Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [83]
Mr. Compopiano, Milo’s short, perpetually sarcastic English teacher, finally presented Milo with a possible solution.
On the third day of loquacious, Mr. Compo, who Milo had always liked and found amusing, had assigned his students the task of writing an essay about any member of their family. Though Milo loved writing and often achieved high marks in his English classes, he doubted that he could get fifty words down on paper before accidentally writing loquacious at least a dozen times. It had become that omnipresent in his mind. This thought had provided Milo with his solution. Or at least the possibility of a solution.
Milo immediately put pen to paper, writing about a make-believe uncle named Jeremiah who lived in the make-believe town of Creedance, Kentucky. Uncle Jeremiah was the pariah of the family (the rhyme not lost on Milo) because of his excessive need to talk, regardless of the circumstances.
Stifled by a mouth filled with peanut butter and jelly, Milo wrote, Jeremiah would still manage to squeeze in a word or two between each chew.
During a sermon on Christmas Eve, Jeremiah’s voice could be heard just beneath that of the minister.
Even while observing a moment of silence, Milo mused, Jeremiah would somehow find a way to get a few words in.
Throughout his essay, Milo did little more than describe Uncle Jeremiah’s obsessive need to talk, using the words chatty and talkative twenty-nine times in the first 250 words, twice separating the two adjectives by a single comma. Once he had filled the front and back of a lined sheet of notebook paper, he brought his unfinished draft to Mr. Compo for a critique.
As Mr. Compo had done for every previous writing conference, he read the entire piece through once before saying a word. “I must gauge the piece in its entirety,” he would tell his students, who would be asked to sit on a short stool beside his desk, waiting for the would-be editor to finish. After reading, he would then sit quietly for up to a minute before speaking. That day was no different.
“Well, Milo,” he finally began. “Your Uncle Jeremiah is quite an interesting guy.”
“Yup,” Milo agreed. “He talks a lot. Wicked chatty.”
“Yes, I certainly got that from your essay. But isn’t there more that you could say about your uncle? Other than his chattiness?”
“Yeah, and I still might, but that’s the one thing that makes him unique. He’s really talkative, Mr. Compo. And chatty too.”
“Sure,” Mr. Compo said. “But I think you might want to dig a little deeper for this essay. Show us other parts of his character. A man isn’t made from a single part. You know what I’m saying?”
“Yup,” Milo answered, feeling a surge of both anxiety and anticipation rise up in him. If his plan was to succeed, it would happen in any moment, and he could barely contain himself. He felt flush with excitement. His feet tapped involuntarily on the tiles beneath him, and his hands were folded tightly in his lap in order to minimize their trembling. If it was going to happen, it would happen now. Milo knew this in his heart.
“Now, as for the nitty-gritty …”
This is it, Milo had thought. My chance. Please. Please, let it be my chance. And at the same time, he wondered if the wait might have been worth it—if the enormous relief that he was about to experience was worth the three days of agonizing and distraction and worry. As foolish as it seemed, he thought it might be.
Mr. Compopiano was a fanatic when it came to increasing a student’s vocabulary and believed in passing new words on to his class at every opportunity. Each week he assigned his students twenty new vocabulary words, each more archaic and multisyllabic than the last. Students were