another test, right? After everything they have put me through, they still
have not decided whether to send me."
"Oh no, in a couple of hours you'll be cracking nuts with ferrets in some
dark Gendian burrow. This is just me, talking."
"You are crazy."
"Actually, I believe the technical term is logomaniac. It's from the
Greek: logos meaning word, mania meaning two bits short of a byte. I just
love to chat is all. Tell you what, I'll go first. If my secret isn't
juicy enough, you don't have tell me anything."
Her eyes were slits as she sipped her tea. I was fairly sure that
whatever she was worrying about at the moment, it wasn't being swallowed by
the big blue marble.
"I was brought up Catholic," I said, settling onto a chair in front of
her. "I'm not anymore, but that's not the secret. My parents sent me to
Mary, Mother of God High School; we called it Moogoo. It was run by a
couple of old priests, Father Thomas and his wife, Mother Jennifer.
Father Tom taught physics, which I got a D in, mostly because he talked
like he had walnuts in his mouth. Mother Jennifer taught theology and had
all the warmth of a marble pew; her nickname was Mama Moogoo.
"One night, just two weeks before my graduation, Father Tom and Mama
Moogoo went out in their Chevy Minimus for ice cream. On the way home,
Mama Moogoo pushed a yellow light and got broadsided by an ambulance.
Like I said, she was old, a hundred and twenty something; they should've
lifted her license back in the '50's. She was killed instantly. Father
Tom died in the hospital.
"Of course, we were all supposed to feel sorry for them and I guess I did
a little, but I never really liked either of them and I resented the way
their deaths had screwed things up for my class. So I was more annoyed
than sorry, but then I also had this edge of guilt for being so
uncharitable. Maybe you'd have to grow up Catholic to understand that.
Anyway, the day after it happened they called an assembly in the gym and we
were all there squirming on the bleachers and the cardinal himself
telepresented a sermon. He kept trying to comfort us, like it had been our
parents that had died. When I made a joke about it to the kid next to me,
I got caught and spent the last week of my senior year with an in-school
suspension."
Kamala had finished her tea. She slid the empty cup into one of the
holders built into the table.
"Want some more?" I said.
She stirred restlessly. "Why are you telling me this?"
"It's part of the secret." I leaned forward in my chair. "See, my family
lived down the street from Holy Spirit Cemetery and in order to get to the
carryvan line on McKinley Ave., I had to cut through. Now this happened a
couple of days after I got in trouble at the assembly. It was around
midnight and I was coming home from a graduation party where I had taken a
couple of pokes of insight, so I was feeling sly as a philosopher-king. As
I walked through the cemetery, I stumbled across two dirt mounds right next
to each other. At first I thought they were flower beds, then I saw the
wooden crosses. Fresh graves: here lies Father Tom and Mama Moogoo. There
wasn't much to the crosses: they were basically just stakes with
