Page 42 of Eye of the Beholder
She stares at me for a second, an odd look on her face, but it’s gone before I can figure it out. “Maybe I will,” she says. “Now, are you ready to look at a few questions about punctuation?”
Five practice questions later, I’m actually starting to get the hang of it. Semicolons are still of the devil though, so I ask Mina about them.
“Oh, easy,” she says, waving her hand. “If the clause on the left and the clause on the right could both stand on their own as complete sentences, you can use a semicolon. But they should be related. If the one on the left has nothing to do with the one on the right, no semicolon.”
“I can remember that,” I say.
“You can,” she says, nodding.
“Hey,” I say, checking my watch. “You should probably get your costume on.”
“Meh,” she says, and I grin at her as she leaves the room with her costume in hand.
She comes back a few minutes later dressed like a skeleton. Her hood is pulled up over her head, and a few wisps of hair have escaped and are hanging around her face. She’s looking at me with an unreadable expression. She sits down on the bed, the springs creaking, and then she says in a serious voice,
“I havetibiahonest; I have aboneto pick with you.”
I stare at her and lean back in my chair, processing what she’s just said, and then I try not to smile because I will not reward such horrible jokes with any response.
She stares back at me, her face still deadly serious.
But I see a twitch at the corner of her lips. Then another. And then she snorts and starts to laugh.
“Get it?” she says, her laughter ringing through my room. “Tibia? Bone?”
I prop my feet up on my desk as I smile, amused. “Those are the worst jokes I have ever heard in my life.”
She’s still laughing. She thinks she’s hilarious. It’s kind of cute. “I looked up skeleton jokes after I changed,” she says. “I couldn’t resist. They’re funny!”
I grin, shaking my head. “They are not.”
“You’re smiling,” she says, wiping tears—actualtearsbecause she’s laughing so hard—from her eyes. “You think they’re funny.”
“No,” I say, holding up a finger. “I thinkyou’re funny. The jokes are bad.”
“Your smile is getting bigger,” she says, sounding triumphant. “It was funny. Admit it. It was funny.”
I’ve never seen her laugh this much or this hard. And all it took was two bad puns.
I fold my arms across my chest. “So do all puns do this to you, or is it just skeleton puns? Do you have preferences?”
Her eyes light up in a way that makes me apprehensive. “I do have preferences. My favorite arehamburger puns.” And she’s laughing again, so hard that she actually flops back on the bed.
This time I grin. “That one was better. Still not great, but better.”
“I heard that one a long time ago, and it’s always stuck with me,” she says, finally taking a deep breath and calming down. She sits up. There are dark smudges under her eyes, and she wipes at them with her pinky fingers. She sighs, still smiling.
“Well, I’m glad you amuse yourself so much,” I say, my grin lingering. Then I sit up straighter. It’s time to get down to business. “But moving on. Tonight you will be interacting with people in a social setting.” She starts to object, but I speak over her. “You agreed this was a good idea.”
She sighs but just nods for me to continue.
“We’re going to work on confidence. I know this outing is just to judge where you are already, but we already know you’ll need to be more confident. So we’re going to start now.”
“Right,” she says, taking it in stride. “Confidence.” Her face falls. “How do I do that?”
“It’s simple, really,” I say, shrugging. “You fake it.”
Her brows furrow as she frowns at me. “That sounds like a terrible plan.”
