Pirates
Another two months had passed, and they had left Egypt far behind. Rosalie had taken that long to come to terms with her new reality. She was going to be a mother in five months, perhaps even less time than that. And still she had not told her husband. She carried on as though nothing had changed, mending and cooking—to the ship cook’s chagrin—and sometimes sitting at the keyboard, though she played less and less until finally she stopped altogether.
Everything had been peaceful and lovely, even the weather. Though she had noticed Liam looking at her strangely, as if asking the question—when would she tell the truth to his brother?—Breandon suspected nothing, was as happy as ever. She had overcome her “homesickness,” for his sake, but now it was time to tell him the truth.
It was time to unleash whatever storm she must. Breandon would be thrilled, she had no doubt of that. He would be even more pleased to know she was not truly ill. But her role on the ship and as his wife would change. And the men would not be so happy…
“Brean, love, I have something to confess,” she said at last, the words bitter on her tongue. What a wretched woman she was, and wife too. She sat on the edge of their bed, brushing her hair out before she braided it for bed. Four…five…six… Counting the strokes until she reached a hundred helped her focus and helped steel her.
Lemony Snicket Reveals How Writing Got Him In Trouble
bookish.comFeb 25, 2013
I’m always kind of loath to make me seem like I’ve been a controversial author, because there’s real controversy and then there are just silly people objecting to things. But the closest I got to real controversy was in high school, Lowell High School in San Francisco, Calif.
There was an experiment going on where [students] took a long career test where we had to say what we wanted to be when we grew up. Then, we took a test of our abilities and interests and the computer spat out a list of things we were suited for. Then we took the first part of the test again to see if the test changed what we wanted to be when we grew up. The first part of the test listed every possible occupation you could imagine, and you had to fill in, with a number 2 pencil, the little bubble.
My friend David and I, in our homeroom where we were taking the test, got everyone to fill in the bubble marked “other” … and then we all wrote in “pirate,” because we thought that was funny—and it was funny. The principal looked at these oddball results of the test because it looked like [students] wanted to be different things, and then [students] took a career test and suddenly everyone wanted to be a pirate in a particular homeroom. The principal knew immediately that it was me, just from looking.
He called me in [to his office] and he said, “I know it’s you. Don’t deny it. You made everybody be a pirate.” And I said, “I want to be a pirate. I can’t help it if everyone else in my homeroom wants to be a pirate. That’s life.”
As it turned out, the school was spearheading some kind of study, so that our meager results for the 3,000 kids in the school were actually going to represent something statewide. I’d managed to throw off some huge study because some sizeable portion of America’s youth now were saying they wanted to be pirates, and he was furious with me.
I was proud of myself for sticking to my guns, for saying that, “I want to be a pirate. It’s not a prank. I’m very interested in piracy. I didn’t realize that everyone else in my homeroom also wants to be a pirate. But that’s life. You should report that, whatever, 8 percent of American youth are interested in piracy.”
