lastcenturioness20

 "Don't look now, but we've got a weird one," Olive Snook sings out of the corner of her mouth as she enters the kitchen. She keeps glancing back to the tables just surreptitiously enough to be completely conspicuous, but Chuck is elbow-deep in flour and sugar and busily filling a batch of cup-pies, and so doesn't notice. Doesn't even look up. "Weird, huh? Why, what's his order? You did tell him it would be a wait of . . . seven minutes more for the rhubarb to be ready, right?" "That's the thing," Olive says with relish. "He didn't order anything. Or, well, he did, but not a pie." "Huh?" Chuck straightens up from the counter with a quiz

There was a typewriter on the console now--a typewriter--and at first he tried to type in his destination: E-A-(pecking with his two long index fingers at the flat little keys, marveling at the new knobbiness of his knuckles, at the new, inexplicable urge he felt to nibble at the cuticles)-R-T-H-(the 'H' was sticking slightly already; he made a little joke about how even the best cosmetic surgery cannot hide a woman's true age and then had to leap backwards with a yelp from a lever which suddenly and mysteriously fell of its own accord and rapped him smartly across his nice new knuckles)-M-O-O-N. As it turned out, however, the typewriter had

 They had it all wrong--his Mum, and his Dad, and all the other schoolchildren watching from behind the hedgerows or the top of the monkey bars, hooting and jeering and tossing bits of bark and gravel to distract him. They all thought that the only reason why he played the game was because he fancied her. That wasn't it at all. Or, well, perhaps it was partially true, but confused pre-pubescent infatuation wasn't enough on its own to make him don her father's old blue dress shirt (which she had cut haphazard holes in with her sharp little craft scissors) and necktie and filch his own father's screwdriver from the tool kit and use up an enti