He shrugged. “Why doesn’t foot rhyme with boot? Why are there two ways to spell one and three ways to spell two, but only one way to spell three? I didn’t make the rules. But if you take more than a day, you can forget about ending the punishment.” He turned away and went back to reading his book.

This was crazy. I had no idea what oxymoron meant, and it was obvious he wasn’t going to tell me. I sighed and looked around at the shelves that surrounded us. “Of course,” I said, hitting myself on the side of the head with my palm. “I can look it up.”

I ran off to find a dictionary.

“No running,” he called after me.

I grabbed a dictionary and looked up the word, even though I had a feeling it wouldn’t be there. It sure didn’t look like a real word. But it was. Oxymoron. It meant “a phrase containing contradictory terms.” Great—I still didn’t have a clue. On top of that, now I needed to look up another word to make sure it meant what I thought it did. I kept my place with one finger and thumbed through the dictionary to find contradictory. In my mind, I imagined going from one word to the next, until I had all ten fingers holding places like they’d been caught in some sort of awful paper trap, never finding out what anything meant.

But it wasn’t that bad.

It turned out that an oxymoron was pretty simple—just a phrase where the two parts seemed to have opposite meanings. The dictionary gave some examples: “pretty ugly,” “strangely normal,” and “sweet sorrow.” I got it. Pretty was the opposite of ugly. So, even though pretty meant something different when you said “pretty ugly,” it still made you think of opposites. Even oxymoron was an oxymoron. It came from a couple of Greek words that mean “sharp” and “dull.”

I had to admit the idea itself was kind of fun. It would all be really cool—if my entire future weren’t in danger.

I tried to think of where I could get a picture of something made up of opposites. And not just one—I needed seven! Right off, I got an idea. I left the library and went down the road to the supermarket. It sold fish—all kinds of fish. It even had a tank with lobsters. And, if I was lucky, it might have something else.

Most places that sell fish sell shrimp, too. And shrimp also means “small.” I went through the door and followed my nose to the seafood section.