In the Dead of Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

but maybe Mackenzie could get some sense of his performance if he could see a tape of Miles’s curly carroty hair as he performed, his comic body language, his hands raised, feet tapping double-time as he belted out, “And maaaake…” (shuffle, shuffle) “your syntax—” (shuffle, shuffle/tap, tap) “cleeeeear!”
    I didn’t know how he’d do academically, but I hoped Miles wanted to be an entertainer, in which case he had a brilliant future. Meantime, he treated my course—and every other course he’d ever had, I gathered—as an independent study in a performing arts school. He wasn’t fond of assignments, except the ones he gave himself, which tended to take twice the time and four times the creativity.
    Most of his audience didn’t get it. Still, they cheered him on and applauded because he was a diversion from the assignment, and that seemed enough to power Miles’s batteries.
    “An’ that little girl who wants to learn everything,” Mackenzie continued, “April?”
    I hate it when this happens, when Mackenzie pays closer attention to my life than I do. And of course, this focus was more intense than ever lately, while he was on medical leave and his own active life was virtually nil.
    “Okay,” I agreed. “But even with her…her brother was at school today, picking her up, and she was fifteen minutes late and there was something wrong there. Something’s going on with her. Some kind of tension…”
    “I din’ think that was our topic,” Mackenzie said in a mild, infuriating voice.
    “She really is quick,” I said. “I enjoy those extra sessions with her.” She absorbed whatever was presented as if she were porous, but still she worried that she wasn’t moving quickly enough, that she wasn’t “learning to be an American,” as she put it, speedily enough. “So it’s April Truong versus the entire rest of them. If, for example, you saw how X—”
    “Who?”
    “His name is Robby, but he insists on X, and he hangs out with Peewee Smith and Abdul from my afternoon class, and they—”
    “’Spect you’ll live through it. It’s about attitude, not reality.”
    “Huh?”
    “You know, like what Epictetus said?”
    I controlled an urge to kick him. His leg had already been done sufficient damage. “No,” I said, “I don’t know, but I bet you do. And why do you, anyway?”
    “Because despite Yankee prejudice, some of us Southerners received truly fine educations.”
    “ Fahn educations?” I mimicked. The man couldn’t even speak properly.
    “And since you did ask, I’ll tell you. Epictetus said, ‘Men are tormented with the opinions they have of things, not by the things themselves.’”
    “Men!” I said idiotically, as if it were some kind of considered response. “What is it with you people, always quoting other people to me?”
    He raised an eyebrow. He didn’t have to speak. Even I knew how stupid I sounded. If only I had a better memory, I’d have quoted people whose ideas I liked. “His observation is so obvious ,” I said—just in case I didn’t sound bullheaded and stupid enough yet. “It’s like apparent temperature. Not the heat but the humidity, too.”
    He stopped sautéing and looked at me with genuine concern.
    “You know what I mean. What we make of the weather, how it feels, not just what some thermometer says.”
    I’d lost the man’s sympathy. I’d had it for a few seconds there, but now it was gone. In the most elegant of ways, via Eppa-whatsis, he’d told me I had an attitude problem. Obviously, he couldn’t cook and be sympathetic at the same time. Or at least not cook, be sympathetic, and recuperate from a maiming. I almost felt sorry for him as he added chopped vegetables and ground herbs to the saucepan and sipped at a drink, a set of crutches propped against the nearby wall.
    But I was too busy feeling sorry for myself. Besides, providing dinner had been his idea, and he’d declined my offer of assistance. “I’m stir crazy,”