trying to decide whether they’ll wear their coats or stuff them under their seats or maybe just sneak out at intermission. It’s tantalizing. It could go in any direction.” She looked down that incredibly long, sharp nose at me. “I believe we were destined to meet, Daniel Bradford. Together you and I are going to ditch this loser town and rule the world.” And, turning on her heel, she walked away.
I stared after her in disbelief, the troll doll pencil still dangling from my hand. All I’d written was:
YOU. ARE. WEIRD .
“Sucks about your mom,” Ruth Wilcox tossed over her shoulder, and I looked down at my dirty fingers and burst into tears.
1 For the record, I am aware “frisbee” should be capitalized—and ultimate frisbee, for that matter. Ditto cup-a-noodles, peppermint pattie, tabasco, internet, sharpie, vaseline, magic marker, post-it, etc., etc. In fact, most of them should be written with a ® too. What can I say? Sometimes that shift key just seems so far away …
2 See note above.
3 Ditto; if there’s anything worse than a word with a totally useless capital letter at the beginning of it, it’s a word with a totally useless capital letter somewhere in the middle. And now, having pretty much run this whole footnote gimmick into the ground, I’ll stop. Your eyes can return to the top of the page with my promise that they won’t have to wander back down here again, except to look for page numbers.
The margarita was the only virgin in the house
“Call me Janet.”
Mrs. Miller opened an amber door and beckoned me into a tawny living room. Beige dining room to the left; ochre hallway to the right; dun-colored patio through a pair of sliding-glass panels. Beyond that, a yard full of dry grass yellowing beneath the merciless Kansas sun.
On the wall next to the door, where some people hang framed squares of needlepoint that say “God Bless This Home” and other people hang pictures of their children or parents or dead wives, Mrs. Miller had hung a brass plate reading:
G OD B LESS S YNONYMS , M ETA PHORS , AND E UPHEMISMS TOO !
“God Bless Synonyms, Metaphors, and Euphemisms too!” is a pretty weird sentence all by itself, but it’s even weirder when it’s stamped into solid brass and fastened to one of those heraldic wooden plaques that usually have a moose’s head or a stuffed pheasant mounted on them, and is the first thing you see when you walk in someone’s front door to boot. Now Mrs. Miller ran a hand through her blonde hair and said:
“Would you like a ‘drink’?”
She used her fingers to make the quotation marks, which kind of threw me. No teacher had ever offered me a “drink” before, or even a drink for that matter. I wondered if “drink” was a synonym for something—or, God forbid, a euphemism.
“Okay … ?”
“Okay what?”
“Okay … Janet?”
“‘At’s my boy.”
“I got married when I was twenty-one,” she called through the kitchen window, her voice barely audible over a roaring blender. “Divorced at twenty-three, but that’s a whole ’nother story. Somehow during the past decade and a half I never got around to taking my name back. I tried doing the whole ‘Ms.’ thing, but I couldn’t even get my head-in-a-bucket colleagues to say it, let alone the students. Kansas ,” she added, as if that explained everything.
I glanced up from my dictionary ( thermotype: a picture obtained by wetting an object with hydrochloric acid, then taking an impression, then heating it ) when the sliding-glass door slid open. Mrs. Miller was hunched over a tray containing a couple of glasses with cactus-shaped stems and a pitcher filled with icy yellow liquid sloshing over the top.
Oh, and a bottle of tequila.
“Anyhoo,” she set the tray on a table, and a little more liquid sloshed out of the pitcher, making me wonder if she wasn’t a bit sloshed herself. “Since, technically speaking, I’m not your teacher during the summer, I thought we’d stick
I stared after her in disbelief, the troll doll pencil still dangling from my hand. All I’d written was:
YOU. ARE. WEIRD .
“Sucks about your mom,” Ruth Wilcox tossed over her shoulder, and I looked down at my dirty fingers and burst into tears.
1 For the record, I am aware “frisbee” should be capitalized—and ultimate frisbee, for that matter. Ditto cup-a-noodles, peppermint pattie, tabasco, internet, sharpie, vaseline, magic marker, post-it, etc., etc. In fact, most of them should be written with a ® too. What can I say? Sometimes that shift key just seems so far away …
2 See note above.
3 Ditto; if there’s anything worse than a word with a totally useless capital letter at the beginning of it, it’s a word with a totally useless capital letter somewhere in the middle. And now, having pretty much run this whole footnote gimmick into the ground, I’ll stop. Your eyes can return to the top of the page with my promise that they won’t have to wander back down here again, except to look for page numbers.
The margarita was the only virgin in the house
“Call me Janet.”
Mrs. Miller opened an amber door and beckoned me into a tawny living room. Beige dining room to the left; ochre hallway to the right; dun-colored patio through a pair of sliding-glass panels. Beyond that, a yard full of dry grass yellowing beneath the merciless Kansas sun.
On the wall next to the door, where some people hang framed squares of needlepoint that say “God Bless This Home” and other people hang pictures of their children or parents or dead wives, Mrs. Miller had hung a brass plate reading:
G OD B LESS S YNONYMS , M ETA PHORS , AND E UPHEMISMS TOO !
“God Bless Synonyms, Metaphors, and Euphemisms too!” is a pretty weird sentence all by itself, but it’s even weirder when it’s stamped into solid brass and fastened to one of those heraldic wooden plaques that usually have a moose’s head or a stuffed pheasant mounted on them, and is the first thing you see when you walk in someone’s front door to boot. Now Mrs. Miller ran a hand through her blonde hair and said:
“Would you like a ‘drink’?”
She used her fingers to make the quotation marks, which kind of threw me. No teacher had ever offered me a “drink” before, or even a drink for that matter. I wondered if “drink” was a synonym for something—or, God forbid, a euphemism.
“Okay … ?”
“Okay what?”
“Okay … Janet?”
“‘At’s my boy.”
“I got married when I was twenty-one,” she called through the kitchen window, her voice barely audible over a roaring blender. “Divorced at twenty-three, but that’s a whole ’nother story. Somehow during the past decade and a half I never got around to taking my name back. I tried doing the whole ‘Ms.’ thing, but I couldn’t even get my head-in-a-bucket colleagues to say it, let alone the students. Kansas ,” she added, as if that explained everything.
I glanced up from my dictionary ( thermotype: a picture obtained by wetting an object with hydrochloric acid, then taking an impression, then heating it ) when the sliding-glass door slid open. Mrs. Miller was hunched over a tray containing a couple of glasses with cactus-shaped stems and a pitcher filled with icy yellow liquid sloshing over the top.
Oh, and a bottle of tequila.
“Anyhoo,” she set the tray on a table, and a little more liquid sloshed out of the pitcher, making me wonder if she wasn’t a bit sloshed herself. “Since, technically speaking, I’m not your teacher during the summer, I thought we’d stick
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