Everything You Want Me to Be(15)
Portia kept chatting as we roamed the hallways and I put in a word here or there, but really, Portia didn’t need a lot of replies. So I pretended I was at the ten-year class reunion. Look at how small everything is! There’s my old locker. Oh yes, I’ve been living in New York for the last decade. Manhattan, darling. I couldn’t possibly live north of 96th Street. Not that I knew where 96th Street was, but I would. In less than a year I would be there and my new outfit officially kicked off the countdown.
We got to our lockers and found Maggie flirting with Corey Hansbrook, who still had acne all over his neck. Gross.
“So.” Maggie turned to us after Corey left for class. “Have you seen the new English teacher?”
“No! Dish.” With the promise of new gossip, Portia completely forgot about being snubbed. At least for now.
“I saw him when Dad and I were pulling into the parking lot and asked who it was.” Maggie’s dad was the vice principal, but that never seemed to interfere with her sexcapades. My dad would’ve freaked out if he saw me hitting on everything with a penis.
“He’s got gorgeous dark hair and cute squareish glasses and he looks like he’s in college.”
“Ass?” Portia demanded.
“Couldn’t tell. He was walking toward us. Kind of skinny, but hot, like library hot. Sweaty in the stacks, you know what I mean?”
I laughed along with Portia as the two-minute bell rang and didn’t give the new teacher another thought until we walked into our fourth period AP English class. Then something changed.
I’d felt out of place in my New York outfit all morning, which was the whole point, really—I was taking my first, deliberate steps away from trying to fit in—but when I walked into English and saw the new teacher, somehow I felt exactly right. He was lounging in his desk chair wearing chinos, facing the window, and completely oblivious to the stream of students talking and laughing as they picked out where to sit. I didn’t pay much attention to them either, only enough to slide into the front row and crack a notebook. Portia and a few other people settled in the desks around me and Maggie leaned over to whisper, “See, he’s totally hot.” I flashed her my Mona Lisa smile and started doodling random patterns on the notebook cover.
When the bell rang, the class quieted down and the new teacher moved to half-sit against the front of his desk. “Right, I’m Mr. Lund and you’re in Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition. If that’s not the class it says on your schedule, you’re in the wrong place.”
It was then, seeing him face-to-face, that I realized we’d already met. He glanced at me, but his attention kept moving around the class. He didn’t make a big deal about his name or introductions like some teachers did and he didn’t seem to care about the whispers that still lingered at the edges of the room.
“I’m sending some papers around. Mark your name on the attendance sheet and take a copy of the syllabus and read through it. This is what we’ll cover for the first semester, but you’ll need to sign up for the spring semester as well in order to take the test for college credit. Everyone clear? Questions?”
When no one spoke up he kept going, and a hint of a grin tugged the corner of his mouth up. “This is by far the best class they gave me this year. You’re all seniors on a college track so you’re smarter than the average bear. We don’t have to beat our heads against the five-paragraph essay or any of the standardized testing crap in here. We’ve got some room to play and do some actual learning. I’m going to expect you to do your own thinking, speak up about your opinions, and be prepared to debate and either defend or relinquish those opinions as our discussions demand. If you’re quiet, I’m going to have trouble passing you. Speak up. I’m not Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, all right? I’m not going to draw you out of your little self-conscious shells and show you that you’re a closet poet.”
Most of the room started snickering.
“And on that subject, we won’t be writing poetry in here. No poems allowed. I can’t stomach them. Don’t write a poem in response to one of our texts and expect me to pass you. This is about reading and critically thinking about what you’ve read and how the text has changed you. Every book changes you in some way, whether it’s your perspective on the world or how you define yourself in relation to the world. Literature gives us identity, even terrible literature. Moby-Dick, for example, defined how I feel about rope. I don’t know how anyone can write pages and pages of thinly veiled rope metaphors. If there are any Melville fans in the room, I might have trouble passing you.”
More laughter and this time I couldn’t help joining in. He pushed away from the desk and collected the attendance sheet.
“I expect this class is going to be the highlight of my day. Don’t let me down.”
As he started going through the syllabus I felt something good happening deep in my stomach, the same kind of feeling I got when the casting call for Jane Eyre was posted for the Rochester Civic Theater a few weeks ago and I knew I was going to get the lead role. Mr. Lund was smart, funny, and urban. He looked as wrong in the cement brick building of Pine Valley High School as I had felt for the last three years. And even though it seemed like he must be a mirage or some product of my bored-to-death-by–Pine Valley imagination, I could feel the heat coming off him from my seat in the front row. I could smell the soapy spice of his deodorant. He was real and he was talking to us like we were actual people, which was a teaching strategy no one had ever tried in this building before. The feeling in my stomach grew throughout the whole period and when the bell rang, I gathered my books with a huge smile on my face.