Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter Read Online Free PDF

these girls were categorically cute, I couldn’t help feeling that their faces belonged to generalized type groupings with ubiquitous representatives that covered every state in the union. As for my own face type, I’m certainly not a member of any larger type grouping, nor even a redheaded sub-grouping. My face displays a Celtic fullmouthed symmetry suggestive of a jovial inattention, capped by naturally upstanding curls in a shade of auburn that is especially striking in reflection.) After asking where I lived, Ashley informed me that I was lucky I hadn’t enrolled at “ Scurv andale,” where I’d surely have ended up a motorhead addicted to methamphetamine. Lauren offered me a piece of watermelon gum and offered me up to Smitty, an evident straight shooter with a steady handshake and a 1950s-combed cut. Smitty taught me all about the wrestling team’s challenge match system, then related a long account of his short career as a Cutpro scissors salesman, including the day he cut his first showroom penny in half only to watch in suspended time as a fraction of that penny whirled its way into the eye of a would-be customer. And this is when I discovered that when Emily starts laughing, when something really tickles her in the right place, there’s no way she’ll stop. She shook madly, bursting forth in a seizing and unexpectedly high-flung hoot that overwhelmed and eventually embarrassed her.
    Near the end of the night the backyard was overtaken by a muddy tennis ball war that began as a slopping game of catch with a buzzed golden retriever. Eventually Tino came stumbling up alongside me, ragingly affectionate and roaring about all the fish we’d be catching and deer we’d be shooting. Hadley apologized about the mud tracks up my driveway. When the kegs emptied and everyone cleared out, Emily offered us all rides in her Volvo, which she touted as having achieved a perfect safety rating. This news proved comforting when I discovered that she was an oblivious driver who showed little concern for any roadway actions that didn’t involve the twenty yards of pavement directly in front of her. But despite the symphony of car horns that made me feel we’d just left a winning basketball game, she never panicked and seemed only to interpret the castigations as neigh borly noise that was none of our business. While her highway abilities appeared utterly opposite her abilities onstage, she was similarly at ease in both roles, going so far as to lend the impression that if we found ourselves head-on with a brick wall, she’d only end up snoozing on her airbag, and wake up fresh as a daisy to face the following day.
    At some point during the drive home, when I was the only passenger left, I was struck by a second—or third, or fourth—wave of infatuation. This occurred at the moment of Emily’s wrong turn onto Hawthorne Drive, when I realized that in her presence I felt on the verge of artistic greatness, like a magician at the precise moment of his maturation when he steps out into the spotlight perfectly assured of his heroic and earth-shattering new trick. Soon enough I was breaking a promise to myself and telling her the story of my family’s first night in Des Moines. (By then everyone knew that the Patterson girl had lied to her parents about an overnight babysitting job in order to spend the intermediate hours with her first official boyfriend. Nicholas Parsons turned out to be a jealous neighbor who did his strangling while the boyfriend was out in the parking lot digging in the backseat for music, for the mood.)
    “Her name’s Missy,” Emily said, after the second time I’d referred to her as “the victim.”
    “Did you know her?”
    “Vaguely,” she said, as a sudden sadness weighed in that seemed to catch her off guard. But she controlled it and it passed quickly. “We had some junior sports together, and a dance team camp. I only remember a couple of conversations. My friend Mandy lives in her