As in:
Pierce’s father worked on the hill in Balboa, keeping track of money that the U.S. Treasury advanced to the Panama Canal Company every year. Meg’s dad worked in the U.S. Consulate in Panama City. Though separated by only a few miles, it was enough of a world apart, the distance between a boy of the colony and a girl of the diplomatic corps. If you needed enough of an excuse not to relate to one another, this was as good as any, or at least as good as any that was readily available.
Meg was in French Club and wrote poetry for The Parakeet. Pierce broke his arm trying to play football and at least the wound from that allowed him to transfer and letter in tennis without taking all kinds of shit for not being a footballer. Point of pride being a footballer at Balboa High. What with the comic and savage “manhunts” to instruct aggressiveness, and the mudhole brawls the games would become when the walls of tropical rains arrived in the fall. But the broken arm became like a permanent hall pass, on account that it was a compound fracture incurred during an off-tackle play.
The worst part of Meg’s life was that she’d lost her mom to cancer when she was twelve, and it wasn’t something she could ever talk about. They were going to go to Paris together, and now she wasn’t sure where she was ever going to go.
The worst part of Pierce’s life is that he had Mrs. Graham for Geometry right after lunch, as in right after lunch in the tropics. He’d done well enough in Algebra, the year before, but Mrs. Graham was a whole different trip, especially after she nailed him the first time mocking her with his little sarcastic voices. It was said of Mrs. Graham that had Nikita Khrushchev taken off his shoe and begun to bang it in her presence, that she would have ended the Cold War right there by ramming the shoe down his throat. You didn’t want to get on her bad side. But he had.
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