*Here's my latest short story, "Ugali." You can read the rest on my Associated Content page.
"Just 'cause you're a Creative Writing minor doesn't mean you can write," Randall sneered. "Can you even spell 'recidivist'?" He crumpled his lip and threw down his pencil. Randall and I had attended the same school since pre-kindergarten and he was just as whiny then as he was now. I still believed he suffered from colic and possibly wore diapers that his mother changed right before his 9 p.m. bedtime. Talk about living in Eden's nursery garden.
Calm down, Casey, I told myself. Deliver your blows with composure. "Just because you're a Literary Criticism minor doesn't mean you can recognize quality writing. Oh, and to prove a point, R-E-C-I-D-I-V-I-S-T."
Randall always pouted instead of making come-backs, as if those azure eyes could salvage anything he said. He sniffed and started marking up my poem on Freud and biscotti. I narrowed my eyes at his trademark red pen, but quickly diverted my attention. Maybe I could write a poem about that brown splotch on the window. Randall would hate that more than a generic brand suit. He had written about the limousine his parents had recently scrapped. It ended with the less-than-sentimental "Good riddance."
"Really, Casey," Randal began again, now that he had recovered from his magenta blush, "You shouldn't have ended that sentence in a preposition." He pen stabbed the line.
"'Was' is not a preposition. It's a conjugation of the word 'to be.'"
He scoffed. "Please, you don't have to explain such base grammatical points to a former English major. I--"
"I thought you might have forgotten some of what you learned from your pre-Accounting major days, Randall." I snatched his pen away.
"Hey! That's a personalized executive pen, ya know! Sterling silver!"
I slipped the pen down my blouse, confident that Randall would never reach there. That guy didn't want me any more than I wanted him, which was about as much as I wanted an STD. Randall gritted his teeth, squeaking, "I was referring to that sentence." He pointed to the sentence above the one I thought he meant.
"Oh." Curses, I had ended the sentence with a preposition without any nerdy-sounding, literary B.S. justification. How would I save myself this time? "You see, I selected that specific sentence construction because--"
The answer arrived much too conveniently.
"Okay, everyone," Professor Oxley announced. "Peer editing's over. I want to quickly collect Week Eight's assignments. Make sure you have your name, the date, and course number written on your portfolio or commonplace book. Then put them in the basket right here next to my desk."
Randall shot up his hand to ask one of his typical goody-goody questions. That freed up my paper. I snatched it away, picked up my tote bag, and headed out the door. I had turned in my portfolio a week ago. Just as I reached the doorway, Randall began basking in Professor Oxley's attention and spewing out word for word what the man had said during his lecture, sort of like a Born Again prostitute beaming before a preacher. Performing proverbial lap-dancing, folks, is how you earn an A.
I knew the library would be open, so I wandered in that general direction. I needed to revise "Dolce Cioccolati," my now-slaughtered poem. Since nobody occupied a cubby in the far back corner, I plopped down my bag there. An industrial sized fan blared like a mutant insect. The library's excuse was that they were in the process of fixing the 1970s air-conditioning, which meant they could not run it. Lacking both headphones and earplugs, I had to endure the sound of a thousand flapping cicadas. Somehow it still wasn't as obnoxious as the sound of Randall's voice.
As I exchanged one word for another, revised syntax here and there, I thought about Randall, as much as I tried to avoid it. Whenever I wrote or read, I had to think about Randall. We taken writing and literature classes together since the days when the sky was green and the grass was blue. He wasn't a bad person and certainly not an evil one, even if he taunted random strangers with his keen spelling knowledge. Randall was simply annoying and unintentionally so. If I were the average American 19-year-old, I might blame his parents for creating an entitled snob of a young man, but I've always had more of a European streak. C'est la vie--et pas la culpibilité de ses parents. Randall could have resisted his parents coddling, he could have been as ornery as I was. Yet he smiled and dribbled and kicked his chubby Winnie the Pooh clad legs as he suffocated beneath the weight of his mother's breast. She would never wean him.
[Read the rest of the story here.]
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