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on My Chosen Career.
    Anastasia Krupnik
    My Chosen Career
    Sometimes, in doing the necessary preparation for your chosen career, you will encounter people that you wish you hadn't encountered.
    Maybe they will be people from your past—people you hoped you would never see again under any circumstances ever.
    Sometimes they may be people you have never met before, the kind of people who recite Shakespeare with gestures and then do a disgusting curtsy at the end.
    I think there is probably no way to avoid this happening. Moving to an entirely new town doesn't seem to be the solution.
    Maybe moving to another country would help.

5

    Anastasia made her way through the Common, averting her eyes from the wino who sat slumped on a bench, slurping booze out of a bottle concealed in a paper bag. She stopped briefly to pat a tall, thin dog who came to her with a stick in his mouth and his tail wagging furiously, until the dog's master called, "Come, Sheba," and the dog reluctantly but obediently trotted away.
    She walked around the State House with its glistening golden dome and found the street she was looking for. Here, on Beacon Hill, it was quieter, less crowded. The streets were narrow, lined with brick sidewalks, trees, and gaslights. There didn't seem to be any stores here, just tall brick houses close to each other.
    Her father had told her that once, in the last century, these were all private homes. Now, though, most of them had been divided into apartments. Only a few people still owned entire houses on Beacon Hill.
Rich
people.
    Anastasia checked the numbers and began walking downhill. She had a horrible thought. What if the bookstore, Pages, was actually in someone's home? A
rich
person's home? What if the bookstore owner, Ms. Barbara Page, was old, rich, and grouchy?
    She looked down at her legs and feet. Her hiking boots were coated with gray slush and the bottoms of her jeans were soggy.
Great.
She had a sudden, horrible vision of an old, rich, grouchy bookstore owner staring at her with hatred as she stood dripping on the polished floor of the bookstore.
    She pictured a newspaper headline that said: JUNIOR HIGH STUDENT THROTTLED TO DEATH BY ENRAGED BEACON HILL BOOKSTORE OWNER.
    She pictured a smaller headline underneath: " SHE GOT SLUSH ON MY RARE VOLUMES," EXPLAINS BARBARA PAGE.
    And finally, Anastasia pictured a third, smaller, sadder newspaper caption: Justifiable homicide, says judge.
    "Grab that leg!" a man's voice yelled suddenly, and Anastasia jumped. She backed away from the voice. Which leg did he mean to grab—her right or her left? Could she kick with the other?
    Then she realized that the voice had come from the back of a truck which had the title great moves painted on the side. Two men were wrestling with a heavy green sofa. She remembered when her own family had moved from Cambridge, and that the moving men had wrestled the same way with their furniture. They had yelled, too. Actually, they had yelled things a lot worse than "Grab that leg," she remembered.
    She paused and waited until the men, grunting, carried the sofa across the sidewalk and up the front steps of a house. Then she walked on and suddenly she was there.
    Whew. It wasn't a whole house. It was a real store, a real bookstore, in the basement of an old brick building. A carved wooden sign that said pages was in the window.
    Relieved, Anastasia took off her glove and pushed open the door. A bell attached to the top of the door tinkled, signaling her entrance.

    "Hi. I'm Barbara Page, and you must be Anastasia Krupnik. Why don't you take off your boots?" the bookstore owner said. "Your feet must be freezing."
    Anastasia said hi, knelt, and began to unlace her boots. Her feet
were
freezing, she realized. Then she realized something else. Something embarrassing. She looked up. "This is embarrassing," she said, "but the socks I have on ..."
    Barbara Page looked, and laughed. "One's blue and the other's brown. That's okay. Leave your boots