Showmanship

13 - Pop, A Wishbone, and Playdough Animals

Pop

"My ears have been, like, sticky."

"Excuse me?"

"Sticky."

My sister glared at me through the computer screen. A blue light lit up her face, showing the pimple on the right side of her nose. The rest of the house lights were off, meaning she was probably supposed to be asleep.

"Do you mean you feel congested?" Marge asked, playing with a slinky she got off her desk.

"No it's not a permanent thing-"

"Normal congestion isn't a permanent thing," she answered.

"I think it's the altitude," I said before she got on WebMD looking up my systems. Last time she did that we almost decided I had colon cancer and my anxiety almost sent me to the hospital.

"Oh!" Marge let out. I thought she had found an article that would tell me I was dying in a minute. "So you need to pop your ears."

Pop, like how a ballon popped. Why would I want something inside me to pop? Why would anyone use that as a descriptive word?

"Is that what they call it?" I asked. "Is that like an American thing."

She sighed. "That's a human thing, James."

"Well that's stupid," I said, an edge of discomfort to my voice. "Why would you want to describe something as popping? Popping indicates that something exploded. I would be indicating that my ear exploded."

Marge rubbed her head. She slowly realized that it was more work to talk to me than that calculus problem she had been procrastinating. "Oh my god. Please stop."

"Google it," I suggested, though it came out more like a command.

Which is why Marge got defensive. "Why me?" But I saw her start to type on her laptop.

Silence.

"Don't forget punctuation," I reminded.

More silence.

"And capitalizing-"

"James!" She whined. The she leaned back on her desk chair, staring blankly at her screen. "Oh my god. All google is giving me is homophone examples."

I started to get flashbacks from my angry Irish history teacher with the bad blonde hair.

"Kindergarten has ruined everything," Marge mumbled. Scrolling through the suggestion, she was still on the hunt for an answer.

Though I think I realized why the blondeness of my old teacher frightened me so much. She wasn't kind, seriously! Where laugh lines should've have been, there was a frown. She never was happy or fun, and at the time I had dealt with enough of that at home.

Not like Dorothy who, when I think about it, is a lot like that old teacher. She's brash and stubborn and blonde. Maybe that teacher wasn't so horrible? Maybe it was someone else who was horrible? After packing so much inside me, I had to store the anger somewhere else.

"Do you remember dad old lawyer?" Marge asked. She stared at her phone when I looked up at the video chat. "The one white guy who only knew how to read Japanese."

Somehow I hadn't repressed that. The man was hard to forget. "Yeah." Her expression had become worrisome. She had become stressed, though so many things do stress our family out.

"Why?" I asked. I started to feel weird. The air got tense around me. Palpable. It's like the dry electricity on the air before a storm.

What storm was heading my way?