Flannery Read Online Free Page A

O’Rourke.
    It seems like a fortune-cookie message, a marriage vow. I half expect Mr. Payne to ask if anyone present sees any reason why these two people should not be joined together, and if so, speak now or forever hold their peace.
    Tyrone glances back at me and lifts his pencil to his temple and gives it a tip, like an army salute. He wiggles his eyebrows. I’m pretty sure a couple of girls in the back groan with disappointment.
    Boom. Boom, boom, boom, boom.
    Okay class, says Mr. Payne. You’ll need to have submitted a proposal for the unit you’re going to sell by September 30th. The revised proposal, incorporating my feedback, will be due October 14th. You’ll be docked two percent for every day you’re late. I simply suggest not being late at all. Off you go.
    The buzzer goes and we head down the corridor to the stairwell and Tyrone is on the staircase above me and he leans over the rail and says, Flan, I know what we should do for our unit.
    He’s being pushed through the door by the waves of students charging to their next classes.
    I’ve got a brilliant idea, he calls out.
    But then he’s out the door and by the time I get up the stairs to math class, which he’s also supposed to be in, he’s disappeared.

3
    When we were in grade one we had to do a project called All About Me. We had to write about what we looked like, what we wanted to become, our secrets, our families, our favorite foods, our favorite animals — each topic on a separate page, with a blank space on top for a crayon drawing. Each kid’s project went in a duotang with our grade-one school photo glued onto the cover.
    My printing went outside the lines and bunched up and slanted like the losing team in a tug of war. When the teacher complained to Miranda that my writing didn’t fit between the lines, Miranda said, Make the lines bigger.
    My crayon drawings, however, were masterpieces. They were violently emotional. I loved that all the crayons had names printed on the sides. The names were either very dramatic (Banana Mania, Laser Lemon, Cerulean Blue, Atomic Tangerine) or mysteriously plain (Medium Red).
    It was during the process of creating All About Me that I first noticed I didn’t have a father.
    I mean, I knew I didn’t have one, of course. But it was the first time I noticed that almost everybody else did.
    On the page that was supposed to be about my father I ended up writing about some guy named Phil, who lived in the house attached to ours for two months and who owned a Doberman.
    The Doberman barked and gnashed his teeth against the living-room window and slathered ropes of saliva from his pink-and-black spotted jowls every time someone walked down the sidewalk.
    Once Phil gave me a bubble wand. It made giant wobbling bubbles as big as my head that would burst with a cloud of mist. The bubble wand seemed to qualify Phil for page 6 in my duotang, the page about Dad .
    The Doberman is also featured on the My Favorite Animal page, a portrait in Turquoise Blue and Crimson crayon, with the studs on his dog collar scrawled with my most prized and never-cracked crayon: Silver.
    Phil moved out two days after he gave me the bubble wand and we never saw him again.
    If I had to write All About Me now, complete with crayon illustrations, what would it contain?
    Name: Flannery Malone
    What I Look Like:
    1) Freckles (Burnt Sienna)
    2) Pale skin (Silver)
    3) Green eyes (Sea Green) . . .
    4) . . . with little hazel flecks shooting through the green (Raw Sienna)
    5) Limp, whip-straight orange hair to my shoulders (Sunglow)
    6) 5'6" on tiptoes
    7) Skinny, except for my boobs, which are, I think we can say, big.
    Secrets: I’ve had the school glockenspiel hidden under my bed since I quit band in grade five. I quit because I couldn’t do the glockenspiel justice and the teacher was threatening me with the triangle.
    It took me so long to return the glockenspiel