Smoke and Mirrors by Lesley Choyce Page A

better.
    She stopped writing. “I don’t know what you mean.” I realized I was not very good at small talk with girls. “I was just wondering if you thought we lived on after we died or what.”
    â€œWow,” she said. “That’s a big question. I guess something must happen. What do you think?”
    I swallowed. I should probably not go there. I had seven different theories, all quite plausible, about what happens when you die, but if I were to tell Tanya, I figured it would be the end of our “friendship.” So I just said, “I think the soul lives on.”
    â€œCool,” she said, pleased with the brevity of my answer.
    â€œSo the Druids lived in France and southern England. They built monuments to the sun — like Stonehenge, for example, where they set up a circle of very large stones.”
    â€œBut I thought they were quite short.”
    â€œNot necessarily, although I think everybody was shorter in those days. And they didn’t live as long as we do.”
    â€œThat’s too bad. But do you think they had any fun?”
    Hmm. I didn’t know if the Druids had any fun. They seemed kind of serious from what I read, but I hoped they had fun so I made something up. “Theyhad lots of parties and drank a concoction made from fermented honey. And they had great music.”
    How could the Druids
not
have had great music? Tanya was back to taking notes, but I’d been distracted from my memory search. I closed my eyes again and saw some Druids dancing on a cliff above the waterfalls. Oh boy.
    â€œThe Druids were the religious leaders of people called the Celts — that’s with a C — and they held worship ceremonies in sacred groves. They had fires and burned things as sacrifices. They worshipped the sun, but they believed the earth too had sacred powers and some Druids could feel the energy along certain paths. Some Druids could use willow branches to find water deep under the earth.”
    â€œHow do you know all this stuff?”
    â€œI read a lot of books.”
    â€œI read mostly magazines. But this is really great stuff.” She looked at me so sweetly I thought I would melt, but she seemed almost sleepy and I think she was stifling a yawn.
    I didn’t know what else to do but ramble on some more about Stonehenge and the sun worship, and when all I had left was stuff about fertility rituals I told her, “Fertility of the earth and people were intermingled in the Druids’ religion. Some plants were considered to have powers to make women more fertile— you know, so they could have sex and have more babies.”
    Tanya was dutifully taking notes. “Mistletoe, for example — the berries were said to represent human male sperm. It was considered a sacred plant to the Druids. In fact, the custom of kissing beneath mistletoe at Christmas is like a leftover from some Druid ritual involving mistletoe.” But that was as far as I was willing to explain anything about fertility rites.
    I waited for Tanya to look up, wondering if she was going to think I was getting too creepy. Instead, she just said, “That’s really fascinating. I never knew that about mistletoe.”
    â€œIt’s a little-known fact.”
    I dredged up some other details about stone circles and more on the Druids’ ideas of immortality and Tanya seemed to be genuinely impressed.
    A car was blowing its horn outside on the street: two long, one short. “That’s for me,” Tanya said. “It’s my mom. She never gets out of the car when she picks me up anywhere. Just two long and one short. You’ve been great.” Then she touched my hand and as she stood up and she smiled at me again. “Let’s get together again,” she said. “I want to pick your brain some more about ancient rituals.”
    As she was about to leave the library, she turned and blew me a kiss.

    At that point I had