Read Online Undercover by Beth Kephart - Free Book Online

never occurred to me—never once—that she could be an ally.
    “So let’s begin with this,” she was saying. “What are a writer’s two best friends?”
    Writers don’t have friends, I almost said. That’s how they get to be writers. But instead I guessed the obvious. “The imagination?”
    “Yes.” She nodded. “And words.” The crisscross of lines on her face smoothed to stillness. There was actually a little color in her face. And now she removed a book from the top of one pile and walked around to my side of her desk. “This,” she told me, “is my own Book of Words. I started it when I was about your age, and I’m still adding to it.”
    She placed what she’d been holding in my hand. It was a dull-gray journal with a ton of what seemed to be coffee mug stains on the front and a dark-blue spine that was ungluing at one end. Inside it had words and definitions written in a thousand different colors. Sometimes the words were in cursive, sometimes they were not. Every once in a while there was some one long thing set out in quotation marks, or a bunch of arrows chasing each other in a circle. None of the entries were alphabetical. You’dhave had to remember where you’d put them in the first place ever to find them all over again.
    “Cool,” I said.
    “I have so many favorite words,” she went on, but not really to me. I slipped off my backpack, sat down in Margie’s chair, and opened up the journal. I flipped the pages backward and forward, forward and back, then finally stopped at one:
    Minion —best to use when expressing contempt
    Feckless : See Mark Lawson
    ERSTWHILE is former, but ERSATZ is inferior.
    N e g a t I v e C a p a b I l I t y = see John Keats, October 27, 1818
    Temerity is more abrasive than audacity .
    “When,” I asked Dr. Charmin, looking up at last, “did you write this page?” It hardly resembled her chalkboard writing. There were cross-outs andsmudge marks. It was messy.
    She came toward me and I gave her the book. She flipped back a few pages and squinted. “That was 1974,” she said, after she’d decoded something. “Freshman year of college.”
    “Oh,” I said. I couldn’t picture that. I couldn’t picture her in jeans or anything. I couldn’t picture her being younger than she was. I needed work, it was clear, on my imagination. “What did you do with the words?” I asked her.
    “I learned them,” she said. “I made them part of me. I used them to help me understand the world—and then I used them to name things. That’s what writers do. And that’s what you are—a writer.”
    “So the words belong to you?” I asked her, thinking about my pond, thinking about the marble girl in the bottom of the pond, reading the book that had no words.
    “No. The words belong to anyone. To anyone who cares. And I think you care, Elisa.”
    I felt my whole face go hot, the skin turn red beneath my freckles, my hair doing a triple somersault away from my head. I could hear the minute hand of the classroom clock tocking off the time and the sound of a basketball being warmed up in the gym across the hall. Dr. Charmin herself was frighteningly quiet, just standing there with her arms folded across her chest, waiting for something. Waiting for me to say the right next thing, I guess, but how could I know what that was?
    “I like to write metaphors,” I finally confessed. “And similes. I like to take what I find and make it an equation. Like colors are flavors. Or seasons are stories. Or clouds are ideas. I like to see what I see and turn it into words, but I think it’s getting harder. Or maybe I peaked. Or maybe there’s nothing new to be said. I don’t know.” I shrugged.
    “What do you mean?” Dr. Charmin untied her arms and leaned against her desk. She smiled, and now something new was happening with the lines in her forehead. I had never talked to a teacher like this.
    “Like in the ‘Vixen’ poem I couldn’t think of what I could put in the hips,