A Place Apart Read Online Free PDF Page B

into the room.
    â€œI think you’re in the wrong classroom, girls,” she said crisply.
    â€œWe wanted to talk by ourselves a minute, Miss Edsey,” Elizabeth said.
    â€œI’m sure,” said Miss Edsey. “Yes, indeed.”
    Just before Elizabeth and I parted in the corridor, she to geometry and I to my special math group, Elizabeth said, “Do you know what she thought we were talking about?”
    â€œLove and sex and beauty,” I replied.
    Elizabeth laughed. “Right!” she said. “They think we’re always talking, and thinking, about love and sex—but not beauty.”
    â€œIt’s all those books they read,” I said.
    Last week, we’d been herded into the auditorium to see a movie about birth. There was a good deal of whispering and snickering at first. Soon it grew quiet. I could even hear the rustle of the nurse’s uniform when her arm brushed the doctor’s arm. I felt nearly as relieved and glad as the mother looked when they placed that wet little child on her belly, but at the same time I was thinking, Why don’t they let me be?
    The “blue hours” is what Elizabeth and I called the hygiene classes, which were taught either by Mr. Chartwell or Miss Battey. I noticed that in no other class did the teachers look at one so straight in the eye. In fact, I often got a stiff neck, sitting there, afraid to turn away for fear Miss Battey would think I had private thoughts of my own about the subject.
    After that movie, Mr. Mellers had jumped up on the stage, a brave deed when you considered his weight, and had begun to talk about the beauty of human birth.
    In my mind, it was something else, something that made my heart feel as if it were turning over. Elizabeth had whispered to me, “He looks so satisfied with himself—as if he’d laid an egg three times his own size.” I let out a screech of nervous laughter, and the teacher at the end of our row gave me a terrible threatening look as if I’d howled in church.
    After all we’d heard in those classes, Elizabeth and I agreed we knew everything and nothing. Names for things. Water is H 2 O. H 2 O is water. But what is water? Elizabeth and I made up stories about round Mr. Mellers pursuing thin, stern Miss Edsey down the empty halls of school at night in the dark, Mr. Mellers shouting, “Beautiful!” and Miss Edsey replying, “Indeed.” We’d get sick, laughing. We had other conversations, full of silences, full of questions no one had answered for us, and which we couldn’t answer.
    The eleventh and twelfth grades didn’t have Mr. Mellers’ classes in the History of Social Ideas, or the hygiene classes either. But everyone in the school knew him, and we all had to listen to him introduce special programs in assembly. I never said anything about old Mel to Hugh. I knew he’d have seen things about him that would make him look a hundred times more foolish than he already was to Elizabeth and me. Once Hugh went to work on him, I was afraid of the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to sit through a Mellers class without exploding into laughter. I knew Hugh was above all that. Or, at least on the other side of it.
    I was a few minutes early for class, so I sat down on my books, thinking about all the mistakes I was going to make in the next fifty-five minutes. A pair of green sneakers placed themselves in front of me, and I looked up at Frank Wilson.
    â€œWant to go to the movies Saturday?”
    I stood up, feeling at a disadvantage on the floor.
    â€œI can’t,” I said.
    â€œToo busy with the Actor?” he asked in a mean, jeering voice.
    The corridor suddenly filled up with people changing classes, and I turned into the math classroom, not bothering to answer Frank. What he said meant nothing to me, but the way he had said it made me feel fretful and, somehow, at fault. During math, I defended myself against