Free Amy Inspired by Bethany Pierce Page A

flapping against his pointed shoulder blades.
    I was surprised that Lonnie had taken my critique as so overly positive. I’d been afraid it was too harsh. Now I chastised myself for inciting false hope.
    I sometimes worried that my writing was bad and that no one would tell me. I imagined editors in New York offices passing my story around, laughing until they were teary-eyed. I imagined them photocopying my manuscript and reading it aloud at corporate Christmas parties for entertainment. It was all very disconcerting.

    The first week with Eli passed and I did not get bedbugs. I got the flu instead.
    The annual Campus Plague descended the week before finals, crippling the student body with high fevers, running noses, and violent coughing fits. Though I swabbed my hands with Purell every hour on the hour, I was too sick to even attend the last day of class for which I’d bought three-dozen donuts and four gallons of offbrand cherry berry juice. Begrudgingly, Everett agreed to stand in my classrooms to collect portfolios and distribute Krispy Kremes.
    “Have fun with that,” he said, dumping the third crate of binders on my bed. “I left the other donuts in the kitchen.”
    He’d stuffed the rolled up Cheetos bag between the two remaining chocolate cream-filled pastries.
    Monday evening the flu moved to my head. Out of pity, Zoë temporarily lifted the two-square-per-use toilet paper rule she’d instituted as part of her personal Save the Earth Campaign. She even returned from work with two boxes of tissues infused with aloe, tossing them to me on the way out the door for her now twice a week stint at the gym: When she wasn’t running she was sweating at Gavin’s Glutes and Abs . She reminded me that I wouldn’t get so sick if I took the vitamin supplements she set out for me every morning. I would have taken pleasure in hating her, but they were very nice tissues.
    When Eli knocked on my door I told him to come back later. “I haven’t brushed my teeth all day.”
    “I don’t care,” he said.
    “I haven’t brushed my hair either.”
    He not only let himself in, he went so far as to sit on the corner of my bed.
    “I brought something for you,” he said. From a paper bag he produced a bottle of NyQuil, a bag of cough drops, and a set of stickers. Great Job! they said. You’re AWESOME! I held them up questioningly.
    “For your papers.” He poured NyQuil onto a spoon for me. “I wanted scratch and sniff, but I couldn’t find any.”
    I dutifully drank the NyQuil. “I don’t think anybody’s going to do so awesome on their papers.”
    “Then they can be for you. Didn’t you ever have a sticker collection?”
    “No.”
    “I thought all girls loved stickers. Stickers and ponies.”
    He peeled a GENIUS ladybug and stuck it to my T-shirt just below my right shoulder. “And men who ride ponies.”
    In spite of my headache, my fever, even my resentment at his presence, I laughed.
    I graded in bed, essays fanned out to my left, grade book to my right. I drank NyQuil straight from the bottle. The syrup slid warm and viscous down my throat, the medicinal licorice flavor lingering in a film on my lips. Delirium set in. It was not unpleasant. The paper in front of me began to go fuzzy around the edges as I read the next student’s thesis statement.
    Since the dawn of time there have always been forms of entertainment. And like most everything else, entertainment has been criticized since there existed a Being knowledgeable enough to know how to do it. In ancient times, Jesus was criticized by many of the people and even went so far as to crucify him by nailing him to a tree in front of all his fans. More recently, The Internet has been going through a criticism war right now on whether the Government should be able to sensor what people do there. What I would argue and will argue in this paper is that that is not advisable because it is a violation of our Free Speech.
    Jesus had very fickle fans , I wrote in