Free The Book of Luke by Jenny O'Connell Page A

Maybe tormented artists with super-sized egos? That was a little closer to what we were after. Didn’t Van Gogh cut off his ear to impress a girl?
    I laid my magazine on the table and opened to a random page.
    “Is that for art history?” I asked, glancing up at them.
    Carolyn nodded. “Yeah. We have to pick an artist for our term paper.”
    “Who are you looking at?” I asked nonchalantly, pretending to be interested in an article on mating rituals of Madagascan aye-ayes.
    “Pretty much the regulars: Jackson Pollock, Mary Cassatt, Monet, Van Gogh.”
    Bingo!
    I looked up from the aye-ayes and prepared to get the ball rolling. It was the moment of truth. Could I, the person who’d been raised to believe that honesty is the best policy, get Carolyn and Pam to give me the information I wanted without coming right out and asking for it?
    “Hey, is it true that Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear and gave it to his girlfriend?”
    “That’s what they say,” Pam told me. “Why? You think we should do Van Gogh?”
    Carolyn shrugged, like that wasn’t such a bad idea. “There is a ton written about him.”
    “I was just thinking how a guy today would never do something like that,” I started, hoping that Pam and Carolyn would take my lead and run with it.
    Luckily, Pam took the bait. “Yeah. Or if he did he’d show his friends first, just so they knew how tough he was. And they’d probably think he was, even if the rest of us knew he was an idiot who’d be hard of hearing the rest of his life.”
    “Or, he wouldn’t even show his friends,” Carolyn said, “because God forbid he actually acts like he really likes her. Instead he’d walk around with a bloody bandage strapped to his ear pretending like nothing happened. And his friends wouldn’t even ask.”
    “Of course they wouldn’t. Why ask a personal question when you can rehash the Red Sox World Series for the billionth time.”
    That was all it took. Pam and Carolyn were off and running. I pushed aside the National Geographic, tipped my notebook against the edge of the table, and pretended to write about the aye-aye’s diet of insect larvae. It was time to take notes. And fast.
That gargling noise guys make in the back of their throats before they hock a loogie six feet (the farther the better, for some reason).
How they can remember every single word to a movie that’s twelve years old, but they can’t remember what we told them fifteen minutes ago.
The way a guy scratches his crotch or adjusts his junk in public, rummaging around like he’s looking for something he misplaced.
    It was amazing. I could barely write fast enough to capture the stream of intolerable traits flying across the table at me. And, although their answers were exactly what I was looking for, it wasn’t the quality of the material that kept a smile on my face as I scribbled down gripe after gripe. It was that I felt like I was part of some covert operation only Lucy, Josie, and I knew about. I’d never belonged to a secret club where you picked a code name like Penelope or Leticia and made up some secret handshake (secrets are rude, after all). But that’s exactly how I felt right then, sitting across from Carolyn and Pam as they gave me exactly what I was after without even realizing it. Like I was going undercover. Like I should be wearing dark sunglasses and a trench coat. Okay, maybe that was too much. In any case, I didn’t have time to plan out an appropriate wardrobe for my mission. I was having a hard enough time keeping up with Carolyn and Pam as it was.
    It was like they’d saved up every single annoying, obnoxious, irritating action of every single annoying, obnoxious, irritating guy they’ve ever known. By the time I was on the third sheet of paper, my fingers were cramping and I was writing so fast my hand was smeared with black ink from dragging along the page. They’d given me more than enough material to start with.
    “So, what do you think?” Carolyn