Free Glass Collector by Anna Perera Page A

moment before suddenly flinging it at her target: the feed bin. The stone pings loudly. “Unlike … me,” she adds firmly.
    “Who’d marry Rachel?” Constance grabs a smaller stone, aims for the feed bin and misses. “Well, maybe Sami would!”
    Everyone laughs. No one likes Sami from the secondhand electrical shop because he says unkind things about people. Aaron has even seen him refusing to help his own mother carry home a huge bag of flour: “It’s not that heavy,” Sami had said.
    “She would never marry him,” Aaron says, then sighs. But no one is listening to him now. They’re too busy competing to hit the target—scaring the ponies into stumbling backward from the pinging noises, ears pricked for further signs of danger. Now that the girls are pretending to have lost interest in Aaron, he grabs the chance to slip past them and creep away.
    A shiver of relief runs through him as he reaches the pale, wide, dusty walkway leading to the church, and just when he begins to feel safe again, he spots his best friend. Jacob, the kid with the curliest hair and most clownlike face in Mokattam, is racing toward him with his head in his hands, muttering to himself.
    “What happened?” Aaron grabs him by the shoulders. Jacob’s in shock, trembling, stuttering wildly. Immediately, Aaron spots the problem before Jacob opens his mouth to answer. Sticking out slightly from his arm, directly beside the edge of his elbow bone, is the point of an old-fashioned needle. Without thinking, using two fingers, Aaron tries to tweak the brittle tip from Jacob’s smooth flesh.
    “OW! You’re not supposed to touch it.” Jacob flinches as if he’s been bitten by a snake. The curve of his arm is covered in scratches and red marks. “I was going to look for someone with tweezers to pull it out,” he says. “Those needles were covered in blood. AIDS, hepat … ize, the lot. I’m going to die and so are you now.”
    “Nothing gets through this skin.” Splaying his ridged fingers high in the air, Aaron almost blocks out the sunlight from Jacob’s eyes, his hands are so big.
    “I fell on loads of used needles,” Jacob explains. “They’re not supposed to put syringes in the bags. They should burn the used stuff, but they don’t anymore. I’m dead, aren’t I?” His clownlike face droops and his lower lip sticks out as if he’s about to cry.
    It’s a nasty moment. Plenty of kids in the hospital-waste clearing area of Mokattam have died of fatal diseases. Everyone feels sorry for them. These families are so far down the pecking order that hardly anyone questions the details of the horrible work they do, or asks why so many suffer illnesses that could easily be avoided if the hospitals disposed of the clinical waste in the proper way. Medical-wasting is a job that gives Aaron nightmares. His hands go clammy just imagining the constant fear that Jacob and his family live with.
    “No. No, Jacob …” Aaron starts, but then forgets what he was going to say. He’s unable to take in the full horror of Jacob’s pleading eyes because there she is—Rachel—coming down the wide path, dressed in a blue galabeya, calmly frowning, as if trying to remember something important. His eyes are fixed on the vision that’s almost upon them. The last thing he wants to happen is for Rachel to run into Shareen and her mates.
    It’s not until Rachel waves at them that Aaron regains some control of his wandering mind. “See, Jacob, someone … who was it? Well, anyway, someone told me that most of those syringes are, are … yeah, they’re used to stir the … the … red wine they give to the rich patients—whenever they run out of, er … spoons. Not all syringes are dangerous.”
    “Eh?” Jacob’s more flustered by this mad explanation than he was by imagining an early death.
    “Honestly, I wouldn’t worry if I were you.” Aaron slaps him on the back. “Hi, Rachel. Where you going?”
    “To the church to say a prayer for