Oozing

As in:

It was the pluck of Tucker Weems, at 16 and a half years of age, to look at almost everything that asked “why?” and to answer back “why not?” He was too young to think of history as anything other than a subject, and too brash to think that he and his oozing self-confidence would be unwelcome anywhere.

Tucker’s buckets of adolescent self-esteem and his inarguably good looks (it would be hard to distinguish him from the teenage Mel Gibson) drew the attention of Misty Ramsfelder, who was also 16 and would look like a teenage Grace Kelly if the future Princess of Monaco had ever assembled her hair in golden cornrows. Misty’s reputation was unsullied. But still there was something about her attraction to Tucker, and his to her, that was exuberantly feral, like young springboks bonding in the wilds of Namibia.

A complication was that Misty’s mom, Jolene, was a precinct chairwoman, an Obama delegate, and the founder of the East Archville Humanist Society. She also built beautiful birdhouses in her spare time and sold them at Art Festivals and Farmers Markets. This detail is important to this memorable first encounter because Jolene would typically build four before she would paint them, and then, weather permitting, allow the freshly painted bird houses to rest on planks supported by saw horses in the side yard, as a sort of public art/promotional display for her craft work.

And this freshly-painted scenario had unfolded on the afternoon when, against every fiber of her better instincts, Jolene first allowed Tucker to date Misty. He arrived in the F-250 Ford pickup truck, double-tired in the rear, with the Sarah Palin bumper sticker, and backed it into a space in the side yard.

“What the #&@#!” Jolene exclaimed from her perch at the kitchen window, using the dreaded #&@#-word for the first time since college. She was barely introduced to Tucker before she began pointedly questioning him about the gas mileage of his “ridiculous” rig, whether he’d considered what kind of planet she wanted for her grandchildren, and whether the Palin bumper sticker was just a crude joke.

You could barely squeeze another sputtering “no maam” out of Tucker before the unlucky couple beat it for the truck. The haste of the departure, coupled with a rare rupture in Tucker’s eminent composure, led to him pumping the gas pedal before taking the truck of out reverse. The magnificent rear bumper on the F-250 slammed the fence so hard that the top rail shot backwards, knocking the legs out from the saw horses like a bowling ball on the way to a strike. The birdhouses collapsed mostly into each other.

Because Jolene then had the good sense to realize murder was a possibility, she sent her husband, Wakefield (“Way”) Ramsfelder, a retired judge, out to process the debacle and the damage. When he got there, Misty still had her hands over her eyes and Tucker was staring forward, blankly, as if he’d fled from his body.

“The good news,” Mr. Ramsfelder offered with a bit of a drawl, “is that when you decide to buy three, Jolene always pitches in the fourth for free. You do enjoy birds, don’t you?”