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the sticks somewhere, but maybe now…
    Gardikian stuck a piece of blank paper in the typewriter and zipped the carriage to the right. Headlines were written by headline writers when pages were made up. But he had to signal the rewrite man, so he typed: STUDENT MAGICIAN BEATEN UNCONSCIOUS BY CLASSMATES. He lit a cigarette. Jerry Samuelson ought to be one happy kid tonight.
    *
    Lila had gone back to the dance floor. He wouldn’t have told her how a trick was done even if she was his wife, which she wasn’t. She’d get over it.
    He left his suitcases in the faculty room and checked the mirror in the adjacent washroom. His hair needed combing.
    He used his fingers first, as always, then fished out the broken-toothed comb to finish the job, cursing himself for having forgotten to bring his brush. Combed hair looked combed, brushed hair looked brushed. Damn!
    The dance floor was crowded. As he edged around the perimeter, bouncing up on his toes once in a while to see better, he noticed some of the kids stopping to look at him as he looked for Lila. The magician in street clothes, like everybody else, but they were staring; to those he knew, he waved casually. He saw five or six kids clustered around Roberta Cardick. Fan-club stuff. Then he spotted Lila dancing with the geek.
    Why some of the girls thought the geek was cute was a mystery to Ed. He had red hair and freckles, but six feet, three inches was too tall for a kid with a face like a kid, and look how clumsy he was, kicking his legs and moving his elbows like the things that connected train wheels.
    Ed caught Lila’s eye. It would only be a minute till the number ended. When it stopped, he ambled over, letting one shoulder droop a little. The geek was snowing away a mile a minute at Lila, polysyllabic like Danny Kaye.
    “Hello, Lila,” Ed said, cool.
    The geek ground his nonstop to a stop and looked at Ed sideways.
    He’ll get the message in a minute, thought Ed. Be patient.
    “The magician,” said the geek. “Nice show.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Hello, Ed,” said Lila’s soft voice.
    “Hello, Lila,” said Ed.
    The message came through.
    “This your girl?” asked the geek.
    Lila, the bitch, didn’t say a thing.
    “Well, I brought her.”
    “Okay,” said the geek. “No hard feelings.” Then to Lila, “Remember what I said.” He sauntered off.
    “What’d he say?” asked Ed.
    “Oh, you know, he talks a blue streak.”
    “I mean, what was he referring to?”
    “He said I looked beautiful.”
    “Well,” said Ed, “I guess you do.”
    Nothing wrong with Lila dancing while she was waiting for him; it wasn’t as if he owned her. Even married women don’t always dance with their husbands, do they?
    “The show went off very well,” said Lila.
    “I guess it did,” he said. There they go, some of the other kids staring again. He hoped they wouldn’t when the music started up. Dancing was not his thing. He felt stupid squirming around and snapping his fingers.
    Lila was leading him out by the hand to a comparatively open space on the floor when he noticed four or five greasers bunched up, chewing away, staring at him. I should have used an American flag in a trick, Ed thought, that would have got to them.
    Lila noticed him noticing, and took his elbow to move him away. “Don’t look for trouble.”
    “I’m not looking for trouble,” he said, following her lead, but taking a last glance over his shoulder and seeing that there were now eight or nine of them.

Chapter 5
    As soon as the last dance was over, Ed took Lila by the hand and hurried to the faculty room to make sure no one had walked off with his two suitcases. They were untouched.
    The pay phone in the hall had a line of seven or eight kids. Several nodded to him. Nobody offered to let him go to the front of the line. Why should they?
    The kids cooperated with each other by keeping their calls short, but it still seemed to take forever until his turn came. Most of the kids had left. Some