Flashback

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Toby Nelms lay on his back and counted the lights as they flashed past overhead. He was eight years old, but small even for that age, with thick red-brown hair, and freckles that ran across the tops of his cheeks and over the bridge of his nose. For a time after his father's job relocation from upstate New York to the T. J. Carter Paper Company of Sterling, New Hampshire, Toby's classmates in the Bouquette Elementary School had called him "dot face, " and "shrimp, " and had pushed him around in the school cafeteria. But things were better now, much better, since the day he had held his ground and absorbed a beating at the hands of Jimmy Barnes, the school bully. Five… six… seven … Toby rubbed at the lump at the top of his leg, next to his peenie, where the pain had started and still persisted. The doctors had said that the shot would take the pain away, but it hadn't. The music that the nurses had promised would relax him wasn't helping, either. The song was okay, but there weren't any words.

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