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with the Read’s Drug Store on Fifth Street?”
    “Am I?” Brian put the key in the ignition and turned it. The motor rumbled to life. “I practically live there.”

    “What’ll it be? My treat.” We sat in a booth at the drug store’s lunch counter. We had the place to ourselves, no privacy issues here.
    “In that case, I’ll have a chocolate milkshake,” I said.
    A waitress appeared in front of us. She couldn’t have looked more bored if she had tried.
    “The lady will have a chocolate milkshake, and I’ll have a vanilla malted.” Brian smiled at her, but her ice refused to break. She grunted and left without saying a word.
    “That’s why I come here so often,” Brian said. “The service is exemplary.”
    I giggled a bit. I guess you could say I liked his sense of humor. Finding humor in a teenage boy was not an everyday occurrence.
    I decided to start at the beginning. “Tell me about yourself. Tell me where you lived before you transferred to Poplar. Tell me if I just met you yesterday, or if I’ve known you from years ago, because right now, I’m not sure what’s going on.”
    “Neither am I,” he responded. “But I’m sure I would have remembered you growing up. I lived around here earlier, on Elm Street on the east side, near the steel mill. And you?”
    “Where I always have, Roseland Drive, on the west side.”
    He slapped his hand on the table. “Okay, that settles it, we weren’t neighbors. If you knew a boy named Brian, it wasn’t me.”
    “I remember the boy in the refrigerator, Brian,” I said as calmly as possible. It wasn’t easy. The two of us as neighbors would have been the only scenario that made sense.
    Brian looked around. We were still the only two in the soda fountain area, but I understood his reasoning. Our conversations had a tinge of craziness about them lately.
    He leaned forward. “I think you were the paper bird that led me to him.”
    There are moments in time, I’ve come to find out, that change a person forever. A moment that once it takes place, there’s no going back to the way things once were. I thought then, when he said those words, that he might have known more than he was telling me, or that he might be figuring it out as he went along, much like me.
    We had journeyed from separate starting points but had somehow come to the same destination, the land of the paper sky. Now it was my turn to talk. It was a relief to know he would not think me crazy by the time I’d finished. His one sentence about the paper bird had convinced me of that. I was frightened, but in a weird way I was calm too. He knew me, maybe not then but now, in this drug store booth, I felt as if he was an ally who could be trusted with what I had to say.
    I told him about my dreams, about the talk I had with my mother. Our milkshakes came but I didn’t touch mine until I had finished talking. He left his alone too. When I was done, the very second I stopped talking, he smiled and I knew my mother was right. He was one of us.

14
    I believe it was on that afternoon, in that Read’s soda fountain booth, that I really began to like him; it was something I thought might happen eventually, just not so soon. His smile wore me down, but the clincher was the way he understood me, the way he believed in me. If he was swayed by anything I said, he didn’t show it. In fact, quite the opposite; he validated my dreams with his own, dreams he had known forever. The paper sky had visited him in his childhood, and had stuck around for a while as he had grown. It had been a while since his last one - a couple of years he thought - but he still had a vivid memory of them.
    The differences between our dream landscapes were subtle but significant. His had all taken place in his backyard. He had yet to see the smoke man, the scarecrow, and rather than just the one paper bird, he had seen many, a flock of them at times. And then there was this: when I told him my mother’s first name, his eyes