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Slaughtered chicken. Mutilated pig.
    “You find anything?” Jack asked.
    “Everything has meat in it,” I said, and
explained to him briefly why I couldn’t eat meat.
    When the waitress came, I ordered a cheese
omelet. Jack asked for just coffee.
    He looked puzzled. “I don’t get something.
You can’t eat meat, I understand that, but you can eat eggs. Eggs
are future chickens, so how can you eat eggs?”
    “If I eat eggs, I get visions of fluffy
little chicks. That’s not so bad. I figure what the hell,
somebody’s going to eat them, right?”
    “I want to suggest something to you,” he
said.
    “Go ahead,” I sighed.
    “I have to ask you first: are you reading my
mind now? Because if you are, I’d be wasting my breath.”
    “No, I’m blocking you out—boy, am I blocking
you out. And you’ll probably be wasting your breath anyway. But go
ahead. Suggest away.”
    “Maybe there’s a reason that Mary Jo
vanished,” he said.
    “Sure, she fell into an alternate
reality.”
    “I mean a greater reason.”
    “Like?”
    “You ever hear that saying: everything
happens for a reason?”
    “Yeah, but I never believed it. How could I?
I constantly see things that make absolutely no sense. What reason
could there be for that?”
    “Well, what if Mary Jo vanished so that you
could find her, so that you discover a practical use for your
abilities.”
    I stared at him for a moment. “Now you’re
thinking there’s a cosmic conspiracy to lead me to do what? Find
missing persons?”
    “You could do worse things in life,” he
said.
    “Sorry, I just don’t buy that,” I said. “I
guarantee you, if I find Mary Jo, it’s going to be for purely
selfish reasons. And I suppose I have to find her,” I added
dismally. Already that morning, Jerry had been harping that I
didn’t seem to be doing anything to retrieve Mary Jo.
    “The girls’ bathroom is still sealed off,”
Jack pointed out.
    “I know.”
    “No way of getting in there during school
hours. That’s the bad part.”
    “The whole thing is the bad part,” I said. “I
don’t want to go looking for this miserable tree-hugging bitch. By
the way, what do you think is the good part?”
    “Well, the cops have been going in and out of
the bathroom, but none of them have disappeared.”
    “That’s the good part?” I wondered; I loathed
the police, especially detectives, anybody in an official capacity
who might discover what I was. The idea of one or two cops going
poof was a happy thought.
    “Sure,” Jack said. “If a couple cops
vanished, it would be a real mess. The school would be overrun with
federal authorities—the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and who knows who
else? It would be Men-in-Black City if it looked like something
really weird was going on. We would never stand a chance to get
into the bathroom and check it out ourselves.”
    “And there’s a chance now?” I asked.
    “If we do it after school hours,” he
said.
    “You’re suggesting we break into the school
at night.”
    “Too risky,” he said. “The school has an
alarm with perimeter sensors. All the windows and doors are wired.
But it doesn’t have interior motion detectors. So the best way to
do it is to get locked in the school, find some hiding place and
let the school shut down around us. That way we’d have the whole
building to ourselves, after Carl the janitor leaves, which is no
later than ten o’clock.”
    I stared at him. “You just figured all this
out?”
    “I think fast.”
    “And you’re serious?”
    “Yeah, definitely.”
    “Did you figure out exactly how we’re
supposed to get Mary Jo back?”
    “I have some ideas,” he said.
    “Meaning, no.”
    “I figured we have to play that part by
ear.”
    After thinking it all over for a moment, I
said, “This sounds like a really bad idea.”
    “So you want to try it?”
    “Yeah, for sure,” I said, concluding that a
bad idea is better than no idea at all.
    “Tomorrow is Friday,” he said. “I figure