Chapter One

     In the darkness of night, a chicken appeared at the back door. Using her beak, she rapped on the glass—rap, rap, rap. She ruffled her feathers. And in a voice gruff with fury, she said,
“I’ve come for my revenge.”



     It all started about a week ago, when Wyatt Griffin’s skin began to turn polka-dotted. Pre-dot, Wyatt’s skin had always been pretty average. Normal. Brownish, usually a scraped knee or two, paint or dirt etched into the lines of his palms, a permanent-marker tattoo started and abandoned on his forearm. Sometimes he painted his nails, and if he wasn’t careful, it took awhile for any misplaced polish to flake off of his fingers.

     But when he woke up on Sunday morning, his skin was no longer normal. Not at all. He pulled off his pajama shirt and there they were: three red dots, right in the middle of his chest.

     “What’s that?” he wondered, touching each dot. Then he shrugged and pulled on his best tie-dye t-shirt. Maybe later he’d get a marker and connect his new dots to make a picture on his
chest. Like a constellation, stars connected in the sky, right on his skin.

     That night, while getting ready for bed, Wyatt found four more dots on his chest. He poked each one. “Seven,” he said. “Like me. Awesome!"

     He grabbed his green permanent marker, the one he kept hidden from his mom in the toe of a glow-in-the-dark rainboot that hadn’t fit him since three springs ago. He connected the dots on his body, and then he checked out his work in the full-length mirror. A smiling-face constellation grinned at him from smack in the middle of his chest. Wyatt smiled right back. He went to sleep dreaming of stars, imagining a dip in the Big Dipper, stomping through the forest with Orion.



     By the next morning, though, Wyatt was no longer smiling.         

     When he sat up in bed, his head felt too heavy and his body was too hot. He groaned, and slumped out of his bed. Slowly, he made his way over to his mirror.

     There were even more dots on Wyatt’s body. All over his body. Too many dots to count!

     Wyatt was a little concerned. He looked closer at his reflection. It didn’t look good.

     But maybe the dots were...normal? “Like freckles,” he told himself. Maybe, he thought, everybody else in the world was walking around with bright red constellations of dots hidden under their clothes.

     His mom? She would have constellations of numbers and symbols and scientific tools. His best friend? Soccer balls, video game aliens, and her beloved stuffed donkey. The bus driver who brought him to the library on Wednesday afternoons? One dollar and fifty cents, in exact change.

     Wyatt examined his spots, trying to find any patterns or signs. Maybe this was a normal part of growing up? And everybody had all just somehow forgotten to tell him?

     Maybe?

     But then one dot started to itch. Then another. And then all the dots started to itch. They itched so badly that Wyatt couldn’t stop scratching once he started. He wanted to scream. And he
felt dizzy—so very dizzy. He grabbed his bathrobe and hurried down the stairs, yelling, “MOM!”



     Wyatt’s mom took one look at him and had him in the car before he could even finish tying his bathrobe.
 
    She called the doctor from the driveway and tried to back up three times before remembering to start the car.

     “Want me to drive?” Wyatt asked. He grinned. The look his mom gave him made him go right back to scratching his spots in silence. The engine roared, and they sped so fast down the street that Wyatt barely had time to wave to Roberta, the friendly chicken who lived next door.

     At the doctor’s office, the receptionist took one look at Wyatt and rushed him right back into an examination room. Wyatt was starting to feel nervous. It didn’t seem like all those spots were just another part of growing up, after all.

     In the examination room, the doctor took one look at Wyatt, and her mouth dropped open in surprise. Quickly, she snapped on her paper mask and rubber gloves.

     “Chicken pox!” she exclaimed, and made a few clicks on the laptop that she’d put next to Wyatt on the exam table. “It says here that you’ve been vaccinated...but sometimes...one in a million...”

     But Wyatt couldn’t concentrate on what Dr. Mahoney was saying. His mind spun in circles, rewinding his memories of the past week. One thing stood out from everything else—all the time he’d spent with Roberta, the nicest of the chickens at the neighbors’ coop next door.

     He’d fed her corn, let her peck at the shiny pennies he’d found on the sidewalk, and told her about all the important events in his first-grade class.

     They played Pictionary in the dirt, with a stick and Roberta’s beak. Roberta won, like always.

     They clucked at the mail carrier, who clucked back. And once, when she was very tired, Roberta fell asleep in Wyatt’s arms.

     He’d always liked Roberta. He’d always thought she was his friend. And then she went and gave
him...a chicken pox?

     Dr. Mahoney tapped Wyatt’s arm. Her glove felt cold and rubbery on his skin, and her words started to reach his ears. “I’m sorry, buddy,” she said. “This is the worst case of chicken pox I’ve ever seen! You’re going to have a fever and be pretty tired for awhile. And until you’ve completely recovered, you’re going to have to be in quarantine.”