Of course, none of this meant anything in modern times, but over the generations, people from Carters Mountain had come to be regarded as, “differen...t.” In my school year, there were about eight or ten kids from Carters Mountain, and even at that age, some of the other kids had picked up on the old Carters Mountain thing from their parents and other older people, so the Carters Mountain crew had to put up with a lot of schoolground teasing. Among those kids were the Szabo twins, Tanya and Erika,. “Anton,” I introduced myself. “And you are?”“Alison,” she answered as she shook my hand.“Oh, shit. You moved to the college, didn’t you?”“Yep.”Just then, one of her friends got my attention. “Mate, barman wants you.”I went back to the bar to retrieve my card and ferry drinks back to my friends. As I stood there sipping on my Coke I kept looking over to Alison’s group. We had talked as I carried her drinks than we had in the time we were in high school together. She kept looking over to my. Our drinks came just as I started the presentation. I talked him through the experimental steps and the timeline involved. He asked me to explain how the different assays worked; I drew diagrams on blank sheets of paper. Someone came in and replaced my empty wine glass with a fresh one. After more than an hour, he leaned across the table. "Tell Dr. Patel that if he gets these results, I'll put him in touch with Reginald Jax." "You can do that?" Reginald Jax was the head of Research and. ”The people came drifting back down from the hillsides and they gathered around me, silently. Then one knelt and made the sign of greatest respect, touching his head to the earth, and all the others did the same. Wise-Woman said, “Stand up,” and I stood, trembling, holding on to her shoulder. I still could not think clearly.She spoke to several c***dren, and they ran to the river and brought back water in pots. She took the hem of her dress and began to wash the blood off me and the ashes out.