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Show Acting Alone Page 466 Shannon was all dolled up in her dress greens with the funny calf-length skirt and the metal buttons and iron horses sprinkled over huge pockets everywhere, leaving no room for the sweet shape of Shanny herself. She wore, almost certainly for the first time in her life, nylons. Colorless bristles from her freshly-shaved legs poked through the fine clear weave. Sammy had only half-facetiously suggested last night that he wished the child would be in a violently jealous rage this morning. But, instead, she was just acting her normal, absent-mindedly pleasant self, as though her mind were elsewhere. She came up and asked, "Where's our cousin, Polly? Didn't you send him a invite?" In spite of herself, Polly looked aghast at her little sister. Didn't Shanny know that their cousin had vanished into thin air not long ago, perhaps never to return, perhaps to participate in an extended rampage of some unimaginably twisted Nazi variety with that bad company he'd been keeping, those bestial Kiev ruffians who had corrupted, even kidnapped the soul of their dimwitted but heretofore sweet little cousin Spikey? Where had Shanny been hiding her head, that she didn't know these things about her own favorite relative in the whole family? Shanny got a bit self-defensive under Polly's amazed stare. She pouted out her lips and cheeks and chest and said, "'Course, I guess, Spikey being so famous and all, I wouldn't of had to ask where he was at today, I mean, like, if I was the sort of woman that read the newspaper and watched Sixty Minutes every night like you, Polly, you being such a egg - I mean, you being so smart and all, or else if Auntie Mae Bell 'n me was on talking terms and |