Edwards pulled up a chair. "You have enough, you don't really need very much," he explained. "The skin grows back from the areas around the hair follicles; the follicles go down pretty deep, down into the area below the skin. Below the burns the new skin grows out from the lining of these follicles, like grass out of a valley. These linings are like nature's reserves. The new skin just keeps growing out from them, creeping over the burned area, until all these little growing areas come together."

"Why am I going to have to be grafted then?" David said sullenly.

Edwards sensed the despair in his question. "Sometimes," he said, trying to sound reasonable, "if the burns are too deep, deep enough to destroy the follicles, then there is no skin togrow back, so we have to graft."

"Where are you going to get the skin for that?"

"From your friends, David," Edwards said gently, "from your friends."

The morning culture again grew out Pseudomonas. That afternoon they took David to the operating room and covered his legs and part of his stomacher with cadaver skin. When Edwards visited him again that evening, he complained that his head hurt and the sulfamyelon was stinging even more.

"What will you do when you get home?" Edwards asked.

David was sullen. "School, I guess."

"You've got to be more positive than that," Edwards said coaxingly.

"I was positive before I got burned."

"I'm telling you, you're going to be OK."

"I didn't see it," David said reproachfully. "I was just walking. I wasn't even point. I swear to God, I didn't even hear it. Can you believe that?" he said loudly. "I couldn't even goddamn hear it."

Within three days, the cadaver grafts failed, refused to take, and Edwards had to order it pulled off, like the rest of the dying skin. David, lying in the water, saw him as soon as he walked into the treatment room.

"I'm handling it, dammit," he said belligerently. "Just leave me alone, will you? Just goddamn leave me alone."

That evening David ignored his presence. "I saw you with some letters this afternoon," Edwards said, noting how the whitish scar tissue under David's chin bad a pale greenish cast to it. "Nice handwriting, Your girl?"