"In what way?" She asked. "You know, like on the Twilight Zone where some guy called Scratch or Old Nick offers to buy your soul with a written contract." "Don't be silly," she wrinkled her nose. "Then will you sell me your soul for a penny?" "Why not?" She answered boldly. She had called my bluff, so I tore off a piece of notebook paper and wrote up a simple deed: "I, Christine Pekarski, sell my soul to Don Horton for the sum of 1 penny." She signed it; I gave her a penny; we both made some kind of point though it wasn’t a deed to her soul that I wanted. Several of the other kids at the table didn't want to be one-upped and also agreed to sell their souls. I tore off several other scraps of paper, made up the deeds and had a half a dozen souls in my possession. The next day at lunchtime Roland Cipolla approached me. "I hear you're buying souls -- want mine?" Ron was another base-rat and I would find them to be disproportionally represented in my cache. "Uh -- okay." Another scrap of paper, another penny, another soul. To my surprise this was starting to become a trend. Soon I had a collection of souls ranging from basketball players to highly popular in-crowd souls such as the beautiful Susan DuCharme. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with my devil's booty but I had gained an odd notoriety verging on something resembling respect. Well, that's probably overstating it -- more like my quirk factor had been squared or cubed. | 
