The Pale Blue Egg

    In 7th grade, I was the Vice President of the science club.* The only thing we really did as an organization was sell carnations to raise money for ourselves. We would go from classroom door to classroom door at the beginning or end of each day leading up to Valentine’s Day. We would trade dollar bills for slips of paper to write messages on that would be attached to the flowers we delivered on the holiday. Our whole club would maybe split into groups to do this, but the whole club was just me and my best friends, so we’d usually just take advantage of the incredibly awkward task of selling carnations to middle schoolers to just hang out.     One of us would hold the envelope for cash and messages, and another would knock and announce that we were in their classroom to sell them carnations. As the VP, I was often not the envelope holder. I ended up with the truly unpleasant task of interrupting a classroom to make a self-serving announcement. Two cl...

    A street with a dead end is a great place to be a kid. Our no-traffic cul-de-sac was a perfect setting for bikes and scooters, and it was even sloped from top to bottom so that you wouldn’t really even have to pedal to go real fast.     At the top of the street were the Adams.* Their grandma lived in a cottage connected to the house by a covered walkway. She sold Avon and went on long walks with my mother. The dad was really hard on the son, Jay. He built a batting cage in the empty lot next door, and we could hear them in our living room, father yelling at son to do a better job hitting the ball. His sister Kasey used to babysit me and my sister, and all I remember about that is playing Rugrats in Tokyo on the Nintendo 64 and saying the word “crud” over and over again.     Jay and Kasey lost their mom when I was in 5th grade, in a tragic car accident that robbed their family of something vital. The dad remarried years and years late...

    The drive is supposed to take 7 hours but usually takes closer to 8 or 9. Especially if I am driving and no matter how much I speed. Driving all day like that fucking sucks.     The whole morning before the drive was infuriating too. Connor had an interview, and he was so nervous that he was acting crazy, kind of like how I act when I’m nervous, which is literally all the time. I am thinking about that and how hard it must be to live with me while he is standing outside the bathroom door, counting down the minutes until I have to turn off the water—finished or not—so that his interviewers won’t hear any background noise on their Skype call. And, really, the worst part is that I know he is just being crazy because of his interview and so I have to roll with it. As he demands that I close a window to keep out the noise from a distant lawnmower, my instinct is to call him an ass and carry on with a nice long shower. But I fight that instinct. He also...