Beast(25)

She smirks.

Commence eye rolling. “Deal. Text it to me.”

Her little firefly fingers go to work, and my phone buzzes. I snatch it off my bedside table. Mom gets her coat on. “You must be hungry. I’m off to get a pizza,” she says.

I wave goodbye. At least, I think I do. I’m busy working on what I hope is the perfect first message. Hey, Jamie. It’s Dylan….





ELEVEN


Thursday. It’s the last class of the day, and all I can think is Jamie, Jamie, Jamie….

“Dylan?”

Except I’m still in English. I look up from doodling Dr. and Mrs. Ingvarsson in the margins of my notebook and scribble it out so hard it rips the paper. “Yeah?”

Mrs. Steig waits patiently, but annoyed. “Your thoughts on The Scarlet Letter?”

“Which part? The slut-shaming part? The Victorian era masquerading as the Puritans? The familial guilt from Nathaniel Hawthorne for his ancestors being jerks in Salem?”

Mrs. Steig’s so sick of me doing this, but she’s smiling because she loves me, so I just wait for her to sigh and throw her hands up, and she does. Right on cue. “Have you read the book, or is this tangent time?”

“Yeah, I read it.” In like the eighth grade because I was bored once, but whatever.

“I take it you’re not interested in The Scarlet Letter,” she says.

I shrug.

Mrs. Steig looks at the clock. Ten minutes before the bell rings. “All right, go ahead.”

“So it’s not really about The Scarlet Letter, right? Because that book’s been beaten to death. We get it. It was amazing at the time, revolutionary, a big slap in the face. Everyone is a hypocrite and no one’s better than anyone else, so quit judging, but it was a major coincidence for Hawthorne because it was almost foreshadowing the time to come, both his and in the book, you know?”

She folds her arms and smirks. “How so?”

“It lines up perfectly with the holding country, England, as a last gasp before the Restoration, when everything pulled a one-eighty once Charles the Second came back on the throne,” I say. “Like, we’re all talking about Nathaniel Hawthorne using Hester as a metaphor or a trope or an analogy or whatever, but did you know that one of the most prolific and bestselling authors in Britain during Hester’s time period, mostly, was a woman named Aphra Behn?”

Mrs. Steig’s arms drop. “I’ve not heard of her. She was more prolific than Shakespeare?”

“No, he was dead by the time she came up,” I say. “But she wrote a lot and made good money for it. She was a legit full-time writer, which is not what you think when you imagine guys in tights and long curly wigs.” The Restoration is one of my favorite time periods. You’d think everyone was all prim and chaste, but they were anything but. “Read her poem ‘The Disappointment’ and tell me if Hester wouldn’t have been one of Aphra’s contemporaries.”

That poem is bold.

A shepherdess is crazy into this shepherd and wants to lose her virginity by banging his brains out. And this poem about a girl wanting to bone sold like hotcakes during the 1600s. It’s kind of nuts.

Mrs. Steig gets her phone out and pulls it up. She swizzles her head and shoulders all cheesy-like, fake stage style, and reads in a booming voice:

“ONE Day the Amorous Lisander, By an impatient Passion sway’d,

Surpris’d fair Cloris, that lov’d Maid, Who cou’d defend her self no longer ;

All things did with his Love conspire,

The gilded Planet of the Day,

In his gay Chariot, drawn by Fire,

Was now descending to the Sea,

And left no Light to guide the World, But what from Cloris’ brighter Eyes was hurl’d.

In a lone Thicket, made for Love, Silent as yielding Maids Consent,

She with a charming Languishment

Permits his force, yet gently strove ?

Her Hands his Bosom softly meet….”



Mrs. Steig stops. She reads far ahead, eyes widening, and puts her phone back in her bag. “Oh my, we can’t read this in class.” Now everyone’s all writing the name of the poem for later. I grin to myself. If there’s one charming thing passed down through time, it’s that humans are all a bunch of horny nerds who can’t wait to talk about it.

Wait until they get to the end. The shepherd dude can’t seal the deal, and the girl—the girl!—has blue balls. I didn’t even know that was possible, but turns out I’m about four hundred years behind the times.

“Well, that’s an alley I didn’t anticipate getting clubbed in,” Mrs. Steig says. “Where did you learn about Aphra Behn?”

“A podcast.” And then I found a book of her work at Powell’s and read that too.

Everyone in class stares at me, but in a good way. They’re floored. This girl Bailey and I have a pissing match over grades, and even she crinkles up her nose with admiration.

“Must’ve been a heck of a podcast,” Mrs. Steig says as the bell rings.

I merge into the flow of traffic in the hall and get carried away to my locker. A note gets dropped in my lap by a cute girl who sprints away so fast, I barely have time to be confused. I think that was JP’s newest girlfriend? It’s so hard to keep them straight. All the note says is Adam Michaels?