Democrat-Gazette online

First off, this ain't Gwen. It's her friend Jymmie Sue. I've had to take over this week on account of Gwen being tired, or should we say, "tired of it." Don't get me wrong, I know she has some weird stuff wrong with her: low blood pressure, fluid around her heart, a murmur, and a slippin' valve. Her numbers for lupus are elevated, which is the thing that worries her mama the most, she told me down at the Kut 'N' Kurl last week. I think truth be told, all that just kinda keeps Gwen at a base level of tired all the time. But she gets this look in her eye, more like a twitch really, when she's what I call "tired of it." She has done it as long as I can remember.

I met Gwen in kindergarten when we were in Mrs. Martha's class, and I'll never forget that my first impression of her came when this boy Tommy designed a contest to decide who could be his girlfriend. Which I thought was dumb from the beginning, so I didn't participate. But Gwen was goo-goo-eyed over Tommy, and so was this other girl Sabrina, and the contest was that they had to hop like bunnies across the carpet to Tommy to get a piece of paper out of his hand, and whoever won would get the wonderful prize of being his girlfriend.

So these idiots did this, and Gwen was the faster hopper, so she arrived at Tommy first. But she stood there and waited for him to give her the paper. When Sabrina hopped up, she grabbed the paper out of his hand and........

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