And then the spot moved. It crawled, and it burned like fire.

There were other spots, I saw, rippling through my arm. A dozen, then two dozen, then more than I could count. There were hundreds of them crawling under my skin, biting me, burning like all hell was inside of me. The pain was so great I fell to the bathroom floor. I scratched at my arm, slapped it, trying to kill whatever was under my skin, whatever caused me to itch and hurt so. The pain was excruciating. It was unlike anything I had ever felt, as if someone had taken a syringe full of fire and injected it straight into my veins.

The flesh on my arm began to bubble, a blister forming. I watched it boil and throb until finally it popped. Blood erupted onto the tile floor, streaming hot over my arm, the sickly smear of it. And from that wound crawled an ant. A red one—a fire ant. It came out blood-smeared, sticky with it, and I flung it in a smatter on the floor.

They began to stream out of my arm then, a flow of ants thicker than blood, hundreds of them bursting out of the hole in my skin. They were crawling up my chest and onto my neck, biting me, swarming up my nose and onto my tongue and down my throat, ants pouring like blood from my body, covering me, smothering me until I couldn’t breathe anymore, until I couldn’t see, until I knew I would die.

And then nothing. I was sitting on my bathroom floor, sweaty and out of breath, my throat sore from screaming. Murphy came running in.

“You okay?” she said.

“I had a vision,” I said.

She just rolled her eyes at me and left.

The next day I saw Kent and this kid Rob Louis hanging out in front of his house. They were drinking Capri Suns, just lounging like they had nothing better to do, like that go-kart wasn’t sitting right there in front of them, ready to ride. I thought maybe that was my chance to let those guys get to know me and see how cool I was. That day I had on my Batman shirt, the one with the yellow logo on the front, which was by far my coolest, most understated shirt of all. It was destiny. I walked myself right over and said hi to them.

“Hi, Kent,” I said. “Hi, Rob.”

They both looked at me like I was some kind of walking fungus.

“I’m Lee,” I said, a little uncomfortable. “I live down the street.”

“The homeschool kid?” said Kent. “Yeah, I heard of you.”

“You have?” I said.

Kent nodded.

“I heard of you too,” said Rob Louis.

I was excited. That meant other kids had been talking about how cool I was. They already knew. Making friends was even easier than I ever thought it would be.

“You guys going to ride the go-kart?” I said.