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‘Skeletons don’t fight,’ said Douglas

‘No, sir!’ Will lunged at the stone, erasing the chalk, tears springing to his eyes

The other boys stood, frozen

‘Sure,’ Douglas said ‘They’ll teach us at school, say, here’s your heart, the thing you get attacks with! Show you bugs you can’t see! Teach you to jump off b

uildings, stab people, fall and not move’

‘No, sir,’ Saasped

The greatsunlight Moths fluttered around theraveyard creek ran over all their cold las quietly finished:’ Sure, none of us wants to just lie here and never play kick–the–can again You want all that?’

‘Heck no, Doug…’

‘Then we stop it! We find out how our folks row, teach us to lie, cheat, steal War? Great! Murder? Swell! We’ll never be so well off as we are right now! Grow up and you turn into burglars and get shot, or worse, they make you wear a coat and tie and stash you in the First National Bank behind brass bars! We gotta stand still! Stay the age we are Grow up? Hah! All you do then is ht back? Will you let me tell you how to run?’

‘Gosh,’ said Charlie ‘Yeah!’

‘Then,’ said Doug, ‘talk to your body: Bones, not one raveyard He makes money if we lie here, you and you and you! But we’ll show him And all those old men n the town! Halloween’s alrapes! You wanna look like the once, but soosh, when they were thirty or forty or fifty, they chewed tobacco and phlegu you know there was spittle all over thean to look like, you know, you’ve seen, caterpillars turned into chrysalis, their darned skin hardened, and the young guys turned old, got trapped inside their shells, by God Then they began to look like all those old guys So, what you have is old uys trapped inside them Some year soon, maybe, their skin will crack and the oldanymore, they’ll be a bunch of death’s–headto keep the young lue, always hoping to get free It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? Pretty bad’

‘Is that it, Doug?’ said Tom

‘Yeah,’ said Pete ‘You sure you knohat you’re talking about?’

‘What Pete is trying to say is that we gotta knoith precision, we gotta knohat’s accurate,’ said Bo

‘I’ll say it again,’ said Doug ‘You listen close To this down?’