Crazy by William Peter Blatty Page A

asked me. “You got a new mask to show off or am I looking at it right now?”
    I said, “No, ma’am. No mask. I’m all me.”
    This didn’t seem to relax her.
    “And then?” she said.
    “And then what, please, ma’am?”
    Doyle squinted suspiciously. “What do you want?”
    I want nothing but the best for all of mankind, came to mind as a way of sort of easing into things, but in the presence of Miss Doyle’s overwhelming emanations of greatness, all I could think of was to blurt out, “My dad would really really like to meet you.”
    She looked at me blankly for a moment, then said, “Why?”
    Oh, well, what to say now for cripessakes! “I don’t know” was a total loser, and “Because he thinks you’re crazy,” I imagined, doubtless worse. But then my basic feral cunning returned to coat my honeyed, lying tongue with moonbeams:
    “Oh, I talk about you almost all the time! ” I gushed.
    “You do?”
    “Oh, yes, truly, Miss Doyle! I do!”
    Her eyes narrowed.
    Looking back, I think the error was the “truly.”
    “Okay, let’s have it, El Bueno. What’s really on your mind?”
    “Jane Bent, ma’am.”
    “Who?”
    “Ah, come on. Jane Bent. You see, her birthday’s coming up next week and I wanted to send her a birthday card and maybe a couple of”—my eyes flicked to the daisies on the desk and then back—“well, daisies. Just a random choice. But I don’t know her address and she hasn’t been in class all week so I…”
    “Okay, hold it, kid, hold it,” Doyle told me as she lifted up a hand palm outward. “You say her name’s Jane B-e-n-t, Bent?”
    “Yes, that’s right,” I said. “The one in eighth grade—I mean, just in case there’s two of them.”
    “Just in case there’s two of them,” Doyle echoed dully.
    She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms.
    “Is this another of your put-ons, El Bueno?”
    “Put-ons?”
    I was frowning in puzzlement, my expression more pious than Frank Morgan’s as the Old Pirate in Tortilla Flat when he asks his dogs about a vision of St. Francis of Assisi in the woods: “Did you see him, boys? Did you see him?”
    “Yeah, put-ons. Like the time you called a limousine service to come pick up Sister Veronica and take her to a prom at the Hotel Edison.”
    “You’re seriously telling me I did that?”
    Inclining her head a little, Doyle seemed to be appraising me with a distant, guarded fondness.
    It was as if she were discerning a kindred spirit.
    “Is your father anything like you?” she asked me.
    “Ma’am?”
    She didn’t answer. She just swiveled around, picked up her pen and went back to work. “Someone else would kick your butt for this, El Bueno. Of course we both know that there’s no Jane Bent at this school, much less two of them, for God’s sake!” She shook her head. “Why do you do these things, would you tell me?” Then she sighed and murmured something very softly.
    It sounded like, “It must be in your blood.”

9
     
    Maybe there’s more to the eye than meets it. Were Jane and Nurse Bloor and the universe real, or was I trapped in a virtual reality video game being played by some snaggle-toothed, teenaged alien being with acne, vast powers and a history of extended bouts of narcoleptic blackouts? So one second I’m sitting in Doyle’s office and the next it’s roughly seven months later with me on the Cyclone, a roller-coaster ride at Coney Island, as we’re starting down the first big vertical drop with my stomach going weightless and me yelling my head off in the middle of May. I’m not saying that I “time tripped,” you know, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five , although it also wasn’t Rip Van Winkle being wakened from a sleep of two hundred years by the roar of a 747 flying low overhead and him shaking his fist at the sky while cursing Mendel and “every other lame-brained, dipshit geneticist” who might have collaborated in the breeding of mosquitoes to such a titanic size and