“Okay, but, like,” Maddy said, breaking the silence in the library, “Why is Quebec even a place?”
Janet sighed the long-suffering sigh of a person who had spent far too much time staring at a page of French vocab. “Because Benedict Arnold was the worst person in the world,” she said.
Maddy slid lower in her seat. A few more inches and she would probably end up dropping onto the carpeted floor and joining the thick layer of dust bunnies that lay on top of it. “Can I punch him in the face?” she asked, tapping her fingers on the tabletop and very pointedly not looking at her French textbook.
Janet shrugged. “The Secret Service might be mad if we dug up the corpse of the second president,” she said, slamming her own textbook shut, “Unless some of them were forced to learn about irregular -ir verbs because of this stupid curriculum. Then I think they’d lend us a shovel.”
They both thought about that for a few seconds. Janet scratched her thumb on the edge of her textbook. Maddy finally pushed herself back up in her seat after a librarian gave her a dirty look.
“If I had to pick a historical figure to punch,” Maddy said, “It’d be him. Stupid Quebec-taking-over piece of human garbage. I could be getting a C in so many other languages if it weren’t for him.”
Janet started to nod, but paused partway through the gesture and pressed her lips together. “Wait,” she said, “Andrew Jackson, though.”
“Oh yeah,” Maddy said, “I change my mind. That guy was the worst.”
[…] was published in The Fairfield Mirror, albeit under the wrong […]