Magic Street Page 0,24

kids who know who you are. You're famous, Mack, just for being alive."

Mack didn't know what famous was. So what if everybody knew who he was? He knew them right back. Was everybody famous?

Okay, so everybody thought he was special or weird because he was found instead of being born or adopted. But that wasn't what made Mack different, he knew.

It was the cold dreams.

He tried to talk about it to Ceese one time. "I had a really bad cold dream last night."

"A what?"

"A cold dream."

"What's that?"

"Where you dream and it's really real and you want it so bad, and when you wake up from it you're shivering so hard you think it's going to break your teeth."

"I never had a dream like that," said Ceese.

"You didn't? I have them sometimes when I'm not even asleep."

"That's just crazy. You can't have a dream when you're not asleep."

"It comes in front of my eyes and I just stop and watch and when it's done I'm shivering so hard I can't even stand up."

"You crazy, Mack Street."

Ceese must have told Miz Smitcher because the next day she took him to a doctor at the hospital who stuck things all over his head and then a bunch of metal rods made squiggly lines on a moving paper and the doctor just smiled and smiled at him but he looked all serious when he talked to Miz Smitcher and then they glanced at him and closed the door and kept talking where he couldn't hear.

But the cold dreams scared him. They were so intense. And strange. His regular dreams, even his nightmares, they were about things in his life. His friends. Miz Smitcher. Ceese. Grocery bags and ants. But the cold dreams would be about grownups most of the time, and more than once it happened that he'd see a grownup for the first time in his life, and it would be somebody from a cold dream.

"Miz Smitcher," said Mack, "I know that man."

"You never met him before in your life."

"He all the time sees this woman naked."

She was furious. "Don't you say such things! He's a deacon at church and he does not see women naked and how would you know, any way?"

"It just came into my head," said Mack, which was true.

"You're too young to understand what you're saying, which is why I don't beat you till your butt turns into hamburger."

"Better than my butt turning into a chocolate milkshake."

"How about beating your butt into french fries?"

"That doesn't even make sense," said Mack.

"Don't go talking about men seeing women naked," said Miz Smitcher.

"I was just saying that I know that man."

"You don't know him. I know him and he's a good man."

But then came a day when Miz Smitcher sent him out of the room when Ceese's mama came over and the two of them talked all serious and after Ceese's mama left Miz Smitcher came in to Mack's room and sat down on the floor and looked him in the eye.

"You tell me, Mack Street, how you happened to know about Deacon Landry and Juanettia Post."

"Who are they?"

"You met Deacon Landry and you told me you saw him looking at a naked woman."

From the look in her eye, Mack knew that this was something really bad, and he wasn't about to admit to anything. "I don't remember," he said.

"I don't know, Miz Smitcher," said Mack. "I don't know nothing about naked women. That's nasty stuff."

She searched his eyes but whatever she was looking for, she didn't find it. "Never mind," said Miz Smitcher. "You shouldn't be thinking about naked women anyway, I'm sorry I brought it up."

But she paused in the door of his room and looked at him like he was something strange, and he decided right then that he'd never tell anybody about those cold dreams, not ever again.

And he probably would have kept that promise if it wasn't for Tamika Brown.

Tamika was older than him and he only knew her because of her little brother Quon who was Mack's age, and they played together all the time cause the Browns only lived a few doors down.

Mack even went into their house sometimes because Quon's mama wasn't one of those women who wouldn't have a grocery-bag baby in their house. But he didn't see Tamika except when she was just going out the door or running around getting ready to go out the door. And she was always wearing a bright red swimming suit because that's what Tamika did