jauntily in the brim, meant to scat through the intersection before it could. Three seconds. Behind Jake, the man in black was lunging forward. On the young man’s boombox, “Love to Love You, Baby” ended and “Dr. Love” began.
Two.
The Cadillac changed to the lane nearest Jake’s side of the street and charged down on the intersection, its killer grille snarling.
One.
Jake’s breath stopped in his throat.
None.
“Uh!” Jake cried as the hands struck him firmly in the back, pushing him, pushing him into the street, pushing him out of his life—
Except there were no hands.
He reeled forward nevertheless, hands flailing at the air, his mouth a dark O of dismay. The Chicano guy with the boombox reached out, grabbed Jake’s arm, and hauled him backward. “Look out, little hero,” he said. “That traffic turn you into bratwurst.”
The Cadillac floated by. Jake caught a glimpse of the fat man in the blue hat peering out through the windshield, and then it was gone.
That was when it happened; that was when he split down the middle and became two boys. One lay dying in the street. The other stood here on the corner, watching in dumb, stricken amazement as DONT WALK turned to WALK again and people began to cross around him just as if nothing had happened . . . as, indeed, nothing had.
I’m alive! half of his mind rejoiced, screaming with relief.
Dead! the other half screamed back. Dead in the street! They’re all gathering around me, and the man in black who pushed me is saying “I am a priest. Let me through.”
Waves of faintness rushed through him and turned his thoughts to billowing parachute silk. He saw the fat lady approaching, and as she passed, Jake looked into her bag. He saw the bright blue eyes of a doll peeping above the edge of a red towel, just as he had known he would. Then she was gone. The pretzel vendor was not yelling Oh my God, he’s kilt; he was continuing to set up for the day’s business while he whistled the Donna Summer tune that had been playing on the Chicano guy’s radio.
Jake turned around, looking wildly for the priest who was not a priest. He wasn’t there.
Jake moaned.
Snap out of it! What’s wrong with you?
He didn’t know. He only knew he was supposed to be lying in the street right now, getting ready to die while the fat woman screamed and the guy in the nailhead worsted suit threw up and the man in black pushed through the gathering crowd.
And in part of his mind, that did seem to be happening.
The faintness began to return. Jake suddenly dropped his lunch sack to the pavement and slapped himself across the face as hard as he could. A woman on her way to work gave him a queer look. Jake ignored her. He left his lunch lying on the sidewalk and plunged into the intersection, also ignoring the red DONT WALK light, which had begun to stutter on and off again. It didn’t matter now. Death had approached . . . and then passed by without a second glance. It hadn’t been meant to happen that way, and on the deepest level of his existence he knew that, but it had.
Maybe now he would live forever.
The thought made him feel like screaming all over again.
6
HIS HEAD HAD CLEARED a little by the time he got to school, and his mind had gone to work trying to convince him that nothing was wrong, really nothing at all. Maybe something a little weird had happened, some sort of psychic flash, a momentary peek into one possible future, but so what? No big deal, right? The idea was actually sort of cool—the kind of thing they were always printing in the weird supermarket newspapers Greta Shaw liked to read when she was sure Jake’s mother wasn’t around—papers like the National Enquirer and Inside View. Except, of course, in those papers the psychic flash was always a kind of tactical nuclear strike—a woman who dreamed of a plane crash and changed her reservations, or a guy who dreamed his brother was being held prisoner in a Chinese fortune cookie factory and it turned out to be true. When your psychic flash consisted of knowing that a Kiss song was going to play next on the radio, that a fat lady had a doll wrapped in a red towel in her Bloomingdale’s bag, and that a pretzel vendor was going to drink a bottle of