Mr. Reynolds said: “There’s nothing wrong with ordinary jobs. Not everyone has to make up dramatic stories just to sound impressive.”
Make up.
Not exaggerate. Not embellish. Make up. The phrase that locates the thing being said in the category of fabrication, of dishonesty, of a child who invents things because reality isn’t sufficient.
I looked at the words in my notebook, the ones I had written at the kitchen table the night before while my mother stood at the sink washing dishes and reaching over my shoulder occasionally to correct my grammar without looking, just knowing by the sound of my pen when I was getting something wrong.
Every word was true.
By lunch the joke had achieved the specific velocity of things that spread through a school — self-replicating, acquiring new details, finding new audiences. Someone near the lockers asked whether my mother parked her fighter jet at Walmart. A group of boys laughed with the ease of people who have found a reliable source of entertainment and intend to use it for as long as it produces.
