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Season 3 Episode 10

Thank you for downloading this episode.

👉The story begins at 02:25 and the tiny lessons begin at 15:02

👉You can find the transcript after the Credits!

👉Visit our website to download the Podcast User's Manual and find out more! https://alittleenglish.com/

A Little English is written, produced, recorded, edited, mixed, mastered and scored by Edward Cooper Howland.

All stories are either in the public domain, or written by me.

Copyright 2024 Edward Cooper Howland

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. My name is Cooper, and this is…A Little English. Every episode, I read a short story. After the story, there are three tiny lessons. 

And welcome to my new studio in Chiba, outside Tokyo. Do I sound a little different? I’m recording in a new studio, but with all the same gear. I hope it sounds good!

Tonight’s story is a flashback. We are going all the way back to 2001, in Charleston, South Carolina. Why? Because that’s where I was in 2001. And what was I doing? Pretty much the same thing these people in this story are doing. Going to college. Acting badly. You know. So, like all my stories, none of these events actually happened to ME. But maybe I was there Maybe I was one of the other people at the party, in the backyard of a fraternity house.

You might want to google that before you begin. Try “College of Charleston Fraternity Houses,” on Google Images. It will give you a pretty good idea of where this story takes place. And honestly, the architecture is pretty awesome. Check it out. 

The name of this story is…Two Thousand and One.

“Hey,” says Sam. “How you doing tonight?”

The girl looks up at him and pretends to be surprised. Sam sees a thin line of beer on her upper lip as she lowers her red plastic cup long enough to reply, 

“Uh, I’m good. Nice party.” She immediately raises the cup back to her lips. 

“This is my place,” says Sam. “Or, like, it’s my fraternity’s place….I live here.”

“Cool,” she says. “I’ve been here a few times.”

“I thought I’d seen you before,” says Sam. 

Sam knows that they are both lying. She is lying because his fraternity has a party nearly every weekend. And this girl has been at almost every single one. She always arrives early and stays close to the keg. She drinks as fast as she can, and doesn’t talk to anyone. As soon as the beer is gone, so is she. He is lying because he knows all this about her. He has been waiting for the right moment to talk to her since at least Christmas.

On the second floor of the fraternity house, a window slides up. One of his brothers screams like a barbarian and drags a huge  pair of speakers out onto the windowsill. Rap beats thunder out. The kids in the back yard cheer and the crowd starts moving to the music. 

“What’s your name?” asks Sam. 

  “I’m Eleanor.”

“Cool,” he says. “You wanna dance with me, Eleanor?”

She looks nervous. “I don’t really know how to dance to this kind of music.”

He reaches out and gently puts his hand on her hip. She lets it rest there. “I don’t really either,” he says. “Let’s give it a try?”

———

Sam sleeps in this room every night, but tonight, when he opens the door with Eleanor behind  him, it is like he is seeing it for the first time. How did it get this bad? He cannot see the floor beneath the collection of dirty laundry, beer cans, textbooks, hamburger wrappers and god knows what other kinds of trash. 

“Sorry,” he tells her. “I really didn’t think that anyone was gonna come up here tonight.” He frowns at the bed - actually just a naked box spring with a mattress sitting on the floor - and sweeps all the clothes off it. He sits down on the mattress and pats the space next to him. 

She stares at him for a moment. She’s going to leave. She’s going to turn right around and walk out the door, and - to be honest - that would be the right thing to do.  No girl would ever stay with him in a room this filthy. What was he thinking?

Slowly, cautiously, she steps over the garbage on the floor, and sits beside him on the bed. Sam’s stomach melts, like broken glass and hot lava. 

“Uh,” he says. “Uh, do you like U2?”

“The band?”

“Yeah.”

“Not really.”

“Oh, uh me neither,” he lies, again. “But they have this one song that I think is like, super-awesome. Do you know, ‘One?’”

She tells him that she’s not sure, and - before she can stop him - he crawls over to the other side of the bed, reaches down and returns holding an acoustic guitar. 

“Wanna hear it?”

She’s smiling at him. He can’t tell what she’s smiling about. Does he look like an idiot? Does she think he’s cool? It’s too late now, anyway. He has to try. He picks out the first chord, and begins to sing. 

He is singing this song - which he knows is the most romantic song in the whole world - and she is just staring at him and smiling.  It’s this tiny little smile just at the corners of her mouth. 

Sam stops the song. 

“I’m sorry, I suck at singing. And, like the song is kinda too high for my vocal range anyway. I’m sorry, I’ll stop.”

She puts her hand on his arm.

“It’s nice. Keep going.”

And…she kisses him. 

————

It’s nearly three am. The party is long over. A couple of his frat brothers have started a little bonfire, and are hanging around it, drinking beer and smoking. Eleanor is the only woman left.

She and Sam are sharing a camping chair, cuddled up together under a blanket. Charleston is still cool at night, this time of year. He speaks quietly into her ear.

“You really  didn’t know that song? It was really big like, ten years ago.” He’s can’t see her face, but he can smell her hair and her perfume. 

“No. We never listened to pop radio growing up.”

“What did you listen to?”

“Classical music. Or Christian talk radio stuff.” He can feel her body getting tense. He changes the subject. 

“Where are you from?”

“Greenville. Or a little bit outside. What about you?” She’s starting to relax again.

“I’m from Rhode Island.”

“Rhode Island? Oh man. If my momma knew I was dating a Yankee, she’d be so upset with me. Like ‘Eleanor, we did not sacrifice and save for you to go to college, just so you could go running around with some boy from Rhode Island.”

Sam can’t stop himself. He says, “So…we’re dating now?”

Her body becomes fully tense. She sits up and turns so that she can look at him. “Oh, I mean, I don’t know. I didn’t really fool around with boys much in high school. It was a really small town, and-“

He kisses her, and asks if she wants to be his girlfriend. 

She says that she does. 

And they stay there, together in that camping chair, and drink warm beer and stare at the fire until the sun starts to come up over the rooftops. 

—----

Hey, so, was that romantic? I wanted to make something romantic. The stories have been kind of dark lately, and I wanted to make something sweet and fun. 

Of course, like always, this story is deeply connected to the other stories. How and why, I’ll let you figure out. But there is a reason we had to go back to 2001 to tell this story. Why it couldn’t happen today in 2023. That’s all the hints I’m gonna give you. 

By the way, we are now one quarter of the way through the big story. How is it going? Are any of the relationships between the characters starting to become clear? If not, just keep listening. I really hope it will all make sense once it’s finished. 

Oh, and I think we are gonna have at least one more skip week, because it’s a holiday next week and I’ll be traveling BACK to Hiroshima to finish clearing out my old house. So the next episode will be May 10th. Thank you for being patient.

Let’s do some tiny lessons. 

The Big Picture is…romantic…

Why does Eleanor kiss Sam? Even in his disgusting bedroom? I don’t just come out and say it in the story, but it’s pretty clear to me. What do you think? Take a minute and think about it. … I think she is really young. They both are. And she’s finally gotten out of her small town, and she’s trying to have some crazy adventures. And he’s kinda sweet. Singing old pop songs to her. 

Do you think they play rap music at the Dictionary Disco?

Our first vocabulary word is…Keg. A Keg is the big metal thing that they serve beer from. It’s supposed to be for bars, but when I was in college, they would have a keg party. Where there’s a keg (or three) in the back of the house, and everyone gets a cup to fill up.

The second vocabulary word is….fraternity. It comes from Latin and means “brotherhood.” But in this case, a fraternity, or “frat” is an organization at universities for boys to join. They call each other their “brothers.” I was never in one, but they did have the biggest parties. 

Finally, let’s listen to the Melody Moment. 

Go back to the paragraph where I’m talking about how they are both lying. Notice the difference between how I say She the first time, and how i say it the second time. “She is lying,” that SHE is really strong and high. After that, it’s way down low. “She always arrives early.” I do the same thing with “He is lying.” Why? Because I said both of them are lying. So I’m separating that paragraph into two parts: First about her lies, then about his. See, I just did it again. Intonation in this case is used as a kind of road sign, to tell you the structure of the sentence or paragraph.

Let’s do the credits. 

Thank you for listening to Season 3 Episode 10 of A Little English. 

Every episode is produced entirely by me, Edward Cooper Howland, here in Chiba, Japan. 

If you like the show, tell someone about it! A recommendation from a friend is the best way to get someone to listen, and I would really appreciate it. 

This season, all the stories are written by…me! I use chatGPT by Openai.com as an editor because I can’t afford to hire a human. It’s an amazing, free piece of software, and you should check it out. 

Again, thank you  so much for listening.

For now, be kind to yourselves, and to each other.