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threatening, so I have no desire to change my ways, thank you very much.
    When it came to Brewster Rawlins, he might have had ahome, but he was a stray in every other sense of the word.
    It all began the day he showed up in the library.
    I was a library aide at the time, which involved a lot of hanging around while the librarian tried to come up with busywork for me to do. I didn’t mind, because it gave me time to read, and be among the books. Do you know that if you take the books in an average school library and stretched out all those words into a single line, the line would go all the way around the world? Actually, I made that up, but doesn’t it sound like it should be true?
    Part of my job was to help other kids find books, because not everyone has a keenly organized mind. Some kids could wander the library for hours and still have no idea how to find anything. For them, the Dewey Decimal System might as well be advanced calculus.
    I figured that here was one of those kids, because I found him lurking in the poetry section looking like a deer caught in the headlights. A really big deer—maybe a caribou or an ibex.
    â€œCan I help you find something?” I asked as politely as I could, since I’ve been known to scare off the more timid wildlife.
    â€œWhere’s the Allen Ginsberg?” he asked.
    It took me by surprise. No one came into our school library looking for Allen Ginsberg. I began to scan the poetry shelf alphabetically. “Is it for an assignment?” I wasgenuinely curious as to which teacher might assign radical beatnik poetry. Probably Mr. Bellini, who we all secretly believed had his brain fried long ago by various and sundry psychedelic chemicals.
    â€œNo assignment,” he said. “I just felt like reading Ginsberg again.”
    That stopped me in midscan. In my experience, there are three reasons why a boy will want to take out a book on poetry:
    1) to impress a girl 2) for a class assignment 3) to impress a girl.
    So, thinking myself oh-so-smart, I smugly said, “What’s her name?”
    He looked at me, blinking with those ibex eyes. A nice shade of green, I might add.
    â€œWhose name?” he asked.
    At this point I felt embarrassed about having to explain my assumption, so I didn’t. “Never mind,” I said, then quickly found the book and handed it to him. “Here you go.”
    â€œYeah, this is the one. Thanks.”
    Still, I found it hard to believe. I mean, Allen Ginsberg is not exactly mainstream. His stuff is out there, even by poetry standards. “So…you just want to read it for…pleasure?”
    â€œSomething wrong with that?”
    â€œNo, no, it’s just…” I knew it was time to give up entirely,as I was truly making a fool of myself. “Forget I said anything. Enjoy the book.”
    Then he looked down at the book. “I can’t really explain it,” he said. “It makes me feel something, but I don’t have to feel it about some one , so I get off easy.”
    It was an odd thing to say—so odd that it made me laugh. Of course, he didn’t appreciate that and turned to leave.
    Something inside me didn’t want our encounter-among-the-stacks to end like this, so before he reached the end of the aisle, I said, “Did you know Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon?”
    He turned back to me. “He did?”
    â€œYes. He and a whole bunch of Vietnam war protesters encircled the Pentagon, then sat in the lotus position and started meditating on levitating the Pentagon at the same time.”
    â€œDid it work?”
    I nodded. “They measured a height change of one point seven millimeters.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œNo, I made that part up. But wouldn’t it be wild if it were true?”
    He laughed at that, and now seemed like a reasonable time to hold out my hand invitingly and introduce myself. “Hi, I’m Brontë,” I