I help him clear off a space for me, and in the process pick up a map made of pinpricks. “What’s this?” I ask.
“A sky atlas3.” He shrugs4. “It’s kind of a hobby.”
“When I was little, I once tried to name every star in the sky after one of my relatives. The scary part is Ihadn’t run out of names by the time I fell asleep.”
“Anna’s named after a galaxy,” Brian says.
“That’s much cooler than being named after a patron saint,” I muse5. “Once, I asked my mom why stars shine.
She said they were night-lights, so the angels could find their way around in Heaven. But when I asked mydad, he started talking about gas, and somehow I put it all together and figured that the food God servedcaused multiple trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night.”
Brian laughs out loud. “And here I was trying to explain atomic fusion6 to my kids.”
“Did it work?”
He considers for a moment. “They could all probably find the Big Dipper with their eyes closed.”
“That’s impressive. Stars all look the same to me.”
“It’s not that hard. You spot a piece of a constellation—like Orion’s belt—and suddenly it’s easier to findRigel in his foot and Betelgeuse in his shoulder.” He hesitates. “But ninety percent of the universe is made ofstuff we can’t even see.”
“Then how do you know it’s there?”
He slows to a stop at a red light. “Dark matter has a gravitational effect on other objects. You can’t see it, youcan’t feel it, but you can watch something being pulled in its direction.”
Ten seconds after Campbell left last night, Izzy walked into the living room where I was just on the cusp ofhaving one of those bone-cleansing cries a woman should treat herself to at least once during a lunar cycle.
“Yeah,” she said dryly. “I can see this is a totally professional relationship.”
I scowled7 at her. “Were you eavesdropping8?”
“Pardon me if you and Romeo were having your little tête-àtête through a thin wall.”
“If you’ve got something to say,” I suggested, “say it.”
“Me?” Izzy frowned. “Hey, it’s none of my business, is it?”
“No, it’s not.”
“Right. So I’ll just keep my opinion to myself.”
I rolled my eyes. “Out with it, Isobel.”
“Thought you’d never ask.” She sat down beside me on the couch. “You know, Julia, the first time a bug9 seesthat big purple zapper light, it looks like God. The second time, he runs in the other direction.”
“First, don’t compare me to a mosquito. Second, he’d fly in the other direction, not run. Third, there is nosecond time. The bug’s dead.”
Izzy smirked10. “You are such a lawyer.”
“I am not letting Campbell zap me.”
“Then request a transfer.”
“This isn’t the Navy.” I hugged one of the throw pillows from the couch. “And I can’t do that, not now. It’llmake him think that I’m such a wimp11 I can’t balance my professional life with some stupid, silly,adolescent…incident.”
“You can’t.” Izzy shook her head. “He’s an egotistical dickhead who’s going to chew you up and spit youout; and you have a really awful history of falling for assholes that you ought to run screaming from; and Idon’t feel like sitting around listening to you try to convince yourself you don’t still feel something forCampbell Alexander when, in fact, you’ve spent the past fifteen years trying to fill in the hole he made insideyou.”
I stared at her. “Wow.”
She shrugged12. “Guess I had a lot to get off my chest, after all.”
“Do you hate all men, or just Campbell?”
Izzy seemed to think about that for a while. “Just Campbell,” she said finally.
What I wanted, at that moment, was to be alone in my living room so that I could throw things, like the TVremote or the glass vase or preferably my sister. But I couldn’t order Izzy out of a house she’d moved intojust hours before. I stood up and plucked my house keys off the counter. “I’m going out,” I told her. “Don’twait up.”
I’m not much of a party girl, which explains why I hadn’t frequented Shakespeare’s Cat before, although itwas a mere13 four blocks from my condo. The bar was dark and crowded and smelled of patchouli and cloves14. Ipushed my way inside, hopped15 up on a stool, and smiled at the man sitting next to me.
I was in the mood to make out in the back row of the movie theater with someone who did not know my firstname. I wanted three guys to fight for the honor of buying me a drink.
I wanted to show Campbell Alexander what he’d been missing.
The man beside me had sky-eyes, a black ponytail, and a Cary Grant grin. He nodded politely at me, thenturned away and began to kiss a white-haired gentleman flush on the mouth. I looked around and saw what Ihad missed on my entrance: the bar was filled with single men—but they were dancing, flirting16, hooking upwith each other.
“What can I get you?” The bartender had fuchsia porcupine17 hair and an oxen ring pierced through his nose.
“This is a gay bar?”
“No, it’s the officers’ club at West Point. You want a drink or not?” I pointed18 over his shoulder to the bottle oftequila, and he reached for a shot glass.
I rummaged19 in my purse and pulled out a fifty-dollar bill. “The whole thing.” Glancing down at the bottle, Ifrowned. “I bet Shakespeare didn’t even have a cat.”
“Who peed in your coffee?” the bartender asked.
Narrowing my eyes, I stared at him. “You’re not gay.”
“Sure I am.”
“Based on my track record, if you were gay, I’d probably find you attractive. As it is…” I looked at the busycouple beside me, and then shrugged at the bartender. He blanched20, then handed me back my fifty. I tucked itback into my wallet. “Who says you can’t buy friends,” I murmured.
Three hours later, I was the only person still there, unless you counted Seven, which was what the bartenderhad rechristened himself last August after deciding to jettison21 whatever sort of label the name Neil suggested.
Seven stood for absolutely nothing, he had told me, which was exactly the way he liked it.
“Maybe I should be Six,” I told him, when I’d made my way to the bottom of the tequila bottle, “and youcould be Nine.”
Seven finished stacking the clean glasses. “That’s it. You’re cut off.”
“He used to call me Jewel,” I said, and that was enough to make me start crying.
A jewel’s just a rock put under enormous heat and pressure. Extraordinary things are always hiding in placespeople never think to look.
But Campbell had looked. And then he’d left me, reminding me that whatever he’d seen wasn’t worth thetime or effort.
“I used to have pink hair,” I told Seven.
“I used to have a real job,” he answered.
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “I dyed my hair pink. What happened to you?”
“I let mine grow out,” I answered.
Seven wiped up a spill I’d made without noticing. “Nobody ever wants what they’ve got,” he said.
Anna sits at the kitchen table by herself, eating a bowl of Golden Grahams. Her eyes widen, as she issurprised to see me with her father, but that’s as much as she’ll reveal. “Fire last night, huh?” she says,sniffing.
Brian crosses the kitchen and gives her a hug. “Big one.”
“The arsonist22?” she asks.
“Doubt it. He goes for empty buildings and this one had a kid in it.”
“Who you saved,” Anna guesses.
“You bet.” He glances at me. “I thought I’d take Julia up to the hospital. Want to come?”
She looks down at her bowl. “I don’t know.”
“Hey.” Brian lifts her chin. “No one’s going to keep you from seeing Kate.”
“No one’s going to be too thrilled to see me there, either,” she says.
The telephone rings, and he picks it up. He listens for a moment, and then smiles. “That’s great. That’s sogreat. Yeah, of course I’m coming in.” He hands the phone to Anna. “Mom wants to talk to you,” he says,and he excuses himself to change clothes.
Anna hesitates, then curls her hand around the receiver. Her shoulders hunch23, a small cubicle24 of personalprivacy. “Hello?” And then, softly: “Really? She did?”
A few moments later, she hangs up. She sits down and takes another spoonful of cereal, then pushes away herbowl. “Was that your mom?” I ask, sitting down across from her.
“Yeah. Kate’s awake,” Anna says.
“That’s good news.”
“I guess.”
I put my elbows on the table. “Why wouldn’t it be good news?”
But Anna doesn’t answer my question. “She asked where I was.”
“Your mother?”
“Kate.”
“Have you talked to her about your lawsuit25, Anna?”
Ignoring me, she grabs the cereal box and begins to roll down the plastic insert. “It’s stale,” she says. “Noone ever gets all the air out, or closes the top right.”
“Has anyone told Kate what’s going on?”
Anna pushes on the box top to get the cardboard tab into its slot, to no avail. “I don’t even like GoldenGrahams.” When she tries again, the box falls out of her arms and spills its contents all over the floor.
“Shoot!” She crawls under the table, trying to scoop26 up the cereal with her hands.
I get on the floor with Anna and watch her shove fistfuls into the liner. She won’t look in my direction. “Wecan always buy Kate some more before she gets home,” I say gently.
Anna stops and glances up. Without the veil of that secret, she looks much younger. “Julia? What if she hatesme?”
I tuck a strand27 of hair behind Anna’s ear. “What if she doesn’t?”
“The bottom line,” Seven explained last night, “is that we never fall for the people we’re supposed to.”
I glanced at him, intrigued28 enough to muster29 the effort to raise my face from where it was plastered on thebar. “It’s not just me?”
“Hell, no.” He set down a stack of clean glasses. “Think about it: Romeo and Juliet bucked30 the system, andlook where it got them. Superman has the hots for Lois Lane, when the better match, of course, would bewith Wonder Woman. Dawson and Joey—need I say more? And don’t even get me started on Charlie Brownand the little redheaded girl.”
“What about you?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Like I said, it happens to everyone.” Leaning his elbows on the counter, he came close enoughthat I could see the dark roots beneath his magenta31 hair. “For me, it was Linden.”
“I’d break up with someone who was named for a tree, too,” I sympathized. “Guy or girl?”
He smirked. “I’ll never tell.”
“So what made her wrong for you?”
Seven sighed. “Well, she—”
“Ha! You said she!”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, Detective Julia. You’ve outed me at this gay establishment. Happy?”
“Not particularly.”
“I sent Linden back to New Zealand. Green card ran out. It was that, or get married.”
“What was wrong with her?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Seven confessed. “She cleaned like a banshee; she never let me wash a dish; shelistened to everything I had to say; she was a hurricane in bed. She was crazy about me, and believe it or not,I was the one for her. It was, like, ninety-eight percent perfect.”
“What about the other two percent?”
“You tell me.” He started stacking the clean glasses on the far side of the bar. “Something was missing. Icouldn’t tell you what it was, if you asked, but it was off. And if you think of a relationship as a living entity,I guess it’s one thing if the missing two percent is, like, a fingernail. But when it’s the heart, that’s a wholedifferent ball of wax.” He turned to me. “I didn’t cry when she got on the plane. She lived with me for fouryears, and when she walked away, I didn’t feel much of anything at all.”
“Well, I had the other problem,” I told him. “I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow it in.”
“What happened then?”
“What else,” I said. “It broke.”
The ridiculous irony32 is that Campbell was attracted to me because I stood apart from everyone else at TheWheeler School; and I was attracted to Campbell because I desperately33 wanted a connection with someone.
There were comments, I knew, and stares sent our way as his friends tried to figure out why Campbell waswasting his time with someone like me. No doubt, they thought I was an easy lay.
But we weren’t doing that. We met after school at the cemetery34. Sometimes we would speak poetry to eachother. Once, we tried to have an entire conversation without the letter “s.” We sat back to back, and tried tothink each other’s thoughts—pretending clairvoyance35, when it only made sense that his whole mind wouldbe full of me and mine would be full of him.
I loved the way he smelled whenever his head dipped close to hear what I was saying—like the sun strikingthe cheek of a tomato, or soap drying on the hood36 of a car. I loved the way his hand felt on my spine37. I loved.
“What if,” I said one night, stealing breath from the edge of his lips, “we did it?”
He was lying on his back, watching the moon rock back and forth38 on a hammock of stars. One hand wastossed up over his head, the other anchored me against his chest. “Did what?”
I didn’t answer, just got up on one elbow and kissed him so deep that the ground gave way. “Oh,” Campbellsaid, hoarse39. “That.”
“Have you ever?” I asked.
He just grinned. I thought that he’d probably fucked Muffy or Buffy or Puffy or all three in the baseballdugout at Wheeler, or after a party at one of their homes when they both still smelled of Daddy’s bourbon. Iwondered why, then, he wasn’t trying to sleep with me. I assumed that it was because I wasn’t Muffy orBuffy or Puffy, but just Julia Romano, which wasn’t good enough.
“Don’t you want to?” I asked.
It was one of those moments where I knew we were not having the conversation that we needed to be having.
And since I didn’t really know what to say, never having crossed this particular bridge between thought anddeed before, I pressed my hand up against the thick ridge40 in his pants. He backed away from me.
“Jewel,” he said, “I don’t want you to think that’s why I’m here.”
Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude41. It’sbecause they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them. “Then whyare you here?”
“Because you know all the words to ‘American Pie,’ ” Campbell said. “Because when you smile, I canalmost see that tooth on the side that’s crooked42.” He stared at me. “Because you’re not like anyone I’ve evermet.”
“Do you love me?” I whispered.
“Didn’t I just say that?”
This time, when I reached for the buttons of his jeans, he didn’t move away. In my palm he was so hot Iimagined he would leave a scar. Unlike me, he knew what to do. He kissed and slipped, pushed, cracked mewide. Then he went perfectly44 still. “You didn’t say you were a virgin,” he said.
“You didn’t ask.”
But he’d assumed. He shuddered45 and began to move inside me, a poetry of limbs. I reached up to hold on tothe gravestone behind me, words I could see in my mind’s eye: Nora Deane, b. 1832, d. 1838.
“Jewel,” he whispered, when it was over. “I thought…”
“I know what you thought.” I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and theyopened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and saythank you all the same.
I blame Campbell Alexander entirely46 for my bad luck with relationships. It is embarrassing to admit, but Ihave only had sex with three and a half other men, and none of those were any great improvement on my firstexperience.
“Let me guess,” Seven said last night. “The first was a rebound47. The second was married.”
“How’d you know?”
He laughed. “Because you’re a cliché.”
I swirled48 my pinky in my martini. It was an optical illusion, making the finger look split and crooked. “Theother one was from Club Med, a windsurfing instructor49.”
“That must have been worthwhile,” Seven said.
“He was absolutely gorgeous,” I answered. “And had a dick the size of a cocktail50 frank.”
“Ouch.”
“Actually,” I mused51, “you couldn’t feel it at all.”
Seven grinned. “So he was the half?”
I turned beet52 red. “No, that was some other guy. I don’t know his name,” I admitted. “I sort of woke up withhim on top of me, after a night like this one.”
“You,” Seven pronounced, “are a train wreck53 of sexual history.”
But this is inaccurate54. A runaway55 train is an accident. Me, I’ll jump in front of the tracks. I’ll even tie myselfdown in front of the speeding engine. There’s some illogical part of me that still believes if you wantSuperman to show up, first there’s got to be someone worth saving.
Kate Fitzgerald is a ghost just waiting to happen. Her skin is nearly translucent56, her hair so fair it bleeds intothe pillowcase. “How are you doing, baby?” Brian murmurs57, and he leans down to kiss her on the forehead.
“I think I might have to blow off the Ironman competition,” Kate jokes.
Anna is hovering58 at the door in front of me; Sara holds out her hand. It is all the encouragement Anna needsto crawl up on Kate’s mattress59, and in my mind I mark off this small gesture from mother to child. Then Sarasees me standing60 at the threshold. “Brian,” she says, “what is she doing here?”
I wait for Brian to explain, but he doesn’t seem inclined to utter a word. So I paste a smile on my face andstep forward. “I heard Kate was feeling better today, and I thought it might be a good time to talk to her.”
Kate struggles to her elbows. “Who are you?”
I expect a fight from Sara, but it is Anna who speaks up. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea,” she says,although she knows this is the very reason I’ve come here. “I mean, Kate’s still pretty sick.”
It takes me a moment, but then I understand: in Anna’s life, everyone who ever talks to Kate takes Kate’sside. She is doing what she can to keep me from defecting.
“You know, Anna’s right,” Sara hastily adds. “Kate’s only just turned a corner.”
I place my hand on Anna’s shoulder. “Don’t worry.” Then I turn to her mother. “It’s my understanding thatyou wanted this hearing—”
Sara cuts me off. “Ms. Romano, could we have a word outside?”
We step into the hallway, and Sara waits for a nurse to pass with a Styrofoam tray of needles. “I know whatyou think of me,” she says.
“Mrs. Fitzgerald—”
She shakes her head. “You’re sticking up for Anna, and you should. I practiced law once, and I understand.
It’s your job, and part of that is figuring out what makes us us.” She rubs her forehead with one fist. “My jobis to take care of my daughters. One of them is extremely ill, and the other one’s extremely unhappy. And Imay not have it all figured out yet, but…I do know that Kate won’t get better any quicker if she finds out thatthe reason you’re here is because Anna hasn’t withdrawn62 her lawsuit yet. So I’m asking you not to tell her,either. Please.”
I nod slowly, and Sara turns to go back into Kate’s room. With her hand on the door, she hesitates. “I loveboth of them,” she says, an equation I am supposed to be able to solve.
I told Seven the Bartender that true love is felonious.
“Not if they’re over eighteen,” he said, shutting the till of the cash register.
By then the bar itself had become an appendage63, a second torso holding up my first. “You take someone’sbreath away,” I stressed. “You rob them of the ability to utter a single word.” I tipped the neck of the emptyliquor bottle toward him. “You steal a heart.”
He wiped up in front of me with a dishrag. “Any judge would toss that case out on its ass1.”
“You’d be surprised.”
Seven spread the rag out on the brass64 bar to dry. “Sounds like a misdemeanor, if you ask me.”
I rested my cheek on the cool, damp wood. “No way,” I said. “Once you’re in, it’s for life.
spaceBrian and Sara take Anna down to the cafeteria. It leaves me alone with Kate, who is eminently65 curious. Iimagine that the number of times her mother has willingly left her side is something she can count on twohands. I explain that I’m helping66 the family make some decisions about her health care.
“Ethics committee?” Kate guesses. “Or are you from the hospital’s legal department? You look like alawyer.”
“What does a lawyer look like?”
“Kind of like a doctor, when he doesn’t want to tell you what your labs say.”
I pull up a chair. “Well, I’m glad to hear you’re doing better today.”
“Yeah. Apparently67 yesterday I was pretty out of it,” Kate says.
“Doped up enough to make Ozzy and Sharon look like Ozzie and Harriet.”
“Do you know where you stand, medically, right now?”
Kate nods. “After my BMT, I got graft-versus-host disease—which is sort of good, because it kicks theleukemia’s butt43, but it also does some funky68 stuff to your skin and organs. The doctors gave me steroids andcyclosporine to control it, and that worked, but it also managed to break down my kidneys, which is theemergency flavor of the month. That’s pretty much the way it goes—fix one leak in the dike69 just in time towatch another one start spouting70. Something is always falling apart in me.”
She says this matter-of-factly, as if I’ve grilled71 her about the weather or what’s on the hospital menu. I couldask her if she has talked to the nephrologists about a kidney transplant, if she has any particular feelingsabout undergoing so many different, painful treatments. But this is exactly what Kate is expecting me to ask,which is probably why the question that comes out of my mouth is completely different. “What do you wantto be when you grow up?”
“No one ever asks me that.” She eyes me carefully. “What makes you think I’m going to grow up?”
“What makes you think that you’re not? Isn’t that why you’re doing all this?”
Just when I think she isn’t going to answer me, she speaks. “I always wanted to be a ballerina.” Her arm goesup, a weak arabesque72. “You know what ballerinas have?”
Eating disorders73, I think.
“Absolute control. When it comes to their bodies, they know exactly what’s going to happen, and when.”
Kate shrugs, coming back to this moment, this hospital room. “Anyway,” she says.
“Tell me about your brother.”
Kate starts to laugh. “You haven’t had the pleasure of meeting him yet, I guess.”
“Not yet.”
“You can pretty much form an opinion about Jesse in the first thirty seconds you spend with him. He getsinto a lot of bad stuff he shouldn’t.”
“You mean drugs, alcohol?”
“Keep going,” Kate says.
“Has that been hard for your family to deal with?”
“Well, yeah. But I don’t really think it’s something he does on purpose. It’s the way he gets noticed, youknow? I mean, imagine what it would be like if you were a squirrel living in the elephant cage at the zoo.
Does anyone ever go there and say, Hey, check out that squirrel? No, because there’s something so muchbigger you notice first.” Kate runs her fingers up and down one of the tubes sprouting74 out of her chest.
“Sometimes it’s shoplifting, and sometimes it’s getting drunk. Last year, it was an anthrax hoax75. That’s thekind of stuff Jesse does.”
“And Anna?”
Kate starts to pleat the blanket in folds on her lap. “There was one year when every single holiday, and Imean even like Memorial Day, I was in the hospital. It wasn’t anything planned, of course, but that’s the wayit happened. We had a tree in my room for Christmas, and an Easter egg hunt in the cafeteria, and we trick-or-treated on the orthopedic ward61. Anna was around six years old, and she threw a total fit because shecouldn’t bring sparklers into the hospital on the Fourth of July—all the oxygen tents.” Kate looks up at me.
“She ran away. Not far, or anything—I think she got to the lobby before someone nabbed her. She was goingto find herself another family, she told me. Like I said, she was only six, and no one really took it seriously.
But I used to wonder what it would be like to be normal. So I totally understood why she’d wonder about it,too.”
“When you’re not sick, do you and Anna get along pretty well?”
“We’re like any pair of sisters, I guess. We fight over who gets to put on whose CDs; we talk about cuteguys; we steal each other’s good nail polish. She gets into my stuff and I yell; I get into her stuff and she criesdown the house. Sometimes she’s great. And other times I wish she’d never been born.”
That sounds so patently familiar that I grin. “I have a twin sister. Every time I used to say that, my motherwould ask me if I could really, truly picture being an only child.”
“Could you?”
I laugh. “Oh…there were definitely times I could imagine life without her.”
Kate doesn’t crack a smile. “See,” she says, “my sister’s the one who’s always had to imagine life withoutme.”
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ass
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| n.驴；傻瓜，蠢笨的人 | |
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xerox
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| n./v.施乐复印机，静电复印 | |
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atlas
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| n.地图册，图表集 | |
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shrugs
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| n.耸肩（以表示冷淡，怀疑等）( shrug的名词复数 ) | |
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muse
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| n.缪斯（希腊神话中的女神），创作灵感 | |
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fusion
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| n.溶化；熔解；熔化状态，熔和；熔接 | |
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scowled
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| 怒视，生气地皱眉( scowl的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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eavesdropping
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bug
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| n.虫子；故障；窃听器；vt.纠缠；装窃听器 | |
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smirked
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| v.傻笑( smirk的过去分词 ) | |
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wimp
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| n.无用的人 | |
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shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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mere
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cloves
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| n.丁香（热带树木的干花，形似小钉子，用作调味品，尤用作甜食的香料）( clove的名词复数 )；蒜瓣(a garlic ~|a ~of garlic) | |
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hopped
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| 跳上[下]( hop的过去式和过去分词 )； 单足蹦跳； 齐足（或双足）跳行； 摘葎草花 | |
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flirting
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| v.调情，打情骂俏( flirt的现在分词 ) | |
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porcupine
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pointed
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rummaged
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blanched
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| v.使变白( blanch的过去式 )；使（植物）不见阳光而变白；酸洗（金属）使有光泽；用沸水烫（杏仁等）以便去皮 | |
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jettison
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arsonist
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hunch
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cubicle
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| n.大房间中隔出的小室 | |
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lawsuit
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| n.诉讼，控诉 | |
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scoop
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| n.铲子，舀取，独家新闻；v.汲取，舀取，抢先登出 | |
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strand
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| vt.使（船）搁浅，使（某人）困于（某地） | |
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intrigued
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| adj.好奇的，被迷住了的v.搞阴谋诡计(intrigue的过去式)；激起…的兴趣或好奇心；“intrigue”的过去式和过去分词 | |
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muster
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| v.集合，收集，鼓起，激起；n.集合，检阅，集合人员，点名册 | |
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bucked
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| adj.快v.（马等）猛然弓背跃起( buck的过去式和过去分词 )；抵制；猛然震荡；马等尥起后蹄跳跃 | |
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magenta
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| n..紫红色（的染料）；adj.紫红色的 | |
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irony
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| n.反语，冷嘲；具有讽刺意味的事，嘲弄 | |
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desperately
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| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
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cemetery
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| n.坟墓，墓地，坟场 | |
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clairvoyance
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| n.超人的洞察力 | |
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hood
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| n.头巾，兜帽，覆盖；v.罩上，以头巾覆盖 | |
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spine
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| n.脊柱，脊椎；(动植物的)刺；书脊 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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hoarse
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| adj.嘶哑的，沙哑的 | |
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ridge
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| n.山脊；鼻梁；分水岭 | |
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solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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crooked
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| adj.弯曲的；不诚实的，狡猾的，不正当的 | |
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butt
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| n.笑柄；烟蒂；枪托；臀部；v.用头撞或顶 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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shuddered
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| v.战栗( shudder的过去式和过去分词 )；发抖；（机器、车辆等）突然震动；颤动 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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rebound
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| v.弹回；n.弹回，跳回 | |
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swirled
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| v.旋转，打旋( swirl的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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instructor
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| n.指导者，教员，教练 | |
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cocktail
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| n.鸡尾酒；餐前开胃小吃；混合物 | |
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mused
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| v.沉思，冥想( muse的过去式和过去分词 )；沉思自语说（某事） | |
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beet
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| n.甜菜；甜菜根 | |
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wreck
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| n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难 | |
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inaccurate
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| adj.错误的，不正确的，不准确的 | |
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runaway
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| n.逃走的人，逃亡，亡命者；adj.逃亡的，逃走的 | |
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translucent
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| adj.半透明的；透明的 | |
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murmurs
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| n.低沉、连续而不清的声音( murmur的名词复数 )；低语声；怨言；嘀咕 | |
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hovering
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| 鸟( hover的现在分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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mattress
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| n.床垫，床褥 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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ward
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| n.守卫，监护，病房，行政区，由监护人或法院保护的人（尤指儿童）；vt.守护，躲开 | |
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withdrawn
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| vt.收回；使退出；vi.撤退，退出 | |
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appendage
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| n.附加物 | |
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brass
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| n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器 | |
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eminently
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| adv.突出地；显著地；不寻常地 | |
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helping
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| n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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funky
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| adj.畏缩的，怯懦的，霉臭的；adj.新式的，时髦的 | |
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dike
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| n.堤，沟；v.开沟排水 | |
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spouting
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| n.水落管系统v.（指液体）喷出( spout的现在分词 )；滔滔不绝地讲；喋喋不休地说；喷水 | |
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grilled
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| adj. 烤的, 炙过的, 有格子的 动词grill的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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72
arabesque
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| n.阿拉伯式花饰；adj.阿拉伯式图案的 | |
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73
disorders
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| n.混乱( disorder的名词复数 )；凌乱；骚乱；（身心、机能）失调 | |
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74
sprouting
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| v.发芽( sprout的现在分词 )；抽芽；出现；（使）涌现出 | |
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75
hoax
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| v.欺骗，哄骗，愚弄；n.愚弄人，恶作剧 | |
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