Blue Angel Read Online Free PDF Page A

its own. I need to see an exorcist, nurse.
    Sherrie takes Arlene’s arm and cradles the doughy knob of her elbow. She says, “We’re late for the meeting. Call me if you need me, hon. Don’t hesitate for a second.”
    Sherrie and Swenson cross the parking lot toward his five-year-old Accord. They know that it’s an ecological crime to drive across campus, but they want to make a getaway the minute the meeting’s over. Sherrie’s Civic is languishing in the Euston garage, stricken with a computer chip ailment that causes the engine to die occasionally, though never in the mechanic’s presence.
    â€œWhat’s with the car?” Swenson asks as he pulls out of the lot.
    Sherrie says, “The garage guys say it’s in denial. They can’t help it heal until it admits it has a problem. Speaking of problems…what was that about? Picking on Arlene?”
    â€œSorry,” says Swenson. “Nothing. Today I had the delightful task of teaching a student story that ends with a kid having sex with a chicken.”
    â€œDid the chicken have fun?”
    â€œThe chicken was dead,” says Swenson.
    â€œToo bad for the chicken,” says Sherrie. “Or maybe it was better off. So how did the class go?”
    â€œIt went. We got through it without my saying anything that’s going to have the Faculty-Student Women’s Alliance camped out on my doorstep tonight. I still have a job. I think.”
    But now they’re approaching the chapel, where, for all they know, Dean Francis Bentham is already informing the community that teaching a story about poultry sex is automatic grounds for dismissal.
    Apparently, they’ve made it in time. A few die-hard smokers—tenured, of course—hover outside the door. Just as Swenson pulls up, they suck their cigarettes down to the filters and flick them, smoldering, onto the path. Holding hands, Swenson and Sherrie follow the smokers inside and find seats in the last row, creating a minor upset just as the room falls silent.
    â€œCan I borrow your sunglasses?” Swenson whispers.
    â€œCool it,” Sherrie says.
    Slouching so low that his toes nearly touch the heels of the woman in front of him, Swenson can still see. The gang’s all here: the tense, anemic junior lecturers, his own grizzled generation, even the retired emeriti. They’ve all crowded obediently into the austere chapel where, centuries before, the Reverend Jonathan Edwards, on the hellfire circuit, the Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God Tour, terrified his listeners with descriptions of the damned cast into the flames and roasted, screaming, to ashes. In memory of that occasion, a burnished portrait of Edwards glowers from the chapel wall, peering over the shoulder of Dean Francis Bentham, who, when he rises to go to the lectern, glances back at the painting and fakes a tiny shudder as he tiptoes past. The faculty giggles, smarmily.
    â€œAsshole,” Swenson hisses.
    The woman in front of them wheels around.
    â€œEasy,” Sherrie says.
    Just as Swenson suspected from the inverted bowl of gray hair and the tense, aggrieved shoulders, it’s Lauren Healy, the English Department’s expert in the feminist misreading of literature and acting head of the Faculty-Student Women’s Alliance. Swenson and Lauren always fake a chilly collegiality, but for reasons he can’t fathom—a testosterone allergy, he guesses—Lauren wants him dead.
    â€œHi, Lauren!” Swenson says.
    â€œHello, Ted,” Lauren mouths silently, redirecting them front and center.
    In his natty blazer, crisp striped shirt, and perky burgundy bowtie, his china-blue eyes glittering in the gold-rimmed saucers of his glasses, Dean Bentham resembles a punitive pediatrician shipped over from England to cure the rude American children of their bad behavior. The dean was hired a half-dozen years ago in a fit of community self-hate; not even when he