Greg always wondered what it'd be like to eat a crayon. His friend Sweeney wondered what it'd be like to eat a crayon in the library. That's why when Sweeney said, "Do you notice something different about my ears?" Greg said, "Have you been eating a crayon in the library?"
   But no, there was something different about his ears. His girlfriend, Shelley, had pierced them. She needed someone to practise on. She was only going to do one, but she got it wrong, so she did the second one, and she got that one less wrong. "If I had a third ear, she might have got that one right," Sweeney said to Greg. "So there's a fair chance she'll get yours right."
   "She's not going anywhere near my ears."
   "I told her she could practise on you."
   "She's not doing anything to my ears."
   Shelley arrived and said to Greg, "Are you ready to get your ears pierced?"
   "I can't. I'm... going over there."
   So he went over there, and it was great for a while. There was a beautiful woman there, and the first thing she said to him was, "I really like your ears."
   But then an angry woman came along, and the first thing she said was, "When are you going to marry my sister?"
   He wondered which sister she was talking about. "I've got to go on top of that," he said, and he left them.
   He was on his own on top of that, and he didn't mind as long as he wasn't over there or getting his ears pierced by Shelley. But he had to go on top of something else when tourists started admiring him.
   The bees arrived with their biscuits. They told him a story. "We went all around the museum, and the patches of sunlight on the ground were just like the light on the carpet when we got home. The bloodhounds were asleep in the corner. Roger was talking on the radio. When he said something about ships, the bloodhounds woke up, and they started sniffing around the room. They've been trying to find a toy white whale that we got for them after reading Moby Dick. A magician made it disappear, but he couldn't find it, and they've been trying to find the magician. He has an advantage over them because he doesn't keep falling asleep. The one advantage they have is that the magician wears very big shoes to give him an air of authority, and this slows him down. On the other hand, if the bloodhounds find a lemon they'll congratulate themselves and fall asleep. It suits us fine because it's much closer to Moby Dick than just bloodhounds with a toy whale, which wasn't really close to anything. I remember there last week..."
   "What does this have to do with biscuits?" Greg said.
   "We're getting to that. As I was saying, I remember last week when the bloodhounds were asleep in the garden, and a mouse was sleeping there too, but I don't know what this has to do with a mouse. There were biscuits on a plate, and they were very nice."
   "Ye just added in the bit about the biscuits."
   "We did not."
   The bees chased off of that and under something else and all around a thing with an umbrella and down a road.
   He met Sweeney on the following day. Greg, avoiding nouns and verbs because of a hangover, wouldn't say where he had been or what he had done there. The tattoo he had acquired overnight suggested he was engaged to someone called Eve, something that would surely disappoint all of the sisters.
   He was tempted to get his ears pierced one afternoon when he had nothing else to do, but he just ate a crayon instead. He regretted not getting his ears pierced.