Читать книгу Smoke and Mirrors - Lesley Choyce - Страница 10

I would not tell my parents about Andrea, but I needed to tell someone. So I told Lydia.

Her apartment was tiny, a cramped living space above a used record store down on Argyle Street. She had no doorbell, no buzzer. An old used envelope tacked to the door said simply, “Go upstairs and walk in. You are expected.” Her idea of a psychic’s joke.

Old tabloid newspapers were piled on the steps up to her place, some with headlines like, “Elvis found Alive and Well Living Among Baboons.” Or “Hitler’s Son a Proctologist in Miami.”

I knocked on the door and walked in. The smell in the air was a combination of garlic and marijuana. Lydia called the marijuana an “herb,” and she seemed quite open about the fact that she was a toker. Never once did she offer me any or even ask if I had ever smoked. I was now a non-toker and a non-drinker. I didn’t want to mess with whatever natural chemical process was going on in my brain. That’s why I snubbed even the store-bought pharmaceuticals my parents were squandering their money on.

“Hey there,” Lydia said as a smoke alarm went off in the tiny kitchen where she was burning something in a frying pan. I walked in and tried to reach for the alarm, but I wasn’t tall enough. The shrill sound hurt my ears. Lydia cursed loudly at it and failed to make it stop so she swatted it with a broom, knocking it onto the floor where it split open and spilled its battery, then fell silent.

“Simon, I knew you’d be over today. It’s about a girl, isn’t it?”

I smiled and sat down on a piece of plastic lawn furniture that served as a kitchen chair.

“Good guess,” I said.

“I never guess,” she said. “I know.”

Everyone around town thought Lydia was a phony. Few believed in her psychic powers. I’m not sure I did either. But Lydia was my friend. After Ozzie left town, she became the only person I could talk to about everything and anything. She was opinionated but kind. And I needed that.

“A skeleton goes into a bar and asks for a drink,” she says. “And the bartender tells him ...”