That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx

weird metal gloves that his grandfather gave him. His grandfather went to England to see the Tower of London and he brought back these metal gloves and Mark put them on and got his hand stuck in one. They had to take him to the emergency room in Kansas City and he was on television getting it taken off. The reason his grandfather gave him the gloves was to keep him from playing the guitar. That was the deal, ‘I give you these English metal gloves and you not play that fucking guitar.’ Excuse me, miss, that was Mark’s grandfather talking, not me.”
    The woman on the chair stared at him with an expression of distaste but said nothing. Bob wanted to say that his uncle’s roommate had been put off a plane in Kansas City but as he opened his mouth the druggist, with great heavy eyes which Bob thought sensual, came to the counter and spoke to the fat boy.
    “Orlando, did Dr. Tungsten give you some samples? I can’t fill your prescription. The doctor didn’t sign it.”
    “What? No, he didn’t give me samples! Just the prescription and he said, ‘Get it filled right away.’ He didn’t sign it? What a jerk.”
    “Do you want me to call him?”
    “Hell no, I’m going back over there,” said Orlando, taking the prescription from her hand and heading briskly for the door.
    When he was out of sight the clerk dialed the telephone and spoke to someone. “This is Ruby Voltaire, the pharmacist down at Young’s? I had an Orlando Bunnel, claims to be a patient of Dr. Tungsten’s, in here just now with a prescription for Viacomdex but it wasn’t signed. So I’m not sure what the story is. Oh? Uh-huh. O.K. O.K.”
    The other clerk looked at Bob Dollar and said, “Your uncle’s prescription is ready.”
    “He wants you to put it on his bill.” He took the container and sprinted for the door.
    In grade school he had had friends, but his freshman year in high school was one of oppression, loneliness and a sense of being an outcast, in part, he was sure, because he wore cast-off garments from Uncle Tam’s shop. A month into his sophomore year he tried to explain the situation to his uncle.
    “I didn’t make many friends last year,” he said, “but I thought it was because I was a freshman. And I thought it would be different this year. But I am still out of it. I try to be nice to everybody but nobody is nice to me. I just don’t know how to make people like me. And they make fun of my clothes.”
    But Uncle Tam was not helpful. “Aw, what do you care? They’re just punks.”
    After Orlando’s advent Bob did not care.

    He could see the fat boy at the bus stop two blocks west. He looked up the street and in the distance saw the flat face of the bus, no larger than the eraser at the end of a pencil. He began to run toward the bus stop, made it with the bus still blocks away.
    “Hi,” he said to the fat boy, who looked at him hard.
    “You were in the drugstore,” he said.
    “Yeah.”
    They said nothing more until they were on the bus.
    “Where do you go to school?” asked Bob Dollar.
    “School! I don’t honor them with my presence. I fucking quit school.”
    “Wow. Your parents let you quit?”
    “Of course they let me quit. The alternative was handcuffs and forcible transport. I had a problem with the teachers. My parents don’t care as long as I read a lot of books.”
    Bob Dollar could believe that the fat boy had problems with his teachers. He could see the potential for arousing teacher fury. “So what happened? You just didn’t go in one day? You just said to your family, ‘I have quit’?”
    “O.K., here’s what happened.” Orlando spoke in a weary voice as though harried beyond bearing. “In this school I was in a class. The teacher’s name was Miss Termino. We called her ‘the Terminator.’ And ‘the Termite.’ She assigned this dumb-ass paper, ‘What I Plan to Do with My Life.’ Everybody had to read his little masterpiece in class. It was the usual dumb shit, kids who wanted to