monday started bizarre. At the bus stop, the sun rose like a diseased orange, dark and ruddy at the bottom and a sick yellow at the top. “It’s the fires in California,” said someone as we shivered in the October cold, but it looked like an omen to me. I shouldn’t have worn a skirt.
The bus arrived late. A little girl who’d missed her ride to the elementary school sat in my seat. I asked her to move. She said, “Who do you think you are?” I had to sit on the other side and watch houses slide by I’d never watched before. At the high school, scraps of paper and an empty milk carton littered the hallway by my locker. The janitors must have taken the weekend off. My locker combination didn’t work the first three times, and then it did. In the meantime, kids walked back and forth behind me, headed to their rooms. I didn’t catch what anyone said, and what I did hear sounded foreign.
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.
Mark Tripp
monday started bizarre. At the bus stop, the sun rose like a diseased orange, dark and ruddy at the bottom and a sick yellow at the top. “It’s the fires in California,” said someone as we shivered in the October cold, but it looked like an omen to me. I shouldn’t have worn a skirt.
The bus arrived late. A little girl who’d missed her ride to the elementary school sat in my seat. I asked her to move. She said, “Who do you think you are?” I had to sit on the other side and watch houses slide by I’d never watched before. At the high school, scraps of paper and an empty milk carton littered the hallway by my locker. The janitors must have taken the weekend off. My locker combination didn’t work the first three times, and then it did. In the meantime, kids walked back and forth behind me, headed to their rooms. I didn’t catch what anyone said, and what I did hear sounded foreign.
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.
Mark Tripp
การแปล กรุณารอสักครู่..
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monday started bizarre. At the bus stop, the sun rose like a diseased orange, dark and ruddy at the bottom and a sick yellow at the top. “It’s the fires in California,” said someone as we shivered in the October cold, but it looked like an omen to me. I shouldn’t have worn a skirt.
The bus arrived late. A little girl who’d missed her ride to the elementary school sat in my seat. I asked her to move. She said, “Who do you think you are? ” I had to sit on the other side and watch houses slide by I’d never watched before. At the high school, scraps of paper and an empty milk carton littered the hallway by my locker. The janitors must have taken the weekend off. My locker combination didn’t work the first three times, and then it did. In the meantime, kids walked back and forth behind me, headed to their rooms. I didn’t catch what anyone said, and what I did hear sounded foreign.
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,แล้วทำคู่ไป ก่อนจะมองออกไป เขาไม่ได้เจอตาของฉันเมื่อเขาถามว่า " คุณรู้มั้ยว่า คุณเป็นใคร ? "
ฉันบอกว่า " โอลิเวีย แลงดอน "
" แน่นอน " เขาศึกษาคลิปบอร์ดและทำเครื่องหมาย
เขาเขียนชื่อของเขาบนกระดานก่อนที่ระฆัง นายเฮอร์เบิร์ต อายุสามสิบกว่าๆ ร้ายผิวพรรณ เน็คไทสีดำ เสื้อ untucked กลับ หนึ่งถุงเท้าสีเทาและสีฟ้าหนึ่งหนึ่งแอบออกมาจากกางเกง นิ้วสั้นด้วย 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.”
นี้จะน่าสนใจ ผมคิด นางสาวเบนใช้เวลาสัปดาห์ที่แล้วพูดถึงสัญลักษณ์ในสไตน์เบ็คของไข่มุก , หนังสือที่ฉันได้ยึดทุกครึ่งชั่วโมงเสร็จ ความคิดของเธอเรียนสนุกสนานได้ย้ายเข้าสู่ไวยากรณ์บทเรียนหลังจากสิบห้านาทีของการป้องกัน spirited สไตน์เบ็คสร้างวรรณกรรมอเมริกัน สัปดาห์ก่อนที่เธอจะทำขั้นตอนเดียวกันยกเว้นผู้เขียนคือ Sherwood Anderson เธอเกือบจะล้มลงด้วยความสุขในขณะที่อ่าน " ฉันโง่ " ออกมาดัง ๆ .
นายเฮอร์เบิร์ต กล่าวว่า " ในอนาคต ฉันหมายถึง นายตายแน่ ร้อยปี นักเรียนจะต้องอ่านคลาสสิก บางคนอาจจะเหมือนหนังสือคุณเรียนวันนี้ แต่คุณจะหายไปอีกนาน ดังนั้นคุณจะใช้จ่ายวันของคุณตอนนี้ latasha "
,นั่งใกล้หน้า กล่าวว่า " ทำโปรแกรมวิทยาลัย " เด็กสองคนหัวเราะ .
" ขอบคุณ latasha . " เขาไม่ได้ปรึกษาผังที่นั่ง แต่จ้องเธออย่างเอาเป็นเอาตาย ฉันสงสัยว่าถ้าเขาจำชื่อของทุกคนอยู่ที่ประตู โทรศัพท์ของฉัน buzzed . latasha ส่งข้อความ " & drnkng เบียร์ "
" แน่นอน พวกเขาอาจจะอ่านสิ่งที่คุณได้เขียนไว้ มาร์ค ทเวน เป็นอายุของคุณสักครั้งคุณก็รู้ และก็เป็น Sylvia Plath และ เออร์เนสต์ เฮมมิ่งเวย์ ฉันสงสัยว่าถ้าพวกเขารู้ว่าพวกเขาจะได้รับหนังสือตำนานตอนที่ 17 ถ้าพวกเขาไม่สามารถรู้สึกได้ เขาก้าวเดินช้าๆ จากแท่นถึงโต๊ะ มองดูเรา " ฉันสงสัยว่าส่วนที่เหลือของชั้นจะคิดว่าถ้าพวกเขาได้รู้จักพวกเขาในการแสดงตนของความยิ่งใหญ่ . "
latasha ส่งข้อความ " 17 ปีเก่า hmngwy เดทยำ "
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.เฮอร์เบิร์ตจับกองเอกสารบนโต๊ะของเบน . จากแบบทดสอบ " ไม่มีใครอ่าน สไตน์เบ็คอีกแล้ว " เขาดูเศร้าโศก . เมื่อฉันคิดถึงเหตุการณ์ที่เกิดขึ้น นี้คือที่ผมเริ่มเลื้อยออกมา ฉันคิดว่าสักพักเขาจะร้องไห้แบบนี้คนข้างถนนจะเริ่มร้องไห้อย่างไม่มีเหตุผล หรือมีการโต้แย้งกับตัวเอง .
" คุณหมายถึงอะไร ? " บอกว่า ไทเลอร์" เราเริ่มต้นในวันจันทร์ มันเป็นมุกหรือม้าสีแดง เราต้องโหวต "
นายเฮอร์เบิร์ต รวมตัวเองและยัก . " เทียนย่อมวรรณกรรมและหย่อม วิธีการหลายท่านอ่าน Rudyard Kipling ในตอนนี้ ? "
ไม่มีใครยกมือเลย ผมมองไปรอบ ๆ ชั้นก็นั่งดูเฮอร์เบิร์ต ก็คงงั้น พวกเขาจับรู้สึกแบบเดียวกันฉัน .
เขาย้ายขึ้นและลงแถว แล้วหยุดที่โต๊ะของฉัน “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.
" นั่นเป็นสิ่งที่สอนในชั้นเรียนที่หนุ่มวิลเลี่ยม เช็คสเปียร์ฟังคำพูดของคุณที่คุณสามารถสังเกตเด็กในทางของเขาเป็น . . . . . . . เป็นไสของวัฒนธรรม "
latasha ส่งข้อความ " bghs ntfk " ซึ่งแปลว่า " bughouse nutfuck "
อะไร latasha พูดออกมาคือ " ถ้าผมมีเครื่องย้อนเวลา ผมไม่อยากสอน sylvia plathผมจะกลับไปฆ่าฮิตเลอร์เมื่อเขาอยู่ในโรงเรียนมัธยม . "
นายเฮอร์เบิร์ต กระโดด เหมือนเขาจะตกใจ " ที่น่าสนใจ เช่น latasha . เกือบ prescient . แต่คุณจะรู้ว่าเขา ฮิตเลอร์ , ฉันหมายถึง ตอนที่เขาอายุสิบเจ็ดปี เขาอยากเป็นศิลปิน "
เขา sidled ถึงหน้าห้อง ผมไม่เคยเห็นใครเดินเอียงข้าง " มาก่อน เฉพาะมอง .
เรียนดู ทั้งหมดของพวกเขา 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.เธอเคยบอกฉันว่า คุณเองก็ต้องถอยห่างจากสิ่งที่เกิดขึ้น หรือคุณไม่สามารถตัดสินได้ ตอนที่เธอเผาขามากในรถจักรยานยนต์ท่อไอเสียเมื่อฤดูร้อน ( ที่กระโดดบนมอเตอร์ไซด์ กับผู้ชายที่เธอเจอตอนใส่กระโปรงที่สั้นอยู่แล้ว ? ) เธอกล่าวว่าเธอได้กลิ่นไหม้ผิวหนัง ก่อนที่เธอจะรู้สึกถึงมัน มันเหมือนกับ มันเกิดขึ้นกับคนอื่น
“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.
Mark Tripp
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