Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [58]
“Now you’re really talking like a bad tattoo.”
“It’s a plague.”
“A contagious babble.”
“Spread by a Byronic sneeze.”
[Pause.]
“Okay. My favorite essay was a mockery of the genre. A girl wrote about flipping over on a hammock, falling on her face, and becoming anosmic.”
“What’s that?”
“She lost her sense of smell.”
“Oh. Anosmic. Good word. Like you’re anosmic right now.”
“What?”
“Because of that nasty cold of yours. Which seems to be doing much better, I must add.”
“It [sniff] comes and goes.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, the essay concluded with something like ‘She learned two invaluable life lessons from this experience. She might have lost her sense of smell, but she gained a sense of self. After all, she was never the type of girl who would stop to smell the roses, but now she wouldn’t have to pretend that she was.’”
“That’s pretty good.”
“It’s not the best part. The kicker was ‘And the other lesson she learned was this: Never fuck in a hammock.’”
“Ha!”
“It’s even funnier when … when … uh …”
[Pause.]
“Jessica?”
“Huh?”
“You just kind of stopped in the middle of a sentence.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
“I did. I’m so sorry, I’m just really dis—”
“Distracted, I know. Now give me a dollar.”
“A dollar? For what—Oh, dammit. Here it is.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re still down by two.”
“This conversation isn’t over yet.”
“No, it’s not.”
“How’s it going so far?”
“What? The conversation?”
“Yes. The conversation. Are you enjoying yourself?”
[Pause.]
“Yes, I am.”
“I am, too.”
[Pause.]
“Is it going the way you thought it would?”
“No … and yes.”
“Meaning?”
“I didn’t really know how it would go, but in that unpredictable sense, it’s going exactly as I thought it would.”
“I’m in full agreement.”
[Long pause.]
“Now look what’s happened.”
“I know! Our in-the-moment analysis of our conversation brought it to a dead stop.”
“Let’s avoid getting meta-conversational again. Let’s just talk.”
“Sure. Let’s just talk. There’s just one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“I totally forgot what I was talking about. I lost my train of thought.”
“You were talking about the girl who had never fucked in a hammock.”
“Right, her. Her …”
“And the essay was funny because …”
“It was funny because, uh, she had never even kissed a boy when she wrote it. Hey, excuse me for a moment, okay? I’m just going to check to see if I missed any calls.”
“Are you expecting to hear from someone?”
“Sort of. Maybe. But… nope. No missed calls.”
“Do you need to make a call? I don’t mind.”
“Do I need to make a call? Uh, no. It’s fine. I can wait. It’s … perfectly fine. Perfect.”
[Pause.]
“Do they only write personal essays, or … ?”
“No, no. We do exercises in all kinds of forms and genres. Nonfiction, fiction, screenwriting, poetry. But as an introductory writing exercise, we ask them to recount a turning point in their lives.”
“Like the classic first-person college application essay.”
“No, actually. The first-person essay has become such a cliché, you know? By the time they hit high school, they’ve already written so many first-person turning-point essays that they’ve run out of turning points. That’s why we make them write that first assignment in the third person.”
“Third person? Why?”
“Brace yourself for another two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar word.”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand?”
“The average sticker price of four years at an Ivy League college.”
“Oh. Okay. Consider me braced.”
“Prosopopoeia.”
“It sounds just like the last quarter-million-dollar word.”
“That was ‘prosopagnosia.’ This is ‘prosopopoeia.’”
“Well, no duh.”
“‘Prosopopoeia’ is a literary device in which a writer speaks as another person.”
“Okay.”
“Research has shown that when you tell a story in the omnipotent third person, it creates a buffer between the narrator and the character in the story, even when the story is autobiographical and the protagonist is a version of yourself. Still with me?”
“I’m still with you.”
“That shift in point of view helps