Montoya, Alden: Dark eyes and long limbs. Brave, honorable, perfect.
Peterson, David: That classically attractive man you may have seen on an army recruiting ad. Could be a bouncer at a tame nightclub or a model for athletic gear.
Rayburn, Jean: Her eyes are a very becoming pale blue. More of a kindred spirit than her sour expression indicates.
Robinson, Caitlin: Always well groomed. No stains on any of her clothes. Owns many beautiful hair clips.
Robinson, Denise: Constantly repositioning her legs to hide her varicose veins. Ha. Ha. Ha!
Schaffer, Max: Wears trendy plastic-rimmed glasses. Does not tuck in his shirts. Never lets his mouth gape open.
Schumacher, Loretta: Practically perfect in every way.
Small, Carrie: Really huge breasts! Lucky she teaches first and not eighth grade.
Warren, Gus: Dreamy. Smiles and sweats a lot.
Q: Did Stephen already know that Alden was Gus’s brother when you came to Boston?
A: Yes! That bully secret keeper!
Q: How do you get kicked out of the army for having US$500,000?
A: Still not entirely sure. Perhaps if you’re too rich, the army doesn’t think you’ll be able to take orders well. But Elvis still did it. Right?
Q: Has Julia/Juliette tried to contact Gus yet?
A: No. Never.
Q: Did Gus know that you and David had broken up when he came over with his mushrooms and his open heart?
A: Yes. I have since learned that my dear mother told him. That woman is far more perceptive than she lets on.
Q: How is Loretta’s health?
A: She caught a nasty flu in October, went to the hospital for three wretched days, but pulled through triumphantly.
Appendix III
Known (and Interesting!) Anomalies of Water165
1. Water has an unusually high viscosity. Viscosity means how easy it is for molecules to wiggle around relative to each other. It depends on the strength of the bonds holding the molecule together. This is called cohesiveness. Water is so cohesive because of its serious 3-D structure of hydrogen bonding. Think of a 3-D puzzle versus a 2-D one. The first is going to be much more complicated to deconstruct. This also accounts for water’s nasty surface tension. Think of how much it hurts to belly flop off a high dive.
2. Water shrinks as it melts, but as temperatures continue to decrease, it then expands as it freezes. Most substances behave in the opposite manner, shrinking as they freeze, because the individual molecules are stuck in fixed positions while the substance is solid, and when they’re liquid they require more space to move around. I like to remember this one by thinking of how when humans are really cold they bundle up. Expanding in size as we freeze. Those New England winters at Yale were brutal.
3. Water has an outrageously high heat of vaporization. The highest of any liquid. Even at 100 degrees Celsius, there are still tons of hydrogen bonds in water that need to break for it to reach the gas phase. Watched or not, pots take wicked long to boil.
4. Pressure reduces the melting point of ice. Adding pressure to a liquid usually promotes freezing—and thus a higher melting point—but water works the opposite way.
5. Water has the highest thermal conductivity of any liquid. That means energy can run through it with considerable ease. So in a lightning storm it’s probably better to stand in a swimming pool of rubbing alcohol than a swimming pool full of water. If you have that option.
6. The Mpemba effect! (Annie said I didn’t have to explain this one because she already has me doing so somewhere in this book she won’t yet let me read.)
Appendix IV
Stupid Things I Considered Calling My Memoirs
1. Wartime Alone Time: When Abstinence Fights for Freedom
2. Spoon the Air
3. Grace in His Absence
4. Dear John
5. Don’t You Call Me a Hero
6. Nine Times Forever Equals Way Too Long
7. Time Out for Karma
8. Without an Artifact
9. Almost Too Ripe for Squeezing
10. So Very Alone
11. Pins and Fucking Needles
12. While Fleeing the Coop of Terror
13. Inside the Yolk of the Sun
14. Reactivating the Fumes
15. 101 Ways to Go Nuts While Your Lover Is at War
16. Caution: This Book Has a Surprise Middle Part
17. Almost Perfectly Innocent
18. Shout Across the Ocean
19. Untitled Suicide Note
20. Dreams from the Homeland
21. Annie Harper’s Journal
22. On the Tailbone of the Luck Monster
23. What I Did on My Boyfriend Vacation
24. Between a War and a Window
25. That’s What Humans Do
26. Red, White, and Brutally Honest
27. The Charisma of Coincidence
28. Miss Harper Can Do It
29. Confession-Booth Graffi ti Artist
30. (no title given for suspense purposes)
31. Arachne vs. Penelope: Live on Pay-Per-View!
Appendix V
Cool Facts About Chickens
1. Chickens were domesticated over eight thousand years ago!
2. An egg-laying chicken will lay about one egg per day for five to six days and then take a few days off to rest.
3. You have to take the eggs away as they’re laid or else the chicken will stop and start brooding after she’s collected six or seven. This little group is called a clutch. I wonder if there’s a relation to the style of handbag of the same name.
4. A chicken cackles to check where all the other chickens are. And they cackle back to say, “I’m here!” That’s why Helen was rather quiet with her vocals. She figured out pretty fast that she was the only hen around.
5. The word for “fear of chickens” is “alektorophobia.” Can you even imagine? What kind of ninnies are scared of chickens?
6. Since chickens don’t have teeth, they mash up their food with grit, which they keep in their gizzard. They put food down there to chew it up before they send it along to their stomachs. I had to buy grit and sprinkle it around Helen’s coop because there wasn’t the right kind of gravel in my yard for her to find it naturally.
7. 2005 will be the Year of the Cock!
8. Chickens have just one orifice for pooping, peeing, and laying eggs. Though this sounds mega gross, it’s really quite efficient. The poop and pee (which is not like our pee, but globby and mucky) come out one tube and the eggs come out another. And both tubes meet at the same opening. However, there is this nifty flap of skin that moves over and sticks out when the egg comes out so that the egg never touches any part of the chicken’s body where the poop was. This is also the same hole they use for S.E.X. Except I kind of deprived poor Helen of that. We were chaste together!
9. A chicken’s heart beats 280-315 times a minute. I felt like at times over this past year mine has too.
10. It takes over four pounds of chicken food to make one dozen eggs. So ultimately, my egg-eating phase was not too economical.
11. A hen usually lives for about five to seven years, but under the right conditions they can live up to twenty. Rest in peace, sweet Helen Harrington-Harper.
Acknowledgments
Many sincere and serious thanks to:
First there was Seth, who afforded me a generous glimpse into his life with the U.S. Army. Thank you for tolerating all my questions back when they were rooted in plain old curiosity and affection.
Sally Wofford-Girand, my incredible agent, for helping a no-cred, no-experience nobody shine up her manuscript into something to be proud of. You understood Annie Harper from the get-go and knew where to send her. And of course, Melissa Sarver, for all your work along the way and for plucking me out of the slush.
Kendra Harpster, my editor, who had so many brilliant ideas for the manuscript and who has really managed to push me into sounding smarter and more intere
sting than I actually am. Thanks to you and everyone at Viking who has worked so hard at getting this book out and making it look way snazzier than Annie Harper could have ever imagined.
Brian Hurley, Carolyn Morrisroe, and Robert Repino for being the smartest, most helpful friends. I swear I’d never get anything done without you three as heroes and advisers.
David Seal for wisely egging me on back in the day.
Maja Nikolic and Elena Santogade, simply the best role models, cheerleaders, counselors, and secret keepers a girl could have.
My sister, Emily Berentson, for having the biggest heart and the dirtiest fingernails and with them inspiring me to work with children.
My brother, Mike Berentson and his wife, Renata. I’m sorry for stealing a bit of your life and sloppily braiding it into this book. You’ve been so brave in your relationship and so helpful with this project. Mike, I’m tremendously proud of the way you excelled in your military career and the choices you made to fit love into your life.
And then there are a handful of women who’ve endured so much of my whining, musing, unreturned phone calls, and general obnoxious claptrap over the course of my entire life. Abbey Raish, Stephanie Linnell, Carly Meznarich, Kelsey Loftness, Tina Collom, Ashley Wells, and Abigail Quesinberry, I owe you big time forever.
Sam Trott, I’m sorry I told you the complete contents of this book in a graceless, out-of-order, overcaffeinated fashion before I ever let you read any of it. Please know that I only got the actual writing done because circumstances had you away from me for far longer than I would have liked.
And finally, Mom and Dad, thank you for always permitting my silliness and for your unconditional pride and encouragement.
1 Presently, I do not have a therapist. Naturally, I have nothing against acquiring one in the future should it become necessary. Honestly, I have no idea what the signs of that necessity will be. Compulsive flossing? Crying in public restrooms? Joint pain?
2 For the uninformed: Lonesome George is the rarest living creature on the planet. He’s the only remaining specimen of his certain subspecies of Galapagos tortoise. I think scientists discovered him back in the seventies when he was still a young spry thing. Now George is pushing seventy or eighty or so, and though they’ve scoured the lush Galapagos islands high and low, zoologists still haven’t found another tortoise of his kind. George is doomed to plod along in solitude. No friends. No family. No lovers. I think the scientists may have tried to mate him with other closely related subspecies females, but Georgie just won’t have it. He’s holding out for his true partner; one who very well may not exist. Talk about patience! 392 days or forever.
3 Note to self: Check on this when you actually write the book. It could have been quilting. Or some type of ancient weaving thing. I seem to remember a loom.
4 Okay. I lost my cool last year when Derek Metticus fed chewed-up Skittles to Churchill, our class beta fish. Churchill went completely cuckoo bananas and banged his head against his hard plastic bowl until he died. RIP Churchill. Unknown-February 23, 2003.
5 What’s to share so far? I’d barely had an hour to start collecting it.
6 It wasn’t really a manchego, but a boring Vermont cheddar. Manchego = $13.99 a pound!
7 Lactaid is a registered trademark of McNeil Nutritionals, LCC. Go McNeil!
8 Not really called a “vagueness pact,” but some substantially less negative-sounding phrase. It might even include the term “top secret.”
9 A totally awesome game I made up last year.
10 Note: Consider a chicken. Ask landlord about building a henhouse.
11 Actually, it was a trigger point for an IED, which means “improvised explosive device.” An IED can be numerous types of patched-together bombs. They can be detonated by motion sensors, magnets, tripwires. Tons of shit.
12 She was wearing a Seattle Mariners hat, a Seattle Mariners sweatshirt, and, honest to god, Seattle Mariners earrings. I just can’t trust people who are that shamelessly passionate about anything.
13 His mom left (disappeared without a trace!) before Gus could walk. His dad never ever talks about it, so naturally, over the years, Gus has LOVED to discuss his missing mother with me. It’s interesting to think about how his theories regarding the absent parent have really evolved over the years. They’ve darkened and changed as adult life taught him to reserve a portion of his heart for dry cynicism. Back in middle school when Gus and I first became great friends—back when he was this goofy, happy kid who built model rockets and was charmed by the way his home rock tumbler could turn regular sidewalk gravel into smooth, lustrous stones—back then he had these cheery, optimistic ideas about his mother. He fancied that her departure was due to some heavily demanding, altruistic career path. She had to leave to fight some evil virus from killing entire states of third-world countries. She was a top member of a super secret international crime-fighting force. But by high school, his fantasies started to sour a bit. She was brain-washed into joining a religious cult. She couldn’t help it; it was hypnosis. Or she had left Gus and Rex just after finding out that she was terminally ill. Maybe she thought a fast departure would be less devastating than a long, brutal one. I think Gus liked this theory best because it allowed him to simultaneously mourn her loss and forgive her for going away. How can you blame a dead woman? And then it wasn’t until two summers ago, right after we graduated from college, when Gus and I were helping my mom set up for a garage sale, that I realized that his mom-hope had fizzled out completely. We were carrying card tables out to the lawn and the topic of his mother came up. “It doesn’t matter if she was an alcoholic, a drug dealer, a tightrope walker, a schizophrenic, a con artist, a flat-out bitch, or any combination of any of those, I really just don’t care anymore.” He had started to flip through a box of old disco records my parents were giving up. “If there was really something positive about her that would make me feel better about who I am and where I come from, my dad would have told me by now. I know that.” And something about this made me very sad for Gus. Obviously there was something positive about his mother somewhere. She couldn’t be an entirely loathsome creature. It was like he finally swallowed this sweet nugget of hope he’d been carrying in the back of his throat for so long. But I guess it is a rather silly hope when logically you know there will never be something real to bite down on.
14 She did not pretend not to see me. She came up and said something like, “Oh, Annie Harper. I didn’t know you lived down in Tacoma now?” And then we chatted quite pleasantly. She works for a small independent publisher of parenting books downtown and has no children of her own. We’re only twenty-four. But she was remarkably overweight. That part was true.
15 If they haven’t been already.
16 Physical training
17 I keep the toilet paper I actually use on the back on the tank now. Those dispensers are sort of superfluous anyway.
18 Except I would surely not capitalize “his,” because I definitely don’t want people to think I’m talking about God or Jesus or somebody. This title would be doubly cool if my name were actually Grace. Oprah would eat that shit up.
19 He actually hasn’t told me anything like this yet, but I read the news. I know a time will come when his phone voice will sink into more morose tones and he’ll relate to me the tragic injury of some dear friend.
20 “Next week on Miss Harper’s Class watch as Steven threatens to sabotage Max’s science project and blackmails him for fifty Yu-Gi-Oh cards! Does Max even have fifty Yu-Gi-Oh cards?”
21 One more thing about Angie. SHE DOESN’T HAVE A JOB. A few months before her husband left for deployment, she quit her post as an office manager of a real estate firm to spend more “quality time” with Mr. Henderson, or Captain Henderson, or whoever. She claims to be sending out résumés, but there was something about the vacuum streaks in her carpet and the spotless grout of her kitchen tile that saddened me. How can full-time fretting be good for the psyche? Well, fretting and knitting.
> 22 So a few days have passed since I wrote this, and I just came back and reread that last bit about The Bachelor. Jeez, I am such a big-stage dramatical. Sure, I miss David, and deep in this quivering lobe of my brain I worry about his safety nonstop, but how much does my missing have to do with the W.A.R.? And how much of my missing has to do with the fact that I’m simply A.L.O.N.E.? (And how much of it actually has do with him?) ? ? ? Alright. I’m going to flip to the back of this book now and have a peek at the answer key.
Ugh. If only.
23 At the time. Now that I’m writing this and trying to think critically and stuff, I’m a little more sympathetic to Greek/Roman Lady. It’s so hard to think rationally when you’re bathed in the warm, viscous mess of self-pity.
24 Oh, the spelling! My community is plagued.
25 100% true altruism?! Does that even exist? Does the word itself leave space for a sliver of selfish intentions? I certainly do hope so.
26 Christ, those dodgeball games were fun.
27 “Tra” is a word I made up in college that means “stuff.” Mostly boring stuff. Or even annoying stuff.
28 Perhaps I’ll start printing out all my antiwar/anti-George W. forwards that old friends from college send on classy parchment paper and stash them in some fancy chest at the foot of my bed. Now that sounds like an artifact!
29 Meal Ready to Eat. It’s a foil packet of food kind of like you get on airplanes. Except the nutritional content is designed to make your poop really dry so you don’t have to wipe much and can go days without having to wash your crusty bum. Ick! Definitely take this part out of the real book, Annie.
Long Division Page 28
