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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOKWhat They Did to the Kid 229folded himself in. %u201cThe more the merrier,%u201d Thom said. He felt he had won the unspoken competition between us. His military career was no longer trumped by my vocation. He had married a girl named Sandy Gully. He had felt sorry for her standing outside the Marine Base at Camp Pendleton, choking on the Southern California smog. She was sixteen, old enough to marry Thom, The Gully-O%u2019Hara Nuptials, but not old enough, her father said, to travel, especially her mother said, being pregnant and all.No one spoke of my past. I was different. They acted normal, trying to fold me back into their world. I was the alien from another planet. Karma barana nick toe. They had always talked to the seminarian. Suddenly I was real to them. I was back among them: Lazarus come back from the dead; a childhood friend hit by a car lying in a coma for ten years, the Sleeping Beauty of boys; The Creature from the Black Lagoon.They covered their puzzlement with laughing, back-slapping, and contests of singing parodies of carols: %u201cI wouldn%u2019t trade brass monkeys for a one-horse open sleigh.%u201d Not one of them believed an %u201cI quit%u201d rubbed out ten years and four months. Tick, tick, tick. The rich Mason faced me toward the facts of life: the ten years and four months, the nearly four thousand days and nights, the ninety-six thousand hours, the six million minutes, the threehundred-and-fifty-million seconds, at five dollars an hour was $480,000 I could have earned.Divorce of any kind interested them. They sniffed at my reasons. They all had heard of %u201cspoiled priests%u201d ruined by alcohol and women, but the spoiling of the best little altar boy in their world created a mystery. Where was my cocktail glass? Where was my girlfriend? Eyes watched from church pews. Faces glanced over plates at holiday supper tables. They stared on the sledding hill in the park where I took my six-year-old sister, Margaret Mary, rocketing down the toboggan run.I was no great mystery.I had no scandal.I had no vocation.My father explained to my mother, %u201cHe%u2019s a cover without a book.%u201d%u201cWhat?%u201d%u201cHis life is beginning.%u201d I could never write or phone or visit Misery again. Ninety-six thousand hours. I could never change my mind. At five bucks an hour. I could not go back. $480,000. I forced myself forward into the future. No longer was a bed and a supper waiting somewhere in some rectory. Life had no net. I sensed danger and adventure. I had a draft card. In six weeks, I could