Queen of Babble by Meg Cabot Page B

me to him—“and all night, too,” he adds with a suggestive wag of his eyebrows. “Wouldn’t that bebrilliant ?”
    My head is still spinning. Even though he’s explained, somehow none of this is making sense…or rather, itis …
    But I don’t think I like the sense it’s making.
    I blink at him. “A few hundred? To pay your matriculation fees?”
    “Two hundred quid or so, yeah,” Andrew says. “Which is…what, five hundred dollars? Not so much if you consider it’s all going to my future…ourfuture. And I’ll make it up to you. If it takes me the rest of my life, I’ll make it up to you.” He lowers his head to my neck, to nuzzle it. “Not,” he adds into my hair,
    “that spending the rest of my life making it up to a girl like you will be such a hardship.”
    “Um,” I say, “I guess I can spare it…” Inside my head, though, a voice is screaming something entirely different. “We could…we could go wire it to the university after we leave here.”
    “Right,” Andrew says. “Listen, about that…It might just be better if you gave me the cash and I sent it.
    There’s a bloke I know at work, he can get it there for nothing, no fees, no nothing…”
    “You want me to give you cash,” I repeat.
    “Right,” Andrew says. “It’ll be cheaper than if we wired the money from here in town. They kill you with fees…” Then, hearing footsteps in the hallways outside the little office, he says quickly, “Listen, tell that wanker, when he gets in here, that you were wrong about my having a job. That you misunderstood. All right? Can you do that for me, Liz?”
    “Lizzie,” I say in a sort of daze.
    He looks at me blankly. “What?”
    “Lizzie. Not Liz. You always call me Liz. No one calls me that. My name’s Lizzie.”
    “Right,” Andrew says. “Whatever. Look, he’s coming. Just tell him, will you? Tell him you made a mistake.”
    “Oh,” I say, “I will.”

    But the mistake, I realize, was not about Andy’s employment status.

    While the Elizabethan age is considered by many historians to be one of enlightenment, given the rise of such geniuses as Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh (see: cape in the mud, etc.), there is no question that Elizabeth, toward the end of her reign, began to behave in an unpredictable and skittish fashion.
    Many believe this may have been due to the copious amount of white foundation she wore upon her face in order to give it what was then considered a youthful appearance. Unfortunately for Queen Elizabeth, there was lead in her face paint, which may have caused lead poisoning, affecting her brain.
    Elizabeth I is not the last to suffer hardship in the pursuit of beauty (see: Jackson, Michael).
    History of Fashion
    SENIOR THESIS BY ELIZABETH NICHOLS
    8
    Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speak by something outside himself—like, for instance, he can’t find any clean socks.
    —Jean Kerr (1923–2003), U.S. author and playwright
    Idon’t know what made me do it.
    One minute I was asking Mr. Williams—the supervisor of the man who’d escorted us to the little back office—if he could direct me to the ladies’ room (although here in England they apparently call it a toilet, since it took some seconds before I could make anyone understand what it was that I needed), and the next I was making a run for it.
    That’s right. I left. I left the Job Centre—and Andrew. I pretended like I was going to the women’s toilet.
    But instead I exited the building, hurrying out onto the busy London streets with no idea where I was going, let alone how to get there.
    I don’t know why I did it. I’d said what Andrew had told me to say—that I’d been mistaken about his having been at work. I suppose that since Andrew gets paid under the table, the Job Centre people have no way to check on whether this is really true. So it wasn’t as if Mr. Williams could reallydo anything to Andrew…like have him