Read Calvin for Free Online Page B

lake, it’s just a force. It’s a big soft hand that pushes and presses at you, silent, steady. Soon you realize the wind isn’t flowing around you, over you, it’s flowing through you, penetrating the electromagnetic field that gives you the illusion of being a solid entity, whipping straight through you, spinning your atoms like tops and leaving them dizzy and frosty and deeply impressed.
    Me: Calvin likes snow.
    Susie: Then you should be super-happy because I’ve never seen so much snow.
    Me (pointing): All we have to do is head that way and we end up at Cleveland.
    Susie: Bill Watterson would hate you to be doing this. He would call it a flare-up of weirdness. He would think you’re trying to keep him from moving on in his life by wanting him to do another Calvin cartoon.
    Me: I just want one. One comic, Calvin, aged seventeen, being of sound mind. Besides, what do you know about Bill Watterson?
    Susie: As much as you!
    Me: Nobody knows Calvin like I do.
    Susie: How can you say that?
    Me: Okay, when was Bill born?
    Susie: July 5, 1958.
    Me: Wha—? How—?
    Susie: Is that the best you can do?
    Me: What’s his brother’s name?
    Susie: Thomas. Father, James. Mother, Kathryn. Wife, Melissa. Cat, Sprite, who has passed on.
    Me: What did he almost call Calvin?
    Susie: Marvin.
    Me:
    Susie (grinning):
    Me: I told you all that stuff.
    Even though I had no memory of telling her.
    Susie: Yes, you did. And I remembered.
    I couldn’t believe the real Susie would remember all that about you, Bill. I didn’t tell her I now had proof she was a delusion. I guess I thought a delusion was better than nobody at all.
    *   *   *
    We walked a long time, taking turns pulling the sled, keeping an eye on the compass. At least it felt like a long time, but when I checked my watch it had only been half an hour. I promised I wouldn’t look at my watch again until an hour had passed.
    White, white, flat, flat, white, white, flat, flat. My boots said it to me over and over. I felt like I was walking and not moving—the horizon the same, the snow the same, my boots sounded the same, white, white, flat, flat, white flat, white flat. Susie hiked with this glum look on her face, stomping like she was mad at the lake, like she wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.
    I checked my watch again. Twenty more minutes had passed.
    Twenty?
    My lungs were going into shock. They weren’t used to such clean air. Where were the exhaust fumes, the spewings of factories and furnaces? the burning of fossil fuels? the crop-dusting, the insect killers, the fertilizer dust? This was Precambrian air.
    I started to forget about my watch, about everything—noise and color and warmth and who I was and why I was there. Then Susie would sigh or say argh when we had to climb a snow dune, and I would remember that I was Calvin, the schizophrenic kid, the kid who was going to flunk twelfth grade because he didn’t do his English and science projects, the kid who didn’t tell his perfectly decent parents that he was going to walk across a lake and they would for sure know by now their son was missing from the hospital.
    *   *   *
    We talked to pass the time. Or at least I talked. About important stuff.
    Me: What would it be like to be a bottom-dwelling fish?
    Susie: Why do you ask questions like that?
    Me: I mean, you would spend your whole existence in the cold and dark. Born in the cold and dark and always in the cold and dark, and when you died, it couldn’t get any colder or darker than that, so you wouldn’t even know that you had died—
    Susie: Bonus.
    Me: Did you know that you’re probably the only one at school who wouldn’t be freaked out by me, a person with schizophrenia?
    Susie: That’s not true. I am freaked out by you.
    Me: I know why. I remind you that reality is just this game people play together, something their brain decides