Shelby Read Online Free

mean?”
    â€œIt means I don’t know if I’m buyin’ what you’re sellin’,”
    â€œI’m not selling anything.”
    â€œIt means I think you’re full o’ crap.”
    â€œOkay, I’ll play.”
    â€œYou will?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI take it all back. You’re a man o’ your word. Cigarette?”
    â€œUm … no thank you. I don’t smoke.”
    Having dropped Eric at his apartment, I returned to my own hovel feeling dazed. Further reflection convinced me that missing the Zoology final may well have been a sign of my growing dissatisfaction with the current state of higher education. Nonetheless, it was after ten P.M. and I knew that if I was to ever leap beyond Bachelor of Science intellectual psychobabble and be granted a position where I could truly delve into methods of solving general social dysfunction, a fine result on the MCAT was imperative. Moreover, I had been procrastinating and I loathe such practices. I took the guidebook from my desk, picked up a pencil off the floor, turned on my bedside lamp and read:
    SECTION 2: SCIENCE PROBLEMS
    Time: 1 hour 20 minutes
    Directions: In this section, descriptive material precedes a set of four (4) related questions. For each question, use the descriptive material and your knowledge of science to determine the best answer …
    I woke up half a day later, 11:18 A.M., with the sun streaking across my room, the study guide spread open on the floor, my bedside lamp still on and my body fully clothed. My teeth were caked. I was sweaty. The window was dripping with condensation. Pulling the piece of paper with Eric’s phone number out of my front pocket, the piece of paper with Lucy’s number fell out, too. I phoned Eric and got his answering machine message advertising the concert at The Cruel Elephant Monday night. A surge of adrenalin surprised me. I picked up my acoustic guitar and commenced playing, occasionally imagining an ocean of perhaps 70,000 bobbing heads, mostly women, chanting my name in abandoned unison.
    By the time I broke for a dinner of cream crackers and cheese that filled my bed with crumbs, my knowledge of Henle’s Loop remained fragmentary but I’d conquered Gordon Lightfoot’s “Pussywillow Cat-tails” at half speed and A Major had lost some of its muffled sound. From then until slumber deep into the early morning hours, my only interruption was Eric’s phone call confirming band practice at two P.M. Other than that I was lost in a stream of notes assembling in such a way as to resemble familiar pop songs of the past two decades. Most delightfully, I was the one playing them.
    Arrival at the rehearsal space the following afternoon found my enthusiastic mood in contrast with the rain and the warehouse complex that spread out before me like a sepia photograph of some closed-down American factory in the Depression. I was fifteen minutes early, and the main door was locked. Knocking received no response. Stepping back into my Datsun 510, I attempted with electrician’s tape to curb water flow through the sunroof—an endeavour that made matters worse.
    About a half hour later a rusty white mafioso-type Pontiac Parisienne with tinted windows pulled up beside me. Out stepped a wooly mammoth of a man—hold the hair—in a jean jacket, Lycra azure sweat pants and a pair of battered brown penny loafers. He surveyed the surroundings as would a King his castle. He had a crewcut and an earring. Thinking he might be involved with drugs and fearing a random knife wound, I slid down in my seat and remained inconspicuous, visualizing his jiggly buttocks lined up through a rifle scope on some African plain in the middle of a monsoon; one bull’s-eyed tranquilizer dart from 200 yards and down he’d tumble. I even imagined the net he’d be placed in being hoisted up by helicopter and escorted to the nearest zoo in Tanzania. I chuckled and