Free My Own Miraculous by Joshilyn Jackson

confirm what I already knew inside my heart.
    I was so glad again to have Walcott here with me. I turned his hand in mine, and I ran my finger over the thin ridge of the scar in the middle of his thumb. He got it here at the halfway place, sitting on this very log with me. Twelve years ago.
    It was his ninth birthday. Aimee had wanted to give him a big Swiss Army knife with several blades, plus scissors and a corkscrew. She’d grown up on a farm out west with three big brothers; by the time she was nine she could whittle a cardinal that you could blow against to make a birdcall sound. Darla, on the other hand, grew up in the city, the only child of university professors. She’d wanted to raise Walcott with only nonaggressive toys. Not gender-neutral things; it was “boy” stuff, just peaceful: racing cars and dump trucks, Lincoln Logs and Lego sets.
    By the time he was four, Walcott was eating his toast into a gun shape and pointing it at the dog, yelling, “Pew! Pew! Pew!” while Frisco wagged and grinned up at him, hoping he would drop the buttered weapon. Darla caved and let him have water guns, lightsabers, and Mr. Bang. But no BB gun, like many country boys had. No Swiss Army knife. She drew the line at any weapon that was “real.”
    The mini pocketknife with its one dull blade was a compromise.
    Ironically, it was Darla who gave him the idea that we should cut ourselves open with it. They’d been reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer together. That book, the knife—what nine-year-old boy worth his salt wouldn’t want to make his best friend into a blood brother?
    We knew that even Aimee would object to this idea, so we met up at the halfway place to do the deed. We sat facing each other, straddling our fallen tree, horsey style. He unfolded the blade, which, small and dull as it was, looked plenty wicked to me, shining in the dappled sunlight.
    “Gimme your thumb,” he said.
    I shook my head, “No, thank you.”
    I hadn’t liked the knife idea from the start, even though I very badly wanted to be blood brothers. I’d brought a safety pin from home, and I held it up and showed it to him. He rolled his eyes at me, silently calling me a wuss, or maybe he didn’t think the pin would do the job. I popped it open and before I could think, I jabbed my thumb with it, right at the ball. It hurt, but I didn’t so much as peep. I pulled the pin out, and we both peered at my thumb, blank and whole.
    Walcott said, “It’s no good.”
    I squeezed at my thumb, and a single bead of blood rose up, red and round. Walcott gave me an approving nod.
    I offered him the pin, but he shook his head. He put the knife against the ball of his own thumb and sliced lightly down. Nothing happened. The blade was too dull. He tried again, harder. Nothing, and then again, until he was pretty much sawing at himself.
    I offered him the pin once more, but by then he was ticked off. He lay his hand down on the tree trunk, palm up.
    I had an inkling of what he was going to do. It was a bad idea. Even as my mouth creaked open, way too slow, he was driving the knife straight down, with all his weight behind it. Right into his thumb.
    Walcott sucked in air, but it seemed to get stuck in his throat. I leaned over, staring at his terrible hand. The blade was in his thumb, all right. The pointy tip was sharper than the edge. A good third of the blade had buried itself into the real, true meat of him. He made small air-choking noises, and he was so pale even his lips were white. He lifted his stabbed hand up, and the blade stayed in. He turned it palm down and still it stayed in, a thin line of red running down into the workings of the hilt. I could see the tip of the blade pressed against his thumbnail from the inside.
    I leapt to my feet.
    “I’m going to get Mommy,” I said, my fear regressing my mother’s name back to its babiest form.
    Walcott said, “No! Wait!” I paused, and he held his hand out with the knife hanging down out of it