Excerpt from The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

If Mingus Rude would walk with him up Dean Street to Smith or Court, walk through the doors of the school with him, side by side, it might be different. Dylan went to the shuttered basement window and rapped. Mingus's own entrance under the stairs had no doorbell.

Dylan should have planned it with him in advance, he saw now. Up the stoop, he rang the bell.

He rang it again, shifting in his Keds, anxious, time ticking away, the day and the prospect of seventh grade rapidly spoiling with him in the sun.

Then, like an irrational puppet, panicked, he leaned on the doorbell and let it ring in a continuous trill.

He was still ringing it when the door opened.

It wasn't Mingus, but Barrett Rude Junior in a white bathrobe, naked underneath, unhidden to the street, arms braced in the door, looking down. Face clotted with sleep, he blinked in the slanted, scouring light. He lifted his arm to cover his eyes with shade, looking like he wanted to wave the day off as a bad idea, a passing mistake.

"Hell you doing, Little Dylan?"

Dylan took a step back from the door, to the first step down.

"Don't never be ringing my doorbell seven in the morning, man."

"Mingus--"

"You'll see Mingus at the got-damn school." Barrett Rude was waking into his anger, his voice like a cloud of hammers. "Get out of here now."

Seventh grade was where it turned out when you finally joined Mingus Rude in the main building Mingus Rude was never there. As if Mingus walked another Dean Street to school, another Court Street, had actually all this time gone to another I.S. 293 entirely. The only evidence in the opposite direction was the proliferation of dose tags on lampposts and mailboxes and on trucks which moved wearily through the neighborhood, Mingus's handiwork spread in a nimbus with the school building at the center. Every few days, it seemed, produced a fresh supply. Dylan would covertly push a forefinger against the metal, wondering if he could measure in the tackiness of the ink the tag's vintage. If his finger stuck slightly Dylan imagined he'd followed Mingus by minutes to the spot, barely missed catching him in the act.

For three weeks Mingus Rude was like the flying man, a rumor with himself Dylan couldn't confirm. Mingus's vacancy from his own schooldays, and from Dylan's, was the secret premise of an existence which was otherwise unchanged except by being worse every possible way. Seventh grade was sixth grade desublimated, uncorked. It was the Lord of the Rings trilogy to sixth grade's The Hobbit, the real story at last, all the ominous foreshadowed stuff flushed from the margins and into view. It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

Bodies ranged like ugly cartoons, as though someone without talent was scribbling in flesh.

The biggest shapes were the angriest. That's what they were, shapes--between hiding your glasses and averting your gaze you were Mr. Magoo now. The less you met anyone's eyes the less chance you'd ever risk doing it, a self-fulfilling program.

Chinese kids had apparently gotten some warning well in advance, and had thoroughly disappeared.

Puerto Rican or Dominican kids seemed to be tiptoeing away from the scene of everything. They decorated themselves differently and spoke more Spanish each passing hour. The way they occupied space in homeroom or gym class they were there and not there, an operation of mass adjacency.

The scariest fights were between two black girls.

On Court Street and Smith Street it wasn't even clear who was and wasn't in your school. Other bodies floated around, loose elements. A couple of black kids might corner you and ask, "You Italian or a white boy?" and all you'd know for sure was not to point out that the Italian kids were white. A black kid might be scared of something, might be watching his back on Court like an Italian kid watched his on Smith, but whatever they were scared of it was never going to be you. Anyway, no Italian kid would've answered I'm Italian. He'd have said Fuck you think I am? Or just grabbed his dick through his pants and sucked his teeth, flared his nostrils.

Excerpted from The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem Copyright© 2003 by Jonathan Lethem. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.