Read The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale for Free Online Page B

if being with her might make him feel just a bit less awkward, and a little less like an outsider. Who knew, she might even help to make his hair do what he wanted it to do. (Samuel’s hair never seemed to want to do anything other than slouch lazily on his scalp like a flat, yellow animal; he had tried using gel on it once, and it had ended up looking like a flat, yellow animal that had somehow become frozen in place just as it was about to attack someone from the top of a small boy’s head.) She could advise him on how to dress so that his shirt matched his trousers, or his shoes matched his jacket, or even so one sock matched the other. In the end, Samuel had wanted Lucy to make him better than he was, ignoring the fact that he was doing perfectly well just being himself. The result was that, because she was secretly more unhappy than he was, she had just ended up making him feel worse: about his hair, his clothes, his friends, himself, even about Boswell.
    Lucy Highmore wasn’t a bad person. She was slightly vain, but she wasn’t mean. Samuel wasn’t a bad person either. He was just insecure, and tired of being the odd kid out. Together, they were a small mistake that was rapidly becoming a bigger, more complicated one.
    “If you like,” said Lucy, “I’ll go with you to help you choose your new glasses. It’ll be fun.”
    Boswell, lying on the floor of Pete’s Pies beside his beloved master, put his head between his paws and sighed a long dog sigh.
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    15 . Similarly, a century ago you would not have been happy to find that one of the passengers on your ship was Violet Jessop. Ms. Jessop, a stewardess and nurse, was on the Titanic when it sank in 1912. She was also on the Brittanic, which was hit by a mine in 1916, and she was on board the Olympic, the Titanic ’s sister ship, when it collided with HMS Hawke in 1910. If Violet Jessop was one of your fellow passengers on a voyage, you might as well have jumped overboard at the start just to get the whole business out of the way.
    16 . To quote the title of a famous song, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” and people find all sorts of ways to do it. If someone is breaking up with you, they may tell you that “it’s not you, it’s me.” This will be a lie. If someone says that it’s not you in order to stop going out with you, then it is you. It doesn’t matter if they tell you that they want to go off and help little orphans in some obscure part of the world, or sign up for a dangerous experimental space mission, or become a monk or a nun, and this is why it’s not you, it’s still you. You, you, you. Believe me, I know. I’m not bitter, though. Not really. Okay, maybe a bit.
    17 . Until he moved on to the letter B, when the reply became “Aardvarks amble awkwardly but briskly . . . ”

VI
    In Which We Are Reunited with Some Old Friends, and Keep a Close Watch on Our Wallets
    T HE CITIZENS OF B IDDLECOMBE woke one morning to find the windows of Wreckit & Sons blacked out. From inside the store came sounds of drilling and hammering, but nobody knew what construction company was in charge, and no one was seen either entering or leaving the building. But the work went on, day and night, and from somewhere in the depths of the store orders were placed for dolls, and games, and model trains.
    The rumor was that Wreckit & Sons was about to reopen as a toy shop.
    • • •
    Sometimes, Dan wondered if he was right to be so upbeat all of the time. He had always had a sunny disposition. If life gave him bruised fruit, he made jam. The glass was always half full, even when it wasn’t, because Dan would get down on his kneesand squint at it from a funny angle until it appeared fuller than it was. Even if there was no glass at all, Dan assumed this was only because someone had taken it away to fill it up again. If he had been told that the world was ending tomorrow, Dan would have shrugged his shoulders and waited patiently for something to turn up to