The Sharp Time Read Online Free PDF

closet .
    And then she poses a query better left for freshman poetry journals: “Are you sleepwalking through your life?”
    Catherine Bennett marches toward me with her fluttering colorless lips, her eyes wild behind her bifocals. An expression that holds both delight and a despairing rage that surely does not stem from a student who doesn’t understand a problem, a girl who has not completed her homework.
    Shouldn’t she be a little mellower on the first Monday morning after Christmas vacation? Shouldn’t she be offering up some postholiday goodwill after two weeks of freedom? Also, hello? The girl with the dead mother? I’m your target?
    “Sandinista, you never listen. Do you need a”—and here she cupped her hands over her mouth, her fingers curling into a megaphone when she screamed her last two words—“hearing aid?
    “All I ask is that you listen, Sandinista! Is that so difficult? Hmmm?
    “All I ask is that you pay attention!
    “I realize you’re not even going to need algebra if you’re just going to get married and have babies.”
    I don’t tell her: Bitch, the plan was Europe with my mom, not marriage . Though the “non-math = excellent bridal potential” equation I find quaint in its antiquity—though it brings an outraged gasp from many a young lady and then it’s all:
    “Sandinista, are you listening to me? Are you even here?”
    Her voice rising and shot with a shrill, aluminum whistle.
    Confession time: yes, I did not review any algebra over winter break, as Mrs. Bennett so strongly advised. And I’m certainly aware of the freakishly ironfisted manner in which Mrs. Bennett conducts her algebra class. (The class is composed of sophomores and juniors, a few irresponsible, arts-loving seniors like me, a few meth heads, and Alecia Hardaway.) It’s my second semester of Catherine Bennett—I squeaked by my autumn of Algebra I with a D—so I really should have known better than to come to class unprepared.
    So, yes, I should have skipped algebra class. I would have skipped algebra had it not been for that old devil inertia. I walked mindlessly from Honors English—the sublime world of Lisa Kaplansky, of poetry and prose—to the roaring fire pit of Algebra II compliments of Catherine Bennett.
    “Sandinista, are you paying attention?”
    And then the world splits into two clean halves: Mrs. Bennett kicks the leg of my desk. I feel a vibration rise through my body. I am tucked up to my desk, freakishly so—the fat man at the buffet—so that the edge of it gives my ribs a ringing jolt. And the class vibrates with me; everyone sucks in their breath and lets it out slowly, oxygenated waves and shimmers.
    Even before her foot hits the floor again, Mrs. Bennett waves good-bye to her known life. Because surely a teacher cannot really live deep down in the heart of Crazyville, though they sure do like to visit that town, especially when they are the only full-fledged adult in the room.
    As soon as Mrs. Bennett kicks my desk, Alecia Hardaway starts crying. Alecia, the slow girl.
    That nice Sara Ellison who sits next to Alecia croons, “It’s okay, Alecia, it’s okay.” Even as I listen to Alecia crying, a shred of genetically coded empathy tells me that it’s not easy to be Catherine Bennett, either. It’s not as if I don’t see Mrs. Bennett trying a little too hard with her rhinestone American-flag lapel pins, her swipes of bronzy-pink lipstick; certainly being a dowdy fifty-something widowed schoolteacher in a suburban Kansas City high school is not the sweetest deal in the world. She missed two days of school last semester when her husband died, her only absence during my tenure in algebra class.
    “Sandinista!”
    Her breathing is ragged, vicious.
    It would seem that our grief-ridden fall semesters—my mother’s death in September, her husband’s death in October—would make us mourning comrades, heirs to the tender world of sadness. But in the weeks after my mother’s death, Mrs.