How Did You Get This Number Read Online Free PDF

(a stick figure with a pipe in his mouth and extra-large clown shoes). The second girl muttered something to the effect of “No, you shut up.” The first spoke in Portuguese but continued to draw at the same time, as if employing a type of sign language for my benefit. Closed Captioning for the American Tourist. She slung her arm around my shoulders, keeping me on her side as the bedlam unfolded. She felt possessive of me. I was her discovery, just as Lisbon was mine.
    This, finally, was something I understood. People who have spent time in Lisbon talk about the city as if it’s theirs. The city allows for this sense of possession in a way that more heavily trafficked places do not. If you are in Lisbon in December, it is very possible to walk past a store window, knowing that it will not host another reflection for whole hours. It is possible to look out onto the river and feel that you are the only one to look at it this way for centuries. And it is possible to be minding your own business and accidentally befriend a monolingual home-wrecking lady clown and her band of merry mimes.
    The boy refused to believe her. He jumped up from the table while holding down his top hat to keep it from flying off from shock. To emphasize her point, the girl decided to take things to the next dimension. With her nails, she tore around the figure representing herself and the figure representing the teacher. She circled the crotches of each person, picked them up, and rubbed them together until the paper thinned to shreds. Then she put the shreds in her mouth and swallowed the whole affair with a big gulp of wine.

Lost in Space
    T hings were better during my genius years. I was eighteen months old when my mother found me in the living room with a pile of building blocks—counting and spelling as I stacked them. This wunderkind behavior continued, and as it is with oddities in children and the mothers who birthed them, mine called a medical professional. My mother spoke about my rate of development. She had recently read a drugstore novel about a super-genius test-tube baby who, moments out of the womb, had mastered blinking and staring at fixed objects. Granted, the baby went on to manipulate people with his mind, using his parents as puppets for world domination. But if drugstore-novel baby was any sort of barometer, I would be doing quadratic equations with my Cray-Pas by the end of the week. Tests were done. Psychologists were consulted. Special schools were researched. Should I be put in genius-kid school? Should I skip a grade? Two? Better wait a while and see if she “evens out,” said the doctor. And he was right. While my parents doted on me, overzealously plying me with brain food and brainteaser games, a healthy case of the stupids kicked in, offsetting my block-building brilliance.
    Blind to my sluggish development, my mother cried “genius” to anyone who would listen. All the while wiping away my doltish spittle while I swatted at her necklaces and played with my belly button.
    By the time I was old enough to go to the bathroom on my own, I was just like every other kid. Maybe a little bright, but nothing to necessitate a lampshade. When it came to bedtime reading, I was less moon, more bowl full of mush. I also wet my bed, once mistook a wax candle for candy, and habitually banged my head so hard against the wall while I slept that my father installed padding. I was out of the woods.
    Then one day, after years of mediocrity, all the kids in my grade were told we’d have to take a test on Iowa. I tried to piece together everything I knew about this subject, but I was eleven years old and my brain was like a slot machine: I put in “Iowa,” pulled the lever, and it came up all corn. When at last the test landed on my desk, I found that “the lowas” was the name of a basic skills test, the standardized kind administered to public-school kids. I assumed the test was concocted by someone in the Midwest for whom the