“Are you a chicken?” she asked, pen poised over a blank piece of paper.
“Nope, unless it has to do with heights,” I replied, getting comfortable in the chair.
“So, you’re not an actual egg-laying, sometimes tasty fowl?”
“No, I am not.”
She jotted something down on the paper.
“Are you stupid?”
I thought about this for a bit.
“I’ve done some stupid things in my life, like thinking I could get rich selling Grit door to door. But I can do things with numbers and know words.”
She jotted down something else.
“Plus I rarely drool,” I added.
More jotting.
“Are you dirty?” she asked.
“Well….sometimes. I’ve seen some JC Penney catalogs back in the day, and some of those pictures gave me….thoughts.”
Jotting some more.
“I shower at least once a week. Water conservation, don’t you know.”
A jot.
“Are you a bastard?” she asked next.
A tear rolled down my face,
“I read the series,” I replied softly.
“John Jakes?” she asked, looking excited.
“Yes!” I exclaimed, as excited as her.
“Let’s name them in order!” she said, laying down her pen.
She stood up.
I stood up.
“The Bastard!” we yelled in unison.
“The Rebels!” we yelled, throwing our hands in that air.
“The Seekers!” we yelled, now hopping around.
We both fell to the floor.
“The Furies!”
We somersaulted around.
“The Titans!”
We lay still.
“The Warriors!”
We got up on one knee and stuck our heads between our thighs.
“The Lawless!” we yelled, but it was obviously a bit muffled.
We leapt to our feet and jumped as high as we could.
“The Americans!”
We both crashed to the floor and giggled.
Then we got up and slow danced with each other.
“And those are the Kent Family Chronicles,” we murmured in each others ears.
We finished that dance.
She sat down behind her desk and picked up her pen.
I got comfortable in my chair.
“My mother wasn’t married when she birthed me,” I said as an afterthought.
She looked stunned and sighed as she wrote something down.
She lay down the pen and looked at me.
I waited.
