Well, the worst has happened: your aunt has been acting distant toward your uncle. Now that your uncle has asked for your help in getting to the bottom of things, you’ll need easy and portable disguises to stay under cover. Keep it simple with these 5 classic books to pretend to read while stalking your aunt on behalf of your uncle.
1. 1984, George Orwell
Your uncle recently called you out of the blue and said, “She’s keeping something from me. Your aunt’s keeping something from me,” so you’re going to need a copy of George Orwell’s cautionary tale about totalitarianism to shield your face as you stake out the early morning spin classes your uncle suspects your aunt isn’t really going to. According to him, her muscle mass hasn’t increased at all in the four months since she joined the exercise studio. “I know your aunt,” he said. “This is not your aunt.”
Orwell’s dystopian classic will help you blend into the background as you sit in the spin studio lobby, secretly scanning your eyes up and down every middle-aged woman to see if she’s the one you’re there to find—your very own aunt.
2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Coming in at 208 pages, The Great Gatsby is a slim tome that won’t weigh down your backpack as tail your aunt’s car on your bike, because—GASP—your aunt HAS been going to spin class!
“It’s something else, then,” your uncle will say when you report that three mornings in a row, your aunt did, in fact, attend a 7:30 a.m. session of 80s Pop Power Cycle.
“It was never about the muscle mass. Cycling is an effective way to build anaerobic endurance, not muscle mass! I know it’s something else,” he’ll confess. “I fear… I fear she could be cheating on me.”
The Great Gatsby‘s cover image is famously a painting of a head with two eyes, so if you hold it up at the just right angle as you follow your aunt’s Prius, chances are she’ll believe she’s just seeing the face of a strange kid on a bike waiting behind her at traffic lights. She’ll have no idea that behind the book, it’s you.
3. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Thankfully, your uncle has been calling your middle school each day and impersonating your dad to report you as absent with a “stomach thing,” so you have plenty of time to drop by the library to pick up a copy of Lord of The Flies, Golding’s acclaimed novel about a group of children who revert to their basest, most animalistic instincts while stranded on a deserted island.
More important than the plot, though is the fact that there are lots of twigs on the cover of Lord Of The Flies, which makes it ideal for hiding amidst the tall grass as you try to suss out what it is your aunt is doing IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WOODS!!
It’s certainly odd. Your aunt isn’t much of a nature-lover, and you’ve never seen her enter these woods before. Unfortunately, the situation only gets more confusing as you watch your aunt walk around the forest aimlessly until she finds a big chunk of wood, which she then carries back to her car.
The good news: during the time your aunt spent walking in circles, you were able to actually read a few pages of the book, which you’d be studying in English class right now if you were actually going to school. The bad news: you still haven’t solved the mystery of what your aunt’s been up to.
4. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë’s beloved bildungsroman follows Jane Eyre from childhood to adulthood, which makes it the perfect book to “read” as you follow your aunt from Anthropologie, to KFC, to her car, where she proceeds to frantically eat an entire bucket of chicken down to the bone!
But when your uncle checks in that night, calling you on the Cricket Wireless phone he bought you specifically for this mission, he says that during his daily recap over dinner with your aunt, she never once mentioned chicken at all, let alone KFC—even when he asked about her lunch!
“I told you she was keeping things from me!” your uncle exclaims. “But why did she eat so much chicken? Was it to impress a new lover? You must figure it out…you must find out what she’s doing behind my back!”
5. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
By now, your uncle must be getting exhausted. He’s been asking you to follow your aunt for nine days straight, and you still haven’t found any answers for him.
But! Under the guise of reading Mark Twain’s oft-banned classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, you can trace your aunt’s steps from a cafe, to a craft studio, to a woodworking room, then back outside the craft studio to the windows outside the woodworking room, where you’ll carefully pull down the book just enough to see that on the very chunk of wood your aunt found in the woods, she’s carving “AUNT + UNCLE FOREVER”!
Then, when you look even closer, you see that she’s also attached the wishbone from the bucket of KFC to the wood, which she’s used to form the sentence, “I [WISHBONE]D FOR YOU.” Although it might have made more sense if she had written “I wished for you,” instead of what basically reads as “I wishboned for you,” it’s an incredibly sweet sentiment.
Now you can finally put your copy of The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer down, bike home, and rest for a while. There’s no need to share your newfound information about your aunt’s doings with your uncle just yet—you’ve got a feeling he’s going to learn for himself real soon.
