Enthusiasm Read Online Free PDF Page B

well.
    This year, the social highlights of my homeroom included three of the grade’s five Seths; Tall Alex and Mad Alex; Michelle Jeffries; Cordelia Nixon; and one of the Gerard twins—Yolanda or Yvette.
    The Y girls are identical twins: the same light-footed roundness, tapered fingers, smooth, dark skin, and elegantly swooping nostrils. Like many identical twins, they like to confuse people by playing games with their clothes and hairstyles. One favorite trick involves gradually trading the colored beads at the ends of their braids, so that, for example, Yolanda will start off with nothing but yellow and Yvette with nothing but green. By the end of the week they’ll both be fifty-fifty yellow and green. Then comes the tricky part. One twin will gradually acquire all the yellow beads and the other all the green—but is the green twin Yolanda, taking over her sister’s look, or is it Yvette, returning to her original color?
    Fortunately—or unfortunately, I guess, if you’re a Gerard twin—there’s a simple way for those in the know to tell whether someone is Yolanda or Yvette. Just stand near her and wait. If the twin in question starts to talk, there’s a good chance it’s Yolanda. If she goes on talking for three or four sentences, the good chance becomes a certainty. Yolanda once told me in confidence that in her elementary school, they used to call her Yoyo Mouth.
    “Julie Lefkowitz! Look at you! You got so tall! Are you taking physics this year? Let’s see your schedule. Look, we’re in gym together. And English—Ms. Nettleton, ig. No fair! I heard we were supposed to get Ms. Muchnick, everybody says she’s loudly crisp, but she had to go get pregnant. Why would she want a baby when she could have had us ? Hey, did you do the summer reading? They love Lord of the Flies , don’t they? We had it in eighth grade at Sacred Heart, and the next summer in Enrichment. If I have to read it one more time, I’m going to go throw myself off a cliff. They call that book realistic? If you ask me, not even boys would act that way. Speaking of boys, here comes Seth Young! Hey, Seth Young! Where’ve you been all summer? Let’s see your schedule. Did you hear about Muchnick?” Diagnosis: Yolanda.
    For the first few days, school had an air of embarrassed festivity. Everyone had come back from their vacations taller, stronger, gawkier, slimmed down or curvier, with their hair grown past their shoulders or newly cropped and sticking out funny. The lawyers’ sons had deep tans from their wilderness adventures, the hippie farmers’ daughters from their long days working outdoors. The cliques shimmered like a mirage, and for a moment it seemed as if a former nerd might cross unharmed into the crisp crowd. Then the walls firmed up again and the moment passed.
    “Julie, it’s time for you to start thinking seriously about college,” said my father one Tuesday evening. “Your grades are good, but that’s not enough. Admissions officers are going to want to see strong extracurriculars too. I know you like to write. Have you thought about joining the school newspaper? Or what about the literary magazine?”
    I groaned silently. The editors of the Byzantine Bugle publish enthusiastic little stories about pep rallies and food drives. Everything has to pass the scrutiny of the administration; the result is loudly dull. The literary magazine, Sailing to Byzantium , isn’t so bad—at least, it wasn’t so bad last year, when Ms. Muchnick was the adviser. With the Much on maternity leave, though, Ms. Nettleton had taken over. Three periods a week of her was quite enough for me .
    “I don’t know, Dad,” I said. “I’m pretty busy with school, plus there’s my job at Conehead’s.” (I decided not to tell him that, due to a weather-linked decrease in the demand for frozen treats, Conehead’s had let me go for the winter.) “Anyway, I’m just not into the whole newspaper/magazine thing so much.”
    “You know I wish