Out of the Blue Read Online Free PDF Page B

the charming couple walk side by side on Madison Avenue, backlit by elegant storefront windows. Joe drapes his arm around Anna’s shoulders. Hear the music swell? The shadows merge and I can almost feel the pressure of his hip against mine. Delicious. And the climactic good-night kiss is surveyed from every conceivable vantage point. The movie camera makes its slow turn around them, Joe and Anna, mouths melting together. Surely I can get six months out of this before the faint taste of wine from his lips fades from memory and the video dries up into a stale rerun.
    “You still awake?” Ma called.
    “Sort of,” I answered.
    “Don’t you have parent conferences tomorrow?” she asked.
    “Oh. Yeah.” What a jolt. Instead of lying in bed indulging my adolescent fantasies to the accompaniment of Nina Simone, I should be poring over my notes in preparation for one of the most harrowing days of the academic year. The video of Joe and Anna slid out of my brain, and in its place snapped the one called Anna’s First Parent Conference. I keep it filed under Horror and Suspense.
    At the Cameron School, it’s the homeroom teacher who gathers up the academic reports and reviews them with the student and parents twice a year. It’s an excellent system, but not without moments of unexpected drama. For my first conference, I had stayed up until three A.M. committing the reports to memory. I was nervous, and I guess I thought that if I didn’t have to refer to the pages, I’d come off looking like a veteran instead of a scared amateur.
    I congratulated myself that my earliest appointment was with the Steinbergers and their son Eric, older brother of Rudy, who at that time was still in grade school. Eric was a prodigy in mathematics, but he didn’t have Rudy’s gentle charm and he despised anything that required movement, like walking or breathing. It was interesting to watch Eric raise his hand, as if it were attached to a string and the puppeteer was dragging on it ever … so … slowly.
    The Steinbergers had arrived promptly, carrying their copies of the reports they’d picked up in the lobby downstairs. We said our good mornings, and then I launched into my little speech about Eric’s refusal to attend gym class. Mr. Steinberger promptly had a fit. I mean a real fit, where he fell out of his chair and frothed at the mouth. I remember thinking for a split second, Mr. Steinberger cares that much about athletics? But it turned out, of course, that the poor man was an epileptic, an affliction with which I can now easily identify. What happened as a result of this initiation rite, however, was that every time somebody mentioned Parent Conference Day, the first thing I visualized was Albert Steinberger writhing on the floor with his eyeballs popping out.
    I flipped on some Vivaldi to buoy my spirits and settled down at my desk. Joe was now safely banished from my mind, terror being a singularly effective antidote to reverie.
    Our homerooms were made up of kids from all four high-school classes. I hit the ground running with a freshman whose father spent most of the conference on his cell phone arguing with the absent mother about pool repairs for the country house. Then an inspiring session with Marti Guzman who lived in the South Bronx and had been mugged four times trying to get to school on the subway. Marti had to translate everything I said into Spanish for his mother, and if she didn’t like something she heard, little sparks flew out of her eyes. After that came Will Simmons, the Johnny Depp look-alike, whose parents listened to the litany of F’s, D’s, and Incompletes with the same charming insouciance as their son. Then a horrific half hour gnashing my teeth as I was told to arrange for Sukey’s transfer out of Grant Hurst’s math class or else: one, Grant would be fired; two, I’d be fired; three, the school would be brought up on charges of criminal cruelty to Sukey, who hadn’t handed in a single homework