ensued during which Bernie shuffled in place, wondering if she, too, were only mocking him. Feeling altogether too vulnerable, he was ready to walk away from her but found that he lacked the will; maybe the janitor would have to pry him loose again. Accustomed as he was to being the butt of jokes and abuse, what appeared on the surface as honest curiosity unnerved him. Yet he, who considered escape his signature feat, was helpless to devise a convenient means of extricating himself from her gaze.
“So what’s it like?” she wanted to know, and Bernie felt as if he were being drawn out onto thin ice.
“I can’t really describe it,” he stammered.
She frowned. “What do you mean? You’re not allowed to describe it or you don’t have the words?”
“Whatever,” was his witless reply.
Her fierce squint returned. “Then what’s the point of it? What’s the point of going where you go?”
This sounded downright combative. What’s the point of breathing? he wondered. What’s the point of being born? “What’s the point of anything?” he answered, marveling at the hint of anger in his tone. Did a thing have to be described to make it worth doing? Though he knew that his irritation at her for asking was only the corollary to his irritation with himself for his inability to explain; and it frustrated him to the point of tears that in the face of the great adventure of his previously uneventful life, he remained tongue-tied. Then the bell rang, signaling the end of the lunch period, and Bernie took the opportunity to say so long forever to the girl.
But she was dawdling there in the glass brick vestibule amid the after-school stampede, the students dispersing toward their various clubs, cliques, and satanic cabals. Pretending not to see the girl, Bernie sloped toward the exit and nearly reached the threshold, where she managed as if by magic to plant herself athwart his path.
“So who do you read?” she asked, adjusting the bulging book bag slung over her shoulder.
He paused, looked askance at her, then recited a catalogue of immortals: “Abraham Abulafia, Moses de Leon, Nachman of Bratslav…” Thinking, That should shut her up; though why should he want to shut her up?
Digesting the names without blinking, she inquired, “Do you ever read Herman Hessie?”
He was unfamiliar with the author.
“What about Carlos Castaneder or Autobiography of a Yogi?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“They write a lot about altered states of consciousness.”
“Really.”
“Yeah.”
There followed an awkward silence the complement to the one they’d shared earlier that day, during which Bernie found himself wishing—though not as hard as he might—for another bell to ring. Still he could think of nothing to say.
“You ever took LSD?” she asked.
He shook his head. “You?”
“Oncet.” It was a syllable from a foreign tongue. “I looked in a mirror and saw cottonmouths crawling out my eyes and nose, which is like pretty cliché. I can do better than that without drugs.” She sniffed disdainfully and Bernie involuntarily sniffed along with her. Who was this person, anyway, with her pudding-bowl hairdo and tomboyish manner, the green eyes that looked, despite the heavy hand with which she laid on her mascara, as if their severity were in the service of resisting tears? Her single earring was a silver ankh dangling from a safety pin, and Bernie wondered if her body bore strange markings in secluded places. He felt as embarrassed for her sake as for his own: since whatever her reputation, it would be compromised from now on for having been seen in conversation with the major laughingstock of Tishimingo High.
But anxious as he was to part company with her, he was equally aware of the fact that she had waited for him; no one had ever waited for him before. He couldn’t linger, though; there was the bus to catch to the downtown shul, an afternoon ritual on its way to becoming routine. After a day in uncongenial classrooms, never mind Dumpsters and lockers, he was eager to return to the pages whose antique code he hoped, with the help of broken-backed grammars, soon to crack. Then the words, once he’d determined their meanings, would acquire the weight of the thing itself, words that didn’t so much denote as embody whatever they spelled. He was about to make his excuses—he had places to go—when she volunteered her name.
“I’m Lou.” Her expression challenged him to make a remark. “It’s short for Lou Ella which sounds like Louella but it’s really Lou Ella.” Bernie