Landon Hopkins raised his hand for another question. I really am not going to live through this class, thought Thomas. His sister, Barbara, claimed that she had never been bored in an English class. Barbara was a senior at Mason School. She was the one, in fact, whose friends had had the party in McLean where he’d met Hesta. He wondered if Barbara had lost her virginity. That was a pretty nasty thought. You don’t usually think of your sister as actually being a girl, or rather as being like a regular girl whose panties you’d want to grab. It made him mad to think of Ned Wood or some other guy she’d been out with trying to grab Barbara’s panties. On the other hand, was anybody up in McLean getting mad at Thomas now for trying to grab Hesta’s panties? Not that he had done so. Hesta didn’t have any brothers, only this one sister who was twelve years older and already married now. What if Hesta did have a brother, though? Would he get mad at Thomas for trying to grab Hesta’s panties, which he hadn’t even tried to grab yet? They’d only been out twice, after all, but he thought about her anatomy almost constantly.
Thomas had a brother, Jeff, who was two years younger. Somehow it wasn’t so bad to think of your brother getting laid someday, as long as it happened when Jeff was older than Thomas was whenever Thomas lost his own virginity. Across the room Richard pretended to be picking his nose.
“That brings us to the rational soul,” said Mr. Farnham, who was drawing arrows like crazy all over the board. “It’s the rational soul, seated in the mind, that is superior to the sensible soul in the heart”—he pointed—“and to the animal soul in the liver”—he pointed again. “The rational soul is, of course, the source of our power to reason, and it is reason that keeps humanity from simply behaving like one of the lesser beasts. We do have urges and emotions, but we are blessed with reason so that we may keep those urges under control. We may feel lust for a woman, for example, but we must resist the temptation to indulge that lust. Otherwise, we have committed the sin “—he pointed again—” of cupiditas, of letting our natural concupiscence and our God-given sexual desire become a form of idolatry. Any questions?”
Go ahead, Landon, thought Thomas. Ask him a question. Thomas felt an overpowering urge to look at his watch. Is it too early? Should I or shouldn’t I? This conflict would be a good example for Mr. Farnham to spaz about in class, with Thomas’s heart telling him to go ahead and look at the damn watch while his brain was telling him to wait, to be cautious.
“All of this,” said Mr. Farnham, pulling out his chair and sitting down at the tidy desk, “is by way of introduction to the next play we’re going to read—”
Here it comes, thought Thomas, the bad news. Richard was sitting across from him with his fingers crossed and his eyes closed.
“—William Shakespeare’s Othello—”
Oh, well. Could be worse. He knew everybody else in the class would be going berserk. They hated Shakespeare worse than anything because he was so hard to read. Thomas kept it to himself that he sort of liked Shakespeare. You don’t go telling people that, unless you’re some total reptile like Landon Hopkins. Thomas groaned along with the rest of the class, but only so that they wouldn’t think he was a nerd.
“—for which you are expected to read and outline—did you hear that, Richard Blackburn?—and outline the first two scenes for tomorrow. Landon?”
Landon’s hand was up. Landon had a complexion like tomato soup before all the soup mix has dissolved and a skinny neck and an Adam’s apple that stuck out and bobbed whenever he talked. He was also unbelievably smart because he was unbelievably geeky enough to study all the damn time. “Is that the same kind of outline we did for Oedipus Rex?” asked Landon. Mr. Farnham said yes.
“I think you’ll enjoy Othello,” said Mr. Farnham. “It features one of the most evil characters in all of literature, a man named Iago. He looks normal to everybody else, but he turns out to be a sex pervert.”
Now he’s exaggerating to get us interested, thought Thomas.
“Imagine the tension,” said Mr. Farnham. “The audience knows, but the characters don’t, that one of them is a dangerously corrupt villain. Only he appears perfectly normal to all the others on stage.”
The bell rang.
I do believe in miracles, I do, I do, thought Thomas. He’d been right not to look at his watch. He’d have to remember that in Heilman’s religion class, which was even more boring than Farnham’s English class. He began to scoop up his other books and notebooks from under the desk.
“Mr. Boatwright, could I speak to you before you leave?” said Mr. Farnham.
Damn. You can’t get away with a thing in here. Mr. Farnham would be all right if he’d just loosen up once in a while. So a guy daydreams for a minute or two during a lecture. So what? Nobody pays perfect attention to everything.
He approached Farnham’s desk with books in hand and coat on. Richard bumped him on the way out the door, and Thomas responded with an elbow. Farnham waited until everyone was out of the room before he spoke.
“Do you have a class next period?”
“Geometry.”
“I won’t keep you long. Did you know that I’m directing Othello as the winter play? We go up in early March.”
“Yes sir.” How the hell could he not know? Farnham had been advertising auditions for a week before Thanksgiving.
“Have you given any thought to trying out for a part?”
No, he hadn’t. “I just made the basketball
