One More Thing (6 page)

“Well,” she would say, and then narrow her eyes at the person she was talking to: “what does your
heart
tell you?”

(Sometimes she would use “gut” instead of “heart.” She switched those up sometimes.)

“Yes. Yes!” the friend would say, as the girl who gave great advice held her squint and then added a slow, small nod one and a half seconds later. “You’re right! Thank you! You give the best advice. I feel so much better. Thank you!”

That’s how it happened most of the time. But sometimes, her task was more complicated. These were the times the person would say “my
heart
tells me …” (or “my
gut
tells me”) but would then say something in a tone of voice that made it sound like the person wasn’t necessarily all that happy to be saying what he or she was saying.

The girl who gave great advice knew how to handle these situations, too. She would lower her head thirty degrees and then tilt it back up after two and a half seconds, and ask at a slightly slower pace in a slightly lower voice: “And what does your …” and then she would say either “gut” or
“heart,”
just whichever one she hadn’t said before. (This was the part she had to be most
careful about. Once, she had said the same word as she had the first time—“heart,” twice—and the whole thing fell apart.)

If her first piece of advice hadn’t worked, this second piece of advice always made everything all right. “Yes! Yes! Now I know what to do! You give the best advice!” everyone told her. “The best! Ever!”

Even though it seemed like her job was over, the girl who gave great advice knew she couldn’t join in the celebration just yet.

First, she had to tilt her head down thirty-seven and a half degrees; and then, after two and a half seconds, she had to look up at the person, nod slightly, raise both eyebrows at the same time, and smile.
Looks like you figured it out, huh?
was the message this conveyed. Even though the problem was already solved by this point, it was this follow-through that would keep them coming back for advice the next time.

After she was done with this part, she really was done, and she could do whatever she wanted to with her face. But she always did the same thing anyway: she smiled, a bright, true smile just for herself, because she really did love being the girl who gave great advice.

All You Have to Do

I wear a bright red T-shirt every single day.

I’ve been doing it for years.

That’s all you have to do to meet the girl of your dreams.

It sounds easy, doesn’t it?

It is. That’s exactly my point. Wearing a red T-shirt is the hardest part of it all, and it’s as easy as could be.

Once I have the red T-shirt on, I just live my life, exactly the way I want to live it. Maybe I take my dog for a walk in the park. If there’s a new bar or restaurant I’ve heard about, I might go and check that place out, and if there are any friends I want to catch up with, I might grab a bite or a drink there with them. But there’s also nothing wrong with going to a restaurant or bar by yourself—in some ways, that’s even better.

I wear one with a pocket, but it doesn’t matter. Bright red is the thing.

Then when you’re done living your life for the day, you just go to this website called Missed Connections and type in
red shirt
. Don’t put it in quotes, because some people might say “red T shirt” without a hyphen, and some others might spell it
t-e-e
or some other little variation. There’s no one right way to spell “T-shirt.” Isn’t that interesting? So anyway, just type
red shirt
. It
will take a little bit of extra time, but that way you’ll be sure not to miss anything.

Then you get to see who liked you. More important:
who liked you for you
. Not you changing your behavior to impress anyone or please anyone. Not you on “date behavior.” Just you being you. And anyone will tell you that’s the whole point. You want to meet someone who likes the same things you do, and who likes you most when you’re most being yourself, so that when you are in a relationship, the person will truly be compatible with the real you.

That’s all you have to do.

It really is that simple.

Now: when someone does contact you, and it seems like it might be a match, should you wear another shirt on the date besides the red T-shirt, so it doesn’t seem like you only have one shirt? Or should you wear the red T-shirt as always, in case the first date doesn’t go well and you want a simple way to check if you caught anyone else’s interest while you were out on the date?

That is a very interesting question, and one that I think about a lot. I will let you know what I do when that comes up.

’Rithmetic

The principal called everyone into the auditorium. Everyone K–8. The teachers and the students. Everyone. Not janitors.

“Everybody, I want you to quiet down and turn off your phones,” he said. People weren’t much quieter. “Nothing I say leaves this room. And if you tell anyone I said this, I’ll deny it.” They still weren’t totally quiet, but quiet enough for him to start.

“Does anybody
hate school
?” No one raised a hand, and whispered laughter again bubbled to the surface of the room.

The principal made an angry face, the kind of angry face people don’t fake. “Oh, bullshit! You all hate school!”

Now they were quiet.

The principal walked up to a whiteboard with three words on it.

“They say school teaches three things,” said the principal, pointing with his permanent marker. “Reading, Writing, and ’Rithmetic—short for ‘arithmetic.’ Which is something, of course, that you know from ‘Reading.’ ” He put his Sharpie at the beginning of the third word. “I think the problem,” he said, squeaking a line through it, “is ’Rithmetic.

“What’s the difference between this school and a happy retirement community?”

The room was silent again.

“The difference is ’rithmetic! A retired person living by the ocean, just doing a little reading and writing till the end of their days—that’s the dream, right? ‘What do you do all day?’ ‘Some reading, a little writing.’ Sounds idyllic, right? And yet school
sucks
. Everybody hates it. What’s the difference? ’Rithmetic! It’s time somebody put their finger on this fucking obvious thing. And I’m the principal, so I’m that person, and I’m going to abolish it. Now,” he said, looking for a glass of water to sip from and finding none, “now, are you going to be unprepared for some aspects of life? Probably. Yes. But you know what? You will have phones with calculators on them. You will have friends who can do math. My mom, God bless her—I love my mom, and she still doesn’t know whether a third of a cup of flour is bigger than a fourth of a cup. You know what she does? Is anybody here honestly wondering, Oh my God, how the hell does anything get baked?! Of course not, and you’re right not to worry. She asks my dad—he knows. Or these days, you ask Google or whatever you use nowadays; you find out in two seconds. And also, it’s the kind of thing you just pick up. Let’s say you’re working at a restaurant, and they offer you a ten percent raise. You’ll figure out what that means. You will! It’s just too interesting, it’s too relevant, it’s about you and money. You’re not going to let yourself get screwed.

“Now, do I wish you all knew math? Were
great
at math? Were fucking
mathematicians
? Of course! It’d be better. But not
much
better, listen to me. Not so much better that it’s worth turning eight years of potential heaven—wait, nine? K-one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight, yeah, nine”—he wasn’t, as was becoming clear, much of a math guy—“nine years of
heaven
of just reading great books and jotting down your thoughts about them—it’s just not worth turning nine years of heaven into nine
years of hell. You’ll get to high school, and you’ll be behind in math, fine. But probably not that far—the other schools in this town are shit, let’s be honest.”

Here there was a sound wave of school spirit:
“Whooo!”

“So you all get to high school, and, yes, you’re behind in math. But you’re so
happy
. Listen to me. This is so big-picture important. You’re
so
good at reading and writing. Okay? You write the most amazing college essay, you ace all your English and history and social studies classes—it’ll all even out. At
least
even out. Plus,” he said, “
plus
, you had the best eight years of your
life
! Childhood! Years you’ll always remember—hell, maybe you’ll even write a book about them—a beautiful one! So I’m just going to do this. I’m the principal. We are, now, a zero-mathematics school. See, you get what that means: zero, none. How did you know what ‘zero’ meant, just now? From your incredible math educations at Clark Street? No.
Life
. Context clues. See? So: who is ready to make school something that is only about reading and writing—reading fiction and the great true stories of history, and then writing about what’s cool and interesting about them? And also music and art and gym and all that stuff, and math teachers, don’t worry, you’ll keep your jobs, we’ll just put you on other stuff. But mostly, reading and writing. How about it? How about we go for this plan and have the happiest, and most literate, kids in the state—
come what may!
”

The students and many teachers cheered.

“Now I need to know you’re all in on this,” said the principal, lowering his tone. “Because you are giving up your math educations. That could be a serious thing. I don’t want you guys running up to me, crying, ‘Mr. McLaughlin, Principal McLaughlin, we didn’t learn maaaaath, now we can’t get into colllllllege.’ You just won’t know math. Are you really fine with that? Is anyone not okay with that?”

One small hand went up. A few bigger hands clapped for the small hand.

“Arush? You want to learn math?”

The boy’s head nodded.

“What if we set you up with a private tutor? Would that be okay?”

The boy nodded again and the hand went back down.

“Does anyone else want private math tutoring after school and on weekends? No one wants that, right? I really think you’ll all be fine,” said the principal quickly. “I promise. I really do believe in this plan. I just needed to say that, full disclosure, etcetera. But it looks like you guys are on board, right? I think this is a good decision, I really do. An exciting one! So from this moment onward: I declare, no more math! This is a math-free school! Do you want that, Clark Street K–8? Do you want to say NO … MORE … MATH … EVER?!”

The auditorium shook with cheers. All the children got swept away in it, even the ones who had secretly liked math, their shy enthusiasms for the shapes of numbers and the comfort of order suddenly crushed to death forever by this unprecedented force of peer and authority pressure teaming up on them together, in a surprise attack, right in the middle of their auditorium, where nothing interesting had ever happened before.

“All right. Now, nobody can say anything,” said the principal. “Okay?”

The students nodded. Some waved a finger across their lips vertically to indicate
shhhh
, some waved a finger horizontally to indicate
lips are sealed
, and the rest of the students, most of them, waved their fingers in front of their faces in a vague, circular pattern that was their best attempt to copy what they could make out of the gestures around them.

“Nobody says
anything
.”

They nodded again.

Everybody said everything.

Soon the principal was fired.

The principal didn’t care. He was sick of it, sick of all of it. He figured something like this would probably happen. But he might as well go out this way, right? That’s what he figured. He had been at this job for a long time, and he was done. Whether the years had finally cracked his spirit, or had finally cracked the shell around his spirit—who was to say, and, really, who cared.

He retired to a house by the beach in Florida and spent the rest of his days reading and writing.

The Ambulance Driver