Free The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler Page B

pretend that I never wrote to you, and you can just

    pretend that you never received them–particularly the last post- card. I mean, we can still be friends, or acquaintances, or whatever we are–dinner partners–but we can just pretend all that Chianti- laced wide-eyed correspondence never happened–particularly the last postcard.” When I go to see a play and somebody makes a speech that lengthy, I’m embarrassed, and it’s a play. People are supposed to be making speeches that lengthy in a play . This isn’t a play.
    “What postcard? I didn’t get any postcard,” he said. “I just got two letters, very nice letters, and I wanted to thank you for them.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    “Did you send me a postcard, too?” He stood up and walked over to me. In another world, I could have just leaned in and kissed him. Perhaps it would have made a difference. I could have moved fast. Instead I just thought fast.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought I did. But I wrote so many postcards.”
    “I didn’t tell anybody you wrote them,” he said, “because I thought that people would think they were love letters.” He moved his hands slightly, palms up, in a gesture that meant I don’t know what. “ I thought maybe they were love letters.”
    Now it was his turn to kiss me, don’t you think? “I thought that maybe they were love letters.” Distantly, a sound of warm violins. He steps closer. Slight swelling (of the music, of course). And then a kiss. It didn’t happen. I couldn’t stand it. “I thought that maybe they were love letters,” and then nothing.
    “Maybe they were,” I said, and I stood up myself and left the room. I wanted to slam the door, but it was one of those public- school doors that just wheeze closed. Swish .

    The rest of the choir looked up at me for a second. “Next!” I called off-handedly, and strode out the door.

    It is the moment that followed–the end of fourth period on Monday September 13th at Roewer High School–that the loudest birds of the gaggle of attending quacks have proclaimed to be the impetus for what has been called everything from “a series of unfortunate behaviors” (Dr. Eleanor Tert) to “the most bloodthirsty of teenage acts I have ever discussed on my program” (“Dr.” Winnie Moprah, the degree is honorary from a school of dubious academic reputation). Tert’s book Crying Too Hard to Be Scared says:
    It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this psychosexual voyeuristic moment in Culp’s adolescence. [What rubbish! Of course she could overemphasize the im- portance of it. What if she said: “This psychosexual voyeur- istic moment in Culp’s adolescence was responsible for world hunger”? That would be overemphasis, wouldn’t it? That’s what’s wrong with the coverage of my story: not so much bias as inaccuracy .] Imagine Culp, in the aftermath of one of the first moments of sexual awakening in her argument with her eventual victim [again: inaccuracy . He was not my victim .], wandering in a sexualized daze to the office of a teacher whom she trusted, seeking advice and counseling [ inaccuracy, inaccuracy, inaccuracy ]. Yet when she walks in she finds her teacher betraying her trust, indeed the very trust of the teaching profession, locked in an embrace with a student [ inaccuracy ]. It was the ultimate betrayal for young Culp, and triggered a horrific, though slightly

    delayed, response–much like Poe and his mother’s death as discussed in my first chapter [horrific and not at all delayed amounts of inaccuracy ].
    And even putting aside facts for a minute, Dr. Tert’s description has serious semantic problems. Embrace is too elegant a term for what Carr was doing. Just about the only accurate thing Eleanor said was that I walked down the hallway and into a classroom. Unlit Bunsen burners and half-dead tadpoles and faded color posters of the digestive system all greeted me, but Carr was nowhere to be seen. Off the main