The Year of the Gadfly Read Online Free PDF

seppuku in front of our class, Mr. Kaplan spent the week ignoring me. Over the weekend I’d given serious thought to the situation: analyzing my body language and whether I appeared standoffish or overly inviting; wondering if I smiled too much or too little. Perhaps this was my first experience of a man playing hard to get, not in a romantic sense, but in the game of mental tag we were engaged in.
    My mind frequently jumped back to our first interaction at the ice cream social. Sometimes I wondered if Dr. Patrick was right and I really was becoming hyper-anxious. Or maybe Mr. Kaplan had a strange ophthalmologic condition that caused him to give people the Sauron Eye. My classmates had obviously made up their minds about him. They joked about his enormous hair and his tie that was constantly askew. They mimicked his cold glare and wild gesticulations. But they did these things, I could tell, because they were afraid of him. I hadn’t been at Mariana long, but it was clear to me that no teacher had dared be a smart-ass to any of
them
before. No teacher had Mr. Kaplan’s fierce energy or snapped around the classroom like a live wire. And for all of these reasons, I believed Mr. Kaplan and I shared something profound. The way he looked at me that first day had been like a challenge:
Could there be a link between us? Are you perceptive enough to uncover it?
There could, and I was.
    Luckily, I had a guide—Lily’s book,
Marvelous Species: Investigating Earth’s Mysterious Biology.
It was uncanny that the universe had handed me a veritable textbook on Mr. Kaplan’s academic specialty, a tome that resembled the kind of encyclopedia God might have used to create the world. Not that Mr. Jonah Atheist Kaplan would buy this scenario. Still, I could just imagine the Almighty sitting around thinking, “I’d like to make something slimy and poisonous with three antennae and seven eyes. I think I’ll consult
Marvelous Species.
” And bingo—there it was on page 783, complete with assembly instructions in English, Swedish, and Japanese.
    The book contained chapters on extreme-loving organisms, adventuring scientists, and philosophical musings on the natural world. Though I was already bombarded with schoolwork, I carved out a mandatory reading period each night to study it. It was like running my own independent study, and I hoped that somehow it would lead me to uncover a link between Mr. Kaplan and me.

Jonah
September 2012
    AT THE END of my second week teaching biology, Headmaster Pasternak gave me an assignment: keep the freshmen out of College Night. This event is a Mariana Academy tradition and a downright Jacobin one. Back when I was a student, we used to call it the Night of Terror. And for good reason. For two hours, students are forced to hear representatives from the nation’s most prestigious universities explain why their 3.9 GPA, near-perfect SAT score, and accomplishments as viola virtuoso, editor-in-chief, star thespian, and/or math whiz don’t give them a fighting chance at Harvard.
    Still, Mariana provides its pupils with reason to hope. The school has one of the nation’s highest Ivy League acceptance rates, so it’s not surprising that our students rev their stress levels like particle colliders. I’d only been teaching freshman biology for two weeks and already my students were biting their nails down to the stubs and, if their eyebrows were any indication, suffering from trichotillomania. My twin brother and I spent our adolescence inside this academic crucible—I was Mariana class of ’02—so I shouldn’t have been surprised when, on the night in question, a slew of freshmen did try to march through the auditorium doors. I simply shook my head and sent them packing.
    Meanwhile, the blazered panel from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were taking their assigned chairs on the stage. (The delegate from Tufts sat at the end of the table, which