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scheme is a dream
    In here.
    So linger, so stay, it’s always today,
    Secrets are mysteries still.
    You’ll have your way, you will.
    No one points a finger
    When you are in Linger,
    Not here,
    Not in here,
    Never here….
    Mr. Raleigh said since Barry Manilow wrote “Mandy” to his dog, he could write a song for Joan.

11
    H AVE YOU BEEN GETTING my letters regularly? my brother wrote . I am writing once or twice a week, Lynn. So far I have the first one you wrote, the postcard, and the one inside your Christmas box, not that I’m not thanking you for writing me when you can get around to it because I am.
    I gulped when I saw what Mr. Raleigh’d copied out on his chalkboard.
    At the bottom it said it was from a speech made by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, of Massachusetts, to members of the 102nd Congress, on the question of whether to let President Bush send out troops into war.
The administration refuses to release casualty estimates, but the 45,000 body bags the Pentagon has sent to the region are all the evidence we need of the high price in lives and blood we will have to spare…. In other words we’re talking about the likelihood of at least 3,000 American casualties a week, with 700 dead, for as long as the war goes on.
    Mr. Raleigh had a basket on his desk filled with new buttons: a big bloody thumb pointed down, across it the same words he had hung on his bulletin board: All for Oil.
    Only a few took one on the way out, after the bell.
    When I went by, he said, “Gary? Wait up.”
    He came hopping around the corner of his desk, smiling at me. “How’s Bobby doing?”
    “Okay.” Didn’t he know Lynn was writing Bobby?
    “This button isn’t against Bobby, you know. It’s for him, in the long run.”
    “I know.” I wasn’t sure I did.
    “I hope you do. Maybe Bobby will get back to writing.”
    “Not if they go to war.”
    “No…. Tell Bobby I’m surprised he remembered I used to call ‘Linger’ ‘Joan’s Song.’”
    “I remember it, too. What’d he do, write you or something?”
    “He wrote Mr. Dunlinger’s daughter.”
    (Like he didn’t know her name? Pass the barf bucket—I’m going to need it.)
    He said, “Lynn had never heard how Joan inspired me to write that.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    He had this crooked grin on his face. He stuck his hand in his trouser pocket and rattled his change. “Say hi to Bobby for me, all right?”
    “I’m not going to get my book report in by Friday, Mr. Raleigh,” I said. “I’ve been watching CNN too much.”
    I thought it was worth a try, seeing if Bobby’s being over in the Persian Gulf might buy me more time.
    He kept grinning down at me. Said, “Then you get an F, Gary.”
    I sighed. “I’ll get it in on time,” I said.
    “What book are you reading?”
    “ The Sheltering Sky .”
    “Come on, Gary. You’re reading a novel from the forties set in Morocco? Just when the movie starts Thursday at Cinema One? No wonder you want extra time—time to see the movie so you don’t have to read anything, right? What’s your problem with reading? You know how much lawyers have to read?”
    “Okay, okay,” I said. “When I’m a lawyer, at least I’ll get paid to read.”
    “Who’s going to take the bar exam for you, Gary? … Now here, here’s a book for you.” He turned to get it from his desk. “Ever read Coward by Tom Tiede?”
    He handed it to me. “It’s not recent,” he said.
    On the front it said, The story of a young draftee who refuses to fight in a war he cannot believe in.
    “I just finished a Stephen King,” I said. “I’ll do a report on that.”
    “Take this anyway,” he said. “I don’t mind you kids reading books made into movies, and thrillers, but it wouldn’t hurt you to escape into a little reality now and then, too.”
    “Vietnam is reality?” I said, because I’d turned to the flap and seen shipped to Vietnam.
    “There’s going to be a lot of little Vietnams,” he said, “and I’m afraid you kids