Sophomores and Other Oxymorons (19 page)

February 1

Happy shortest month of the year, you shortest Hudson. Last year in English, Mr. Franka taught us about redundant statements, like
free gift
and
surprise ambush
. Those are kind of obvious. But I've noticed some subtler ones. In the short story I'm reading for class, I saw the phrase
dried husks
. But being dry is part of the definition of husk. I think it's really easy to fall into redundancy. People say stuff like, “When I first started high school . . .” But
first started
is redundant. If you look at it, you're sort of redundant, too.

I'd never been so nervous about a report card. When I got mine on Tuesday, my eyes went right to the bottom. It's funny—I think it's a lot harder to make sure something isn't there than to verify that it is there. But there was no sign at all, in any spot, of the word
ineligible.

Lee was actually waiting for me outside of geometry.

“Well?”

“Eligible again,” I said.

“Great.”

“Yeah. Maybe this time, now that I'm back on staff, I can actually kill a teacher with my writing,” I said.

“I'm pretty sure everyone is safe from your superpower,” Lee said. “But just to be certain, maybe you should set your journalistic sights on something inanimate, like cafeteria food quality, or budget cuts.”

“Good idea.”

“Hey,” Lee said as we headed in. “There's a pattern. You were ineligible. Then you became eligible. If the sequence holds up, next marking period you'll be igible. And you can finish up the year as ible.” She laughed and repeated “ible” with various tones and stresses as we made our way to our seats.

• • •

The next day, after school, I had the pleasure of walking into the newspaper meeting, and saying, “I'm back.”

“Yay!” Jeremy said.

I looked at Mr. Franka and added, “If that's okay with you.”

“Welcome back,” he said. He didn't smile, but he gave me a small nod.

My first official act wasn't to pitch an article. It was to ask Sarah to permanently kill that opinion piece I'd written about prepositions.

She was happy to do that.

• • •

“I have to figure out what to get Lee for Valentine's Day,” I told Bobby. I would have asked Amala, but she'd gone into New York to meet with a prospective client. “Any ideas.”

“That depends. Are you still
just friends
? Please say no. . . .”

“Yes . . .”

“Jewelry for her,” Bobby said. “And a backbone for you.”

“She isn't into that stuff,” I said. Lee put a lot of effort into not falling into any stereotypes. Though a tiny backbone made of silver would probably please her.

“Scott,” Bobby said, putting his hands on my shoulders. “Have you ever actually looked at her?”

“Uh, yeah. All the time. I'm pathetically incapable of not looking at her.”

“And, uh, her face is sort of decorated with stuff, right?”

“Right.”

“And what would you call that stuff? It's not rivets and bolts. It's not fishing tackle.”

“Sometimes she wears a safety pin,” I said. Though I realized she'd pared down the edgier hardware in the last several months.

“Forget that. All this other stuff. Rings. Tiny gems. Small objects made of precious metals. Tell us, Mr. Vocabulary, what do you think that might be called?”

“. . . Jewelry . . . ?”

“Bingo! Do you get it? She might not want a gold bracelet or a pearl necklace. She sure wouldn't want the kind of jewelry Grandma likes. But she'd love the right piece.”

“How'd you get so smart about girls?” I asked.

“By not wasting time getting smart about anything else,” he said. “I decided to specialize.”

“Good move.” I headed out of his room. “Thanks.”

“Any time, little brother.”

“Middle brother,” I said.

“Middle little brother,” Bobby said.

“I like little middle brother better,” I said.

“They sound the same to me,” Bobby said.

“That's how I feel about guitars,” I said.

So, now, at least I had a clue. And I knew a shop nearby where I could probably find something Lee would love.

Bobby didn't have time to take me there before he had to go to work. So I called Wesley. He picked me up in what looked like an oil truck.

“Are you delivering fuel now?” I asked.

“Nope. I'm pumping crap.”

“What kind of crap?” I thought he was using it as a synonym for
stuff.

“Crap crap,” Wesley said. “What other kind is there?”

It took a moment for that to register. And for me to identify the smell that seemed to envelop us. We have a sewer line at our house, but some of the houses way out in the woods at the edge of town have septic tanks. So does my uncle Steve's
place, up in the Poconos. And those tanks have to be pumped.

“That stinks,” I said.

“Pays good,” Wesley said.

“Why don't you work for your dad?” I asked. “Limos cost a ton to rent. I'll bet the drivers make good money. And tips.”

“I want to. But I'm not old enough to get a limo driver's license. You have to be twenty.”

“I've seen you drive trucks and stuff,” I said. “How old do you have to be for that?”

“Just eighteen,” he said.

“So you have that license?” I asked.

“It's never really come up. The people I drove for didn't seem concerned.”

“You could do other stuff for your dad, like take care of the limos,” I said.

“I already do. He doesn't think I should get paid for that. Not while I'm living at home.”

“Are you thinking about getting your own place?” I pictured myself hanging out at Wesley's future apartment. Better yet, I pictured Lee and me hanging out there.

“I'm pretty comfortable at home,” he said. “So, where are we headed?”

“That goth shop in South Side Bethlehem.”

“Got it.”

He drove down the street, turned left on the corner, then took the ramp for the highway.

I thought about the part of the town where the shop was. “Parking might be tough.”

“I'm not worried.”

I think
worried Wesley
would be an oxymoron. Or an impossibility. But, just as I'd feared, there weren't any spaces in front of the store. Not that a space or two would have helped. I estimated that Wesley would need three open spaces in a row to park the truck. I hadn't counted on him double-parking, but he stopped in front of the shop and turned off the engine.

“You're just going to leave it there?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He glanced at the three cars he'd blocked in. “If anybody needs to pull out, I'm sure they'll make some kind of noise.”

I looked at the sign above the door of the shop:
WHAT HATH GOTH WRAUGHT?
Beneath that, it read,
Handmade Gifts and Unique Clothing
.

“Good choice,” Wesley said, looking around at the displays of grim merchandise as we walked in the door. “This is Lee's kind of stuff.” The earthy scent of leather and the synthetic odor of vinyl battled for dominance.

There was a woman behind the counter to the left. She had full arm tattoos, and some impressive hardware on her face. “Lost?” she asked.

“Often,” I said. “But not this time.” I wasn't insulted that I didn't strike her as a typical customer. “I'm looking for a present for a friend.”

“Sweet,” she said. She licked her lips.

I jumped back when I noticed her tongue was split. I'd heard about people having that done, but I'd never seen it. Not counting a statue of a lizard man at a Ripley's Believe It or Not! museum.

Before I could tell her what I was looking for, I heard a shout from outside. “Who blocked me in?”

“Told you it would work,” Wesley said. “I'll be right back.”

“Careful,” the woman said. “They tow cars around here.”

“Good luck with that,” I said.

I told the woman what I was looking for. She asked me a couple of questions about Lee, then pulled a tray out from under the counter. “These are nice.”

There were various beads and rings, along with a lot of skulls. “She likes skulls,” I said. As I stared at the assortment of pins, my brain handed me a gift. It struck with enough force that I said, “Oh, my God!”

“Easy there, kid. Don't get too spiritual.”

“Sorry. Thanks. I figured out exactly what I need.” I knew a place that had to have what I was looking for. I stepped outside the store and called them, just to make sure. Then I hunted down Wesley, who'd pulled around the corner.

“We need to go to Allentown. Okay?”

Wesley laughed. “Sure. I love opening this thing up on Route 22.”

And so we went to a shop in the city next to Bethlehem,
and I bought the perfect, and perfectly affordable, present for Lee. And Wesley got to raise the blood pressure of several dozen more drivers, who had the pleasure of trailing us on the highway and wondering
What's that smell?

February 7

Word geek alert, Sean. You can skip this entry without fear of missing important life skills. But if you read it, and can understand why I bothered to write it, you'll move a little closer to understanding me. I just realized something interesting. Well, interesting to me. I think Lee and Mr. Franka would also appreciate it. But it's bedtime, and I want to write it down while it's fresh in my mind. It's amazing how ephemeral an idea can be if you don't make a note of it. (Yeah, I'm still working hard to enhance your vocabulary.) So, lucky you, you're the first one to get my thoughts on this. A while back, I mentioned tautology. That's when you say the same thing more than once. For example:
I went home. I returned to my house. I entered the
place where I live
. The other day, I reminded you about redundancy, where you use words that are unnecessary because they're covered by the meaning of other words. Like if you say crossword puzzle, that's redundant since a crossword is a puzzle. But if tautologies and redundancies both refer to repeated information,
why do we need two terms? Isn't tautology itself, as a term, redundant? As I was trying to figure that out, I realized there are subtle differences. The unnecessary word in a redundancy doesn't have to have the whole meaning of the other word. It just has to repeat part of the meaning.
Surprise
doesn't mean the same thing as
ambush
. But there also seems to be a lot of overlap between tautologies and redundancies. And tautology can be part of a writer's style. I guess I have to give all of this a bit more thought. But I'll give you a break and stop for now. I don't want your little head to explode. Or blow up.

Wait. One more thought. This is really cool. I just realized that a redundancy is the opposite of an oxymoron. Or maybe a tautology is. It's amazing my own head doesn't explode. Or blow up.

Hang on. Yeah. Yet another last thought. A redundancy slipped into this discussion. See if you can find it. I'll give you a couple days. It's sort of subtle.

H
udson,” Mr. Cravutto called as I was closing my locker. He'd stuck his head out the door of his office, and waved his hand to get my attention. Given the size of his hand, that was sort of like getting waved down by a yellow flag at the racetrack.

“Yes?”

“Come here.”

“Okay.” I walked over, wondering what sort of nightmare was about to invade my life.

“You wrote all those sports articles last year, right?”

“Yeah. That was me.”

“Do you know anything about poetry?” he asked.

I'll admit I was briefly bemused by the totally unexpected direction the conversation was taking. I felt I knew a lot about poetry—thanks to Mr. Franka. I still wasn't sure where this was heading, so I didn't admit my passion for the subject, but I did nod and make an affirmative utterance along the lines of “Uh-huh.”

Mr. Cravutto slid a notepad on his desk around so the scrawled words faced me. “Is this any good?”

I read the poem he'd written.

Your eyes are pools of starlight,

Your thighs are full of muscles,

Your laugh is like nice laughter,

You're as sweet as sprouts from Brussels.

“It's for Valentine's Day,” he said.

“It's very nice.” At first, I felt the opening line was a mixed metaphor, but I guess a pool of water could reflect starlight, or light could pool in other ways. I decided Mr. Cravutto wasn't going to be interested in a literary analysis that went to quite that deep a level. I moved my attention to the second line. “Do you think the person you give this to will want you to focus on her thighs?”

“She's very proud of them,” he said. “She puts a lot of time in at the gym.”

“Good to know.” I rescanned the third line. “Maybe you can compare her laugh to something other than laughter?”

He frowned, and I had an image of myself being dribbled into the gym and stuffed through a basketball hoop. Some people don't cope well with constructive criticism. But then he nodded. “That's a good point. I'll work on it. What about the last line? Is it okay?”

“Well, you should feel good you found a rhyme for ‘muscles.' I don't think there are a lot of them.” I ran the other
candidates through my mind:
bustles, hustles, rustles, tussles.
Nope, not much to work with. I wasn't going to advise him to keep looking.

“Thanks. So it's mushy enough?”

“Absolutely. Can I have a late pass?”

“You won't need it,” he said, giving me a dismissive wave.

I headed off to art. Once again, all I had to do was start a sentence with “Mr. Cravutto,” and my art teacher gave me an understanding nod and a sympathetic smile.

As I took my seat, I thought about all the pain caused by Valentine's Day. Maybe it was Cupid, and not Mars, who should have been the god of war.

Zenger Zinger for February 10

Last answer:
“It's a shame to burn the steak,” John Peter said sincerely.

This week's puzzle:
“The preschool eye chart keeps sliding,” John Peter said
_________
.

Since Valentine's Day was on a Saturday, the dance was tonight, Friday, after school. By lunchtime, I still hadn't figured out the best strategy for coordinating my moves. I had a present for Lee, and I wanted to ask her to the dance. I wasn't sure whether to give her the present and then ask about the dance, or ask about the dance, and give her the present there. But if she shot down my invitation to the dance, it would be weird
to give her the present. And the present was so totally cool and amazing it would kill me to not give it to her.

Time was running out. I figured I'd just give her the present, and take it from there. I pulled the box out of my pocket. I'd wrapped it in plain green paper. Nothing pink or heart-strewn. I wanted it to be sort of casual.

“Got you something,” I said, sliding the box across the table.

“For me?” She picked it up and tore off the paper.

I remembered a phrase she'd used last year, when she'd given me a bag of black jelly beans. I tossed it back at her, now. “Reciprocity is not mandatory.”

Her grin told me she recognized the words. “Deferred reciprocity has its charms,” she said. She opened the box and stared at the small piece of pewter jewelry inside.

“A fish?” she said.

“A special fish,” I said. I contemplated tossing out the scientific name,
Cottidea
, but that would make the search for the meaning behind the gift too easy. I knew she'd search. I wanted it to take a bit of work, so the revelation would be that much more powerful and rewarding. I wanted her to gasp when she grasped the significance.

She took the pewter pin from the box and examined it from every angle. “Thank you.”

I contemplated options for my next sentence:

If you're still perplexed, I'll tell you after the dance.

Hey, I think there's a dance tonight.

You can wear it to the dance.

That one might work.

I reached out to point at the pin. My hand hit her soda, knocking it over.

Lee pushed her chair back. “I'll get some napkins.”

By the time she got back and mopped up the spill, we were rushing to biology.

February 13

Sean, would you like to go to the dance? I know dancing isn't part of your skillset at the moment. Neither is the ability to say yes or no. That doesn't matter. I just wanted to actually ask someone the question, to see how it felt. I realize, looking back, I never actually asked Lee to the dance last year. Yeah, I know we went. I won't go into all the details, but I said something stupid and I hurt her. To make up for it, I told her I was picking her up for the dance. When she scoffed, I told her I'd be at her house to pick her up, and I'd wait outside all night if I had to. Luckily, she answered the door when I knocked. That's how it played out. And maybe that's why this is so hard. It's a lot easier to tell than to ask. You're less vulnerable.

Anyhow, no need for you to take dance lessons or find some festive diapers. Neither of us is going to
tonight's dance. You're going to take a nap. And I'm going to see if I can get a ride to the mall.

Wait. Before I go, did you spot the redundancy in the last entry? (Or did your head explode?) If not (neither?), here's a hint. It's in this part: “A while back, I mentioned tautology. That's when you say the same thing more than once.”

Give it some thought.