looked down and seemed to be studying the trash on the hallway floor. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I can,” she said, letting me down as gently, I guess, as she could.
“Maybe the exam will be easy anyway,” I said.
Tanya smiled what I’d call a one-quarter smile and fled down the hall, swallowed by the crowd of noisy end-of-the-school-day students.
Amazingly, Andrea was there at my locker when I arrived. She had been watching me talk to Tanya. I felt a wave of euphoria sweep over me. She was back.
“I was afraid you were gone. One minute you were at the computer and then gone the next.”
“You’ll have to get used to me coming and going.”
“I was afraid it was like some kind of computer virus had sucked you into cyber world or something.”
“I’m not computer generated, if that is on your list of theories.”
“That’s comforting. But I still have a long list.”
“Willing to share the top five?”
“Well, the top one is currently that you don’t exist at all. That you are a product of my own mental imbalance.”
“I hadn’t noticed you were imbalanced.”
“I cried when I thought you were gone. I mean, I really let go. Would a balanced person have done that?”
“I’m touched.”
“Maybe you should tell me why you’re here.”
“I have some theories too, but I really don’t know the whole truth. I just know I’m supposed to be with you.”
Sung and Fishman had apparently made up and they were walking by me now, best of friends. They must have thought I was talking to them because they turned and stopped. I just waved. “Gonna watch the game tonight on TV?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Sung said.
They did not see Andrea. “Am I the only one who can see you?” I asked her after Sung and Fishman had moved on.
“So far, just you. Which is what makes me think I am here to do something for you. Help you in some way. But that’s just a hypothesis.”
“Do you have any special powers?”
Andrea looked straight at Lisa DeLong, another one of the students who had seen me cry in English, walking towards us carrying an armful of textbooks. Suddenly Lisa dropped a pencil, stopped, and picked it up, almost spilling her books.
As Lisa walked by, she paused and smiled. “See you tomorrow, Simon.”
“Bye, Lisa.” And she walked on.
“What about that?” Andrea asked.
“That what?”
“The way she smiled at you.”
“You’re saying you made her do that?”
“When was the last time she even gave you the time of day?”
“I’m not totally without my charms.”
“You wanted to know about my ‘special powers.’ Well, I’m just beginning to figure out what I can and cannot do. I don’t know how special they have to be to impress you, but I made her look at you. And I made her feel something, some small thing, something warm and fuzzy towards you just then.”
“Oh,” I said. “Like mind control?”
“No, Simon. All I can do is tweak a person’s emotions. I can’t change what they will do. I can’t totally change the way they feel. But if someone is feeling angry I can make them angrier. If they are feeling kind, I can make them a little kinder.”
“So you tweaked Lisa DeLong’s feelings towards me?”
“Just then. Just a little.”
I was beginning to see some possibilities here.
“How am I feeling right now?” I asked.
“You seem to be feeling pretty good.”
“So do something with that.”
And damn. I suddenly felt a little better. A bit lighter. The weight of this crazy world had been lifted from my shoulders.
Andrea smiled at me. My own elevated spirits seemed to have lifted hers as well.
“So there has to be a bit of mind reading involved here, yes?”
“I suppose so. You might call it that. It’s just that I know certain things. I don’t know where the information comes from. In fact, there’s an awful lot I don’t know, so you’ll have to bear with me as I figure things out.”
I was still smiling, still on my emotionally tweaked little buzz of being happy. I took hold of my padlock and was going to turn the numbers when I stopped.
“What’s the combination?” I asked her.
“That’s easy. Right to twelve, left to thirty-seven, right to twenty-one.” She was totally certain she was right. She worked the combination herself, but the lock would not open.
She was one hundred percent wrong. “Sorry,” I said, and cranked back and forth on the dial until the lock snapped open.
Andrea suddenly looked distraught. She was staring at the lock, and I felt like there was a great distance between us. I tried to say something reassuring but couldn’t find the right words.
Then she seemed to remember something. “Of course,” she said. “That couldn’t be your combination. It belongs to someone else.”
“Who?”
“Never mind,” she said. “It’s not important.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Andrea told me to forget about the bus. She wanted to walk.
“You’re going to come home with me?”
“You thought I wanted to stay here at school?”
“My parents are going to love this.”
“Just pretend I’m not there.”
Andrea wanted to walk the old abandoned railway hiking path that follows the river. I’m not sure how she knew about it. Out of the blue she started naming trees and birds. “Oak, chokecherry, tamarack, alder, hemlock, maple. Goldfinch, purple martin, grackle, blue jay, mourning dove.”
It was beautiful walking through the forest like this. I almost never went hiking. I would take the bus home, and my brain would whirr, but I usually talked to no
