Sister

I got all the way up the stairs and beyond to the small atrium where on the left was my bedroom door, and opposite my adoptive sister’s. At no point did I cease muting myself as much as possible, and soon I was in my little private space, now the only pocket of normality I had access to. No one could misread my bewilderment and take it as want of immediate sex here.

Several minutes passed. I emptied my schoolbag, put away its contents, put the bag out of the way; cleared my desk, cleared the floor of untended objects. I had time to think about what I should do next, even had time for the shadow of an idea to form in my head: search the web for data. I was about to sit down and map possible courses of action, of investigation and escape, when I heard the muffled sound of a door being opened, followed by a knock on mine. I suppressed the urge to swear.

Julie didn’t wait for me to answer. She was through the door and standing in front of the desk right beside me before I had time to react. She slapped a huge bundle of books and papers on the table, and as if I wasn’t startled enough, she threw herself at me and hugged me tight. It was all I could do not to fall over backwards. All of this happened so fast I never even looked my sister in the face.

My blood ran cold when I got myself together enough to return the greeting, finding a completely bare naked little female body in my arms. When Julie bounced back away from me I almost didn’t hear her speak, as I automatically stared at her breasts having felt their mass on my chest. They swayed from side to side.

“It’s textual analysis again.” She said. For a moment the words were meaningless. I wondered if she was referring to some exotic property of her breasts. And then I remembered.

Textual analysis is a particularly obscure method of sorting between two different kinds of students: those who have a knack at memorizing a load of half-way nonsensical jargon and then regurgitating it at exams, and those who don’t. The exercise consists of looking at a given sample of text, which might be theatre, prose, poetry (or poetry written in prose if you’re incredibly unlucky), or anything at all with words, and identifying the stylistic devices used, and then also interpreting them, that is, saying what effect was sought by the author in using them. The more of them you find, the more marks you get, and the more convoluted your interpretation, the more brownie points you get in the eyes of the teachers. It’s especially appreciated if you can find silly or sexual motifs.

The problem is the exercise only works with particular types of works, because not all the great writers are necessarily aware or particularly interested in filling their texts with plain patterns for students to pick apart. I happen to be good at textual analysis because I like classing and categorising stuff in the first place.

“So what have you got?” I asked. Only last week my sister had had her first assignment involving dissection of texts, a particularly annoying sample of early twentieth century experimental fiction. I don’t recall what it was called, but it involved a house, and nothing but a house, for a whole book.

“I can’t pronounce that.” She said and handed me one of the old books she had dumped on my desk. There was a big purple post-it serving as a bookmark, and the pages at that location were covered in scribbles. Most of them had been crossed out.

“L’Assommoir. You’re very lucky.”

“Why? It isn’t even our language! We have to work with a translation. Doesn’t that fuck everything up?”

“It shouldn’t if it’s been translated properly. But it’s Zola. He’s really easy. He was French, and lived before the craze for glorified nonsense. You really don’t need me for this, and I bet half your notes you crossed out actually refer to something valid...”

She cut in, “It can’t be valid. I can’t find any of the stuff we found last time. Like asyndeton, polyptoton... the cool stuff. I can’t see it. I’m worried I’ll lose marks if I just point out the obvious stuff.”

“Last week was a little advanced, especially for beginners such as you lot. Zola is all about the really obvious stuff. Seriously, look at this, don’t look at the words, look at the paragraphs and tell me, what’s the obvious pattern going on there?”

She stared at the page, and then looked at me as if I’d asked her if she could count to two.

“They, um, get bigger?”

I managed a smile. “Right on. Now you just have to point that out in your analysis, and link it to the main theme of the text.”

“But what do I say? Doesn’t that have a special name? Like, I want to be able to write a nice list of all the stylistical thingummies I found so I can count how many marks I think I’m going to get. That’s what the others do.”

“And none of them will stand out. They’ll all get average marks, because they got so caught up in finding what they wanted to find they’ll have had to make up stuff in the interpretation of the text. You won’t. You’ll be the one with very little useless jargon just shooting the shit where you see it. That will get you marks.”

She was disappointed. I would have been too. There’s nothing quite as horrifying as seeking help for schoolwork that looks awful and hard only for that help resulting in you being able to do it all on your own. You feel cheated.

“Well, I can see why you quit the humanities even though you suck at maths and physics.” said Julie flatly. Then she lit up, “But I only have to hand it in two weeks from now, so can we fuck instead? I really need to clear my brain, and Sheridan texted me that you looked really good at it.”