Posted: List 3

A petition was going around that was supposedly headed to our congressman, asking him to intercede and somehow overthrow the school board’s decision—as if he gave a flying fart what happened at BMS.

I scanned the row of blue lockers across the hall. They all looked the same, except for one that was dented from when one of the football players tested out his new helmet by running headlong into it.

“Get in there, you big furry oaf, I don’t care what you smell,” I coaxed.

“Dude—it’s twenty minutes. You have to eat. Besides,” I added tentatively, “she’s not that bad.”

I craned my neck around the door and looked across the filling tables at Rose Holland, at least three inches taller than Wolf. Shoulders you could park a car on. And that face. Those eyes, large and luminescent. If faces were states, she’d be Montana and those eyes would be full bright moons.

He had enough to contend with without also being “that dweeb with the dice.”

He reluctantly fished out his ten-sided dragon die and stealthily slid it across the table.

I feigned disinterest, taking another bite but watching out of the corner of my eye.

I pictured the antlers. The flaring nostrils. The big, melancholy eyes. I nearly blurted it out. Moose.

“I’ll give you a hint,” Rose said, then she rubbed her cheeks vigorously with her hands, smiling real big so they stretched and puffed.

Score one for the snowman, who, so far, has managed to escape the penetrating inquisition of the all-knowing die.

It's Wolf. Shrugging nonchalantly that moment his own number came up.

Mr. Hostler had paired our social studies class up earlier that week and given us each a major twentieth-century war/calamity/atrocity/human rights struggle to research and report on.

I hadn’t really noticed it at the lunch table where the din of a hundred conversation-starved middle schoolers could drown out a nuclear bomb test, but there in the restaurant she made no attempt to stifle it, not even when other people turned and gave her looks.

I hadn’t really noticed it at the lunch table where the din of a hundred conversation-starved middle schoolers could drown out a nuclear bomb test, but there in the restaurant she made no attempt to stifle it, not even when other people turned and gave her looks. It was a determined laugh. Totally in-your-face.

I sat down next to him and studied the cracks in the street, the dark, hard, bubbly patches from last year’s road construction, the plumes of coughed exhaust from passing cars.

It was an intense out-of-left-field kind of question. But I guess sitting on a sun- dappled curb after learning about the end of the world for an hour can put you in that kind of mood.

The right person finds it, likes it, favorites it, tweets it, endorses it, gives it four stars, two thumbs up, and then it just spreads.

First one bomb. Then two. Then hundreds. Then thousands. Piled up in silos.

That’s what happened with the sticky notes. They proliferated, went viral.

“Isn’t that when the blood in your brain explodes?” Samantha Bowles guessed. I had seen her reading a note when I walked in, eyes wide at whatever gossip was scrawled on it.
“That’s an aneurism, but thanks for playing. Yes, Marianna?”

“An aphorism is a pithy or witty saying,” he continued. “Like a little kernel of wisdom wrapped up in a single sentence. We might think of them as quotes, except they are designed to say something deep and true about the world, and not all quotes do that.”

Aphorisms go a little deeper than that. They speak to something universal about the human condition. They can be humorous, and often are, but they should always make you think. They should be true in some way.

And while ‘Liam Hemsworth is hot’ may sound to some of you like universal truth, I hardly think it qualifies as a profound thought that requires sharing.

Therefore I think it’s worth taking a time-out from Caesar’s plight in Ancient Rome to think about the power that language can have.

You have ten minutes to think of your own original aphorism—some witty little revelation that you can fit on that three-inch-square sticky note in front of you.

I instantly conjured an image of writing-utensil-wielding hobbits plunging Sharpies into the backs of orcs, except instead of blood the bodies spilled ink.

“You are going to put this out in the world for others to see. You can write something provocative. Something challenging. Something passionate and opinionated and even, potentially, dangerous. But keep it clean. Don’t write anything that would get you in trouble.”

I entertained a brief image of Jason and Noah being mauled by a pack of starved lions in the middle of the Colosseum in front of a cheering crowd—too much Roman history, I guess—then turned back to my blank note.

Ask them what they think. How does it make them feel? Angry? Wistful? Optimistic?

In middle school, everybody gets a label. It’s important. It makes it easier to spread gossip, to choose seats in the auditorium during school-wide convocations, to decide who belongs where.

He only spoke of them after the fact, and then only when one of us noticed the new ribbon or trophy on the cherrywood mantel in his living room.

Wolf’s accolades were on prominent display, visible from the foyer of their three-story house.

Wolf’s accolades were on prominent display, visible from the foyer of their three-story house.

You could see them through the prominent bay window that protruded like a blister from the front.

The opposing team looked a lot bigger than us, galumphing across the field like a crash of rhinos.

I was about to ask it what my mom’s chances of winning the lottery were (she got one ticket every week), but on the ensuing kickoff the Falcons ran it all the way back for a touchdown, proving the die wrong.

No way he catches it. Because that’s not how the universe works. Movies, maybe, but not real life. Not for people like us. Not for the outliers. The benchwarmers.

I have no idea what the Nobel Prize looks like, but in my dream it resembled the Stanley Cup, a glinting metal behemoth nearly twice my size with handles on the side.

She looked completely normal, except for the pair of antlers that protruded from either side of her head, branching into fuzzy nubs.