Free So Shelly by Ty Roth Page A

was almost entirely uneducable. She hated the indoors; her attention was always directed out the classroom window, and like Gordon, she had little respect for or fear of authority. She could have been the poster child for ADHD, if she could have sat still long enough for the photograph. Having grown up in the relative isolation of Acedia, with only the equallyeccentric Byron children as playmates, Shelly was already socially dysfunctional when she was thrown into the survival-of-the-fittest world of elementary school.
    She did herself no favors, however, when in first grade she liberated the class gerbil, Brownie; or, when in second grade she convinced her classmates of the implausibility of Santa Claus; or, when in third grade she was caught with a consecrated communion host under a microscope, searching for evidence of the transubstantiation; or, when in fourth grade she temporarily earned the nickname Lorax by climbing a tree in a field adjacent to the playground and refusing to come down because it had been marked for removal for the expansion of the jungle gym; or, when in the fifth grade she became a proselytizing vegan; or, when in the sixth grade she shamelessly explained the process of tampon insertion (complete with visual aids) to a group of mortified boys; or, when in the seventh grade she was thrown into the boys’ locker room after gym class by some of the “cool” girls, and she laughed at all the tiny peckers; or, when in the eighth grade she attempted to form a FLAG (Friends of Lesbians and Gays) Club; or, when as a freshman she contributed an article to the school literary magazine critical of the “obscene expenditures” earmarked by the school for the state powerhouse football program and the award-winning cheerleading and dance squads in comparison with the paltry amount spent in support of Trinity’s service organizations or in the actual “feeding of the hungry, clothing of the naked, or housing of the homeless.”
    But now, with Gordon about to join her at Trinity, she wouldn’t be so alone—or so she thought.
    *    *    *
    The truth turned out to be that Gordon had little time for Shelly, her causes, or her peculiarities once he stormed into Trinity. A summertime friendship in the relative anonymity of Acedia was one thing. The real world was something else. It didn’t take him long to understand that an affiliation with Shelly would keep his hands out from under more skirts and from inside more blouses than he cared to miss, for he was immediately impressed by the Amazonian bodies of the daughters of Ogontz’s plebeian class, and he longed to sample as many as possible.
    By the first day of school, Gordon had earned his driver’s permit, which, by Ohio law, enabled him to operate a car at fifteen, as long as he was accompanied by an adult licensed driver. With Catherine’s promise to make the subsequent monthly car payments herself, he used part of his advance to make a down payment to lease a black Hummer H3, in which he pulled into the student parking lot at the nearby All Saints Catholic Church.
    According to Shelly, he made his mother slouch in the backseat under cover of the tinted windows in order to save him the embarrassment of her accompaniment. She waited until well past the opening eight a.m. bell to climb into the front seat and drive home, only to return to the same location before the final bell at three, or at whatever time Gordon assigned, when she would resume her crouched position in the backseat. This routine they continued until Gordon earned his actual license on his sixteenth birthday in January. I don’t know why she tolerated it. Something aboutGordon made women want to please him, protect him, save him, and, in general, do for him. If you could have bottled Gordon’s charisma, you could have made a fortune doing creepy late-night infomercials in between the even sadder ones for
Girls Gone Wild
and for male “enhancement” pills.
    You know, it’s