In the Dead of Summer Read Online Free PDF

double. It wasn’t until we were close that his harder features were apparent, their masculinity unmistakable.
    “My teacher, Miss Pepper,” April said, introducing us. “My brother, Thomas Truong. He drive—drives—me to work on these late days. And he picks me up, too, when I am finished at eleven.”
    “How nice!” I said.
    He nodded brusquely at me. “You’re late,” he told his sister in an annoyed voice. “I been here long. Everybody else gone. I thought maybe you don’t want me to see you, that you were with—”
    “No!” she said.
    “She was with me,” I said. “We were working hard. My fault, sorry.” His powerful effect on his sister worried me. Her normal calm self-possession seemed to have dissolved the moment she saw him, or before, when she’d seen the clock and realized we were running late. All I could assume was that her job was of enormous importance to the family, and that tardiness was a potential disaster. I would have to make certain that we completed our sessions on time from now on.
    Thomas Truong scanned his surroundings, like a bodyguard might, and then, with another curt nod in my direction, he took his sister’s elbow and ushered her away. It was a brotherly, helpful deed, this chauffeuring her to work, so I couldn’t figure out why it bothered me so much, why his gallant gesture seemed so much like that of a warden, or a guard.
    *
    I dipped a chip in salsa and munched on it as I downloaded—I love sounding high tech, and it’s such a reach, given my field—the day’s grievances onto the chef. “The class is like a jigsaw puzzle nobody wants to put together,” I said. “They obviously arrived with old alliances—and old angers, too, I think—and there’s a tension, a fragmentation, that has nothing to do with academics.”
    Mackenzie made a polite noise that meant, I hoped, Go on. “One of the kids,” I said. “Woody Marshall. All he does is glare, four hours straight.”
    “At you?” Mackenzie carefully peeled a shallot.
    “Not exclusively. At his classmates—except his good buddies, who do their own separate glaring. At his hands. At the textbook. This morning, while we were having the most innocuous class discussion—we’re staggering through Romeo and Juliet, how much less urgent can you get?—the glare became nuclear-force. I didn’t know what to think. He’s like those traumatized vets. Something waiting to explode just behind the eyes, and anything could set him off.”
    “He do anything besides glare?”
    “Not really. Not yet. Besides, he’s only one piece of the problem. That whole morning class… Like a miasma. I could handle it if it were them versus me. I’m used to that. There’s a point at which a class becomes a unit and acquires a personality, even if it’s a rotten one. But the only personality this one has is of a paranoid schizophrenic.”
    “Prob’ly ’cause they aren’t a class. They aren’t an anythin’ except an assemblage. Short-timers, together for five more weeks, then they’ll go their separate ways again.”
    “Six. Six more weeks.” My time already served felt interminable, but in truth, only two of the eight weeks were partially completed, a fact that horrified me. I mentally shook the calendar the way I would a watch, to make sure it was moving at all. “And it isn’t because of their ‘ethnic diversity,’ to use a Havermeyer. It isn’t because they are strangers—some of them know each other from before, are even from the same high school.”
    “You had a bad day,” Mackenzie said, “and you’re only seein’ the worst of them. You’ve told me good moments already. Lots of them. The funny kid?”
    “Miles. Miles Nye.”
    “He the one makes up songs?”
    I had to smile, despite my fervent desire to stay sour. But during the first week, Miles had burst into class in top hat and tap shoes and performed a routine based on grammar exercises. I wish I had taped it. Even seeing was barely believing,