Nothing Is Terrible by Matthew Sharpe Page A

away.
    “But it’s only six-thirty.”
    She turned and came back to the doorway. “Oh, well, then, I’ll fix us some dinner. I’ll prepare those flounder fillets I bought at the farmers’ market.”
    “Skippy?”
    “Yes?”
    “You can’t prepare anything because the stove got all burnt to a crisp.”
    “It did?”
    “In the fire.”
    “Yes, the fire.” Skip’s pink face was dazed. “I hope you had fun with your friends. I so want you to be happy.”
    “Skippy-doo?”
    “Yes?”
    “I love you.”
    “Come to me,” she said. I did.

4      I Am Stuck
    On the morning of what would have been the first day of school, Skip Hartman and I attempted to begin my home schooling. I had a stomachache.
    We sat in her book room, I in my Snoopy pajamas and she in one of her silk and linen teaching outfits, which she called “a bulwark against the boundarylessness of this household.” She tried to give me a lesson in English literature.
    “Let us begin at the beginning of the world,” she said.
    “With swirling hot gases?” I asked.
    “With Shakespeare,” she said.
    “Oh, yeah, I remember him from when I was in school.”
    “And I suppose that you wish you were in school now?”
    “I suppose that I wish I were in heaven.”
    “ ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame,’ ” Skip Hartmansaid, “ ‘Is lust in action, and till action, lust / Is perjur’d, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame, / Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust.’
    “What do you think of the opening lines of this poem, Mary?”
    “I think I have a stomachache. Could I go to the park?”
    “I’d prefer if you didn’t.”
    “I’d prefer if I did.”
    We were sitting next to each other on chairs in the book room, the oaken floor spreading out all around us.
The Riverside Shakespeare
, volume 2, opened to pages 1772 and 1773, lay in her lap. She stared at me. She reached out and brushed a lock of black hair away from my eyes. It fell in front of my eyes when she let go of it. She brushed it away again and it fell back again, and she brushed it away and it fell back. “Ach,” she said, which seemed to be a comment on the uselessness of, for example, trying to brush my hair away from my eyes.
    “Go,” she said.
    “I need money.”
    “What for?”
    “Hot dog.”
    “You have a stomachache.”
    “What if it goes away?”
    She gave me a dollar.
    “That’s it?”
    “How much do you want?”
    “Fifteen.”
    “What for?”
    “Harry says you can’t leave the house with less than fifteen, just like you can’t leave the house without ID because if someoneruns you over and kills you the police won’t know who you are.”
    “Here’s ten.”
    “So anyway, is this that discussion we were going to have where I own everything that you own?”
    “Here’s another twenty.” She walked out of the room.
    The weather was cloudy and hot and damp. I went to the same place that Dierdre and Harry and I had gone to the day before. I stopped at the long, thin area of concrete where the people had skated. Today there were only three skaters and no music, except the high, thin, rhythmic noise that came from the tiny speakers they all had inserted in their ears. These people were committed athletic skaters and serious loners, skating around and around privately behind their sunglasses on an overcast Tuesday afternoon near the end of summer.
    The tall, skinny black boy who had sold pot to Harry the day before was pressing the top of the low fence around the Sheep Meadow with his elongated forearms. He gazed out at the vast, sparsely populated lawn. “Hey,” I said.
    His body stiffened. He pretended not to have heard me. “Excuse me,” I said, nudging his arm, “do you have pot?”
    “Do I have what?”
    “Pot. Marijuana.”
    He stood and turned to me. “What do I look like to you?”
    “Like the guy who sold my friend marijuana yesterday.”
    “I see. You saw a black man sell marijuana to your friend here yesterday, and