “Because,” Julian mumbled, “it’s all true. My great-great-grandfather really did steal a lump of gold from this mine in Australia. When I was little, my grandfather told me the story. He showed me the half of the nugget that never got sold. I’ve seen it.”
    So Julian hadn’t simply pulled this story out of pure imagination. It wasn’t slanted—not even one half of a degree. Somehow this comforted me.
    He went on: “It’s like our biggest, darkest family secret. Everything we have today is on account of a low-life thief and murderer.”
    This muttered confession caused me an unreasonable amount of joy, for which I immediately felt the blackest kind of guilt. Maybe he wasn’t really better than me; maybe he just had a more sordid history to draw from.
    “So why the hell did you write about it?”
    He gave me a look, as if to say, You know .
    He’d written it for the same reason that I’d written mine. Out of sheer desperation. Out of competition. Each in an effort to top the other, we’d driven ourselves to this. Julian had created an atomic bomb of a story, which, if detonated, would mushroom cloud his parents’ lives and probably his own inheritance. It was the same thing I had done, I’d realized. Made a little bomb all my own.
    “Read something else then. Read one of the other ones. They were all good.”
    Julian shook his head, starting to pull himself together. “I burned those all weeks ago. You’re going to have to do it. Morrissey said he’ll let you read yours.”
    My heart began pounding.
    “I can’t,” I said quickly, looking at my toes.
    “Why not?” Julian snapped.
    Of course I wanted to read it—I wanted to badly. But not with Shelly there. Not with Evelyn there. I’d been in such a