Crazy by William Peter Blatty

inhumane, was the special weapon that Sister Louise was now groping to find in her bag, her dreaded nail-studded “Guidance Ruler,” and seizing the chance while she was distracted, I grabbed hold of Paulie Farragher and asked him in urgent whispers to confirm that he’d actually seen and met Jane.
    “Jane who?” he hissed back at me.
    “Bent! Jane Bent! Pretty girl with pigtails? Came over and shook your hand and said, ‘Nice’ when you’d finished up a fight in the yard?”
    “Who told you that?” he hissed.
    I gurgled, “You!”
    Sister Louise looked up, half amazed and half not gruntled. “What is it, El Bueno?” she husked in her gravelly Lionel Stander voice.
    “Nothing, Sister. Some kind of bug just landed on my neck.”
    “So instead of slapping at it you decided just to accuse it?”
    I hadn’t thought fast enough. She’d been as likely to swallow my story as to take off her hood and then fill it with drugged Brazil nuts to feed to the pigeons camping out on our window ledges, cooing and strutting around like they thought they were really special and the white stuff all over the ledges was tributes from subservient finches, but she hadn’t found her weapon as yet, so she lowered her glare to her briefcase in what I would describe as extreme slow motion, maybe thirty-six frames per second, and possibly wishing that she were the Medusa. She ended it all with a “Hmph!”
    At mid-morning recess I landed on Farragher again until at least he said maybe he remembered Jane. “Yeah, some girl shook my hand,” he allowed, but then he had to add “Maybe,” explaining that his windmill defense could at times cause “some dizziness” in the “aftermath of battle.”
    “Where’d you learn that word?” I said, my blood running hot.
    “What word?”
    “The word ‘aftermath,’ you moron!”
    Many hands at last disengaged mine from his throat.
    For now.
    At recess I collared Baloqui, grabbing him forcefully by the front of his sweater and pulling him close to ask, my eyes wide, my nostrils flaring, “Listen, tell me, is there really a Jane Bent at this school?” And after his usual trademark frowns and glares of intently probing paranoid suspicion, not to mention his infuriating quietly uttered demand to know, “Why is this important to you?” he confirmed to me that Jane was enrolled at St. Stephen’s and confided in a whisper behind his hand that the boys in eighth grade were just having me on. But then what did that mean inasmuch as he had previously confirmed the existence of the Asp and Mr. Am, and, if pressed, would have sworn that not only was Nancy Drew a real person but she would “probably be coming to Thanksgiving dinner.”

     
    “Come on in, El Bueno. Take a seat.”
    There was no other way.
    Miss Doyle motioned to a chair beside her desk where she was probably bringing my tardy record up to date by inscribing an infinity symbol in the box headed “Number of Times.”
    “Be with you in a minute,” she said.
    I sat down. Through the glass partition of the file room I saw Sister Veronica’s hood bobbing up and down and out of sight a few times very quickly in succession like some huge cloistered blackbird high on amphetamines and thinking that worms could be found in file drawers. On Doyle’s desk I saw a Glidden’s Paint color chart with the odds pretty even she was making a selection for either her apartment kitchen or her hair. I was also surprised to see a little framed photo of Clark Gable on her desk behind a clutch of white daisies in a water glass half filled with water. I was strangely touched. I could hear Judy Garland singing “You Made Me Love You” and wondered whether Doyle wrote “Dear Mr. Gable” letters in her mind. Finally, she lifted her pen from the ledger, and as she swiveled around to warily appraise me, the humongous cross that always dangled at her chest made a soft bumping sound against the edge of the desk. “So what’s up, El Bueno?” she