Read Online Larque on the Wing by Nancy Springer - Free Book Online

and she chose her college accordingly. For three years her choice of career was the only demonstrable effect of her meetings with the Wiccan Circle.
    In autumn of her senior year, at a powder-puff football game, she met Jeff Harootunian, a new student who was cheerleading for the freshman-sophomore team. All through college she had been conducting a discreet search for owlish men of Scottish descent, qualities she had learned to loathe. This blond giant was distinctly neither. She fell at once wildly in love with him for the length of his sturdy legs, the flair with which he wore his pleated skirt, and the utter conviction with which he defended his falsies, balloons begging to be popped. She was playing tight end, which earned her some kidding, but not from him. He noticed her, she could tell, but he had a kind of sublimity about him that elevated him above yelling such things as, “Great ball handling!”
    She played flag football for all she was worth, but his team won because they cheated. Afterward, at the party, to which she took care to wear her shortest minidress, she went up to him and told him so.
    â€œMy classmates, right or wrong,” he informed her.
    He had changed into jeans but was still wearing beneath his sweater one unpopped balloon, a badge of honor. At the time Larque had formidable fingernails. She reached out and dispatched it. “Why’d you do that?” he asked, aggrieved.
    â€œSo we can dance.”
    On the dance floor he moved like he had a stick up his ass. Had there ever been such a thing as a heterosexual man who really knew how to dance? Larque decided it would be better to try to talk with him, and they took a walk to get away from the party noise, and they lost track of time, and she nearly missed curfew. Every night that week she nearly missed curfew. They were seeing each other all the time, and she was simultaneously ecstatic at having found him and heartbroken with dread of losing him—which had to happen, because he was the wrong one. He was Pennsylvania Dutch, not Scottish. He had nothing to do with fireworks or dandelions, and he was anything but owlish. Any moment they were together it might happen, she would slip up, she wouldn’t be able to keep from thinking about his body, and oops, doppelganger time. Then it would be all over. He was not the one the Wiccans had foreseen for her; he would not be able to cope. He would run like water.
    She spent every minute she could with him, collecting memories like flowers to press.
    On the Saturday evening of their one-week anniversary, on a special date, they were walking across campus when a dorm mate jeered out a window at Jeff, “Hey, Hoot! Still trying to score? You’re in big trouble, man.”
    To hell with the insulting content of this remark. Hoot?
    â€œHoot?” she gasped. “Is that what they call you? Hoot?”
    â€œYep.”
    She laughed, she pealed out wedding bells of laughter, not because the name was comical but because all had been lost and now was found. Scottish, schmottish! The turbaned woman had seen his silly little kilt of a cheerleading skirt. The thing on the computer screen had been a powder puff.
    She calmed down just enough to speak. “Hoot,” she asked him, “what is your opinion of doppelgangers?”
    â€œI firmly support all First Amendment rights. What’s a doppelganger?”
    â€œYou’ll find out. Can we get married?”
    He quit college to do it. Said he had no idea what he was supposed to accomplish in college anyway. Larque invited the members of the Ladies’ Witchcraft Circle to be her matrons of honor: the poodle-haired housewife, the black woman in her turban, the redheaded computer programmer, the sleek society woman. Her mother, who was now a Baptist, wanted a church wedding, but Larque insisted on a barefoot back-to-nature hippie affair in a county park. After which she and Hoot moved into a far-from-nature fifth-floor