The Virginity of Famous Men by Christine Sneed

Author:Christine Sneed [Sneed, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620406977
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-07-04T04:00:00+00:00

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You have a mice problem was the first thing he said to me. Then he said, “No, no. I mean, I have a mice problem.” He confused I and you sometimes. Once in a while he also confused stoplights with streetlights and this had caused him a couple of worse problems than mixing up his pronouns. As for his mouse hang-up, he had to have known that I’d be curious. What normal person wouldn’t be? I considered myself normal and had for a long time. But if your switchboard wasn’t in full working order, one thing you might do is take detours that end with you knocking on the door to some stranger’s toolshed or the padlocked entrance to the movie house that closed down three years ago, though faded boxes of Good & Fruity and Goobers still sit inside its display case. Josh had taken a detour like this at least once that I knew of: on his way to the store one afternoon, he got it into his head to drive to his old elementary school and sit in the parking lot playing his leg like a piano until someone came out and made him leave.

He might have been a little off, but he didn’t say cruel things to people, not on purpose, and his pronoun dyslexia had started after he was whacked in the head with a baseball bat in gym during his last year in high school, which had scrambled up more than his pronouns for a while. He went colorblind for a couple of months, and a few times he had to be stopped from chewing on kitchen sponges and tinfoil. He also couldn’t stop calling his mother Robert for several weeks, which was the name of the kid who almost accidentally broke his skull. She didn’t like this because she thought it was his way of saying that he blamed her for the accident, even though she hadn’t been anywhere near the school when it happened. As usual, she’d been at home, where she worked in a little room off the kitchen, sewing placemats and tablecloths and kitchen aprons for sale in gift shops for rich people who couldn’t or didn’t want to sew their own.

As for the mouse problem, it wasn’t even close to what I expected. Along with the other side effects, the head injury sometimes made him blurt things out, but not like people with Tourette’s did. It wasn’t dirty words or angry yelling, nothing that would have gotten him in trouble with his teachers or his boss if he’d had one at the time. He just didn’t know how to put his thoughts in the right order and it took a couple of years for most of the kinks to straighten out again. He was still recovering from his messed-up brain when we started going out, and I finally realized what he meant by the mice. He’d confused them with cats. The truth was, he had a cat problem: he was allergic to them.

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