Scandalous

Chapter 7

Friday arrived with the particular energy of a day that knew it was the last one of the week and had decided to coast on that knowledge alone.

Nathan had noticed, in his relatively short time at Crestwood, that Fridays had their own atmospheric quality — a loosening, a barely perceptible drop in the tension that held the school upright from Monday through Thursday. Students who had been performing attentiveness all week allowed their performances to slip slightly by the final period. Teachers moved through their lesson plans with marginally less urgency. Even the hallways sounded different — louder, less directed, the noise of people who have already, mentally, begun the weekend and are simply waiting for the building to agree.

He had no particular feelings about Fridays. He had never been the kind of person whose week was structured around the anticipation of its end.

He arrived at Room 214 at seven-fifty, made his coffee, set his marked essays on the corner of the desk in a stack that represented, collectively, approximately four hours of his Thursday night reading, and waited for the bell.

Second period filed in with its usual distribution of energy — the front-row contingent alert and prepared, the middle rows functional, the back rows in various states of Friday-morning negotiation with consciousness. Shae Madison arrived with Claire Monroe two minutes before the bell, took the back left corner, and set her bag down without looking at anything in particular.

Nathan waited until the room was fully settled. Then he picked up the stack of essays and held them in a way that communicated, without requiring explanation, that what he was about to say was not going to be entirely good news.

"I read your essays," he said.

The room's energy shifted — that specific collective alertness of students who understand that a grade they haven't seen yet is about to be contextualized.

"I want to be straightforward with you because I think you're old enough for that, and because I think anything less would be a disservice." He set the stack back on the desk. "The majority of these essays were disappointing."

A beat. Someone in the second row shifted in their seat.

"I want to clarify what I mean by disappointing, because I don't mean difficult to read or poorly structured, though some of them were both of those things. What I mean is that several of these essays — a significant number — appear to have been written by a language model rather than by the person whose name is on the top of the page." He said it evenly, without accusation in his voice, without the theatrics of moral outrage, which was a more effective delivery and he knew it. "I can tell the difference. It is not a subtle difference."

The front row had gone very still.

"Beyond that — and this is perhaps the more concerning category — several of you appear to have based your analysis not on the novel but on the 2013 film adaptation." He paused. "I assigned the book. The book, as it happens, is the source material. The film, while visually interesting, is not the text. Baz Luhrmann and F. Scott Fitzgerald are not interchangeable." He let that sit for a moment. "And then there are those of you who read the book — or at least a sufficient portion of it — but produced essays that stayed firmly on the surface of the thing. The American Dream. Wealth and excess. The impossibility of the past." He picked up one of the essays from the stack, looked at it briefly, set it back down. "These readings are not wrong. They are simply not enough."

The silence in the room had the particular quality of twenty-four people doing individual internal accounting.

Nathan's gaze moved across the room — not slowly, not pointedly, just the steady pan of a man taking inventory — and when it reached the back left corner it paused, briefly, almost imperceptibly.

She was looking at him. Had been looking at him, he suspected, since he started speaking, with that characteristic directness, the green eyes level and attentive and giving nothing away.

He raised an eyebrow.

"There was," he said, to the room, "one essay that fully understood the novel."

He did not look at her when he said it. He looked at the middle of the room, at the space above the second row, and kept his voice entirely neutral. "One essay that moved past the surface and found the actual argument underneath it. That engaged with the text as a text — as a constructed thing with deliberate choices behind every image, every repetition, every silence." He picked up the stack. "That essay received a grade that reflects that level of engagement. The rest of you received grades that reflect the level of engagement those essays represent." He set the stack down again. "You'll have them back by the end of class. I suggest you read the comments."

He allowed a brief, measured silence.

Then he looked back to the corner.

Shae was still watching him. Her expression had not changed — composed, unreadable, the expression of someone who has absorbed information and is filing it without fanfare. Her pen was resting against the desk, not moving.

Nathan gave her a single, small nod. Barely a nod — more an acknowledgment, the slight downward incline of his head that lasted less than a second.

She looked back down at her desk.

He turned to the board.

"Your next assignment," he said, uncapping the marker, "will be a presentation."

The word presentation produced a specific quality of attention in a classroom — not the attention of engagement, but the attention of people calculating what they were being asked for and whether it was going to be inconvenient.

"The subject is a book of your choice. Any book — fiction, non-fiction, contemporary, classic, I have no restrictions on the text itself beyond the requirement that it be a book and that you have actually read it." He wrote on the board as he spoke: ANALYSIS. THEMATIC EXPLORATION. PERSONAL EVALUATION. "You'll need to cover these three areas. The format is entirely up to you. Essay, PowerPoint, poster, spoken presentation — I don't care about the vehicle, I care about what you put in it."

He turned back to the room.

"You have two weeks."

A groan moved through the class — not from every student, but from enough of them that it had presence. The particular, corporate sound of people who had been hoping the week would end without new obligations being introduced.

Nathan looked at them with the expression of a man who had anticipated this and had chosen his next words accordingly.

"I would strongly suggest," he said, "that you take this seriously. This assignment represents a significant portion of your grade for this course. Not a quiz. Not a participation mark." He let that register. "A significant portion. I would recommend allocating your two weeks accordingly and not arriving on the due date having allocated significantly less."

The groan had subsided. The room was doing the arithmetic now — the realistic kind, the kind that involved the actual available hours between now and two weeks from today and what was already scheduled in them.

"Good," Nathan said, as if someone had agreed with him. He set the marker down and moved to the side of his desk, where a box sat that he'd carried up from his car that morning.

"We're moving on," he said. "New text."

He reached into the box and began pulling out copies — dark spines, familiar weight — and moving through the rows with them, setting one on each desk with the efficient unhurriedness of a man who had done this many times and found nothing ceremonial about it.

"Wuthering Heights," he said, to the room as he moved. "Emily Brontë. Published 1847. I want to be clear that this is not a love story, despite what you may have heard. It is a book about obsession — about what happens when the thing you want becomes so embedded in you that you can no longer distinguish it from yourself. It is uncomfortable and it is frequently unpleasant and it is one of the most precise and brutally honest things ever written about the way desire can corrupt a person from the inside." He reached the back row. "It is also one of my personal favorites, which should tell you something about me that you may file away as you see fit."

A few people laughed — not the polite, front-row laugh, but something more genuine, caught off guard by the last part of it.

He moved along the back row. Set a copy on Claire Monroe's desk — she picked it up immediately, turned it over, read the back with the expression of someone doing a rapid threat assessment. Set a copy on the desk to her left.

He set a copy on Shae's desk.

He paused. Just briefly. Just long enough to lower his voice to the register that didn't carry past the immediate vicinity.

"Miss Madison." He said it without looking directly at her for more than a moment, his eyes dropping to the copy of Wuthering Heights on her desk and back. "Your essay was excellent. I mean that without qualification." A beat. "I genuinely enjoyed reading it. Keep doing whatever it is you're doing."

He straightened up and moved back toward the front of the room before she had time to respond, if she'd intended to respond, which he suspected she hadn't.

In the back left corner, Shae looked at the copy of Wuthering Heights on her desk.

She did not look up. She was aware — acutely, in the specific way she was aware of things she was trying not to be aware of — of the space where he had just been standing, the proximity of it, the low register of his voice saying excellent and without qualification and genuinely enjoyed.

She had not expected that. She had expected the nod — had understood the nod, had filed it with the minimum amount of feeling she could manage — but she had not expected him to come to the back row and say it directly.

Claire leaned three inches toward her. "Did he just—"

"Yes," Shae said quietly. "Read your book."

Claire straightened up with the expression of someone who had a great deal to say and had accepted that now was not the time. She opened Wuthering Heights to the first page.

Shae opened hers.

"For the remainder of the period," Nathan said, from the front, "I want you in the first two chapters. Read them. Actually read them — not the summary, not the first paragraph, the chapters. We'll discuss them Monday."

The room settled into the particular quality of group reading — the sound of pages, the occasional shift of a chair, the gradual, collective sinking of twenty-four people into varying degrees of engagement with a moor in the north of England.

Nathan sat at his desk. He opened his own copy — worn, annotated in the margins with years of his own notes layered over each other in different pens — and read.

The room was quiet.

Outside the south-facing windows, the jacaranda trees moved in the late September wind, and the California light came through at the low, warm angle of a Friday morning, and the week drew itself toward its close with the unhurried patience of things that know they are almost done.