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

my own sake. Besides, the idea that I could help him made me feel strong. It compensated for the seventy-pound, six-inch discrepancy between us. So I set about teaching Justin that cynicism was an invaluable buffer between a person’s heart and the outside world. Again and again I told him to forget the books, the ideals. And when telling didn’t work, I went further. I took extreme measures to show Justin that we lived in a world of hard evidence, of fact. If only he’d listened.
    ***
    I finished my sandwich and headed to chemistry before the bell. Ever since yesterday’s flash mob, the halls had echoed with menace. It was only 1 p.m. and already the afternoon had descended into a minor key. The English teachers in the lounge were willfully ignoring the ominous feeling that pervaded, consumed as they were by their Harold Bloom, and I envied their selfish persistence.
    â€œJonah!”
    I’d just entered the main stairwell and looked up to see the exophthalmic orbs that were Pasternak’s eyes. He was rippling the tips of his fingers—index, middle, ring, pinkie—at nervous speed. He looked like a fly preening. “Can you come up here?” his voice boomed down from on high. An interrogation was at hand.
    When I finally reached Pasternak’s landing, he glanced around. Down, up, left, right. We were alone in the cold, cylindrical space. It resembled a belfry, but instead of bells overhead there was only a dirty skylight.
    â€œIf you’d been in the refectory yesterday . . . I arrived just before the mob ended.” Pasternak looked at me like he expected me to say something about this. Like I knew something about it. “You’ve read
Nineteen Eighty-four,
right?” He scratched his thinning hair with a jaundiced finger. “Of course you have. It’s been on the eighth-grade English curriculum for two decades.”
    What did he want me to say? Yes, kids played pranks, but there were more than a few who yearned to be the heroes of their own epic story, who turned their books into bibles and worshiped them with religious zeal.
    â€œJonah—” Pasternak pursed his lips, looked past me down the stairs. “Do you know how that recording made its way onto the intercom?”
    Why was he asking me this question? I shook my head.
    â€œYou don’t?” His bug eyes seemed to pop inches from his face. He nodded absently. “Well, do you know how Prisom’s Party managed to hack into the Community Council’s email?”
    â€œAre you insinuating something about my involvement in all this?” As obsequious as Pasternak had been since my arrival, it was difficult to shake the old indignities. Sometimes he still seemed to consider me a kind of antimatter in the school, unpredictable and destructive.
    â€œInsinuating? Jonah, I’m asking for you to—”
    â€œI’m sorry,” I interrupted. “But I have students to teach.” And I left him there in the stairwell.

Iris
September 2012
    I COULDN’T GET a meeting with Katie Milford for a full twenty-four hours after the flash mob, and when I finally snagged five minutes with her, she rejected my proposed investigation of the event outright.
    â€œDo I need to break down for you what happened, Iris?” she said, shoving a stack of edited news copy off a chair and pointing at me to sit down.
    â€œNo,” I mumbled, and sat.
    â€œFor starters,” Katie said, pacing in front of my chair, “Prisom’s Party hacked into the Community Council’s email account and sent out instructions for a flash mob. They then asked the student body to verbally attack a weak underclassman, Marvin Breckinridge, whose sister Mary happened to be a huge liar but who himself never hurt anybody. And, finally, this action ‘proved’ that the school is full of mindless robots. Now you’re telling me you want to smear this iniquity across the front page? Do you