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Spanish, I want to take Danish. My family is Danish.”

      “We do not offer Danish as a language option.”

      Armo shrugged.

      The counselor said, “You understand that everyone in Denmark speaks English, right? Usually better than most Americans?”

      A faint smile twisted the corner of Armo’s lips. “This is why it’s important to keep Danish alive. It’s my heritage.”

      “Oooookay.” The counselor laid his hands palm down on his desk in a gesture that signaled surrender. “Okay, Armo. But you won’t graduate. And if you don’t graduate, you won’t go to college.”

      “Yeah.”

      “And that will make it very difficult for you to get a decent job.”

      “Like school counselor?”

      Armo’s face was blank, but there was a spark in his blue eyes, and despite the implied insult, despite the brick-wall refusal to go along with, well, anything, the counselor found himself smiling.

      That shut him up, Armo thought.

      “Can I take off now?” Armo asked, and thirty seconds later he was back out on campus, striding to the parking lot as the churning mass of students rushing between classes parted before him like the Red Sea before Moses.

      The parking lot was a sea of BMWs, Mercedes and Teslas. There were also, at the other end of the spectrum, numerous Priuses and Leafs. But there was only one beat-up, orange and white 2003 Dodge Viper. Many of the cars of the rich kids at Malibu High were fast, but only one did zero to 60 in 3.8 seconds with a top speed of 189.5 miles per hour, and made the earth shake from the throaty rumble of the Viper’s enormous engine.

      No one but an idiot gave a seventeen-year-old a car that fast, but fortunately for Armo his father was a former stuntman who had managed to become an action movie star. His father figured if fast-and-furious was good for him, it would surely be good for his son as well.

      The Viper’s cloth top was down and Armo hopped smoothly over the door and dropped onto the cracked leather seat. This, this right here, this moment, when he was in his car, when he was done with school for the day, with the sun shining and the ocean sparkling, this was his favorite part of the day. He loved this moment. He looked forward all through the tedious day to this moment. The moment of escape.

      Of freedom.

      He keyed the accelerator and felt the 8.3 liter, 500 horsepower engine come to life, startling a pair of seagulls into dropping the French fry they’d been fighting over.

      Armo roared down Morning View Drive, pulled onto the Pacific Coast Highway and was hit so hard by a gasoline tanker truck that the Viper went airborne for fifty feet, spinning in mid-air as Armo thought, Uh-oh: that was a mistake.

      The Viper landed on the far side of the PCH, bounced over the low metal railing that fronted the beach, and came to rest upside down on the sand, knocking a three-inch crack into Armo’s thick skull.

      For a long time, a very long time, Armo saw, smelled, tasted and heard nothing.

      Nothing. A very long nothing.

      And then . . . a sound! Meaningless, but something rather than the nothing.

      Two days after that single sound, Armo opened his eyes and saw blurry figures.

      The next day he opened his eyes again and saw a man’s face. There was something familiar about the face, but he couldn’t place it, just vague, distorted memories of previous brief emergences into consciousness. His grip on awareness was still extremely weak, in and out, with no way to know how much time passed between each brief contact with reality.

      The next day he opened his eyes again and said, “Water.”

      “Your fluids are in your IV,” a male voice said. “You are in a medical facility. Your injuries are healing nicely.”

      “Whuh?”

      “I’m Dr. Park. You are safe, you are in a medical facility,” that blandly comforting voice said. Armo squinted and sort of saw the doctor, a plain-looking, middle-aged Asian man with graying hair. “You’re going to be all right.”

      “A damn sight better than all right,” a female voice with a hint of the old south said, but he’d have had to turn his head to see her and found he couldn’t quite do that.

      “Tomorrow we’ll get that neck brace off you and try some liquids,” Dr. Park said. And Armo went back to sleep.

      The woman’s voice said, “One more day, Park. Then he’s mine.”

      The next day Armo was feeling much better. He could see clearly, though the dull beige hospital room was nothing much to look at. He saw himself, most of himself, stretched out under a white sheet. He tried to move a leg and it moved. Tried to move the other leg and it ached, but it too was still attached. Hands? There they were, right in front of his face, and he could count to ten on his fingers.

      “So, how are we today?” Dr. Park bustled into the room.

      “Water?”

      The doctor poured from a plastic jug into a paper cup and held it to Armo’s parched lips. The pleasure was exquisite.

      “What happened to me?” Armo asked.

      “Well, you had a disagreement with a tanker truck. Broken leg, broken collarbone, multiple contusions and abrasions, the most serious matter being a cracked skull.”

      “Is my . . .” Armo pointed with awkward fingers at his crotch.

      “Yes, your penis and testicles are undamaged.” Dr. Park rolled his eyes.

      Armo sighed relief. “My car?”

      “Totaled, I’m afraid.”

      Armo fought back tears. “Is my mom or dad here?”

      “We’ll talk about all that later,” Dr. Park said. He did something with a small toggle on the clear plastic line that ran into the veins of Armo’s wrist and a wave of weariness flooded him. Armo closed his eyes, but he did not lose consciousness—Dr. Park was not an anesthesiologist and gave him a dose that would put a normal-size person under, but Armo was not a normal-size person.

      Armo listened as a second person walked in. He’d heard this voice before, the tense female voice out of the south. The last time it had said, A damn sight better than all right.

      “How’s our patient?”

      “Much better. The spinal fracture is almost completely healed. The skull fracture is knitting up well. His vitals are steady, in fact—”

      “So he’ll recover completely?”

      “He’ll likely have some memory loss,” Dr. Park said.

      “So much the better.”

      “I don’t think we—” Dr. Park began in a chiding tone, but the woman cut him off.

      “It may well make him more manageable. Anyway, we’ll give him enough to fill whatever hole is in his memory.”

      Armo heard the woman walk slowly around, from his right side to his left, then back. “You must admit, he’s a nearly perfect specimen. Big, strong and not overly bright.”

      Armo frowned at that, but quickly resumed a blank, unconscious expression.

      “I don’t know about that, Colonel,” Dr. Park said. “According to his school record he’s a rather difficult character.”

      Colonel Gwendolyn DiMarco, US Army, laughed. “Then I suppose it’s a good thing he soon won’t be quite human.”

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