A Year in the Life of a Complete and Total Genius by Stacey Matson Read Free Book Online Page A

assignment is merely an unfortunate coincidence, and not because you helped Robbie with his assignment this week.
    Ms. Whitehead
    â€¢ • •
    December 10th
    Dear RJ,
    I can’t win. Ms. Whitehead hates me. She’s made it pretty clear. I think she must have been secretly heartbroken by a famous author when she was young. I bet she met him in college and he told her she was pretty, and then broke up with her because she told him that his work was lazy. But he was just being deep without using a lot of words. Lots of famous writers let things stay below the surface. Or maybe he thought that the assignment was stupid and not worth his time. That happens. Then she probably got all mad at him about it, and he realized that she would always be telling him that his writing sucked and that he was being lazy. So he dumped her. And now she’s taking it out on me. I bet I remind her of him because I wear cool hats and show promise as a famous writer. She’s jealous of my talent. I bet she never wrote anything good ever. She’ll never choose my story for the school competition, even if it is the best one, I know it. Well, I’ll show her. My story is going to be way better than all of them. It will be better than her stupid “brilliant” Shakespeare, because no one understands that, and no one cares about the stupid diary entries of an old play.
    Yours truly,
    Arthur Bean
    â€¢ • •
    Assignment: Holiday Free-Form Writing
    Happy holidays! In this assignment I want you to indulge your creative spirit! There are no boundaries, no structure, and no rules here; just write something you want to write. It can be a poem, a short story, a diary entry of a fictional character, a memoir from your childhood—anything that inspires you to write! Let your inner artist soar on the paper!
    Due: December 15
    â€¢ • •
    December 15th
    Dear RJ,
    Here’s a thing I wrote for Ms. Whitehead’s class, but then I decided not to hand it in. I don’t think it’s very good, so I’m going to hand in something different. But I wanted to put this somewhere, and you seem like the kind of guy who would appreciate it. Let me know what you think… Ha-ha-ha!
    Yours truly,
    Arthur Bean
    A Christmas Story
    My dad bought a Christmas tree this past weekend. He went to the lot and picked it out while I stayed home and watched whatever movie was on TV on Sunday afternoon. When he came home, he left it sitting on top of the car until dinner, when I saw it and said, “Hey, Dad. There’s a tree on the car.” He mumbled something about it being an impulse buy. He even bought a stand even though I know we already have one somewhere. I guess now we have two. But I didn’t say anything. I just helped him pull it off the car, and we set it up in the living room, right beside the television.
    There were old sitcom reruns playing on the television the whole time. I made us mac and cheese, and my dad had a beer and watched TV. He never picked up the remote control to change the channel, he just sat there watching the television on the same channel I had been watching, and I listened to the sounds of canned laughter as I stirred in the cheese. As the tree warmed up, it dropped its branches and began to lean to the left, and soon half of the tree was blocking the television. I noticed it during dinner, but I didn’t say anything. I don’t think my dad noticed. We just sat there with our empty plates covered in drying cheese sauce on the floor beside the couch.
    After a couple of days, I asked my dad if we were going to decorate it, but he said that he didn’t know where Mom had kept the decorations. So the tree sits in the living room, blocking the television. Its needles are falling off, and we haven’t watered it in days. It is empty of lights and balls and glittery tin soldiers and nutcrackers, but still full of the memories of Christmases past.
    Yours truly,
    Arthur