The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

stood and brushed the dirt from her thighs. “We’ll go together.”
    Dylan absorbed the thrill of Rachel’s indignation, his breath short. “Maybe you should just call her,” he said as they went into the kitchen.
    Rachel scrubbed under her nails at the sink, and slurped from her cooled coffee.
    “Let’s see what she has to say,” she said, and Dylan was silent, understanding that his fate was to cross Isabel’s threshold at least once again.
    In the yard of the abandoned house the boys who would never be invited to work for Isabel Vendle played running bases: two basemen tossing a spaldeen between two squares designated as bases and four or five base stealers—Earl, Alberto, Lonnie, some other Puerto Rican kid. The runners bunched in between, bobbing and colliding like cartoon mice, while Henry gripped the ball and faked a throw once, twice, three times, wagging the spaldeen, showing it to them like a stuck-out tongue as he threatened the chase with a stomped footfall in their direction, until his bluff became irresistible and in glee and exhaustion the congregated runners surged, loping toward his base as though his hand was empty, and were tagged out one after the other in quick sequence. The base runners lolled their heads, drunk on being fooled, on Henry’s mastery.
    Robert Woolfolk wasn’t among them.
    Maybe nobody saw Dylan looking. Often a kid was invisible walking with his mother halfway down the block. You didn’t look, you didn’t want to get mixed up in that space between a kid and his parents.
    Then Earl waved, but he could have been pointing out a bird or a cloud in the sky. Instead of returning the wave Dylan looked up at the sky himself, pretended he’d seen something move there, a body dart across the cornices, or leap from one side of Dean Street to the other.
    “I’m Croft,” said the man who opened Isabel Vendle’s door, amused with himself already. “You’re the kid that works for Isabel, I guess.” He shook Dylan’s hand comically before looking up at Rachel. His cropped black hair was astonishingly equal in length everywhere on his head, including his eyebrows. “You got a girlfriend, huh? Come on in, Isabel’s upstairs. Me and her are drinking Coca-Cola, and there’s plenty.”
    It was as if Vendlemachine had calculated the coming affront and defended herself with the visitor. She was supposed to be alone on Sunday mornings, adrift in bed or curled at her desk, moaning, trembling to moisten a stamp with her tongue. She had always waited for Dylan by herself and now she’d cheated him, denied him the chance to show his mother the deathly house he’d been forced to enter. The darkened street-level front room was opened now, the corners only Dylan and the orange cat knew exposed to light, the dusty chairs rearranged to make room for a green plaid sleeping bag and a hiker’s backpack spilling with clothes, T-shirts balled like used tissues, and a stack of paperbacks: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater ; In Watermelon Sugar ; Sexus . Even the garbage smell was mysteriously gone.
    Vendlemachine sat at her patio table, scowling, her grip crackling the real estate section of the Sunday Times . The table was littered with sections of newspaper and the promised Coca-Cola and a scattering of violently colorful comic books. “Isabel’s Sunday paper was stolen this morning,” began Croft, as though he felt generally destined to explain everything and accepted the assignment with good humor. He might next start explaining that he was young and Isabel Vendle was old, or that they sat in a backyard in Brooklyn.
    “Again,” said Isabel Vendle.
    “I had to walk all the way up to Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic to buy a replacement,” Croft said. “I found that newsstand on the traffic island. There were all these great comics, you never know where you’re going to find them. The Fantastic Four, Dr. Doom, Doctor Strange, you know.”
    Dylan wasn’t clear whom Croft was talking to until