Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Acrostic Girl Outsmarted Herself

Fiorella has composed acrostics---a practice she invented on her own--since she was a kid. It probably started when she was in fourth grade when Mrs. Johnson had the class write a sentence apiece using each one of the weekly spelling words. This was duck soup to Fio, who had a high ol' time making up stories involving those twenty-five words or arranging the first word down in each sentence to say something.
       A bored Fiorella is a dangerous Fiorella so her acrostic playtime served her well in grade school and junior high, but it cost her a boyfriend in high school. She was dating a tall, dark, handsome, and smart guy--her ideal--so when the inevitable assignment to write a sentence for each spelling word came, she composed an acrostic that, reading down the first letters of each sentence, said "I LOVE XXXXXXXXXXX"--name deleted to protect the innocent. Apparently, Fio's high school teacher was more astute than Mrs. Johnson because the next day, Boyfriend's mother, who was also a teacher, looked in on the class as if searching for someone, and Fiorella never heard from her beau again.
       Fio was confused and sad, but she soon recovered--a sixteen-year-old's heartbreak is reparable-- but it took her several years to realize that Boyfriend's mother dropping in on the class the day after she turned in her spelling assignment was not coincidental, that her own teacher had ratted her out.
       It never would have worked out anyway. Boyfriend was very conventional, and Fiorella is..........not.








No comments: