Longshot by Lance Allred Page A

from the many files on the table before me. I’m sure all my imperfections and sins are in those files: the time I lied to my mother when I told her I had brushed my teeth; the time I cheated at Stratego and looked at Court’s pieces when he went to the bathroom; the time I mistakenly ate the ibuprofen tabs on the neighbor’s kitchen counter, believing them to be M&M’s.
    â€œVery good, Lance.” Christina says. “Please be sure to use my name the next time you see me, as it’s polite to include someone’s name when you greet them.”
    I’m aware of this social nuance, as Dad and Mom had just joined the Amway group, which is very into social edification. But even before that, my parents were very big into social appropriateness. I nod compliance.
    â€œThank you. Now, I’m going to give you a piece of paper.” She pulls out a single page from the folder. “I want to you to read those words to me.”
    I look at the paper. Terror.
    Car. Bar. Jar. Star. Dry. Cry. Try. Carry. Dairy. Marry….
    I’m aware I have trouble with r’ s, as has been made painfully clear to me by my classmates. What went wrong with my learning of the English language and alphabet was that I had to read lips to get the proper movement of the mouth in order to get the correct enunciation of each letter. I hear things differently, but I learned to read lips and to replicate with my mouth what I saw others doing with theirs. The letter r , however, is a tricky one. As I read people’s lips, I cannot see their tongue curling in the back. When people use an r, their mouth will take the same shape as either a w or an o. Go look in the mirror and say red and then say wed. It isn’t spot-on, but very similar. Then say run and one. The trick with the r is the tongue movement in the back of the mouth, a movement that one cannot see when reading lips. When I was developing my motor and verbal skills as a child, I didn’t establish the curling movement in my r’ s. It’s very difficult to retrain your tongue—much like asking an English speaker to roll their r’ s the way a Latino would.
    I take Christina’s paper and read: “Caw. Bow. Jao. Staow. Dwy. Cuay. Twy….” Although this is how they sound to me when people speak, I’m experienced enough to know that this isn’t correct. As if my humiliation isn’t enough, Christina does the bitchy thing and repeats after me, with perfect diction, “Car. Bar. Jar….”
    In her eyes she thinks I’m just being lazy, like kids with a lisp, * and believes she can will me to get the true r sound in there, as if I had an on-and-off switch. I repeat each word again, and I really am trying to please her, until she says, “Watch my tongue…. Car. ”
    â€œI’m watching…. Caw. ”
    â€œNo. Look at my tongue.”
    â€œI can’t see it behind your teeth; I don’t know what it’s doing.” I did well on the fly to only have one r in that sentence.
    â€œWatch,” she says as she leans in, her nose nearly touching mine, “ Carrrrrrrrr. ” It is so accentuated that it doesn’t even sound like car. Instead, it sounds like she’s gargling.
    And so with that idea, I begin to gargle with my tongue, mustering a choked r, which is enough of a breakthrough for her that she feels as if she has just cured cancer. But soon that isn’t enough for her. It isn’t so much that she is displeased with the false r, but rather that I’m still unable to say her name as she wants it, as she is so in love with herself. She will be damned if I don’t fully appreciate her beautiful name.
    In no time at all, so overconfident in her ability as a speech therapist, Christina grows tired of my gargling sound, which I had only replicated from her and her dumb extended Carrrrrrrrr. She then does the unthinkable: she literally grabs my cheeks and tries to