A Plague Year

this, Stokes.”

Arthur pointed at my shirt collar. “Hands off the merchandise. Understand, Dork-man? Or I shall visit the wrath of God on you.”

Dorfman took a step back, out of Arthur’s reach. He nodded his head up and down, one time. “Forget it. Forget you.”

Arthur nodded his head the same way. “Forget me? That would be stupid. Real stupid. Of course, nobody ever said you weren’t stupid.”

Dorfman then turned his back on us and faced Coach Malloy. The coach had put down his fruit jar by now. He had clearly been watching, and listening, but he hadn’t done a thing to help.

Arthur jerked his head toward the hallway and told me, “Come on.”

We started down JH1 alongside a slow stream of kids. Most of them were about a foot shorter than Arthur. (I was only about six inches shorter, but with about half his muscle mass.) I kept craning and rubbing my neck, trying to loosen it up, trying to tell if Dorfman had snapped a vertebra.

Arthur finally asked, “You okay, cuz?”

I tried to keep my voice calm. “Sure. Yeah.”

He gave me a quick nod. “I heard what you did at the Food Giant today.”

“You did? How?”

“Buddy of mine in first period. He stopped in on his way to school. He talked to Uno.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Uno said you were like an action hero out there.”

“What?”

“Like Rambo.”

“Like Rambo? No.”

“Like James Bond in a spy-pimped minivan or something.”

I was surprised that I could laugh. “Yeah. Maybe that.”

“I didn’t know you could drive.”

“I can’t. Not for eighteen months.”

“But who’s counting, right?”

“Right.”

We arrived at Mr. Proctor’s door, and I followed Arthur inside. If Arthur was embarrassed to be there among ninth graders, it didn’t show.

Mr. Proctor is both a first-year teacher at Haven and a grad student at Blackwater University. He’s working on his master’s degree in English. He told us that he is from Philadelphia but he likes it better out here. (He didn’t say why, and I couldn’t imagine.)

Anyway, he teaches ninth-grade English. Ninth grade plus Arthur Stokes.

Last week, the first week of school, he got my attention by covering all of early American lit in just a day. He summed up the Puritans in two sentences: “They suffered, and they died. Let’s move on to something good.”

That was it. I loved it.

In Friday’s class, he had had a brief discussion with Arthur about Shakespeare. He asked him, “Mr. Stokes, what did you like or dislike about Shakespeare?”

“Uh, I disliked that I couldn’t understand it. It wasn’t in English.”

“Sure it was.”

“Yeah, but like Old English.”

“No. Shakespeare is neither Old nor Middle English. It is modern English.” He smiled. “Didn’t you at least like all the sex and violence?”

“Maybe if I’d understood it.”

“Because I need to assign some Shakespeare to you this year,” Mr. Proctor explained. “The rest of you will have to wait for it.” Then he pointed to someone in the back. “Yes?”

A girl’s voice answered, “I really like Shakespeare.”

“Good. What plays have you read?”

“All of them.”

Mr. Proctor sounded impressed. “You have? All thirty-seven?”

“Yes,” the girl assured him. She sounded very confident.

As those two continued to talk, Mr. Proctor passed out copies of a paperback book. When I got mine, I read the title, A Journal of the Plague Year.

“This is a classic novel by Daniel Defoe, who also wrote Robinson Crusoe,” Mr. Proctor explained. “In this novel, people are getting killed by something mysterious.” He switched to a spooky, horror-movie voice. “Is it God? Is it the devil?”

Then he answered his own question: “No. It is a disease that spreads through London in the year 1665.”

The confident girl from the back asked, “Did you say this is a novel?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s called a journal, and it reads like it’s nonfiction.”

“It does seem like nonfiction, yes. The author was in London that year, and he did keep a journal. What you are holding is a story based on all that, but written afterward. It is a work of fiction.”

I finally turned around to match that girl’s voice with a face. She was really cute. And smart. And, as I mentioned, confident.

Mr. Proctor held up a memo. “Before we begin, I want to tell you about a change in the language arts curriculum this year. You are expected to write a lot, about four thousand words per month.”

Arthur let out a low whistle.

A new kid in a very tight Pittsburgh Penguins T-shirt raised his hand. He asked, “How many words is that a day?”

“I don’t know. I’ll let you do the math. One way you can achieve that total, though, is to write a journal for me for extra credit. So pay attention as you read this book. Think about how Daniel Defoe documented the history of a people and a place.”

The Pittsburgh Penguins kid asked, “What if you don’t have a journal?”

Mr. Proctor smiled. “A journal can be anything—a notebook, a pad, even loose papers that you clip together.”

The kid seemed relieved.

Arthur muttered to me, “No way. That’s too much work.”

But I didn’t think so. I had a new notebook from the Food Giant school supplies section, a small one that fit in my back pocket. I kind of liked the idea of a journal.

The Pittsburgh Penguins kid asked, “What if we write a whole lot and then we lose it?”

Mr. Proctor squinted at him, but then he explained patiently, “You can just tell me you did it. I’ll believe you.”

The kid sounded amazed. “Really?”

“Yeah.” He looked around. “You guys wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

The kid laughed and answered goofily, as if for the whole class, “Oh no! No, we wouldn’t do that!”

Mr. Proctor then picked up a black erasable marker and wrote one word on the whiteboard: plague. “Okay, tell me, what is a plague?” No one said anything, so he looked at his seating chart. He asked that new kid, “Ben Gibbons, what is a plague?”

“Uh, it’s a really bad thing.”

Mr. Proctor laughed. “It is. It’s a really bad thing. So what are some really bad things that can come in plague form?” He turned to the whiteboard and assumed a writing stance. Still, no one said anything, so he wrote the word disease.

Then the cute girl in the back spoke up. She rattled off a list as Mr. Proctor wrote frantically to keep up: “Frogs. Locusts. Hail. Darkness. Death of firstborn males.”

Mr. Proctor muttered, “Good. Good. Some of the ten plagues of Egypt, from the Bible.” He pointed at the