"So I heard you're the best."
I looked across the table at my newest pupil, Ben, holding his pitiful essay in both of his hands. His hair was unbrushed, his girlfriend had just broken up with him, and he clearly didn't know how to use a semicolon.
He was a tragic case, handed down to me by the head of the English department, who didn't have the time to reteach him punctuation. But I was determined. I had been working as a tutor in the school library for almost a year now, and had yet to meet a verb I could not conjugate or a thesis I couldn't restate more clearly.
"Oh, I'm all right," I told him modestly. It was, of course, a lie. I was the best. Unfortunately, only at grammar, and at other parts of my life, I was mediocre, if not worse.
"I need you to teach me how to do this. My paper's a fucking mess. My professor said that the sentences needed 'variety.'"
He handed me the essay.
"Well, it does seem a bit redundant. You should really switch up your punctuation here."
Ben stared blankly at me.
"Explain."
"Dashes can be--as you may already know--a nice break from parenthesis (which I personally find make a sentence more awkward). But really, you should trust your own voice. Once you know the rules, feel free to break them."
Ben moved next to me and I felt his warmth. My heart jabbed me with violent pounds.
"No one's ever told me that before," he said.
"Told you what?"
"To trust my own voice," he said.
We stared at each other for a moment, before I broke the gaze.
"Did you know that the comma originated in the third century BC?" I asked, my voice shaking just a little bit, "it was created so that actors knew when to catch a breath."
Ben tilted his head.
"Can I kiss you? I've never kissed a smart chick before."
"Technically, the question should be may I kiss you, as you are asking for permission to kiss me, not about your own physical capabilities."
Ben leaned forward, cupped his hands over my face, and kissed me more gently than I had ever been kissed before. The kiss was exactly like a semicolon; it connected two independent items and, properly used, made me swoon.
"Whoa," I said, "you kiss good. You kiss me into bad grammar."
Ben looked down at his brown, scuffed up sneakers.
"Well, you're good with English. I have to be good at something, too, right?"
"Uh, yeah. Maybe you should be tutoring me. Anyway. Ahem. Another way you can change up your structure is by inserting a paranthetical phrase, which discloses unnecessary yet interesting information, and place it between two commas."
He shrugged and took the essay out of my hands.
"I think we're done editing my essay," he said.
"But it isn't perfect yet. You should use an exclamation point somewhere in your introduction, to indicate how passionately you feel."
The librarian walked over to us.
"We're actually going to be closing the library in about ten minutes."
"Do you want to come over to my house, where we can discuss this in private?" Ben asked me.
"Absolutely!" I told him, "I mean, we haven't covered everything. How much do you know about question marks?"
"I think enough," Ben told me as he packed up his backpack, "but I am curious about those dot-dot-dots."
"Ellipses?" I said. "Oh, ellipses are possibly my favorite. Subtle, mysterious, and strangely intriguing, they leave so much to be unsaid. You can never underestimate the power of the ellipses."
"Wow," Ben held the library door open for me as I walked out of the building, "you know, I always hated English in school. But it's just weird. Like one minute, it's just this ordinary thing you encounter every day, and the next, there's just so much more to know about it. And I actually want to know more about it."
I looked over his misbuttoned jacket, his wild hair, which I wanted to reach up and touch, and his hand, which would look a lot better with mine in it.
"Well, I have a lot to show you..."
Micaela Gardner is an eighty year old woman trapped in the body of a twenty year old. She enjoys card games, knitting, crossword puzzles, and cats.
