a halfhearted effort to jimmy the mechanism that would have released the door from inside, had it not been locked in any case from without. Able at times to escape his own skin, he lacked the wherewithal to free himself from his present confinement, or even to bang on the interior till he was heard. Instead he adjusted his bones into a snug fetal tuck to await his discovery: Eventually caught, the fish would give up its prey. He was awakened from his brief nap when a crowbar jarred loose the padlock and the locker door sprang open, revealing the same prune-faced janitor who’d extracted him from the garbage compactor. A black man in a skullcap fashioned from a lady’s stocking, his querulous expression suggested it was more than his job was worth to have to attend to such affairs. He accepted with a brusque nod the thanks of the girl who’d apparently engaged his services, then departed, leaving her to ask Bernie, antagonistically, “How did you get in there?”
Bernie confessed he hadn’t the least idea.
The girl exhaled a puff of air that lifted the dark fringe of her bangs like a wave. “You’re that loser kid who’s always tuning out,” she accused, her accent bordering on a hillbilly twang.
He saw no reason to deny it.
“Of all the lockers in the whole damn school, why’d they have to stuff you in mine?”
Again he was without a ready explanation. She stared at him another beat as if inspecting a rare insect, then demanded, “Well, get out!”
He explained apologetically that he didn’t think he could move; he’d been in one position so long that his muscles had seized up. “What muscles?” she sneered, then reached into the coffin-size space, grabbed his arm, and yanked him until he tumbled onto the scuffed linoleum floor. From there he began the painful process of unfolding himself, looking up at the girl as he did so, noting that, no thanks to her makeup and scruffy attire, she was almost pretty. She wore torn jeans and a bulky, black leather jacket over a cameo-pink T-shirt, her feet (turned out like a dancer’s) shod in hooflike yellow clogs. Coltishly skinny, she’d converted a perfectly pleasing mouth into a crooked cupid’s bow with violet lip gloss, and her eyes, an aqueous jade, were made aggressively feline by her shadowed squint. Harlequin bangs framed her forehead like a bouquet of parentheses. Her outfit was the kind some girls affected as a punkish fashion statement, though on her the clothes looked as if they might have come by their wear naturally. And while her accent typed her as working-class, the kind of poor girl who was automatically classified a slut in the high-school pecking order, her attitude dared you to classify her at all.
Seeing that he was still having difficulty with his stiffened limbs, she took his arm again and hauled him to his feet. Bernie thanked her, registering the shock of prehensile female fingers on his flesh. Then the blood suddenly left his head and the girl had to support him once again lest he swoon, and when she removed her hands from his arm, he was a little regretful to find he could stand on his own. He waited for her to depart; she’d done her bit, shown him a kindness beyond the call that should make her feel pleased with herself—Bernie winced at his own cynical observation. Why didn’t she just walk away?
Biting her lip as if literally chewing on a thought, she asked him—while passing students gawked at the girl who condescended to speak to Bernie Karp—in a voice just above a whisper, “So where do you go?”
“Eh?”
“Where do you go when, y’know, like when you go off the way you do?”
Bernie suffered a tremor whose source was either the bowels of the earth or his own, he couldn’t have said. No one other than Mr. Murtha, who merely taunted him, had ever bothered to ask. He told himself it was intrusive; she had no right to pry; his exaltations belonged exclusively to him. But here was a girl his own age weathering the stares of her peers to inquire about his experience, and what he felt despite his best efforts to resist it was gratitude.
“Heaven, mostly,” he replied. And there it was: the answer fluttering from his mouth like a moth he hadn’t known was trapped inside.
“Cool.” Pronounced with the requisite nasal diphthong to rhyme with cruel, though from her it sounded a touch ironic.
A silence