In the Dead of Summer Read Online Free PDF Page A

and fluttered her eyelashes and might even have blushed, were it visible beneath her artificially rosied cheeks. “We’re being so rude ,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Acting as if civilization hasn’t moved west of the Mississippi when”—and now she gazed at the history teacher—“it so obviously has.”
    “You’re right ,” Edie Friedman said. “We must sound like such boobs to you.” She smiled at him with terrifying neediness. I could envision her adding riding boots to her hope chest, and hoping for the eventual pitter-patter of little Sixes.
    It had taken no more than a nanosecond to move from political correctness, students, curriculum, anti-intellectualism west of the Mississippi, summer school, or any of the many other topics that might have been of concern to a group of professionals meeting a new challenge, to sex, or lust, or the power of great looks and charm on female teachers. Business as usual, summer or winter. Nothing was going to be any different.
    I was wrong on that last point. And naïve to yearn for change, any sort of change, as if different automatically meant better.
    But I was only a half day into summer school. I had a whole lot left to learn.

Four
    APRIL TRUONG LOOKED AT THE CLASSROOM CLOCK AND gasped. Five-fifteen. Our after-school session had run late. As of the second week of summer school, we’d decided on an extra hour of tutoring three times a week. I was disappointed by what wasn’t happening in the classroom, but April was the exception. She was so motivated and bright that the after-school hours had become my favorite part of the week. I would never have believed I could feel this way about additional, unpaid teaching.
    We always stopped promptly at five so that she could get to her after-school job, but we’d forgotten today. April had been talking about Juliet’s options—as good a topic as any on which to practice tense and syntax, and interesting, because her view of the world was very different from mine and from most of her classmates. Family obligation was extremely important, and April worried at length about the morality of Juliet’s refusal to bow to her family’s wishes. We had both ignored the clock.
    “Sorry,” I said. “Are you going to be late? I can drive you there if that would help.” I was on my way to dinner at Mackenzie’s. A detour wouldn’t be any trouble—Star’s Café, where April worked, was in Chinatown, en route to Mackenzie’s place in Old City. Besides, even if it had been out of my way, April Truong brought out whatever residual altruism I had left. I didn’t think that was a bad thing.
    “No, thank you. I am fine,” she said, but she rapidly pushed papers into a backpack, looking concerned. I, too, gathered my things and flicked off the lights as we made our exit.
    I always felt hulking next to her. She was tiny, barely five feet tall and made of reeds, not bones, and she dressed simply, a study in black and white. She wore black jeans that had to be sized in the minus range, and a white T-shirt floated over her slight body, as did a fall of gleaming black hair that reached almost to her waist.
    Halfway down the marble staircase, she dropped her backpack, and stopped to retrieve papers. I looked back. “It’s fine,” she said. “I have everything.” I continued down—and gasped. She was behind me, but now I saw her in front of me as well, standing by the front door of the school. A double, except that she had short hair.
    April laughed softly—behind me. “You’re frightened?” she asked.
    “For a second I thought—do you have a twin sister?”
    “That is Thomas, my older brother.”
    A brother. Had I just been grossly insensitive? As in the all-Oriental-folk-look-alike school of jerkiness?
    “Many people think there is a resemblance,” she said, “although I cannot see it.”
    I was sure she’d said that to let me save face, but even at second look, the figure by the door seemed her