Read The Adults for Free Online

was so thin and restrained in her movement. She was sticking out her hand, saying thank you so much for attending our party, we’ll see you soon. It was like she always said: there are better ways of saying good-bye than others. Don’t just stand there, with your mouth all agape, Emily, it’s unbecoming. Be an adult. There’s nothing more impressive than a child who is really an adult and vice versa. Stick out your hand, keep a firm grasp, no, no, not a limp noodle, Emily, not like that, do you want people to think you are just a noodle? Do you want them to say, “You throw a good party,” for a noodle? No. Stand tall, look people in the eye, and say, “Good-bye and thank you so much for attending our party.”

The Other Girls

3

    A t first, it was intuitive. You could spot an Unfuckable the same way you could identify a bird sitting outside a window. This was what the Other Girls told me as soon as we sat at our desks in the back of biology. One of them pointed a finger and proclaimed, “Unfuckable.” Debate followed. Consensus reached. Annie Lars, an Unfuckable indeed. It was an archaic system of justice; we passed judgment with only suspicions of Unfuckability, and all the while, our teacher Ms. Nailer stood in the front of the room trying to teach us how to be grateful for things we never knew we had to be grateful for.
    “Eskimo women chewed on their husband’s shoes when they got back from hunting,” Ms. Nailer said between sips of her coffee. “Their teeth would wear down over time. I want you all to rub your teeth and feel grateful.”
    We did as such.
    These were the things we learned freshman year: Even Eskimo women (who did not like to be called Eskimo women) needed to get married in order to survive (one person couldn’t tend to the igloo and also hunt all day for the seals); it took fifteen days for a peeled banana enclosed in a jar to be fully infested by tiny maggots, and it took another fifteen days after that for all the maggots to consume the banana, and this whole affair was called decomposition (something that would happen to us one day, said Ms. Nailer). We learned that most records were not necessarily achievements: Janice’s ancestors were responsible for executing hundreds of “witches” in seventeenth-century Germany; Brittany Stone’s parents had been divorced and remarried three times; soda cans have nine teaspoons of sugar (which makes you fat); William Taft, heaviest president of all time, was so fat he couldn’t get out of his tub, which wasn’t supposed to be funny, Ms. Nailer said. It was wrong to make fun of fat people (Taft couldn’t help it), or the mentally challenged (extra chromosome), or the Unfuckables (they’ll never get fucked), or girls wearing their mothers’ gold jewelry (their mothers were usually dead), and we knew all of this, even though none of us could recognize the difference between “discreet” and “discrete,” Missouri or Mississippi, good people or bad people (but I was pretty positive reptile eggs had tough outer coverings and amphibian eggs lacked outer coverings, which was why they were laid in water, water that contained over nineteen species of box jellyfish, the most venomous animal in the world, a bite that nearly no one ever survived, unless you were smart and had on your panty hose).
    Ms. Nailer pushed up her yellow Dior glasses. The Other Girls were cross-legged behind their desks, whispering hurtful things about everyone sitting in front of them.
    “Annie’s nose is so large, she descended from a rare line of prehistoric bird.”
    “Annie the Bird’s ears stick out so bad, from the back, she actually looks more like a bear than a bird.”
    “Annie the Bird or Bear hasn’t shaved since the Cambrian Period.”
    “Annie the Bird or Bear is so tall, she can fuck all the teachers standing up,” Richard Trenton said, chiming in from across the room.
    At Webb High you were either Fuckable or Unfuckable. Anything else you might