No one was quite so enthusiastic about that sort of sin as the sinners themselves, grown weary; in one breath they’d be talking about how drunk they got in college and what pranks they’d gotten up to (generally involving property damage and a lot of work to clean up, work for someone else). Then in the next it was ‘these kids today have no values.’ Max would turn on the vacuum cleaner and pretend he didn’t hear.

Actually there were lots of conversations he had to pretend he didn’t hear, especially the ones about things they’d visited on the boys who weren’t manly enough or the girls they considered ugly. When those grown men waxed nostalgic about the cruelties they had committed in adolescence, Max thought about the gangs at school that he avoided. It had been particularly bad when he was twelve and thirteen, until he had met Erika and Chloe and Thaddeus.

 ***

Max and the Ghost was released this week by Glass Knife Press.