The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma Read Free Book Online Page B

get you anything?”
    He set some coffee on a Bunsen burner and found some bagels in the back of a minifridge. “Six years at boarding schools and you learn how to maximize your space.” He sprinkled the bagels with a strange spice. “ Za’atar . I put it on everything.”
    Though I’d never heard of it in my life, I nodded and smiled. “Ah . . . za’atar ,” I replied. “My grandmother used to put this on her shredded wheat.”
    Julian seemed delighted at the idea, and I was thrilled to have gotten one over on him. He continued eagerly, “Maimonides said it cures parasites and flatulence. With that sort of range, I figure it must be good for everything else in between.”
    This seemed to be Julian’s philosophy on life: that no one could ever hope to get the breadth of the whole thing, so he would stick to the extremes and assume the middle was thus covered. He knew everything there was to know about Schopenhauer and Napoléon Bonaparte. He read every gossip rag with a headline about the marriage of Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson. But he didn’t seem to know normal things, like the difference between Newt Gingrich and Roger Ebert. Each night after we’d hung out for one hour, I’d spend three more at the library, reading up on everything he’d mentioned, even in passing. And in each word and place I sensed an unfolding universe of stories, just waiting for me to make them real.
    Shelly hated him, naturally. As often as he invited her to join us over in Shangri-La, she refused to accept. If I even brought him up in her presence, she rolled her eyes until I stopped.
    “He’s totally in love with you,” she snapped.
    “That’s absurd,” I said, trying hard not to flush at the suggestion—and it was absurd. About Julian’s preferences in the bedroom I didn’t dare speculate, but I felt certain that his interests in me were as a kindred spirit who shared his deepest obsession. Back home, there’d been no one. Girls could dabble in poetry and keep diaries. But guys were expected to be memorizing sports statistics, not the opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities . Even my English teachers seemed to hold books several feet from their bodies, as if some contagion might be multiplying within the pages. Julian held books right up close to his face—a habit formed, he explained, in his nearsighted youth—and now, even with contact lenses in, he liked to have the page within a few inches of his eyes. So close that the pages scraped the tip of his nose as he turned them. So close that, when he inhaled sharply at a particularly good turn of phrase, the paper seemed to lift up slightly and tremble before settling back again.
    In class, once Julian knew he had an ally, he talked more often, and together we eviscerated the bland tales of moonlit marriage proposals and drunken deflowerings that our classmates brought in. Morrissey began to call on Julian and me as one person, and often he’d jokingly call us by the names of famous writing duos.
    “Hawthorne? Longfellow? What do you think about all this?” or sometimes, “Emerson? Thoreau? Which of you wants to start?” Once we even scored a “Fitz? Hem?” but most of the time we were “Pinkerton and McGann”—which always got a chuckle as the class thought back on the day of the guest lecturer. I still wondered often what had become of the weeping writer.
    As the weeks went on, Julian and I worked furiously on our contest entries. Julian would invite me over in the afternoons to work, and for hours we would sit there, me scribbling on a yellow legal pad and him hammering on the typewriter, with the humming aerator of his fish tank behind us.
    We had only two rules: one, we would never write anything about each other—that was off-limit s—and two, we would not peek at the other’s work until it was finished. The first condition I succeeded in following only because I felt certain that if Julian could be captured in words, I was not yet good