The Broken Teaglass by Emily Arsenault Read Free Book Online Page B

happened to me all day, although I did get ‘ass-wipe’ in my stack of citations today, so I shouldn’t complain. Not that there were enough cits to justify bothering with a definition. But—” I saw Mona’s mouth open to say something, but I didn’t let her.
“But
. These
Teaglass
things, they’re two cits in—what? Ten million? Why do you care so much?”
    “You know how you said you don’t like reading just the little pieces of articles we get in the cits? It sucks, always just getting to read a few sentences and thinking,
Now
that
sounds interesting
. In the beginning, I used to write down the names and dates of articles with the intention of going to the public library sometime and looking them up. But I never did. You get used to it. You learn to be able to find something intriguing for a second, and then let it go.”
    “It doesn’t seem like you’ve quite learned how to do that yet.”
    “Well, I was about to say that these cits are different. This is the one story I want to finish.
This
story is driving me crazy. Because I know it’s not just hacked out of some magazine. There’s no way to go to the library and look it up. It’s
because
there’s no clear way to find the rest that I care. And it’s so obviously written by someone who works at Samuelson. You can tell. This person is tired of that office, with all of its intellectual, socially inept automatons. Sick of all the silent judgment, and
sticking
it to the place. Don’t you think that’s intriguing?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Sticking it to the dictionary man.”
    “And then the next cit is about some personal story. Maybe about the same person, who knows? But don’t you want to know? Maybe two editors are communicating. Maybe—”
    The waitress approached with Mona’s large sundae and my sherbet.
    “Is he gonna help you with that?” the waitress asked as she placed the sundae on the table. Mona seemed to bliss out for a moment, fixing her gaze on the cherry-less white peak in front of her.
    “Nope,” I said, answering for Mona. “It’s all hers.”
    “I don’t know about that. Where’s she gonna put it all?” The waitress examined Mona and chuckled at her own joke. “You guys need anything else?”
    “No, I think we’re all set,” I said.
    Mona was silent.
    “What a snatch,” Mona said as soon as the waitress was out of earshot.
    “She was just trying to be friendly.”
    “Waitrons should never refer to the size of their customers. Large or small.”
    Mona began working her way through the mound of whipped cream in silence. I puzzled over her use of the word
waitron
, which came out of her mouth without a trace of irony. Perhaps a vestige of her PC girls’ school education. A weird accompaniment to her first designation for our waitress.
    After a few bites of chocolate ice cream, Mona said, “Maybe ‘snatch’ was a little harsh.”
    “Maybe.”
    “Anyway. The bottom line is I’m a sucker for a juicy story, and this looks like it might be one. And if we’ve seen two in just a couple of months, there must be more.”
    “Interesting logic. Those two could just as easily be the only two that exist.”
    “Right. But c’mon. I don’t think so. And I want to figure out how to find more of them.”
    “Well, that’s simple. You go to the first file drawer. You start at ‘aardvark,’ and just start flippin’ your way through—”
    “That’s ridiculous. I have a lot of free time at the office, but not
that
kind of free time.”
    “You tried the editors’ library. And Amazon. And, what else? Library of Congress? Where else are you going to look now but in the cit file?”
    “Yes, but there must be a way to do it intelligently. I think the only way to do that is to look closer at
these two cits
.” Mona waved the cits dramatically as she spoke.
    “It looks to me like you’ve already been spending a little too much time looking at those things.”
    “What I’m getting at … if you will listen