How They Met Read Online Free PDF Page B

hit the rope on B, shackling her in eternal devotion to Barry Lefner for at least the next ten minutes. A fourth-grade girl got to R. But most of the second-grade girls couldn’t make it past Evan Eager. I don’t know if it was the fact that we were exhausting the alphabetically early boys, or whether it was because Eve knew my name since I was friends with Rachel, but whatever the case, when the rope started turning for me, the strawberry shortcake was sent back to the kitchen, and Miss Lucy sailed right in.

    Miss Lucy had a steamboat
    The steamboat had a bell
    Miss Lucy went to heaven
    And the steamboat went to

    At this point I tripped up in a downward direction, skinning my knee and coming way too close to smudging my favorite shirt. When the next girl went, the shortcake had returned. I walked over to Rachel and asked her who Miss Lucy was.
    Now, of all the Cullins sisters, Rachel was always the one to blush fastest. And I’m sure just the mention of Miss Lucy was enough to make her feel like the worst kind of sinner. There was no way she could share the rhyme with me. No decent girl would. My older sister, Antonia, certainly wouldn’t. She was already in junior high, planning her hypothetical wedding day.
    Luckily, a girl named Heron overheard my question. Heron was fairly new to our school, and generally untested. When Mrs. Park had introduced her to the class, she’d said Heron’s name was “Hero…with an n.” That set Heron back a couple of months. She wore clothes—even then—that seemed like hand-me-downs from when her mother had been in second grade. I didn’t know what to make of her.
    “C’mere,” she said to me now.
    Curious, I obliged. She told me to sit down with my legs making a wide V. (Don’t worry: I was wearing pants.) Then she sat across from me and touched her feet to mine. She started to make a patty-cake patty-cake motion, and I knew that I was supposed to clap my hands to hers according to a certain order. So far, so good.
    “It’s like this,” she said. And then she presented me with my last possible role model.

    Miss Lucy had a steamboat
    The steamboat had a bell
    Miss Lucy went to heaven
    And the steamboat went to
    Hello, operator
    Please give me number nine
    And if you disconnect me,
    I will chop off your
    Behind the ’frigerator
    There was a piece of glass
    Miss Lucy sat upon it
    And it went right up her
    Ask me no more questions
    And I’ll tell you no more lies
    The boys are in the bathroom
    Zipping up their
    Flies are in the belfry
    And bees are in the park
    And boys and girls are kissing
    In the D-A-R-K
    D-A-R-K
    D-A-R-K
    DARK DARK DARK

    It’s not a rhyme, because it doesn’t rhyme. It’s not a song, because there’s no real music. It’s not a limerick, because it’s not Irish. At some point, I guess I just started thinking of it as a biography.
    By the time I got to senior year of high school, I figured I’d run Miss Lucy’s story through my head at least a thousand times. In the beginning it was a source of endless amusement. Then it was one of my earliest pieces of nostalgia—when I was a sixth grader, I used it to remember the fond innocence of second grade. Then it became a place my mind went from time to time. Science class boring? Well, Miss Lucy had a steamboat. Dying to get off the phone with the friend who won’t shut up? Miss Lucy had a steamboat. Stuck in the car while Mom runs in for the dry cleaning? Miss Lucy had a steamboat.
    I had no idea what it meant. That was the beauty of it.
    I could relate to Miss Lucy because her life made absolutely no sense.
             
    I’d say I was itching to see Ashley again after our first brief conversation, but an itch is something you can scratch, while absence is something you can’t really do shit about. She wasn’t in any of my classes; since I was in all of the average classes, this meant she was either really smart or really dumb. There was a slim chance she’d just decided this place