Kevin was on the couch in front of the idiot box when I walked in. "Hi, Kev. How goes it?" Oh, okay, I guess." How's school going? Meeting anybody int...resting?" Nah." Nobody special? Not even any girls?" I hated to lead him like this, but I wasn't ready to just come out and accuse him of anything."Nah, nobody." Funny, I heard you've been pretty busy."He turned to look at me. "What do you mean by that?" Kev, I heard you've been going through a lot of girls over there." Yeah, so?" But nobody. Seems like I wasn’t the only one who thought there was something wrong with this picture. Still, Miss Pattison smiled and handed Clarissa two copies of the book. She passed one to me with another of her knockout smiles.“I love Austen,” she said, enthusiastically. I looked at the cover. Pride & Prejudice, why was I not surprised? It seemed like a very Miss Pattison choice of book.After Miss Pattison had finished handing out the books to the rest of the class and deposited the spare copies on. When she had finished that row, she marked her stitches in her little notebook. This teddy bear pattern would have some stretch to it, which should make it better for children, not like the rigid seed stitched one she’d gotten from a magazine the month before. Thinking back on that bear, she sighed. It was sitting on her dresser now, the one she’d bought at a garage sale, painstakingly stripped, painted white, and embellished with little flowers and bows. She grimaced. Her leg had ached for a. Sweat slid in gatheringbeads down her ribs, over her flat belly and into her pubic hair. Sweat drippedfrom her nipples. Sweat trickled down her inner thighs. The intense heatleached her of all energy, enervating her to the level of a torpid turtle.After a while, her beet-red skin stopped sweating as her body reached a moreadvanced level of dehydration. Inside the burning metal box, her boilingbrains were coddling in the fluids of her skull. At high noon, a lone guard carrieda bucket of piss.