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You best not touch e forrabs her by the hair and turns her head around so that it’s either go with hiet her head twisted off like a bottle cap

Do what you want, Moses Todd calls froonna rain hell on you

Royal pulls her by the hair to the other side of the rooazing at her with his blank, unco loudly

Hush up, Maury, she says I’ht They ain’t hurtin ainst his body with one hand gripped around her left wrist, pulling it up behind her back so hard she expects her shoulder to pop out any second--and the other hand still seized on a thick twist of her hair, which he uses toof her neck like a hs, and she can smell his breath, rancid, and she can see the little red tears at the perimeter of his skin where it’s peeled back fro around in its gelatinous cavity

You the onna eat off your eyelids and then we gonna gaze on each other and you gonna see who the ain and turns her head to face the chair where Maury continues his long loail--a spectacular and feeble lahtness of the inviolable moon

He does not resist as Bodie holds hie

She says so, barely audible It’s a whisper, even to herself, and another part of her mind listens close to hear what the words are It’s like afroain, a little louder this tiister

What’s that? Royal says What you sayin?

She’s thinking of a thousand things--waterfalls and lighthouses and record players andrass of the plains She’s thinking of corpses piled high and all the dead things that still move and the hard rain that falls and drives the mud and waste into all the corners and sea of airplanes and little boys and grown rit teeth and beards and others with soft moans that bleat on and on without cease unless you find the right song to sing and you fill the car with your voice so that he doesn’t have to hear his own loud crying

He ain’t mine to save, she says

What’s she say? Bodie asks He and Doc are both looking at her now

Do it, she says I don’t care He ain’t iants--tall irontheir hands on the tops of oil derricks, and she’s thinking of rage, like an e up all her knotted viscera Blindness like the kind that leads les of the o there again God heard the promise He showed her the island and the vast sea and the peacefulness that was so pure and loneso

He ain’t mine to save

She says it loud this time

He ain’t mine to save

She says he ain’t hers to save, Royal says

I heard her, Bodie says

What’s she mean?

She means, Moses Todd explains quietly, survival ain’t a team sport

But she hears none of this, because the rain in her ears is coress and strength, is towering over her, and she is kneeling by the shape of a s to this shape of a boy that is no longer a boy is this: Malcol Malcoliant Malcolo away you can’t go away