Excerpt from Flannery by Lisa Moore, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1

I'm walking up Long's Hill, hoofing it because I am about to be late for school. Again.

If you're late for school you get an automated phone call. A fake-human voice, faux-friendly and regular-guy-sounding, calls to rat you out.

A child in your household named — and when it says "named," the voice changes. A completely different voice inserts your name right into Regular Guy's sentence.

And the second voice is very disappointed in you. The second voice sounds all blamey and sad and rumbling like a clap of thunder. The voice says FLANNERY.

Yesterday was the third phone call since I started grade twelve, a mere two weeks ago.

I'm always the one to answer the phone. Miranda, my mother, never answers the phone. She hates the phone.

Then I have to write myself a note and forge Miranda's signature because if she does it, she'll write a manifesto about how she doesn't believe in punctuality. She believes punctuality promotes conformity, and high-school kids need more sleep and fewer alarm clocks screaming through their early-morning dreams.

I usually have to write the note the next morning. I am tearing through the house looking for a piece of paper to write the note and then I'm late again.

So this morning I am hoofing it, because otherwise, tomorrow FLANNERY will receive phone call number four.

First period is Entrepreneurship. It's the last elective I need to graduate high school and, frankly, the only one that fits into my schedule.

It's raining in slanting sheets and my jeans are plastered onto my thighs and I'm trying to think of what my unit is going to be. The unit I'm going to produce for 60 percent of my grade in my Entrepreneurship class.

Mr. Payne advised us to think about the sorts of things people don't have already. Things they only realize they want the instant they clamp eyes on them.

You have to create a desire for your product, Mr. Payne said. Where, hitherto, there had been no desire and no need at all. That is the essence, he said, the very soul of being an entrepreneur.

For instance: furry toilet-seat covers, pet rocks, fluorescent-pink feather dusters, avocado scoopers, ice-cube trays molded into starfish, and Christmas sweaters with lights that blink on and off. Mr. Payne had a PowerPoint presentation and he flicked through images of these items.

Next there was an image of a vegetable juicer. Then a yo-gurt maker and a massage chair with straps and buckles that looked medieval. Then an image of fridge-magnet words so people could make poetry on the front of their fridges while sipping their morning coffees.

All things people got along fine without until they were invented, Mr. Payne said. He closed the lid of the laptop.

That's the sort of thing, Mr. Payne continued, that you should design for your unit. You have to intuit what the world is waiting for, because the desire for new products is insatiable. Make something new or reinvent something old so it appears to be new.

Stuff, he said. Let's make stuff.

Rumor has it that Mr. Payne once invented a grain-sized microchip that could be inserted painlessly between a child's shoulder blades and was sensitive to the biometric changes that occurred whenever the child told a lie. A fluctuation in temperature, quickening of the pulse, dilation of the pupils and sweaty palms. The microchip was said to emit a high-pitched alarm on the parent's key chain when the lie rolled off the tongue.

Apparently it did not take off. But Mr. Payne still has the black hairy eyebrows and gelled helmet hair of a scientific genius.

First I was thinking a waterproof bra. A waterproof bra that actually fits properly. I am a girl with big boobs, and an innovative bra design could revolutionize the lingerie market.

Excerpted from Flannery by Lisa Moore. Copyright © 2016 by Lisa Moore. Excerpted by permission of Groundwood Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.