A Place Apart Read Online Free PDF Page A

people talked about basketball, or if he seemed, at times, to have just a touch of a British accent, like one drop of color in a bowl of water, well—he was different, and good at being different.
    Mr. Tate, my English teacher, had us read plays that spring, and when I showed him the ten-page scene I’d written, he said, “It’s interesting. I mean that. People often say interesting when they mean boring. I don’t. This work of yours really interests me.”
    I liked Mr. Tate. Now and then he was too cute with us, just to show what a sport he was, but quite a few of the younger teachers were like that. He wasn’t a real phony. He wasn’t like Mel Mellers, who taught one two-hour class a week to all grades except the eleventh and twelfth. It was called the History of Social Ideas—or, maybe, the Social History of Ideas. Mel Mellers liked to pretend he didn’t know any more than we did. One Friday morning he said, “Thomas Jefferson! What a name! Do you dig it!” I didn’t dare look at Elizabeth.
    Mel, as we were supposed to call him, had a beard you could have hidden three piccolos in. Man! he’d cry, he was really with us! Starting out in a world we’d never made! Once in a while, he’d mention his postgraduate work at Princeton. But Mr. Mellers, Mel, was a pal.
    Mr. Tate wasn’t. I felt he meant what he said. He’d read over what I’d written and mutter to himself, then stab the paper with his finger and say, “That’s right … Now, here you’ve gone off … you’re just filling in space, but not here. Keep at it!”
    I told Elizabeth how much I liked writing that scene, how it made up for the torture of mathematics. We were sitting in an empty classroom during the lunch period.
    â€œCan I read it?” she asked.
    â€œIt’s not half done.”
    â€œI’d like to see it anyhow.”
    â€œI can’t show it to you yet, Elizabeth.”
    She put half a bar of chocolate on the desk I was sitting at. “Not even for that?” she asked, smiling.
    â€œI can’t. Really.”
    â€œYou make it sound very important.”
    â€œNo, no …” I exclaimed quickly. “It’s that I’m scared to have anyone see it. Tate has to. But if I start showing it to you—or other people—”
    â€œâ€”Hugh Todd, you mean.”
    â€œâ€”then I won’t finish it. You’ll like it, or you won’t like it, and then I’ll start working on it with you in mind. Even if you didn’t say a word, I’d be wondering what you thought. Do you see what I mean?”
    I couldn’t look at her. I was half lying. That means I was lying. I had already shown it to Hugh. I wanted to make it right for him. I couldn’t have explained that to Elizabeth. I couldn’t explain it to myself. It would have hurt her feelings if she had known. We were best friends. But between Hugh and me, there was something else. I couldn’t get hold of what it was; what I told myself was that he had a real interest in me. I was someone different for him than I was for Ma, or even had been for Papa when he was alive. When I was with Hugh, I traveled a little distance from myself, and he and I watched and thought about the familiar Victoria Finch who began to seem somewhat unfamiliar.
    After I’d first had the idea of writing a scene for English credit, I’d told Hugh about it on one of the afternoons he stopped by my house for a while. Now, when we were both in the lunchroom, he with some of the other juniors in his class, and me with Elizabeth, he’d look straight at me suddenly and I’d look back. We wouldn’t smile, or wave, just look. I knew, at those moments, that we were thinking about the scene I was writing, what he had begun to call “our play.”
    I loved to look at Hugh Todd. The whites of his eyes were the clearest I’d ever seen, and the irises were