favorite comes from my years teaching junior high school English, about an eighth-grade girl who'd nearly mastered the genre of the absentee note. One Tuesday morning, she handed me this note: "Please excuse Marie from school yesterday "(written on embossed, blue note paper with rounded flourishes astride long elegant script) "as she was sick with a cold and low-grade fever. "The "as she was sick with... "perfectly rendered, I thought, American suburban maternal discourse patterns. But in closing the note, Marie gave herself away: "Luv ya, Mrs. Smith. " Marie's adolescent voice was her fingerprint. She had absorbed her mother's note-writing style from years of careful study and experience: the handwriting, the stationery, most of the word choices, the appropriate language register for an absentee note. Marie was an artful forger. Expert forgers, we know, especially in the world of the arts