fiefoe

A teenager's lot:

A week later in prayers Mr. Rosser gave us all a lecture about pornography. He said it was a plastic primrose and not the real thing at all.
Nightingale and I were still friends and still told the old jokes sometimes. But we had to put aside the way we used to be almost in love in a way that did not touch.
My father had gone supernova. Bright meteors from the explosion spread out through my mind. For the rest of my life, those meteors would be finding their way in from distant orbits. They'd burst open and make me remember the things they had been hiding. Memories would flare up clearly and return return me for a moment to the time when he was alive. Then the picture would burn out, as quickly and unexpectedly as it had appeared. My father would never be whole again. From now on, there were only meteors.
It made me sad to think that my greatest pleasure was to buy cheese and bread and coffee and sit on my windowsill, hearing distant people laughing in the dark. I wondered if I'd ever meet a girl and fall in love. I wondered what she look like and where she was now and how our paths would cross. If I could just see her, I thought, just catch a glimpse of her and know that someday we'd meet up, I wouldn't feel as bad as I did then.
The outside world seemed a cold and distant place. The traveling and parties and epic love affairs that we allowed ourselves to dream about were never meant to find a place in what was real. We all knew the truth, that the outside world wasn't distant at all. But we still couldn't reach it, except for brief moments on the weekends. We had to wait with the patience of statues for the time when we could bust out and wallow in the things we had imagined.
It seemed that all of us were beginning to ask questions that we had never asked before. Even Rupert, who at first mistook his confusion for some kind of insult, although he couldn't think who had insulted him.

Misc:

I found out that it was only the true things that could cut you and keep returning over the years to cut just as painfully as they did the first time.
It could have been said that people were basically the same everywhere, but there were always subtle differences, and never so subtle that the differences could be ignored.
I once heard that no enemy prisoner ever escaped from England during the last war, partly because it was an island, but also because the English could pick out the slightest trace of a foreign accent or the tiniest inaccuracy of dress.
Another time, when it had snowed outside, I was given a garbage can and told to bring it back filled with snow. Once I'd done that, the senior boys had a snowball fight inside the Library and I had to clean up the mess.

Many thanks to a lady who knows for getting both this and "Paris Out of Hand" onto my reading list. (Bonus Amazon list.)

[Query]: Do weathermen ever get bribes?