Unit 5: Selection Vocabulary 1

There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts.

She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.

When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason.

“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.

Released into his old man’s custody after six months in juvenile hall—for breaking and entering—and he didn’t even take anything.

Luis has been getting in trouble since he started high school two years ago, mainly because of the “social group” he organized—a bunch of guys who were into harassing the local authorities.

It was just this year, after a couple of botched jobs, that the teachers had started getting suspicious. The first one to go wrong was when he sent Kenny Matoa to borrow some “souvenirs” out of Anita Robles’s locker.

Luis watched as the most beautiful girl he had ever seen climbed out of a vintage white Volkswagen Bug.

His father nodded and showed him the bump on his temple where one of Luis’s flying saucers had gotten him. “Practice makes perfect, you know. Next time you’ll probably decapitate me.”