Woolly took the dictionary out and felt its reassuring heft in his hands. How he had loved this dictionary—because its purpose was to tell you exactly what a word meant. Pick a word, turn to the appropriate page, and there was the word’s meaning. And if there was a word in the definition you didn’t recognize, you could look up that word to find out exactly what it meant.
When his mother had given him the dictionary, it had been part of a set—tucked in a slipcase alongside a matching thesaurus. And as much as Woolly had loved the dictionary, he had loathed the thesaurus. Just the thought of it gave him the heebie-jeebies. Because the whole purpose of it seemed to be the opposite of the dictionary’s. Instead of telling you exactly what a word meant, it took a word and gave you ten other words that could be used in its place.
How was one to communicate an idea to another person if when one had something to say, one could choose from ten different words for every word in a sentence? The number of potential variations boggled the mind. So much so that shortly after arriving at St. Paul’s, Woolly had gone to his math teacher, Mr. Kehlenbeck, and asked him if one had a sentence with ten words and each word could be substituted with ten other words, then how many sentences could there be? And without a moment’s hesitation, Mr. Kehlenbeck had gone to the chalkboard, scratched out a formula, and done a few quick calculations to prove incontrovertibly that the answer to Woolly’s question was ten billion. Well, when confronted with a revelation like that, how was one to even begin writing an answer to an essay question during end-of-term exams?
Nonetheless, when Woolly left St. Paul’s to attend St. Mark’s, he had dutifully carried the thesaurus with him and set it down on his desk, where it remained snugly in its case, smirking at him with its tens of thousands of words that could be substituted one for the other. For the next year, it taunted, teased, and goaded him until finally, one evening shortly before Thanksgiving break, Woolly had taken the thesaurus from its case, carried it down to the football field, doused it with some gasoline that he’d discovered in the crew coach’s launch, and set the dastardly thing on fire.
In retrospect, it probably would have been peaches and cream if Woolly had thought to set the thesaurus on fire on the fifty-yard line. But for some reason Woolly couldn’t quite remember, he had put the book in the end zone, and when he’d thrown the match, the flames had quickly followed a trail of gas that had been sloshed on the grass, engulfed the gas can, and triggered an explosion that set the goalpost on fire.
Backing up to the twenty-yard line, Woolly had watched at first in shock and then amazement as the fire made its way up the center support, then moved simultaneously along the two shoulders and up the posts until the whole thing was in flames. Suddenly, it didn’t look like a goalpost at all. It looked like a fiery spirit raising its arms to the sky in a state of exultation. And it was very, very beautiful.
When they called Woolly before the disciplinary committee, it was Woolly’s intention to explain that all he had wanted was to free himself from the tyranny of the thesaurus so that he could do a better job in his exams. But before he was given a chance to speak, the Dean of Students, who was presiding over the hearing, said that Woolly was there to answer for the fire he had set on the football field. A moment later, Mr. Harrington, the faculty representative, referred to it as a blaze. Then Dunkie Dunkle, the student council president （who also happened to be captain of the football team）， referred to it as a conflagration. And Woolly knew right then and there that no matter what he had to say, they were all going to take the side of the thesaurus.
As Woolly placed his dictionary back in the box, he heard the tentative creak of a footstep in the hall, and when he turned, he found his sister standing in the doorway—with a baseball bat in her hands.
* * *
—I’m sorry about the room, said Sarah.
Woolly and his sister were sitting in the kitchen at the little table in the nook across from the sink. Sarah had already apologized for greeting Woolly with a baseball bat after finding the front door wide open. Now she was apologizing for taking away the room that was and wasn’t his. Sarah was the only one in Woolly’s family who said she was sorry and meant it. The only problem, it seemed to Woolly, was that she often said she was sorry when she hadn’t the slightest reason to be so. Like now.
—No, no, said Woolly. There’s no need to apologize on my account. I think it’s wonderful that it’s going to be the baby’s room.
—We thought we might move your things to the room by the back stairs. You would have much more privacy there, and it would be easier for you to come and go as you please.