Corner Books. It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to open a bookstore and I’m thrilled so many of you are here this evening,” Jefferson began.
Roy shifted on his stool. It was almost time.
“Without further ado, I’m delighted to introduce one of my all-time favorite authors—I’m still pinching myself that he’s here in my little store. You know him from Blue, Yellow, Green, Purple, and the smash hit Orange, which The New Yorker described as Bridget Jones meets Waiting for Godot The Guardian has said of him, ‘If Jane Austen froze her eggs and one of them was impregnated by both Albert Camus and Tim Robbins, this author would be the brainchild.’ The New York Times calls him ‘Kafka for millennials and way, way funnier.’ An absurdist and a realist, a master of the microscope. No one understands the tragedy, the humor, and the romance in the everyday better than this guy. If you’ve read or seen the part in Orange when Mark stops up the toilet with marmalade, you know what I’m talking about. Boxed sets of the Roy Clarke Rainbow and individual titles are all available here tonight. Please welcome Roy Clarke.”
Roy looked up. Jefferson applauded with the crowd and backed into his seat. His introduction had been rather too swift, Roy thought. He sat up straighter, crossed and uncrossed, then recrossed his legs. Bloody uncomfortable stool. He cleared his throat and looked out at the audience.
At one end of the first row, next to her mother, sat his daughter Shy, her knees squeezed together, eyes on the wooden floorboards, vibrating up and down like she needed the toilet. Next to Shy, Jefferson beamed up at Roy through his beard. Wendy beamed up at Roy from beneath her blond fringe with a sort of pert but docile admiration he didn’t recognize. Roy opened his copy of Orange and thumbed through it in search of the firemen scene. He didn’t know the exact page number, but at some point he’d written a stream of foul words. That was what he looked for.
The firemen were chopping through a burning building with axes. Smoking embers stung their eyes. They could barely breathe. Like drunken fraternity brothers, they shouted out and explained the dirtiest, most disgusting sexual acts they’d ever heard of with cheerful camaraderie. Later on in the scene they did a full analysis of Julia Roberts’s entire acting career, starting with Mystic Pizza, which was their favorite. It was this scene that had won Roy’s writing critical accolades such as, “witty, sexy fun,” and “a man’s book you can take home to Mother.”
“I think I’ll read straight off and get to know you later,” Roy said without looking up. Titters of laughter. A few whoops. A whistle. He’d been told that he always came off sounding “very cool” at his readings, which was odd, because speaking in front of large groups of people made him sweat so much he was required to wear black or navy blue so no one would see.
Rusty Trombone. Mississippi Hot Pocket. Dirty Sanchez. Glory Hole. Julia Roberts. Mystic Pizza. Pretty Woman. Notting Hill.
There it was, the Dirty Words Firemen Scene. For a fleeting second Roy worried that Shy was about to be mortified. But she was fifteen. She’d watched the marmalade toilet scene from Orange. Nothing could possibly surprise her now. He cracked the spine and began to read.
PART I SEPTEMBER
Chapter 1
A MESSAGE FROM NURSE PEACHES
Welcome back, PS 919 peeps!
Thanks for returning your pediatric examination forms. If your child has specific medical requirements, please give me a holler.
Moving on to nastier things: EIGHT students have been sent down to me with lice. These are cases that began over the summer and are still lingering. Don’t let them linger on your child’s head. Now’s the time to comb through your child’s hair with thick white conditioner such as Pantene. If lice are present, they will be visible in the white stuff. A cursory visual inspection of dry hair is not effective, and those lice treatment kits from the drugstore are full of poison and do not work! Instructions on how to perform a proper comb-through are all over YouTube. Come by my office for a good-quality $10 lice comb. Proceeds go to our PTA. There are also professional “lice ladies” who can remove the bugs and nits from your child’s hair for a fee. I have a list of names and numbers. Feel free to call or email me, or stop by my office with any