Harold

Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright Guide Cover Start of Content Title Page Dedication Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright I II III V VI VII VIII 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 
 
 Harold
 A Novel
 Steven Wright
 
 
 
 
 
 For Barry Crimmins and Peter Lassally
 
 
 Chapter 1
 Ms. Yuka was standing in front of her desk when she began to brush a small piece of lint off her skirt just above her right knee and Harold wondered if there was more lint in China than in the United States and wondered if it mattered and if so how?
 Harold wondered if the Chinese had their own FBI and if it was called the CFBI.
 Could the CFBI and the FBI tell the difference between Chinese fingerprints and American fingerprints and he didn’t mean a specific person he meant was there an in general difference?
 Then he thought there should be a fistfight between the guy who said no two fingerprints were alike and the guy who said no two snowflakes were alike. A fight to the death.
 
 After Ms. Yuka finished with her US/Chinese lint she said to the class:
 “Remember to keep working on your book report and your oral presentation which are both due after Christmas vacation which starts Friday.”
 Harold’s book report was about a book he read about Alfred Nobel who was the guy who invented dynamite.
 He worked in a factory as a chemist focussing on explosives. His brother worked there too and was accidentally killed in an explosion.
 So Alfred decided to turn this horrible tragedy into something positive.
 With the huge fortune he made from dynamite he developed the Nobel Prize which led to the Nobel Peace Prize.
 Harold thought if this was true what kind of prizes could the guy who invented the atom bomb come up with?
 Maybe the “Universe Peace Prize.”
 Just to torture Ms. Yuka Harold thought of asking her if the book report should be about the subject of the book or a report about how the book was written.
 But he didn’t because he was tired and just wasn’t in the mood.
 
 Harold was 7 in 3rd grade at Wildwood Elementary School.
 
 He did more thinking than someone his age. Or any age.
 He thought wouldn’t it be great to be able to sleep standing up with your eyes open.
 Imagine asking Elizabeth if she would like to meet him some night in the middle of the woods so they could sleep standing up with their eyes open facing each other, and he wondered what kinds of dreams they would have then?
 And wouldn’t it be weird if they both had dreams but neither one of them was in the other’s dreams.
 Elizabeth was a girl in the class.
 Harold thought that Alfred Nobel should have a fistfight with the guy who invented gunpowder whose name nobody knew because it was invented by the Chinese in the 9th century. A fight to the death.
 He wondered if Ms. Yuka was related to the guy who invented gunpowder, he thought if she was he would look at her differently.
 Harold imagined raising his hand.
 “Yes Harold?”
 “Are you at all related to the guy who invented gunpowder?”
 
 He pictured her looking at him and then, in a gentle but somehow also stern way, saying:
 “Harold, just pay attention.”
 In his mind he would say, “I’ll pay attention but I was wondering if over Christmas vacation I could come over to your house and you could make believe you’re the Empress of China and I’m the guy who just invented gunpowder and you wanted to reward me.
 “How would you feel about that?”
 Harold loved the birds in his head and Elizabeth and Ms. Yuka once in a while.
 
 Sometimes he imagined he was shipwrecked with Elizabeth and Ms. Yuka on an island that had hundreds of parrots and no other kinds of birds.
 The 3 of them would live in 2 different huts.
 All the parrots spoke different languages and they were in groups of two so each parrot had another parrot to talk to.
 This led to him imagining quietly making little parrot noises to