CONT'D: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way Here | Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Petunia had no choice but to be firm. "Thanks, but I'm really not interested."

The boy let out a yelp. "Of course you're not! You'd like to ignore everything, wouldn't you? People like you are what's wrong with the world. People like you can go to hell." His arms were quivering with anger.

"Leave the lady alone." Grease-man had opened his eyes and was leaning over Petunia. "Leave the lady alone, you punk. She don't want to talk to you."

"This isn't any of your business, mister," the boy shot back. Petunia shrank between them.

"You're bothering her," said the fat man.

"Of course I'm bothering her! That's the whole point! If no one is ever bothered, no one will ever do anything! Go back to sleep, fatso. Go back to sleep and keep right on dreaming about cupcakes and jellybeans."

"Kid's crazy," the fat man muttered to Petunia. "Probably on crack or heroin. Or both. You want to trade places with me? He don't look dangerous, but he could have a knife or something."

The boy rolled his eyes. "Mister, I don't have a knife. I don't have a fork even. But I guess you're right when you say I'm dangerous. You know why? Anyone who does anything they aren't supposed to is dangerous. So in that sense I'm a menace."

"It's fine," Petunia said. "I'm fine. I mean, don't worry about it," turning to the man on her right (his willingness to intervene on her behalf had been sufficiently kind, she decided, that she would no longer think of him as Grease-Man). "He's just talking.

I don't want to cause a scene." "I don't want you getting knifed or something, that's all," he said. "They talk about keeping the subway clean? They should keep the freaks off the trains, if you ask me."

"Freaks have a right to ride the trains just like anyone else," said the boy. "Freaks have places to go, too, you know."

The fat man shook his head. "Fine. The freaks can all go to their freakish places, but I don't want to sit next to them on the way." The boy shrugged.

"Freakish is as freakish does."

Petunia could not restrain a giggle. The fat man shot her a glance of disapproval. "Sorry," she said.

"Freaks," the man muttered to himself, and pointedly looked away. The boy grinned and Petunia, in spite of herself, grinned back. His eyes, she noticed, were not as crazed as she had first thought. They were an intense shade of blue, and he did look as if he hadn't had a shower or a solid meal in a few days, but he did not carry himself with the worn dejection of most subway panhandlers. He was young, she thought. Twenty? Maybe less. Less than twenty, and walking the streets of New York, alone with his red pamphlets and a paperback copy of Marxist manifestoes. When she was twenty, she had been tucked away at Smith College, an earnest English major with some vague notions of a career in literature. Upon graduating, she had realized that people with vague notions of literary careers went to graduate school so they could have something definite to do while they waited, manuscripts in hand, on the brink of greatness. Of course graduate school had brought her into contact with hundreds of similarly earnest English majors, all hoping to find room in the world of writing. Inspiring, at the time, but in retrospect a bit depressing.

A wave of something sympathetic washed through her. "So are you the founder of the club? The, the, organization? G.A.O.L.?"

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