"Jerry Oltion - Abridged Edition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

remember him by, but until lately he hadn't felt the need to actually use it.
Good thing; even now the disappointment was intense, like being rejected all
over again.

That was silly. It was just a dictionary, and not a very good one at that. He
was trying hard not to be vengeful about it, but even so, a dictionary without
"stevedore" was missing something.
He flipped to the F's, remembering how as a kid he used to look up dirty words
for fun, but "fuck" wasn't there. Nor was "fornicate." Well, that was somehow
appropriate. Since Richard had left, Owen hadn't had so much as a date. Not
that
he hadn't tried, but one of the people he'd attempted to strike up a
relationship with had turned out to be his boss's nephew, and now he was out
of
a job.

He closed the dictionary and looked back to the paper. Maybe he would just
call
the number and ask what a stevedore was. But when he looked for the ad, he
couldn't find that, either.

What the heck? He traced the columns of jobs. They were alphabetized; he saw
sales, screen printers, steelworkers, then summer jobs. No stevedore. But it
had
been there just a minute ago. He wouldn't have made up a whole job listing,
not
for something as unlikely as "stevedore."

There was another explanation, of course. An easily testable one, too, save
that
it was completely crazy to imagine it could be true.

Owen didn't mind. Right now he felt as if he were at least halfway insane
anyway. So he picked another ad from the paper -- taxi driver --and flipped
through the dictionary to the T's. No listing for taxi.

He'd kept his finger on the ad for taxi drivers, but when he looked back down,
it now pointed to "teachers."

Owen stared at the newspaper for a long while, not really seeing anything
printed there. He shifted his gaze to the dictionary. It looked like a
standard
collegiate, hardbound in red cloth, but instead of Webster's, the name read,
"Drake's Deleting Dictionary."

Where had Richard gotten it? Owen had no idea. He looked for a publisher's
mark
on the copyright page, but there was no copyright page. Good grief, did it
contain anything it was supposed to?