MISC: The Girl Who Saved the Word Part 29

[George Phillies]

“It’s not way above,” Trisha answered.  “And you get the same next year.”

  “To answer your question,” Janie added,  “I got straight As on my 
exams, well, mayhaps not A+s in all of them.  Except Romeo and Juliet 
makes absolutely no sense at all.  I just wrote down what I memorized 
from those other books. You were right, Dad.  Finding those other books 
helped a lot. But if I had crossed out half the ‘not’s in my sentences, 
what I wrote would have made exactly as much sense. The teacher said it 
was enough extra books, not just one, and I could name them, so I got my 
A. How did you do it, Brian? How did you pull an A+? We read the same 
extra books.”

“Oh, I added stuff about ‘the unbearable agony of separation’. Whatever 
nonsense that is. I lifted it from one of Trisha’s romance novels,” 
Brian said.

“I only have one romance novel!” Trisha interrupted.  “It’s a reading 
assignment.  For my genre fiction requirement! It’s unbearably awful. 
It’s even worse than that Russian thing.”

“Sorry,” said a chastened Brian.  “But you see, it was good for 
something.  Your sacrifice, you read  it, got me an A+.”

“You talked about, yuck, romance novels? You think I can get an A+ if I 
insert something intelligent instead? I could talk about Chess or City 
of Steel or outward influence on my next English exam.” Janie noticed 
her parents shaking their heads.

“I lucked out,” Brian said.  “I guessed Romeo and Juliet had something 
to do with romance novels.  I can’t tell what. I wasn’t really sure.”