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“MR. GORDOOOOOON!”

The high-pitched wail filled the halls, followed by the click click click of Genevieve's uniform heels as she ran down the crowded halls of Meadowview at a dead sprint. Well, as much of a sprint as heels would allow. As much of a sprint as heels plus a stack of books nearly as tall as the girl herself would allow.

Papers trailed behind her as she went, xeroxed copies of archived books and wikipedia articles acting as bread crumbs should she get lost and need to find the way back to the moment she had apparently lost her cool and gone screaming through the halls. Red-faced and already out of breath, Genevieve was the very image of fretting. Her face was scrunched into a maze of worry lines, lips pursed into a small speck of cherry gloss. Her bottom lip had disappeared entirely between her teeth, emerging only when she let go long enough to shout: “MR. GORDOOOOOOooooOOOOooooOOOON!”

Jenny burst into his office without so much as knocking, shoving the door open with a hip and dropping the stack of books, papers, Lisa Frank folders, and composition notebooks onto his desk. She immediately began picking from the stack, sorting them into piles and stopping only when she could take a moment to wring her hands and chew her lip some more. On occasion she would look at him, turn a new shade of red that had nothing to do with running, and return to sorting.

All the while she was jabbering: “Mr. Gordon the placement exams are coming up and I don't know what to study and there is so much information and I can't be placed in remedial english because that is for stupid people and I can't say I was taught by you and then end up in remedial english and if I fail I will never make it into a good writing program and I will never write my own best selling romance novels and I will never have the publicity to become the first female president and I won't get married and nobody will surprise me with a puppy for christmas and I will have nine cats and I don't even like cats that much and I don't like dogs that much either but I really want that puppy and Mr. Gordon I needyourhelpohgodI'mgoingtodiealoneandoldandwrinkled.”

This was almost entirely indecipherable and sounded more like an Alvin and the Chipmunks song on fast forward. She might as well have been speed-singing 'I just want a hula hoop'.

Genevieve was looking at Ray with the angriest expression she could muster. Considering he had just referred to her as 'honey', the angriest expression she could muster consisted of a wide grin and a barely stifled series of giggles that broke through her worry like a hammer through plate glass. Watching her try to hold in her girlish glee was like watching someone try to put the cork back into a well-shaken bottle of champagne.

That glee lasted only a moment before her eyes snagged on the pile of books and fear reestablished its grip on her. There, among the stacks of papers and reports, was an incriminating assignment for her fictional writing study group. The title read in bold, black letters The Lovely Life of Genevieve Gordon. She snatched the paper up as though it might suddenly explode, and ripped it into small pieces as she spoke. Genevieve somehow managed to do this while acting like this was entirely normal.

Nothing to see here, Mr. Gordon. Nothing to see here at all.

“Placement exams!” she exclaimed, slipping the confetti handful into her purse, “Placement exams for Sovereign Heights! There's so much and I don't know where to start and I don't know what to do or where to begin and I'm going to fail and then I'm going to die!” This was dramatic. If you said so, of course, she would argue that death was the only logical end result of shaming Mr. Gordon by failing her placement exams.

She began sifting through the pile again, ticking off each item as she separated it out, “Shakespeare and Poe and Thoreau and Hemmingway and Cold Mountain and Snow Falling On Cedars and The Handmaid's Tale,” this one she set gently off to one side, as it was her favorite, “and, and, and...” she trailed off, as though drowning in the pile of books. After a long moment of staring at them, her expression visibly shifting from slight worry to full on panic all the while, she lifted her head to stare at him, bit her lip for a moment, and finally said: “I'm not pretty enough to make it as a trophy wife, Mr. Gordon!”

A majority's of Ray's wit and charm went unheard and thus unappreciated, wiped out by Jenny's Gordon Filter. It was an elaborate mental mechanism which allowed her to live in her perpetually hopeful little dream world as it filtered out everything he said except for great, fawn over you, and pretty.

Especially pretty.

Jenny likely could have gone to almost any four-year university of her choice. She had the GPA of a kid who had no social life, the extracurricular list of a kid who had no social life, and the glowing recommendation letters of a kid who, well, had no social life. She had chosen Sovereign Heights because for all of her excitement about the world around her, all of her wonder and joy, all of her curiosity and belief that the world was a magical place with endless opportunity, the truth was that Genevieve Prideux was not yet ready to face that world. So she had declined her acceptance to universities in Massachusetts , California, London, even Norway and began thumbing through the limited selection of Sovereign Heights courses.

Mr. Gordon had never liked this. Mr. Gordon had sat her down, hands on her shoulders, and lectured her on the dire importance of getting out while you still could. He had explained the importance of getting away from family and safe zones with a multitude of comparisons to literature and media. He had told her not to be the kid other kids look up on Facebook when they're twenty-five and scoff at because they're still stuck in their hometown working at Borders. He had said all of this, flattered her with praise, and had frowned when Jenny smiled, folded her hands in her lap and said, “I just can't.”

Little Jenny-V, running away by staying put.

“Mr. Geeeeeee,” she drew out the sound, her own way of saying 'not this again'. Jenny spent a moment bouncing on her heels before finally dropping herself into the chair opposite his own. She pulled a piece of yellow paper from the pile, scanning the list of essay topics before pinning it to the table with her index finger, “This one.”

Just above a perfectly manicured and pink-polished nail, in her curly handwriting and heart-dotted i's, was the phrase 'Compare and contrast the social relevancy of The Diary of a Young Girl with Snow Falling on Cedars.' Apparently, just reading the line sent Jenny into a new fit of panic.

“I didn't read The Diary of a young Girl. Mr. Gordon. I tried, I did! But it was just so sad and...” she trailed off with a frown. It was part of the required reading for Meadowview, one of a long list of books deemed relevant by some committee of parents and teachers who thought themselves fit to determine the relevance of literature. Twining her fingers together, Jenny stared down at her lap and wrung her hands silently. When she spoke again, it was to answer the unasked question of how she had passed the sophomore English final without having read the material.

“I...” Jenny looked around, as though she were confessing to some kind of crime, and lowered her voice to a whisper, “I read the Spark Notes.”

If one could imagine Peter's face as Jesus told him that he had gotten a piece of that fine, fine Mary Magdalene tail the night before his crucifixion, they might have seen the exact same expression that Jenny wore when Ray stopped talking. It was a slow progression, beginning with a pursing of her sparkle-glossed lips and ending with her brows halfway up her forehead and her eyes so wide that the iris touched neither top nor bottom lid.

This was partly due to the fact that Mr. Gordon had just laid upon her the most stunning Truth of Truths, but mostly just because he had called her 'pumpkin'. Jenny filed it away in the back of her mind as another nickname to add to the list she kept on a bright pink Post-it on the inside cover of her Biology book. Below it, on a much smaller blue Post-it, were all of the nicknames Charys Murphy had given her. Unsurprisingly, if one were to put the two lists together into a Venn diagram, they would end up with one circle on Earth, the other floating somewhere along the orbital path of the not-planet Pluto.

The pen she pulled from her pocket book was surprisingly boring. It was a plain, clear plastic Bic ballpoint. It was not the shiny, glitterly, kitten-topped affair that Jenny usually wrote with, but cracked along the plastic tube and wrapped in clear Scotch tape. Mr. Gordon might have recognized it as the pen which he had once loaned Jenny when she'd forgotten her own. He might have recognized it, except nobody would ever credit Genevieve Prideux with being ablet o keep track of something for more than a day. She'd nearly had a panic attack when she couldn't take notes on the movie being played as a reward for excellent class test scores. Of course, the movie being played was Cool Runnings, but that didn't stop Jenny from waving her hand obnoxiously until Mr. Gordon, fearing she might be mauled by the rest of the class, tossed her a pen.

That was freshman year, and three years later the ink was running a little low. Jenny shook it once before scribbling on the reading list. Most of the names were crossed off; the adventures, the romances, the mythology. By the time she had finished, stopping several times to shake her dying pen, only those books based on history remained.

“I read the Spark Notes, honest I did, but I just can't read them. How is that supposed to be interesting, Mr. Gordon? It's all real and boring! It's not like.. falling in love and living happily ever after.” There was something sad about the way Jenny said the word love, as though it were some impossible, unreachable ideal.

“I already know what the real world is like," Jenny was convinced of this, no matter how often Charys told her otherwise, "I don't want to read about it.”

Jenny was chewing on her lower lip so much that it was surprising she still had a lower lip to chew on. Enough time around Jenny and you got used to this and stopped wondering how she hadn't chewed through it already. The key, she would have told anyone who asked (though nobody ever would) was lubrication with lots and lots of sparkle cherry lip gloss. She smacked her lips once to re-smooth the coat of gloss, turned red as she remembered Rule Nineteen*, and stared down at her lap.

“No,” she murmured, “But I did read the spark notes! And I watched the movie for Cold Mountain. My mom told me I have eyes like Nicole Kidman, but I think she was just being nice. Nicole Kidman is so much prettier and she has such nice skin and her teeth are just so white, I wonder if she uses those chemical whiteners. I tried, but they make my teeth hurt and they're still not as white as hers and-”

Ray cleared his throat.

“Well, who wants to read a book about killing birds?”

Jenny Prideux was not stupid, this was something Ray knew well. However, Jenny Prideux was incredibly naïve and spent eighty percent of English class staring out the window and imagining the various ways Mr. Gordon might propose to her. During the explanation of what To Kill A Mockingbird was really about, she had decided that it would probably be on some fabulous Caribbean cruise.

They were going to honeymoon in Disneyland.

She was going to be Cinderella.