Faerie Read Online Free PDF Page B

desks.
    â€œMorning!” The room stilled as the teacher picked up a dusty stick of chalk and produced his name on the board with the force of a swordsman.
    â€œI am Mr Black. Andrew Black.” He put down the chalk, slapped the magic powder from his princely palms, and swept his gaze across the alert row of teens, skirting the starry-eyed girl in the third row who was inwardly serenading him already. He was, he said, our newly hired English teacher.
    His words melted into a watery mumble in my ears as he told us that he had travelled from his native England to the US, and his desire to learn French had led him north to Quebec, where ironically, he was teaching English. As he spoke, my alert senses captured his handsomeness. He was over six feet tall and wore a tweed jacket with the dishevelled swagger of a rock star. My Sting substitute made generous use of his hands. He expressed himself well, ending statements with a sweep of his fingers through his fair hair. His pale skin produced a nutty scent of talcum powder and almond, which evaporated over the hours and became a sort of accidental barometer of the time of day.
    â€œWhat brings me here, dear students, is literature.” He stopped less than a foot away from my desk. I slowly, cautiously looked up at him, and he met my gaze. A beat short of drawingattention to his singular deliberation of me, he tapped my desk lightly, as if to produce a mental nota bene from this arrested moment, and carried on with his introduction.
    For the remainder of the class and for the rest of the week, he paid me no attention. I longed for another flaming spark to set me ablaze, but each time I passed him in the hallway or classroom, he carried on in the ordinary guise of a regular teacher. After three weeks, I assumed that my face had blended into his mental blur of all the girls’ faces—if it had ever existed for him at all. I surrendered to the realization that my infatuation was spurred on by my own loneliness and self-loathing, and that it never could have had any reciprocal power.
    One day, I’d just eaten the banana bread planted in my lunch box by Mother. I ate it because it was there. I ate everything, even when I felt full. Fat, thoughtless cow , I said to myself.
    After lunch, I shut my lonely 126-pound self in a bathroom stall in the girls’ washroom. I fell to my knees, and with a ball of toilet paper, soaked up my baboon tears. In this private confessional, I admitted my weaknesses to an unseen witness. I listed in my mind numerous infractions and transgressions, the calories and desserts, the despicable deluge of desire, my immense appetite for love, and for that horrid banana bread. Consumed with guilt and a gut-wrenching hunger for more, I could feel my belly swelling up and the flooding feeling rising in disgust. It reached my esophagus and rose into the back of my throat. Suddenly, a wellspring of all the sin gushed out fully, completely evacuating my body.
    I was pure again. I was absolved. Immediately I experienceda sense of bliss, an intoxicating rush of power from my empty stomach. My throat felt hot, and the veins in my temples throbbed. I curled over the toilet bowl and saw through moist eyes a blur of brownish-yellow vomit. The vile odour rose to my nostrils, jolting me into a recognition of what I had done. There it was. It had a form, colour, and smell. The shape of how I felt. I wiped my hot face and acrid lips with toilet paper and flushed the toilet. I watched the bowl fill up again, dutifully rising with a pool of clear water. Clean and renewed.

    Mr Black walked toward us and addressed me directly. “Hello. Lila, is it?”
    The girls standing in the hall turned their heads to look at me. I pretended that I hardly noticed him and looked sideways, toying with my school bag zipper.
    â€œYeah,” I said breezily. Surprisingly, the girls didn’t seem to notice how strangely I was behaving and how wildly I wanted