My stomach hurt.
And to top it off, Ms Benda didn’t show up for English. A stranger stood at the door, wearing a substitute teacher badge, checking off names as we entered the room. There was a line. He looked up when I stepped behind Carmen Tripp, and then did a double take, before looking away. He didn’t meet my eyes when he asked, “Do you know who you are?”
I said, “Olivia Langdon.”
“Of course.” He studied the clipboard and made a mark.
He wrote his name on the board before the bell, Mr. Herbert. Thirtyish. Bad complexion. Black tie. Shirt untucked in back. One gray sock and one blue one peeking out from pants an inch too short. He carefully put his briefcase on the desk, patted it twice, like it was a pet dog, then stepped behind the podium. The school district scrapes the bottom of the barrel for subs. Latasha texted me before the bell rang. “wrdo.” I sent back, “no kdng.”
To open class, he said, “You’re all dead.” He glanced at his briefcase. “But two of you will be famous. Hey, nonny, nonny.”
This is going to be interesting, I thought. Ms Benda had spent the last week discussing symbolism in Steinbeck’s The Pearl, a book that had taken me all of a half hour to finish. Her idea of an entertaining class was to move onto a grammar lesson after fifteen minutes of spirited defense of Steinbeck’s contribution to American literature. The week before she’d done the same routine, except the author was Sherwood Anderson. She practically collapsed with joy while reading “I’m a Fool” out loud.
Mr. Herbert said, “In the future, I mean, you’re dead. A hundred years from now, high school students will be reading the classics, maybe some of the same books you are studying today, but you will be long gone, so how are you going to spend your days now?”
Latasha, sitting near the front, said, “Doing college applications.” A couple of kids laughed.
“Thank you, Latasha.” He didn’t consult the seating chart, but stared at her intensely. I wondered if he’d memorized everyone’s name at the door. My phone buzzed. Latasha texted, “& drnkng beer.”
“Of course, maybe they will be reading what one of you has written. Mark Twain was your age once, you know, and so was Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway. I wonder if they knew they would be literary legends when they were seventeen. If they could feel it.” He paced slowly from the podium to the desk, looking out at us. “I wonder what the rest of the class would think if they had known they were in the presence of greatness.”
Latasha texted, “17 yr old Hmngwy on a date—yum.”
I sent back, “perv.”
Tyler what’s-his-name, from the golf team, raised his hand, and then said before Mr. Herbert could call on him, “We’re studying The Pearl. Are we going to have a quiz on yesterday’s reading?”
Somebody groaned. Depend on Tyler to bring up the quiz. I texted to Latasha, “a-hole.”
She snickered. Like me, she palmed her phone in her lap, out of sight. She typed with her thumb without looking. Beneath the desks where the teacher couldn’t see, a whole other conversation was taking place. I’ll bet half the kids were texting at any time. I once had an argument with my boyfriend, broke up with him, made up and broke up again before the end of a lesson on Emily Dickinson’s “Twas Just This Time, Last Year, When I Died.”
Mr. Herbert touched a pile of papers on Ms Benda’s desk. Undoubtedly the quizzes. “Nobody reads Steinbeck anymore.” He looked mournful. When I think back on the incident, this is where I started creeping out. I thought for a moment he was going to cry in that way a street person will just start crying for no reason, or have an argument with himself.
“What do you mean?” said Tyler. “We started on Monday. It was The Pearl or The Red Pony. We got to vote.”
Mr. Herbert gathered himself and shrugged. “Literary reputations wax and wane. How many of you read Rudyard Kipling now?”
Nobody raised their hand. I looked around. The class was sitting up, watching Herbert warily. They caught the same vibe I did.
He moved up and down the rows, then stopped at my desk. “How about you, Olivia? Have you read ‘The Man Who Would be King’? How about The Story of the Gadsbys?”
“You mean The Great Gatsby?”
He leaned too close too me, and his hands were on my desk. The little hairs on his knuckles caught the light. Definite boundary issues. Hospital breath. “No, that was Fitzgerald, another fading star.”
I wanted to bolt.
Somebody whispered to someone else on the other side of the room. Their heads bent together in my peripheral vision, but I couldn’t look away. Mr. Herbert’s face moved a half foot from my own. “Even you might be famous in the future.” His shoulders scrunched up, and his tongue clicked against the back of his teeth twice. Then he straightened. My heart pounded in relief as he moved away.
“Wouldn’t that be something, to teach in the class where a young William Shakespeare listened to your words, where you could observe the child on his way to becoming… a shaper of culture?”
Latasha texted, “bghs ntfk,” which translated as “bughouse nutfuck.”
What Latasha said out loud was, “If I had a time machine, I wouldn’t want to teach Sylvia Plath. I’d go back and kill Hitler when he was in high school.”
Mr. Herbert jumped like he’d been shocked. “Interesting example, Latasha. Almost prescient. But how would you know him? Hitler, I mean. When he was seventeen, he wanted to be an artist.”
He sidled to the front of the class. I’d never actually seen anyone “sidle” before. Peculiar looking.
The class watched, all of them. Something wasn’t right with his voice; it quivered, and when he reached the desk and actually stroked his briefcase, I could almost hear the goosebumps rising on the other kids’ skin.
Latasha seemed unperturbed, but that’s the way she has always been, utterly confident. She called it detachment. She’d told me once that you had to be able to step back from what was going on or you couldn’t judge it. When she burned her leg so badly on a motorcycle exhaust pipe last summer (who hops on a motorcyle with a guy she just met while wearing a short skirt anyway?), she said that she smelled the burning skin before she felt it, and it was like it was happening to someone else.
“I’d have a picture of him, of course. Even Hitler didn’t know he was Hitler at seventeen.”
“Yes.” Mr. Herbert laughed, and by then everyone had to have been convinced he was not right. “Hitler didn’t know. Mark Twain didn’t know. Twain thought he would be a riverboat captain.”
He toyed with his briefcase’s latch. Suddenly, I pictured a gun in it, or a bomb.
“Now here’s an interesting thought.” His finger popped the latch, then he pressed it closed with a click. “What if Adolf Hitler and Sylvia Plath were in the same high school class? Wouldn’t that be an incredible coincidence? Don’t you think a historian would love to see their interactions, if he could?” The latch popped open again. He snapped it shut.
Mr. Herbert looked out at us, waiting for an answer. Finally, Taylor said in a shaky voice, “They couldn’t be classmates, could they? He was in Germany, and she was American?”
I texted Latasha, “911?”
“Did you know that Plath’s epitaph on her tombstone reads, ‘Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.’ If she and Hitler had been classmates, wouldn’t that have been an appropriate message? He would have destroyed and she would have created. But Plath isn’t influential enough. No, imagine William Shakespeare and Adolf Hitler in the same class. The bright and dark, side by side, maybe drinking buddies when they were young.” He glanced at his watch. “I don’t have much time. Hey, nonny.”