your room.”
“I’ll do that,” he said. “You bet I will. I should get shot more often.” She snorted and held the clinic door open for him.
* * *
Bryce Miller’s alarm clock went off like a bomb. It was a windup Timex of uncertain but ancient vintage. Its ticking was loud enough to be annoying when he noticed it. It kept rotten time. He’d bought it for two bucks at a Goodwill store right after he landed the job at Junipero High.
That was six months ago now. These days, one like it would cost at least ten times as much, likely more. Six months ago, power in L.A. had been pretty reliable. Now. . Now all the supervolcano sludge in the Columbia had screwed the fancy turbines up there but good. The grid had other problems, too, but that was the juicy one.
So L.A. had power a few hours a day, a few days a week. Bryce vaguely remembered reading Bucharest had been like that, back when the Communist dictator, old nutty What’s-his-name, ran Romania. The Cold War was only history to him, and seemed almost as far removed from the here and now as his pet Hellenistic poets.
The Cold War here and now was the war against real, physical cold. The world’s politics were still screwed up, but not that particular way. Los Angeles remained lucky. It might get chilly here, but chilly wasn’t arctic.
And Bryce was awake. Once that alarm started clattering, he would have had a hard time staying dead. With a rented truck, he’d spent a small fortune moving up to what they called West Hills. He was only a couple of miles from Junipero High here. These days, that was walking distance.
He had a gas stove. He could light a burner with a match when the electric flame-starter didn’t work. That let him boil water to make coffee to go with his bagel. He liked real cream in his coffee, but he used Coffeemate with sugar. Coffeemate kept basically forever. Cream didn’t keep at all without refrigeration. The apartment had a refrigerator. It made a fair icebox when he could get ice, which wasn’t often enough.
Out he went, carrying a briefcase and an umbrella. It wasn’t raining right this minute, but you couldn’t trust it even in summer after the eruption, let alone in winter. He’d work up a sweat by the time he got to school, but he didn’t worry about it. He wouldn’t be the only one.
When he got to the campus, the first thing he did was check his box. With e-mail scarce and unreliable, paper was making a comeback. A typewriter-an ancient manual, dredged up God knew where-clacked on a secretary’s desk. When you lacked what you’d had before, you did the best you could with what you could find. Or, welcome back to the turn of the twentieth century.
Bulletins and orders might be typewritten, but they got Xeroxed when the power did come on. Junipero dished out less bullshit than he’d heard public schools had to endure. All the same, the administration had some pretty good fascists in training-or would they be inquisitors here?
Bryce taught Latin, world history, and U.S. history (in the latter, he was indeed staying a chapter ahead of the kids). Maybe next year, if the world hadn’t ended by then, the powers that be honest to God would let him take a swing at Greek. Or maybe they wouldn’t. And if they didn’t, maybe he wouldn’t be so very upset. Seeing what tough sledding the students made of Latin, they might not grok Greek at all.
U.S. history first period. In he walked, to go over the causes of the Civil War one more time before the kids showed up. By Junipero standards, it was a big class: twenty-three students. No, public school wasn’t like this.
The kids were totally SoCal, which was to say, almost everything under the sun. Hispanics. Irish. A very bright Jewish kid named Perry Ginsberg, who seemed to be stoned most of the time. A dark, pretty girl named Singh, which probably meant she was a Sikh. A Vietnamese kid. A Korean.
No African-Americans, though. There weren’t many at Junipero-fewer, Bryce thought, than there were Jews. It would have been funny if it weren’t sad. Fewer black parents than Jewish ones trusted a Catholic school not to mess up their children.
He covered the points he needed to cover. “Slavery,” he said. “That’s the biggest cause. All the talk about states’ rights and other stuff, it’s just a smokescreen for slavery. The South wanted to keep it and make it grow. The North wanted to stop it and eventually roll it back.”
Most of them took notes. A few didn’t give a damn. Their parents were wasting the cash they spent here. What could you do, though?
“Question?” Bryce nodded towards a raised hand.
“Yes.” The Sikh girl nodded. “How do you know it was slavery most of all? What is the evidence?”
Would she be a lawyer when she grew up, or a biochemist? Bryce was just glad he’d done his review before the class started. He had the answer at his fingertips. “Well, let’s look at South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession. South Carolina was the first state out of the Union, remember. When the ordinance talks about why the state’s leaving, it says ‘These States’-the free ones-‘have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions, and have denied the right of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery; they have permitted the establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and eloin’-that means
“Instead of reading them, though, let’s look at the Confederate Constitution. That was the law the South set up for itself to live by. A lot of it’s modeled after the U.S. Constitution, but some isn’t. Here’s Article One, Section Nine, Part Three: ‘No bill of attainder,
He looked at her. “So. Is that evidence?”
“It is.” She nodded gravely.
Right then, he was a little relieved to have no black kids in the class. Reminding them Southern whites had been sure enough that their ancestors were no more than cattle with hands to fight a war about it wouldn’t have been comfortable, which was putting things mildly. Easier to sound dispassionate about it while they were out of the room, so to speak.
Or maybe the fact that he still worried about it meant the country had taken longer to dig out from under the burden of slavery than it would to clean up after the supervolcano eruption. And if that wasn’t a scary thought, he didn’t know what would be.
Latin was cleaner. It didn’t seem so intimately connected to the world they lived in. (Well, yes, the Romans were slaveowners, too. Well, yes, the Hispanic kids, or most of them, spoke a language that was one of today’s versions of Vulgar Latin. Details, details. .)
Trying to explain what cases were all about took up a lot of his time. When he was in college, he’d taken German before Latin, so the dead language had confused him less, anyhow. The kids might well have had an easier time with calculus. Some of them
Then there was Sasha Smyslovsky. He spoke Russian at home, and Russian had more cases than Latin. His trouble wasn’t grammar-it was vocabulary. People who grew up with English (and, even more so, people who grew up with Spanish) could figure out a lot of Latin words from their modern cognates. Russian, though, didn’t have that kind of relationship to Latin.
Sasha was a junior, so he was sixteen, maybe seventeen. To Bryce, he looked about thirteen. All the boys in his classes, even the football players who could have cleaned his clock without breaking a sweat, looked like kids to him. He worked hard not to show it. He’d hated his teachers condescending to him when he was in high school. That had to be a constant of human, or at least teenage, nature.
Some of the girls in his classes looked like kids to him, too. Some of them struck him as seventeen going on thirty-five. He also worked hard not to show that. He didn’t want to give them ideas, and he didn’t want some of the ideas they gave him. More than he ever had before, he understood how high school teachers slipped every once in a while.
He never said word one about that to Susan. He didn’t want to give her ideas, either. If he had, he knew what she would have given him: a piece of her mind, and a sharp-edged one at that.
World history struck him as an exercise in political correctness. Every ethnic group made its contribution-its
