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Comet Committee, either, which sure felt to me like magic starting up again. He would be left out, and it served him right.
    And I couldn’t tell if I was glad or miserable about it.

 
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Leftover Hash
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    T HERE WAS NO SIGN OF CHANGE in my Gran.
    I had to force myself to visit the ICU to see her. I hated the quiet, I hated the strained, nervous people tiptoeing around with their flowers and their frightened eyes, and I hated the beds with the curtains drawn around them so you couldn’t see but you could still hear.
    I also hated that Gran had to lie naked under a sheet. I suppose that made it easier for the staff to take care of her, but my Gran was an old-fashioned, modest sort of person.
    That was how I thought of her, anyway.
    I guess the only good thing about being out of it, with tubes taped up your nose and a transparent plastic tent over you, is that you don’t know that you’re laid out there like a package of steak at the meat counter.
    Not that the people weren’t nice. The nurses really seemed to know what they were doing, which was stuff I knew I could never do and keep my cool. I had to admire them.
    â€œHi, Gran,” I said, leaning close and talking quietly so as not to bother anybody else. I knew she couldn’t hear me, but somehow it helped just to talk to her. “Listen, something really weird happened on New Year’s, and it’s got me sort of jangled up.”
    Jangled up and with nobody to talk to about it. I had broached the subject with Lennie twice since that night, but he just got quieter and quieter as I talked, meaning he was uncomfortable with the whole subject, so I stopped. And I was still too mad at Joel to try talking to him.
    Barb, my best friend, who actually knew about my family gift from being involved in my last experience with it, wasn’t around. She was visiting her aunt in Barbados for the holidays.
    What had happened, anyway?
    Something big, something full of fear and delight, and I couldn’t figure it out at all. Maybe that girl I hadn’t recognized at the party had been right, and we shouldn’t have messed around with some sort of half-baked magical ritual (maybe, if that’s what it had been—I mean, how could I tell?) in the first place.
    If I’d been hoping for enlightenment from Gran, I was doomed to disappointment. When the nurse came around to do something with Gran’s I.V., I left, carrying away with me the same anxious misery I came in with.
    This anxiety about Gran was like a fog of numbness flickering with hot red sheets and streaks of hurt and fear. It filled my mind when I couldn’t find anything to distract me. And most distractions that worked didn’t work for long. Even the whole Comet Committee mystery sank down into a dark place at the back of my mind.
    On Monday I went back to school with everybody else, hoping the week ahead would provide some distractions. And there was Bosanka Lonatz.
    Funny name, right? Well, she was no joke.
    I talked with my friend Megan in homeroom while our teacher, Mrs. Corelli, tried to get enough order to introduce this new student. Megan indulged me while I gabbled nonsense about Michael Scott, the senior I had a crush on and who didn’t know I existed, the way these things usually work.
    Megan’s span of attention was not exceptional. She interrupted me as usual: “Wow, look at that new kid! A real heartbreaker.”
    Mrs. Corelli was yodeling along about Bosanka—Bosanka? That was a name?
    She was from Bosnia, one of the countries made out of the dismemberment of the old Yugoslavia, and we should all extend to her the heartfelt hospitality and sympathy of our wonderful country with its ultra-superior way of life. Mrs. Corelli was a sort of Rambo clone, except she had less bosom and she could talk. And talk and talk.
    Bosanka stood up to face the class. We all stared at her with a kind of awestruck fascination. This girl was