Read Online The Year of the Gadfly by Jennifer Miller - Free Book Online

me. There they lie and here lie we, under the spreading chestnut tree. Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me. There they lie and here lie we, under the spreading chestnut tree!” The voices chanted in lockstep with the intercom, and the words flew down over the poor, frightened student. He gave up protesting or trying to make sense of the situation and covered his head with his arms. It occurred to me that most students in the refectory couldn’t see the boy; they were shouting because the ones in front of them were shouting.
Murrow,
I thought anxiously,
I have to help him!
But I was stuck in the crush and couldn’t move.
    â€œ UNDER THE SPREADING CHESTNUT TREE, I SOLD YOU AND YOU SOLD ME. THERE THEY LIE AND HERE LIE WE, UNDER THE SPREADING CHESTNUT TREE.”
    And then suddenly there was a tremendous record-like scratch, and the intercom voice went silent. The room fell silent too. The boy at the table kept his head buried, his shoulders quivering.
    â€œToday’s flash mob was brought to you by Prisom’s Party,” the original intercom voice declared. “Our diagnostic assessment of the school’s collective conscience has determined that you will harass a blameless student simply because the Community Council asks you to. The instructional email many of you received this morning did not come from the Council. It came from us. Prisom’s Party declares the collective conscience poor.”
    At that exact moment, the bell rang to signal the end of lunch. Everybody started talking at once and pushing toward the refectory doors. Meanwhile, the embattled boy had raised his head and was looking around dazed, as though he’d woken from a nightmare.
    Holy breaking news!
I thought, and rushed off to find Katie Milford.

II
Intraterrestrials
These extremophiles thrive in darkness, feeding on poisonous methane and sulfur gases. The renowned molecular philosopher Lucinda Starburst has written that “intraterrestrials grow strong on substances utterly destructive to human life, and yet they shape our lives at the most fundamental level. They force us to reexamine what it means to create and destroy, to benefit and harm.”
—Marvelous Species: Investigating Earth’s Mysterious Biology

Jonah
September 2012
    UNTIL I STARTED teaching, I never knew how much faculty and students have in common. For one thing, we’re as territorial as our charges. The science teachers, for example, keep mainly to the department office. It’s where we grade papers, take coffee breaks, and complain about making so much less than our public school counterparts.
    I store my lunch in the departmental mini-fridge, a dirty box packed with miscellaneous containers of Chinese food (circa who knows when), mushy fruit, Red Bulls, and half-eaten yogurts. That—and a whole lot of loose paper—is what you get when seven science nerds share a tiny office. But I like to eat in less cluttered accommodations. The teachers’ lounge is spacious and newly renovated, albeit in a manner meant to preserve Mariana’s “aesthetic integrity.” That just means it has Gothic windows, heavy furniture, and dim lighting. The second week of school, somebody stuck a sign on the door that said,
Ye Olde Teachers’ Lounge.
(Probably a science teacher; we’re the only department with a sense of humor. At a recent science department trivia night, we decided to dub ourselves the Left Brains—the Bloods of the prep school faculty set. Pasternak put a stop to the game, because he didn’t want the students to think we were encouraging cliques.)
    Anyway, I walked into Ye Olde Lounge (reeking of ye olde coffee) and found half the English department settled around the oak table talking shop. I chose a high-backed leather chair and sat down with my tuna sandwich to listen in unobserved. As a student of animal behavior once told me, the trick to studying creatures in their natural