Free Dread Locks by Neal Shusterman

out into the sink. “That’s rank.”
    I took the can away from him. “What’s wrong with you? Are you deaf? I asked you a question.”
    He spotted a half-gallon carton of milk in the fridge, grabbed it, and chugged it all the way down. Little rivers of milk spilled from the corners of his mouth. Garrett has always made a habit of ignoring me, so that wasn’t all that unusual—but you first have to notice someone before you can ignore them.
    I grabbed his arm and forced him to face me. The milk carton dropped to the ground, but he had already emptied it.
    “What happened tonight?” I asked, speaking each word slowly and clearly.
    Garrett looked at me. It seemed like he was trying to remember who I was. Finally, he shook his head and for a moment seemed to come back from whatever mental vacation he was on.
    “To tell you the truth, Parker, I don’t remember. Isn’t that a hoot?”
    And I believed him. It didn’t make any sense at all, but I believed him. I turned, troubled, and started to walk away, but then he suddenly spoke up.
    “I do remember one thing, though. I do remember one thing.”
    I turned back to face him. He was staring off into the distance, like an old man trying to remember things that had happened to him a long time ago.
    “I do remember one thing,” he said again.
    “What?” I asked, afraid to hear the answer.
    Then he looked straight at me.
    “She took off her glasses.”

10

    BECOMING IGOR
    L ethargy. It’s a word I know, because it’s in one of my father’s favorite expressions. Lethargy breeds lethargy. It means the more you lie around doing nothing, the more you want to lie around doing nothing. Your limbs and your mind feel so heavy that it becomes a major effort just to lift your arm to channel surf.
    When you’ve got money and time, lethargy becomes like a disease. You’ve got so many choices of things to do that nothing seems worthwhile anymore. That’s the way it had been with me and basketball. That’s the way it had been with me and so many other things. I remember how my friends and I used to hang around on weekends, saying to one another, “So what do you want to do?” only to get shrugs and the same question back. After a while on those long, boring weekends, it would feel like your body was turning to stone and your mind was turning to mush. I never really thought about it much, but seeing Garrett acting so strangely started me thinking about a lot of things.
    Laziness and attitude ran rampant at my school, so maybe that’s why it took so long for people to notice the hardening of the social arteries. It began with Ernest, then spread with the tireless growth of a creeping vine. I knew the symptoms. The dull, pasty skin. The glazing of the eyes, and a weariness that went bone deep. I could spot them in the lunchroom. The girl who would lift her spoon to her mouth as if her arm were moving through dense Jell-O instead of air. There was the guy in English class who, when everyone else rushed out with the bell, would take a deep, shuddering breath and rise from his seat like Atlas with the world on his shoulders. And then there was the thing about food. That was perhaps the strangest of all.
    It was on the last day Dante, Freddy, and I hung out together. We sat at lunch, chowing down on what we liked to call Roadkill Roast—an oversalted, semi-edible pot-roast substance that the cafeteria served. It was nice out that day, so most kids sat at the outdoor lunch tables. Then, a few tables over from us, Celeste Kroeger, of Banshee fame, dropped her tray on the ground, flipping her Roadkill Roast into the dirt.
    “Best thing that could happen to the stuff,” Dante commented. “Now all she has to do is kick some dirt over it and give it a decent burial.”
    But that’s not what she did. Instead, Celeste knelt down and picked up the strips of pot roast one by one ... and pushed each one into her mouth.
    “Oh, gross!” Freddy said. Dante and I were beyond even those