“Maybe you’re part salamander. They regrow their legs and tails. Or a worm—cut a worm in half and you get two worms. It’s in one of my Da’s books.”
He stared at his thumb. It had grown perceptibly, just on the journey into town to Marci’s place. They were holed up in her room, surrounded by watercolors of horses in motion that her mother had painted. She’d raided the fridge for cold pork pies and cheese and fizzy lemonade that her father had shipped from the Marks & Spencer in Toronto. It was the strangest food he’d ever eaten but he’d developed a taste for it.
“Wiggle it again,” she said.
He did, and the thumbtip bent down like a scale model of a thumbtip, cracking the scab around it.
“We should go to a doctor,” she said.
“I don’t go to doctors,” he said flatly.
“You haven’t gone to a doctor—doesn’t mean you can’t.”
“I don’t go to doctors.” X-ray machines and stethoscopes, blood tests and clever little flashlights in your ears—who knew what they’d reveal? He wanted to be the first to discover it, he didn’t want to have to try to explain it to a doctor before he understood it himself.
“Not even when you’re sick?”
“The golems take care of it,” he said.