There was absolutely nothing extraordinary about George Roach. She was neither tall nor short, her hair was neither light nor dark, and her eyes were of a color that could be called neither brown nor green; instead they seemed to settle reluctantly for being a watered-down shade of hazel. Of course, the color of her eyes was of little consequence, as they were frequently hidden behind a pair of thick-framed squarish glasses....
Now, you should know that the first sentence of this chapter is not absolutely true, which is often the case with sentences that have the word "absolutely" in them. If there is one thing to learn in life, it is that you should be suspicious of sentences that say absolutely this or that. There were exactly three extraordinary things about George Roach.
First, there was her name. There are not many eleven-year-olds in this world who are burdened with a name like Georgette Roach. Her parents named her after a great-great-great grandmother Georgette, a sturdy, fiery frontier woman who drove her own wagon across the plains and built her own home with logs felled by her own sturdy hands. Of that Georgette it was said that, upon seeing a visitor approaching in the distance, she could kill a chicken, pluck it, gut it, stuff it, and have it in the oven by the time the visitor arrived. Probably George's parents thought the name a gift, one that would infuse the baby girl with the guts and toughness of ...
But this George was nothing like that George, and so the name wasn't a gift after all, but a burden--simply an annoyance of unwanted attention on the first day of school each year.
Second, George was an extraordinary reader. She read constantly and she read voraciously, and if you were looking for George, you would most likely find her.... But, of course, as George would remark, saying someone is an extraordinary reader is like saying she is an extraordinary breather or an extraordinary eater. It's something you tell someone when you can't really think of anything she's actually good at. It's something her mother would say when George brought home another dismal report card: "But you're such a good reader."
Now the third extraordinary thing is something you don't know yet, is indeed something George herself didn't know yet, and is in fact something George might never have known, had not something extraordinary happened to George that summer before she started middle school: a boy named Max moved into the house around the corner.
...If George were reading this book right now, as you are, she would have tossed the book down in irritation. It always irritated her when authors put their main characters in a position of mild peril, and then took away their glasses. But that is neither here nor there, as it is you, not George, reading this book, and George was, at this moment, in a position of mild peril, crawling around on her hands and knees, looking for her glasses.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
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