Flannery Read Online Free Page B

that after a while I was afraid to return it at all. It lives under my bed, silent in a glockenspiel coffin, a heavy, velvet-lined box of guilt (a toss-up between Crimson or Medium Red for the lining).
    Other: I am sixteen, currently without a boyfriend, though I am horribly in love with Tyrone O’Rourke. The very worst kind of love. Unrequited love.
    I am in high school at Holy Heart in St. John’s, Newfoundland. I have a driver’s permit, level one. I once had a math tutor who told me that whales have veins big enough for a person to swim through and many other interesting facts that did not appear on my math exam but have made me feel awe.
    I am a person who likes to feel awe.
    I also enjoy making pancakes, often spelling my brother’s name with the batter. Which leads me to . . .
    Family: Miranda (mother), Felix (half-brother) and two goldfish, Spiky and Smooth.
    Miranda (see above) has nearly killed these goldfish many times, but they are true soldiers. She forgets to feed them when it’s her turn, and feeds them again when it’s supposed to be my turn, and lets their water evaporate until they’re almost beached.
    Once Miranda let Smooth bellyflop out of the soup ladle when she was in the middle of transporting them so she could clean the bowl. She stood there screaming and waving her hands around her head yelling, Flannery, do something! Do something! And I had to pick up poor old Smooth and practically give him mouth-to-gill resuscitation before plopping him back in the bowl.
    Once after a party I found a cigar butt floating on the water. Smooth and Spiky climbed up onto the stogie, one on either end, and stood on their fins attempting the age-old sport of log rolling. They made that cigar roll back and forth with deft slaps of their tails, just like the stubble-faced lumberjacks of yore.
    Okay, Spiky and Smooth, they didn’t really do that with the stogie. But they did waste a day or two head-butting the soggy cigar from one end of the bowl to the other.
    They are a lesson in fortitude and commitment.
    Father: I have a single artifact, from the once-upon-a-time love affair between my mother and father. A sole memento in the form of a single chocolate shaped like a heart and wrapped in bright red tinfoil and hidden in a jewelry box under my bed.
    Soon after my father left, sailing away from St. John’s forever, Miranda discovered she had no contact info on him — that, in fact, she hadn’t really caught his last name. And, before I was even born, she had already fallen in love with someone else. And then someone else. And so on.
    My father’s first name is Xavier. That much she knows. It’s a French name. That’s why I took French last year — I figured that if I ever meet the guy, it would be nice to say a few words in his mother tongue. Father tongue. Xavier . X is the unknown variable in a math equation. If Y equals my mother in her tiara, with her love for fairness and feminism and joie de vivre , her inability to pay bills, her blogs and her non-existent domestic skills, and if I am the answer, then Dad must be X, right?
    So I like to call him — my father —  X . In my head, I mean, because of course I don’t actually get to talk to him or call him anything because, like I said, Miranda forgot that little thing of asking for his address, or his last name, or blood type, or genetic propensities for disease or special talents or whether he has a strong sense of smell, which I do have, or if he was good at the glockenspiel, or if he loves chocolate, or if there are aunts and uncles or even other children. Brothers and sisters.
    What she does remember I can fit in a thimble. 1) He had hazel-green eyes; 2) red curly hair; 3) he was six foot two; 4) he cared about the environment; 5) he laughed a lot and they stayed up until dawn on the fateful night of my conception and they drank and went for a skinny dip in the