Mother Nature’s Revenge

After hitting all the secondhand shops at Leicester Square, we only managed to score one copy of Sleepy Town High, my second novel. We decided to walk to Piccadilly Circus. On our way over, Burbank nearly got hit by a car. In fact, the car did hit him a little in the leg, but he whipped his leg around really fast to get out of the way. Sometimes I wonder if he’s got super powers. The thing about London traffic is not just that the cars come from the other direction—Burbank grew up in England, he’s prepared for that—but they actually seem to speed up in order to knock over pedestrians.

Burbank was understandably upset about the whole thing. “Wheels are destroying the planet,” he told me. “We couldn’t have smogged our way into global warming if nobody’d invented the wheel. It’s all my fault and now Mother Nature’s taking her revenge.”

I yelled at him then, right in front of everybody. “You didn’t fucking invent the wheel! It was a stupid dream that you should just forget. Now start watching where you’re going and grow up.”

I don’t think I’ve ever shouted at Burbank like that before. Well, not in public anyway. I regret it now. He didn’t deserve that. In fact, he probably is right about the whole reincarnation thing. I think I was just taking out my anger about the bookshop screw-up on him.

Waterstones at Piccadilly Circus had five copies of Blue Sock Death and a few of the old ones, so I bought them up, and we went to lunch down the road. I had a Rueben sandwich with chips. Burbank just had vanilla ice cream.