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Authors: Sam Munson
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attention to this obvious hideous fact. Our classes were held on the fourth floor, the highest floor, and thus it took us longer to get to the auditorium than anyone else. That’s why we had our own row, right? Nothing to see there .
A whole field of heads swept downward to the stage, where an aluminum stand offered the microphone to nothing. My pager kept vibrating. Digger felt it—she was resting her knee against mine, as she sometimes did in assemblies, and she gave me a knock with her sharp patella, without looking at me, as though to say, Quite the entrepreneur . I should mention here that public displays of affection—and this is bizarre, when you consider all the other shenanigans that pass without comment at Kennedy—public displays of affection bring with them downpours and cloudbursts of administrative trouble. So knee-to-knee contact was about all you could get away with. I know for a fact that Brent Academy does not have similar rules. You can see the students making out through the fence if you walk by at lunch, sitting or lying on their eternal-looking emerald lawn, goddamn Daisies and Toms (the second book ever assigned at Kennedy that provided me with any pleasure). This assembly took place Friday morning, in the hopes, I suppose, of ruining our weekend by inflaming our wretched consciences. As Dr. Karlstadt explained the nature of our still-meaningful relations to the school—“We are all Tigers!” emphasized by a subsequent moment of lull, as though she expected a spontaneous unitary cheer to rise—I ran through the state of my finances over and over in my head, until it was time to leave. Did you know that you can fit, on average, about thirty-four hundred dollars into a standard shoe box? At least when you use the currencies popular among high school students.
“What are you smirking about,” Digger asked as we trudged up the stairs, lagging behind the pack of our fellow achievers, staring at the flesh-colored marble floor.
“I’m not smirking.” She bodychecked me, and I caught a scrap of her scent, her burnt-leaf scent.
“Nope, you were smirking.” And here she made her idiot face: eyes crossed, crimson tongue limp in the corner of her mouth.
“No, like that was like my thinking face.”
“Like your money face,” she said through a sudden bright smile. And with no further communication the crowd parted and we followed our dividing streams, she into French and me into Latin, and the slablike doors closed and the class-starting noise—you can’t call it a bell—buzzed over the PA.
I tried to think about her knee against mine as Ms. Erlacher launched into a furious denunciation of the class’s performance on the last test—nice thematic continuance there, you administrative assholes! Although I myself had scored a ninety-seven, I was included in her indictment. But even setting aside Ms. Erlacher’s explosion, this was quite a memorable day in Latin class, for me. This was the day Virginia Werfell completely fucked up. Virginia, a girl famous for boning two guys at the same time, just blanked when Ms. Erlacher asked her to translate fifteen lines from the start of book two of the Aeneid , beginning with Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem . This is how Aeneas opens his tale of the sack of Troy, in response to a request from Dido, the queen of Carthage. The line means, “O queen, you command me to know again pain beyond words.” Infandum is kind of a horrible concept: it indicates something so beyond comprehension it cannot be expressed: in (not) + fandum (to be spoken). And that’s the first word of Aeneas’s story! Which is kind of ironic, I guess, because he then goes on about the fall of his city at considerable length. A weird way to begin, right? It suggests that maybe underneath all the talking there really is some intractable, inexpressible misery.
Needless to say, not only did Virginia fail to mention any of this, which is hugely important stuff in the
A whole field of heads swept downward to the stage, where an aluminum stand offered the microphone to nothing. My pager kept vibrating. Digger felt it—she was resting her knee against mine, as she sometimes did in assemblies, and she gave me a knock with her sharp patella, without looking at me, as though to say, Quite the entrepreneur . I should mention here that public displays of affection—and this is bizarre, when you consider all the other shenanigans that pass without comment at Kennedy—public displays of affection bring with them downpours and cloudbursts of administrative trouble. So knee-to-knee contact was about all you could get away with. I know for a fact that Brent Academy does not have similar rules. You can see the students making out through the fence if you walk by at lunch, sitting or lying on their eternal-looking emerald lawn, goddamn Daisies and Toms (the second book ever assigned at Kennedy that provided me with any pleasure). This assembly took place Friday morning, in the hopes, I suppose, of ruining our weekend by inflaming our wretched consciences. As Dr. Karlstadt explained the nature of our still-meaningful relations to the school—“We are all Tigers!” emphasized by a subsequent moment of lull, as though she expected a spontaneous unitary cheer to rise—I ran through the state of my finances over and over in my head, until it was time to leave. Did you know that you can fit, on average, about thirty-four hundred dollars into a standard shoe box? At least when you use the currencies popular among high school students.
“What are you smirking about,” Digger asked as we trudged up the stairs, lagging behind the pack of our fellow achievers, staring at the flesh-colored marble floor.
“I’m not smirking.” She bodychecked me, and I caught a scrap of her scent, her burnt-leaf scent.
“Nope, you were smirking.” And here she made her idiot face: eyes crossed, crimson tongue limp in the corner of her mouth.
“No, like that was like my thinking face.”
“Like your money face,” she said through a sudden bright smile. And with no further communication the crowd parted and we followed our dividing streams, she into French and me into Latin, and the slablike doors closed and the class-starting noise—you can’t call it a bell—buzzed over the PA.
I tried to think about her knee against mine as Ms. Erlacher launched into a furious denunciation of the class’s performance on the last test—nice thematic continuance there, you administrative assholes! Although I myself had scored a ninety-seven, I was included in her indictment. But even setting aside Ms. Erlacher’s explosion, this was quite a memorable day in Latin class, for me. This was the day Virginia Werfell completely fucked up. Virginia, a girl famous for boning two guys at the same time, just blanked when Ms. Erlacher asked her to translate fifteen lines from the start of book two of the Aeneid , beginning with Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem . This is how Aeneas opens his tale of the sack of Troy, in response to a request from Dido, the queen of Carthage. The line means, “O queen, you command me to know again pain beyond words.” Infandum is kind of a horrible concept: it indicates something so beyond comprehension it cannot be expressed: in (not) + fandum (to be spoken). And that’s the first word of Aeneas’s story! Which is kind of ironic, I guess, because he then goes on about the fall of his city at considerable length. A weird way to begin, right? It suggests that maybe underneath all the talking there really is some intractable, inexpressible misery.
Needless to say, not only did Virginia fail to mention any of this, which is hugely important stuff in the
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