Smoke and Mirrors by Lesley Choyce Page B

forgotten all about Andrea. I had never had a girl like Tanya give me so much attention and I was in a kind of swoon — foggy in the head, getting up and floating down the aisles through the bookshelves. I turned a corner and nearly ran right into Andrea standing there leafing through a book about vampires.
    â€œAnd how did that go?”
    â€œFine,” I answered. “I really like her. She has an inquiring mind.”
    â€œAnd a nice set of boobs,” Andrea said sarcastically.
    I think I blushed. “She was nice to me because of you, right?”
    â€œCorrect,” Andrea said, a cool breeze in her voice.
    â€œAnd I don’t really stand a chance?”
    Andrea didn’t say anything. She smirked. At least that’s what I think that look was on her face.
    Andrea looked down at her book and turned the page, pretending to read it. After I stood silently for a few minutes, she looked up. “What are you waiting for?” she asked.
    I wasn’t sure what to say. I felt flustered. Puzzled. “I don’t know. I guess I figured that if you were here, you were here to talk to me about something.”
    She seemed downright angry now, closed her book, and said, “You think it’s always about you, don’t you?” She slid the book back onto the shelf andthen went down the next aisle into the fiction section. I followed, but as expected, when I looked down the next aisle she was gone.

C HAPTER E IGHT
    Once when I was fifteen, I was walking to the mall on a winter day near sunset when I looked out into a field and saw a tree that seemed to be on fire. But there was no smoke, just the fire of the sun shining through the leafless branches. I felt paralyzed, but in a good way. It was the kind of feeling I expected if ever aliens transported me up into a spacecraft.
    Immobility and a kind of diffuse feeling of well-being. I felt myself being drawn toward the light even though I was not moving. I felt like I was one with the tree and one with the sun. And no, I had not been toking up (marijuana makes me cough) and I was not taking anything illegal or over-the-counter.
    I think this feeling, this sense of overwhelming connection and awe, lasted for nearly a minute. Then the sun was dropping beneath the horizon and it was gone.
    I felt cold and alone and infinitely sad, for what I had experienced was so brief.
    I kept expecting the same thing to happen again. But it didn’t. I tried to
make
it happen but it wasn’t there. It was like a fleeting window had opened up to another world, another way of being, another me — and then that window was gone, maybe forever.
    Lydia was the only one I could talk to about this. I did not mention it to my parents or there would have been more money wasted on prescriptions I would not take. Lydia made me feel like I wasn’t crazy.
    â€œThe Japanese Zen Buddhists call it a
satori
. Wham. It just hits you, usually triggered by something. Something beautiful but not always. You could be walking down the street on a dull, dreary afternoon and it could happen.”
    â€œWhat does it mean?”
    â€œIt means everything is connected to everything else, if you’ll pardon my New Age vernacular. If we are lucky, every once in a while we just feel this to be true. You had your
satori
. You were a lucky boy. I felt the same thing once sitting in an airplane of all places. Coming home from a psychic fair in Ottawa. There was a rainbow at the end of the runway, and when we took off through the arch of the rainbow it followed us up into the clouds and changed into a perfect circle around the plane. We flew through the centre of it and then itvanished. Nobody else on the plane seemed to notice or care. Except for me.”
    â€œSo it doesn’t mean I’m crazy?”
    Lydia laughed and then straightened a pile of palmistry books sitting on the table. “Oh, you’re freaking crazy all right. You’d rather be