Читать книгу Fishbowl - Sarah Mlynowski - Страница 14

JODINE

I am so angry, my hands are shaking. If I were a cartoon character, gray clouds of smoke would be steaming from my ears, and my face would be the color of Emma’s nails, cherry red. It’s 3:11 a.m. and someone is making popcorn. Popcorn! At 3:11 in the morning! Why would anyone make popcorn at 3:11 in the morning? It makes no sense.

Every night it’s something. Usually it’s the giggling. Too often, when I’m trying to fall asleep, Allie is giggling on the phone. I can’t decipher what she’s actually saying or to whom she is speaking. All I hear is that infernal giggling like a bad echo reverberating through the walls. I would buy earplugs, except that they present two immediate problems. First, how would I hear my alarm clock? And second, whenever earplugs are remotely near my body, I tense with stress. I wore them when I took the LSATs, and now whenever I think of them, my back tenses in an “I am about to sit still for the next three hours that will define my entire future” Pavlovian manner. Since falling asleep requires the absence of stress, I doubt that a stress-inducing object will succeed in blocking out nocturnal distractions.

The first time I heard the giggles I didn’t think anything of them, hoping the incident was a one-time thing. The second time, I couldn’t stand it. I attempted to ignore them; honestly, I did. I tried to fall asleep, despite the feeling that a pack of flies was buzzing around in my ears, but I ended up tossing and turning, turning and tossing, and eventually I slipped into my black-and-white-and-red Minnie Mouse slippers from Disney World, padded over to Allie’s room and knocked three times on the door.

“Come in!” she sang out, obviously unaware of the purpose of my visit. Did she think I was stopping by for a late-night girlie chat? Me? “Hold on, it’s one of my roomies,” she said into the phone. “Hi, Jay!”

These days, she has been calling me Jay. First she tried Jo, not believing me when I told her that I despised it. Then for some inexplicable reason she tried Jon. Jon? First of all, I despise all male names for females. You know, like Sidney or Michael. But no female has ever even tried using Jon before. I even dislike those ambiguous names that can go either way, like Robin. Although I must point out that I am in favor of names like Carol or Lynn; no matter how many males carry these identifiers, and no matter how they are spelled—Carol/Caroll, Lyn/Lynn—an extra consonant, in my book, does not legitimize the transsexual operation. To me, these names are strictly feminine.