One Two Three

by Laurie Frankel

So every night, as we fade beneath our fading stars, my sisters and I discuss all the immensities and all the minutiae, the everything and nothing of our lives. But mostly the nothing.

Teenage girls don’t get enough credit for this, their ability to see the potential import of everything, no matter how insignificant it seems, and analyze it endlessly. It’s written off—we’re written off—as silly, but it’s the opposite. We understand instinctively that, like me, change is slow. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss it.

Every few months Monday demands to know why I keep going to read to Pooh since the program is over and I already graduated from middle school, and I reply that I was never reading to Pooh. This is the kind of logic required to unstick Monday from whatever she’s stuck on.

neurodivergent

William Golding who won an award for showing that boys are mean and badly behaved, even somewhere nice like the beach. This seems like something anyone in the entire world who has ever met a boy could tell you, but they gave William Golding a Nobel Prize for it.

“Everyone needs air, water, food, shelter, and clothing all the time, Monday. Everyone needs care when they’re sick or hurt, love when they’re sad or scared, someone to tell them no or stop when they’re being unsafe. Everything else people need sometimes—and it’s a lot—is special. All of us have special needs.” I felt happy because that made sense, and I like when things make sense.

“Do you know what a spectrum is?” he asked me. I did not because I was only ten. “A spectrum is a classification system that arranges everyone or everything between two opposite extremes, which means a spectrum, by definition, includes everyone. For a spectrum to be a thing, we all have to be on it.”

“I like labels because they mean organized and order and control and correct.” “Sometimes they do. And sometimes they just give you the illusion of those things. Giving something a label and putting it in a box makes you feel like you’ve understood it and accounted for it and can keep track of it, and that’s great for things like paperwork or books, but sometimes things get mislabeled or misfiled, and then they get misunderstood or misaccounted for.” “That is why you have to label things carefully,” I told him. “Sure. But when those things aren’t things but people, it’s not just a question of careful. People are complicated. They’re more than one thing. They’re less than another.

“perspicacious”

“immured.”

“‘Algid’ means cold.”

Pusillanimous’ means fearful.

‘timorous.’”

“Heteroclitic,” I say finally. “What?” “Week before last,” I remind her. “Weird as shit.”

As I have said—and as should be obvious—stupid people need to read books in order to get smarter, but unfortunately people who like books are usually smart already, and stupid people do not read. Maybe this is tragic irony, or maybe cause and effect. I do not know.

One thing that is good about librarians is they listen to what you need and want and think of a way to help you which sometimes is by ignoring what you need and want. Maybe they do not have the book you requested because their library is nothing but leftovers. Or maybe what you requested is wrong—people often are, even smart people who read—but it is okay because librarians have witchlike librarian magic to pick the right book for you.

I have seen that he jogs on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings which he must do to increase his longevity because that is the only reason a person would jog.

“Phantasmagorical,”

incontrovertibly.

I get up and go to church, seeking not salvation but alone time, which is nearly as elusive and just as holy.

One is a shiny, black BMW, new, immense, almost uncomfortable to look at. (Petra would say “carnal,” “corporeal,” “lascivious,” “lubricious”—it’s weird how many vocabulary words there are to describe kind of gross and inappropriate cars.)

He has a funny look on his face. Is he confused or contemptuous? (“Supercilious,” Petra would say.)

Timeworn wisdom prescribes food whole and unprocessed, slow and locally grown, low on sugar and light on butter. But Nora loves us, and if she boils boxed macaroni and cheese in bottled water then adds yellow beans from a can and bakes a cake, nothing involved has anything to do with our river or our soil. We all choose the terms of the desperate bargains we make with the powers that may be, which baseless beliefs and decaying wisdoms we cling to, and which we discard as superstition or sorcery or the ravings of misguided zealots. Which is to say: it may not make sense all the way, but it makes sense enough.

failure to take reasonable care like a normal person would. Lawyers have fancier language than that, but that’s their point. It’s easier to prove, but you can only claim compensatory damages—here’s how much my medical expenses were; here’s how much income I lost. Whereas if you want to hurt them as much as they hurt you, if you want to make sure they can never do it again, if you want to punish them into oblivion, if you want to send a warning to others, if you want to make sure they don’t decide that your measly compensatory damage award costs them so little compared to what they make damaging you that they’re thrilled with the trade-off never mind that an award that was actually compensatory would bankrupt them forever because your suffering is high as the moon, and your town and your family and your whole entire life will never be the same ever again, if that is the case, you don’t settle for negligence. You go for recklessness, maybe even intent. That’s how you get punitive damages. That’s how you shut a company down. That’s how you see justice served.

is true.” Sad. Petra would say “atrabilious.”

Mama always says that—“Knowledge is power”—but she also says knowledge is depressing, demoralizing, soul crushing, mad making, and despair inducing, so I do not know if it is worth it. She says knowledge is power, but she also says there is such a thing as knowing too much as well as such a thing as too much power, depending on whose. Mama says knowledge is power but only if what you know is actually true.

opens his arms into the gloaming.

exsanguinate

“Chicanery,” she pronounces. So I write back, “Is this a trick?”

Petra and I are speechless. If she weren’t, she would say “aphonic.”

“Enigmatical,” Petra says to me.

“But something’s going on here. Obviously.” He waves vaguely around the cafeteria. “There has to be some explanation. And I couldn’t think of one. Well, of another one.” “Yeah,” I breathe. The fact of us. Our irrefutability.

(If she weren’t grinning like a demented clown and kicking me under the table, Petra would say “disentranced.”)

I’ll be forgiven for being overly critical of his diction like what was important about his sentiment was word choice. I’ll even be forgiven for being kind of grossed out by his earnestness.

But in the high court of celestial judgment, when I go before whoever evaluates souls in the end, I’ll be condemned anyway for the thought that bubbles to the top of this stew of squeamishness: I can use this. I can use him. If he can’t stop thinking about me, if he wants me to know he can’t stop thinking about me, I can get him to do what I want. I can get him to find what we need.

list of irritatingly misapplied clichés people utter would take me more hours to type out than I have left to live, but near the top is the conversational gambit “There are two kinds of people in this world…” There are two kinds of people in this world: the ones who split the world into two kinds of people, and the ones who know that’s reductive and conversationally lazy. With this exception: There are two kinds of people in this world. People who can expect to, strive to, feel entitled to be happy. And people who cannot.

But part of me—a bigger part—decides to help him because I love my sister. Petra would call this exculpating.

“That’s why you’re so vacuous,”

Lugubrious.”

Fall comes for real. The world gets a little chillier, dark a little earlier, a funny, buzzy feeling. “Mercurial,” Petra calls it. “Serotinal,” I offer. “Just barely.” We actually needed sweaters this morning. “Isochronous.” “Seasonal?” I check. “Or occurring at the same time. Either might show up.” “Variegated,” I reply. She high-fives me. “Good one.” Even though it’s an easy word unlikely to show up on the SATs, what fall in Bourne usually is is anticlimactic. The color of the leaves changes but nothing else does.

It’s a hard thing though to ignore. (Petra would say “elide.”)

“Abstruse?” “Hard to understand. Complicated.”

“Mrs. Lasserstein says I am being too literal, but there is no such thing as too literal. Literal does not come in degrees. That is like being too seventy-seven point four. That is like being too bicycle.” “Monday, you do not know everything.”

Everything feels different. It is a new feeling, difference. That difference should feel different makes sense I guess, but it means I feel it twice, once because you get to the other side and find everything’s changed, which is probably what change means, but what I didn’t expect was how change feels while it’s going on.

“You should excogitate upon the matter.”

“I am convinced of this eschewal,”

“I have other, clamant things on my mind now.”

“Let’s take a peregrination,”

She has on vertiginous heels

This