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The lunch bell rang, but I was pretty into the story, so I stayed where I was and continued reading.

Before too long I was down to the last few pages, and it was really exciting and suspenseful. I was feeling spacey because of the spooky thing I mentioned before (and maybe even more than usual because there were a lot of priests and so forth in the book and that always adds to the spookiness).

And then a shadow suddenly fell on the page. I saw an elongated shadow head and shoulders on the grass in front of me and felt the presence of someone behind me. Then, and this was all in just a second, not how long it’s taking me to describe it, I saw some stuff splashing on the page, though first 107

I think I heard the sound of it hitting the page, which was very, very loud in my ears.

“The fuck?” I said, and turned around. It was Paul Krebs, one of Matt Lynch’s pals and as psychotic a normal person as ever there was, pouring Coke out of a can onto my book and giggling like a simian maniac.

Now, this all happened in a split second, like I said. Paul Krebs was up there on the crest of the slope giggling, doing this little taunting dance, like a boxer or something. My ears were ringing so loudly I couldn’t hear much else, and I was seeing little multicolored blobs that started small but expanded to obscure my field of vision slightly before they dissipated and new ones would take their place. Little circles of green, yellow, and red. A liquid kaleidoscope. I got up and he kind of danced away from me, still giggling and yammering. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I started to chase him, and somehow, I don’t know how, I managed to trip him and pull his legs upward so that he fell down on to the rough gravel path. He must have hit his head pretty hard on one of the bigger rocks that lined the pathway, because there was a tremendous amount of blood seeping from a cut near his hairline. I had fallen in a big patch of mud in the process. I scrambled to get up, sliding around a bit, but he was just lying there blubbering and bloody.

I grabbed his hair and smashed his head into the gravel as hard as I could. Then I stepped on his neck and said, “I will kill you.”

And we both knew I totally meant it.

While I had been chasing him, I had still had Brighton Rock in my hand, but I had dropped it when the whole head-smashing thing was happening. It was lying open on the path, with little splotches and splatters of Paul Krebs’s blood on it, reflecting the sun, shining on the page. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking, stupidly, maybe this is how The Catcher in the Rye, CEH 1960, got bloodstains on it.

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My first impulse was to run like hell in some random direction, but for some reason, instead, I sat down very deliberately on a big stone over on the other side of the path and read the last couple of blood-spattered pages of Brighton Rock, tuning out the sound of Paul Krebs’s gentle moaning. Then I paused and stared off into space. It was a great ending, the best ending of anything, book or movie, I’d ever experienced. Then I closed the book reverently and walked back toward the campus, because I needed to get myself cleaned up and fifth period was about to start and I didn’t see any reason to be late.

P OD H I P P I E S

It was a day or two after I accidentally beat up Paul Krebs that two very, very surprising things happened.

The first was that Pierre Butterfly Cameroon, the diminutive, flute-playing, hippie-parent-stunted, relentlessly picked-on PBC, my brother in dorkdom, started “going with” Renée

“Née-Née” Tagliafero. For real. I mean, eating together, having third parties deliver notes to each other, and spending lunch period walking in a circle around the perimeter of Center Court, just like all the normal freshman and sophomore couples did. (I’ve never really understood why couples do the joined-at-the-hip lunchtime laps. They stop doing it junior year because once you’re a junior you can leave during lunch and go to the Burger King instead.) Now, when I say that Pierre Butterfly Cameroon is my brother in dorkdom, I mean that we are both at roughly the same low level of the social structure. The Untouchable level.

I don’t mean brotherhood in any other sense. I mean, I don’t know him. Hanging out with each other would just make us both look even more pathetic. Sam Hellerman is kind of 109

friendly with him, as he is with everybody who isn’t a dangerous normal psychotic. I’m more of a loner. Still, if I’m the king of hearts in the dork deck, PBC is definitely one of the other kings.

But Pierre Butterfly Cameroon was no longer Untouchable, or so it appeared from where I was sitting when I first saw them walk by. Née-Née Tagliafero was touching him quite frequently, in fact. They looked weird as a couple because he was not much more than half her height. But more than that: such things just didn’t happen. It was inconceivable.

Née-Née Tagliafero was pretty and popular, with no handicaps or defects except, perhaps, for a very slight mustache, which she was able to bleach into insignificance. And she had pretty big breasts, too, which counted for a lot. I’d never seen her picked on by anyone. She had a kind of punky hair and thrift-store clothes thing going on, but that was fashion rather than true alienation, like it always is. I mean, she was definitely one of “them,” that is to say, mostly normal, not actually one of society’s unwanted. I would classify her as subnormal/drama. She’d had several normal boyfriends before.

What the hell was going on around here? It was mind-boggling.

The other thing that happened was hardly less surprising.

Sam Hellerman suddenly started hanging out with the Hillmont High fake-hippie drama crowd. I swear to God.

This came without warning. I walked out of fourth period expecting our paths to converge at around locker number 414, as usual, and to continue on to our usual lunch-period routine of eating at the cafeteria and trying to remain unob-trusive and unharassed till the bell rang. But I walked past locker number 414, and he wasn’t there. I backtracked, looked around, and finally saw him sitting on the lawn near the drama hippies. No, not near —with them. I can’t remember 110

ever having been so surprised. He must have known I’d be looking for him, of course. I tried to get his attention, but he deliberately avoided looking up to the exit of building C and locker number 414, where he had to have known I’d be.

God only knows what they were talking about. He didn’t seem to be doing much talking, but it was hard to tell.

Somehow I couldn’t see him actually becoming a faux-hippie drama person himself—that would be too bizarre. But how would I know? Maybe that’s how it always begins: you sit with them on the lawn during lunch; then, later that night, a pod grows under your bed with a little fake-hippie version of you inside; then the fake-hippie you hatches, kills the original you, and takes your place. Before you know it you’re embroidering your jeans, singing “Casey Jones,” smoking pot from a pipe you made out of an apple, and playing Motel the Tailor in the class production of Fiddler on the Roof.

Could that really happen to Sam Hellerman? Ordinarily I’d have said no, but after witnessing the courtship rituals of Pierre Butterfly Cameroon and Née-Née Tagliafero, I had to admit that my sense of what did and what did not constitute a believable thread in the fabric of reality suddenly didn’t seem very adequate.

I wasn’t about to barge in on that groovy Happening, I can tell you that. Instead, I went on alone to the cafeteria, semidazed, with a lot on my mind.

TH E BAD DETECTIVE

Channel two was showing two horror movies back to back every Wednesday and Sunday night for the whole month of October. I was in my room brooding over this and that—Fiona, my dad’s library, Paul Krebs, and the whole weird Sam 111