Jack on the Tracks Read Online Free PDF Page B

started with the period of the sentence, and then with the last letter of the last word, and continued to write completely backward from right to left. She did this with ease, and she did it all in
cursive,
and she finished the sentence exactly in the middle where her two hands met and seamlessly completed the final word.
    I felt my lips move in awe as I read, “The education of the senses is the foundation of civilization.”
    Writing a sentence from both ends and finishing it in the middle was an amazing skill. I may have hated the way the room was organized, and I hated being thought of as nasty just because I was a boy, but her handwriting made me like her again.
    “Does anyone know what this means?” she asked as each of her protruding, independent eyes scanned us.
    She pointed to someone on the girls’ side. “Stand up, please.”
    “It means, Mrs. Pierre,” the girl said with a fake French accent, “that without an understanding of our senses there would be no civilization.”
    “Oui! Oui! Oui!”
Mrs. Pierre cried out, as if she were the little piggy toe that cried all the way home. She paused and composed herself by smoothing the wrinkles out of her skirt with the palms of her hands. “Without knowing
who
you are, you will never know
why
you do what you do. So for the next five days of school we will work on educating the five senses. Smell, hearing, touch, taste, and sight. The beauty of educating all five senses is that you get the sixth for free. Now who can tell me what the sixth sense is?” she asked. Once again her ball-bearing eyes worked independently of each other as she scanned the class.
    “A spooky feeling like when a ghost enters a room?” some guy said.
    “Déjà vu?” said a girl I couldn’t see.
    “You can sense danger?” another guy guessed.
    Mrs. Pierre smiled. “No, no, no,” she said. “You are trying too hard. Here is one of nature’s greatest gifts. Once you educate the five senses you develop the most important sense of all, the sense
of good taste.”
    I could hear a few confused kids smacking their lips.
    “I don’t mean
good taste
as with your tongue. I mean
good taste
as in good manners, how to dress, how to think, how to live, how to be sophisticated and
civilized”
    I loved getting things for free, and it sounded like a great secret that after you got the five senses under control the sense
of good taste
came as a bonus. Sure, I thought, she’s different, but no other teacher I ever had cared enough to really want to educate us about ourselves.
    “And then, students,” she said, and clapped her hands together as if they were a pair of cymbals, “we will apply our sharpened senses to create only what comes from refined civilizations—great literature. For, as the French say, ‘Literature is the fruit of the senses.’”
    I perked up when she said she wanted us to write. I was hoping to get a teacher who allowed us to keep journals. But then I slumped back down into my seat when she announced, “So, tonight your homework is to work on the sense of smell. Tomorrow, arrive wearing a perfume or cologne that smells
heavenly.”
When she said
heavenly
her nose flared, her eyelids fluttered, and her knees buckled. I thought she was going to faint. But she pulled out of it and before long we were learning how to name our senses in French.
    After school I opened my journal and leafed through. It was the kind that had a wise saying printed on the top of each page, and I was looking for something to inspire me.
A lesson is something someone teaches you,
one read.
An insight is something you teach yourself.
I couldn’t think of an
insight
I had discovered on my own. It seemed to me that everything I knew was taught to me by someone else. I figured it was about time I grew up and figured some stuff out on my own. Suddenly, I remembered my sense-of-smell assignment, so I put my journal down and got moving.
           The next morning I was coming out of the bathroom