4
" Kipster is a perfectly valid word,” Wendy argued, about to write down her score on the little notepad that had come with the game. “Okay, so what does it mean?” Mandy wanted to know. Wendy struggled to come up with an answer, and finally just changed the subject with school gossip. Mandy found herself just ignoring it… it always sounded the same, the same events, same rumors, same secrets, same affairs, but never anything of interest to her.“Well Sarah’s on drugs again and that’s why she did it in Mario’s backseat, but now she might be pregnant, oh, and that messed-up Seth kid’s been cutting himself again so he was sent away to Halifax last week, and there’s a festival in Wolfville but Kathy won’t go because Audrey-Rose is going to be there and they hate each other, and….”Mandy had learned two years ago to detach herself from gossip; she’d learned it from Jud’s death. Wendy may have been eighteen years old but she could be immature on the best of days. "
5
" Did somebody die?”“Yes,” I replied.“Who?” he asked, starting to freak out. I pulled out my notepad and asked him if he knew a Marcie Tucker. “Marcie? Hm, Marcie, it doesn't ring a bell but… Oh yeah, the temp who's filling in while my regular assistant is out, I think her name is Marcie. In fact, she was supposed to be here today. I was actually starting to worry that… Wait. Is she…”“Unfortunately yes,” I said, “Marcie was found in her apartment late last night uh… no longer alive.” My bedside manner has never been my strong suit.Dr. Taggart looked distressed and began to ramble incoherently for a minute. I let him work through it though, I figured it was his way of grieving. I wouldn't have even paid attention to it except for the fact that it was kind of goofily, ineptly… well, poignant:" Oh, uh, Oh my God. That's terrible. I uh… I hope she didn't have any family. I mean, I don't hope she didn't have any family, what I mean is, if she uh… if she didn't have any family then there would be nobody to get all bummed out about this and uh… you know, when something like this happens, you always think about the poor, heartbroken family, so uh… if she doesn't have any family then uh… the bright side would be that nobody would, you know, have to be all bummed out." Hm. I guess I never thought of it that way. Awkward wording aside, he's kind of got a point there. "
9
" Since you haven’t got a name,” he said. “I guess you can pick one for yourself. Would you like to pick one for me to write down?”
She stopped rocking and looked at him. “I can do that? It’s legal and everything?”
He smiled. “It’s a free country again,” he said. “At least in theory.”
She nodded. “And when I pick a name it can be any name I want?”
He nodded.
“What’s your name?”
“Victor,” he said. “Vic, for short.”
“Okay,” she said, leaning forward and taking the pad from under his large thing hands. “How do you spell that?”
He spelled it and she wrote it down. Her handwriting was perfectly small and legible. “Can I be Victor, too?” she said, looking up from the pad.
He smirked. “It’s a boy’s name,” he said. “You’re a girl. You have to add an i and an a to the end if you want to make it a girl’s name.”
She looked down at the name she had written and added the letters i and a to the end. “Victoria,” she said, passing the notepad back to the cop.
“Hello, Victoria,” he said, smiling, taking the pad and pen back and presenting his hand for a shake. “It’s nice to meet you, officially. "
― Benjamin R. Smith , Atlas
