The 25th Hour Read Online Free PDF Page A

freshmen begin hollering and throwing paper air-planes out the windows. ‘What can I do for you?’
    ‘I want to know why I got a B-plus on this story.’
    ‘Okay, first of all—;’
    ‘Nobody else in this class can write,’ says Mary, her fingers playing over the punk-rock band names written in silver marker on the binder she bounces on her knees. ‘You know it too; don’t start—;’
    ‘Don’t worry about everyone else. You’re not competing with them.’
    Mary snorts. ‘Yeah, but I am , okay? I am competing with them. When I apply to colleges – you might have heard about this – they look at these things called grades. And if your grades aren’t good—;’
    ‘Your grade will be fine. Look, Mary, why—;’
    ‘See, I don’t want fine. I’m the best writer in this class. And I deserve the best grade in the class. And this, what is this? B-plus? Everyone else is writing about their fucking Christmas vacation, and you give me a B-plus?’
    Mary’s hazel eyes drown in pools of painted shadow, pennies just visible at the bottom of the wishing well. Jakob wonders why she and her friends favor such a morbid style, as if their models were not chosen from the covers of slick magazines but the refrigerators of the city morgue. And her hair. When was the last time she washed her hair?
    ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘the point is, I’m basing the grade on your own potential. Other things you’ve written were more carefully constructed. This one – I’m not sure it quite works.’
    ‘So what you’re saying is, don’t try anything new, don’t experiment.’
    ‘No—;’
    ‘Because if I write something different from what you expect, I’ll be punished.’ She rakes the blue vinyl binder cover with her glossy black nails. For one second Jakob imagines the skin of his back transposed with the vinyl.
    ‘Punished?’ He smiles. ‘I wouldn’t call a B-plus punishment.’
    ‘Vince Miskella writes a story about his grandmother dying and you give him an A. I mean – what, you feel sorry for him, is that it? Was that a charity A? Everyone’s always writing about their grandmothers dying. You know why? Not because it’s so fucking traumatic. Because it’s a guaranteed A. Meanwhile, the night of his grandmother’s funeral, you know where Vince is? Getting drunk at a football party and slapping girls’ asses. And you’re all sentimental, like, “Oh, Vince, that was very powerful, very moving.” No, it wasn’t. I didn’t care, you didn’t care, nobody cared. That’s what grandmothers do, they die. And then their grandkids write about it for school, and the teachers are forced to give them an A.’
    ‘Maybe that was Vince’s way of grieving,’ says Jakob, trying to avoid staring at the holes in her torn jeans, at her pale knees peeking through white threading. ‘Sometimes guys have a hard time showing their – you know, their emotions.’ What am I babbling about? wonders Jakob.
    ‘So slapping my ass, that’s Vince’s way of mourning his grandmother?’
    Jakob glances at the open door of the classroom. All this talk of ass-slapping is making him nervous. Mostly he wants to escape – he knows he will never touch her, but he feels dirty anyway, an old pervert lusting after schoolgirls. Already an old pervert at twenty-six.
    ‘Sometimes people get drunk because they don’t want to think about things. But,’ he adds, anxious not to sound like an advocate of alcoholism, ‘it doesn’t work. The thing you didn’t want to think about ends up being the only thing you can think about, and your thoughts about it get stupider and stupider.’ Jakob nods twice to affirm the logic of his comment and then tries to remember what he just said.
    ‘Whatever,’ says Mary. ‘The point is, this story is good. Maybe it’s not perfect, but it’s better than anything anyone else handed in.’
    Jakob looks down at Mary’s fragile wrists, one of them encircled by a tattooed garland of roses. ‘What did your