Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [84]
Milo also suspected that Mr. Compo enjoyed using large and unusual words, and that he took great pride in hearing his students use them as well. As he finished critiquing a story or essay, he would routinely affix a Post-it note to the piece and begin a list of editing suggestions. Though this process often included suggestions related to punctuation and sentence structure, it invariably included a list of new vocabulary that the writer might consider adding to his or her piece.
Sometimes a writer would leave Mr. Compo’s desk with a dozen Post-it notes covering his or her paper. If only Milo could be so lucky this time.
As many times as he used them, Milo had no doubt that Mr. Compo would provide alternatives for chatty and talkative. He just hoped that loquacious would be one of them.
“Obviously you didn’t reread your piece, Milo,” Mr. Compo began. “Or else you would’ve noticed that you used words like talkative quite a bit. I mean, they’re all over the page.”
“Yeah, I was so anxious to have you read the piece that I didn’t really do any editing yet.”
“Well, you could start by limiting the repetition in the piece and making some better word choices.”
And then it happened. Like a thousand juice boxes punctured at once, loquacious burst forth from the lips of Marvin Compopiano, three syllables spoken at an ordinary volume but echoing vociferously in Milo’s head. In that moment, all the tension and pressure of three days of agony were released. Milo’s muscles instantly relaxed, his jaw, which he hadn’t even realized was clenched, went slack, and his mind suddenly felt open, clear, and uncluttered for the first time in days. Most of the relief was the result of the actual word, but Milo also felt a small degree of pleasure and satisfaction with his plan coming together.
“Loquacious might be an excellent word choice for this piece, Milo. Have you ever heard it before?” Mr. Compo said, and in Milo’s mind, angels sang.
There was no telling how long Milo sat beside his teacher, silent and unmoving, reveling in the moment, before Mr. Compo finally broke the silence.
“Milo? Are you all right?”
He was.
In fact, Milo was great. Better than he had been in days. Though there would be many words after loquacious, and for years, each of these words would carry a burden of anxiety and pressure that would weigh greatly on him, Milo could always look back on that first word and the challenges that it had presented and know that relief was possible.
After years of facing the challenge of words like loquacious, Milo had learned to manage their demands well. Though they were still accompanied by pressure, distraction, pain, and occasional anxiety depending on the difficulty of the word, he was usually able to remain composed and focused in the face of their monotonous calls.
And Milo was now beginning to understand how this ability to maintain a secret life might have doomed his marriage from the start. In many ways, he had lived through his three years of marriage on the edge, fearful that the wrong decision might cause him to lose Christine forever. For much of his life, beginning years ago with his teenage resignation to prostitutes in Chinatown, Milo had assumed that his future would be a solitary one. His inexplicable, indescribable demands, coupled with his nervousness around women and his garden-variety oddities, made the possibility of a long-term girlfriend, let alone a wife, incomprehensible. So when Christine, a fledgling attorney at a large practice in downtown Hartford, continued to show interest in him after three dates, Milo could hardly believe his good fortune, and so he did everything in his power to foster the relationship: flowers once a week, candlelit dinners at the finest restaurants in town,