Smoke and Mirrors by Lesley Choyce

thin air, and I was left alone with my cold meat loaf and a new sense of confusion, enough to send me back to my locker to check my schedule to figure out where I had to go next. I realizedI might have to make it through the rest of the day on my own.

C HAPTER S EVEN
    For the rest of the school day I was on my own. And I did wonder often where Andrea went. Was it a matter of geography, of time, of different planes of existence? Or was she still
there
? Could she simply control who could see her and when?
    I should have been nervous about my after-school meeting with Tanya but I wasn’t. I was in fortune cookie mode. I had good planets in the right houses. I had Andrea influencing Tanya’s interest in me. I figured I was pretty much just along for the ride. And it was about time.
    My interest in girls had always been there, but it seemed like a lost cause. I was a kid with many labels — some polite, some not. Oddly enough I was rarely a victim. Guys didn’t pick on me because of the way I am. If someone made fun of me for saying something stupid in class, I laughed along with everyone else. Ilearned a long time ago that the best self-defence is sometimes no defence at all. Laugh at yourself when they are laughing at you and you defuse their power.
    Andrea, on my behalf, had changed Tanya’s view of me from peculiar to interesting. If you think about it, the two aren’t that far apart. I wanted to thank Andrea, but she wasn’t anywhere to be seen at school at the end of the day, so I walked down the street to the library and there was Tanya sitting at a table alone. I saw her through the window and my heart leaped in my chest. “Just try to avoid acting like an idiot,” I counselled myself. At least I assume it was me giving advice to myself in my head. “Be cool,” the voice said. “Like ice,” I replied.
    Tanya was doodling in her notebook.
    â€œHi,” I said.
    â€œThanks for coming,” she said.
    I sat down. “So you’re interested in Druids?”
    She nodded. “Well, I’m curious. They seem so mysterious. But I don’t know where to begin ... my research, I mean.”
    â€œWe could get a few books.”
    Tanya seemed to think that using the computer to look up the call numbers of books and then actually finding the books was brilliant on my part. It wasn’t like rocket science, but maybe she was just trying to be nice to me.
    â€œI really appreciate you helping me.”

    â€œSure. No problem. In fact, first let me tell you what I already know about Druids.”
    My head was stuffed with an encyclopaedia of information regarding the occult, mysticism, the paranormal. What I had read stayed with me — almost all of it. But I couldn’t retrieve it easily. I suppose it had something to do with the brain damage. In order to remember things, I would have to use memory tricks. For example, if I closed my eyes and pretended I was in the desert, and then started looking for something by digging in the sand, I would find what I was looking for. Or I could imagine I was on a lake and go fishing for an answer with a fishing pole. And find it.
    Tanya studied my face as I closed my eyes. I went to a rocky coastline this time. It looked like Cornwall in England, and I was looking for a stone that had the dope on Druids. It was just beneath a high cliff with a cascading waterfall.
    â€œThe Druids were like religious leaders, healers some of them. I think they cured sick people with herbs and plants. They worshipped the sun and they believed in the immortality of the soul.”
    I could open my eyes now and remember more once I had started to tap into the information in my memory. Tanya was taking notes. She had the most beautiful handwriting I’d ever seen — like flowers in a garden. “What do you think about the immortality ofthe soul?” I asked her, thinking this was a clever segue into getting to know her