Free St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell Page B

beach in a puddle of moonlight. He appears to be doing your basic two-step, but he’s spiced it up with a spastic little shimmy from side to side. He twitches; he twirls. He lets out a low, gurgly giggle that goes goose-bumpling up my arm.
    Petey’s not particularly nimble, but he sure is quick. I’m not surprised. The formula bubbles up unbidden in my brain:
Momentum
©
mass
®
velocity.
And Petey is a sandy dervish of a man, soft-bellied, at least twice my height.
    He is also twinkling like a star.
    When I get closer, I find out why. Somebody has tied a trash-can lid to Petey’s chest with crisscrossed strings of Xmas lights. It’s been buffed to an impressive sheen. The rest of Petey’s upper body is festooned with more of the tiny white bulbs. They loop around his arms and neck, blinking on and off at random intervals that seem timed to coincide with his lurching dance. I hypothesize that they must be battery-operated. The nearest hotel is a fifteen-minute walk away, so you’d need a pretty long extension cord.
    We’ve never met before, but I know that this human disco ball must be Petey; after all, what other adult man on the island would look and move and laugh this way? Petey is something of a legend around here. Doreen, the chambermaid at the Bowl-a-Bed Hotel, told Dad that he’s one of the few people who come to the island every summer. Nobody’s sure what’s wrong with him, exactly, and Doreen says he always shows up at midnight so she’s never there to check him in. All Doreen knows for certain is that Petey’s at least thirty years old and has wax-white skin and long, colorless lashes. She says that frightened guests always call to report a ghost haunting the hallways whenever Petey comes to stay.
    “Is he a friendly ghost?” my sister Molly wanted to know. “Like Casper?”
    “Oh, Petey’s no ghost,” she reassured us. “I told you, I don’t know what he is, exactly, but he’s harmless. You’ll see.”
    But the ocean mist has fogged up my glasses, and now I can’t see a thing. After I spit-shine them, I realize that Petey’s arms and hands are covered in tinfoil. He’s holding a pair of huge red flashlights in his aluminum-foiled fingertips; he shakes these like maracas. They cast weird shadows across a roped-off square of sand. I can’t actually see what’s inside the roped-off area; all I can make out is the red plastic tape wrapped around four wooden beams. A triangular sign is attached to a driftwood post behind it. It takes me a couple of Petey’s strobe-light revolutions to read it: SEA TURTLE NEST. DO NOT DISTURB ! VIOLATORS SUBJECT TO FINES AND IMPRISONMENT .
    A boy and a girl are standing next to Petey, staring down at the mound of sand. I recognize the boy as Raffy. Uh-oh, I think. I stuff my stargazing apparatus in my back pocket and turn to go, but it’s too late. They’ve seen me.
    “Hey, Raffy,” I gulp. “What’s up?”
    “Hey, cockbag,” he says. His tone is unexpectedly genial. “Who the hell are you?”
    Raffy must have forgotten that he already knows me. We’ve had homeroom together since middle school, but Raffy travels in a different social solar system. Raffy hangs out with tattooed graffiti artists who race cars; I hang out with members of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Club. We discuss the fiery edge of Orion’s sword. We wear helmets and reflective knee pads when we ride our ergonomic bikes to school.
    Raffy is the reason that we wear protective gear. He demands “loans” from our meager treasury and mocks the size of our genitalia and brags about fornicating with our mothers. If you inform Raffy that you do not, in fact, have a mother, as I have on several occasions, he tells you to go fornicate with yourself. All the girls in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Club confide to me that they are secretly in love with Raffy. It’s not fair. Everybody knows that bullies are supposed to have squat bodies and flattish heads like hammerhead sharks. But Raffy is tall and lean and