Any Resemblance to Actual Persons by Kevin Allardice Page A

reflux—the latter was probably due to my vending machine diet but it was still emotionally appropriate. I told myself not to scroll down the page—just as an author shouldn’t read his reviews—but I found myself doing it anyway. Sixty-three reviews dating back only one year, apparently since the website’s launch, proclaiming in all caps and strange phonetic spelling things like this guy SUXXX and I HATED this class mor then life itself and, simply, STOOPID! I kept scrolling. I couldn’t stop myself. I read through all sixty-three of those reviews, which ranged from the psychotically angry to the completely indifferent. Most of them veered toward the latter, which made me wonder why so many people would log on to this website simply to say this man made no impression on me . At least those who hated me felt something. I heard someone somewhere say something along the lines of: A good teacher will make five percent of his class absolutely hate him, and five percent absolutely love him. So I went hunting for that other five percent. After an hour of scrolling and reading, I found one review that said, hes nice i liked the class . I stared at that comment until the rods and cones in the back of my eyeballs had its every pixel memorized. I deduced that the person who wrote it was a female: prefacing the “like” with “nice” revealed as much. She was shy: The lack of capital letters suggested a fear of self-assertion, which probably meant she’d been surrounded by dominating male figures who’d been telling her to keep her mouth shut her whole life. In my experience, women like that are almost always physically attractive (aesthetically unappealing women tend to be loud, thinking that personality can make up the difference). This beneficent commenter was surely small, mousy, not the kind of beauty who’d make every headturn, but undeniably beautiful once you took notice of her. A brunette, probably, with glasses. And she said I was nice, which probably meant I’d helped her with some assignment she was having trouble with. The comment was dated February 1994, so she probably took one of my classes in the fall of 1993. As I’ve said, I have on average about two hundred students every semester, so I couldn’t immediately bring to mind everyone in my roster who fit that description. But that’s not the point. The point is that I had developed a small habit of sneaking into Chris’s room every day and checking Grade-a-Prof to see if there were any more—positive—comments posted. In an effort to boost that C-, I started telling jokes in my classes, funny ones, but had to stop when I accidentally made the same Wordsworth pun three times in one class, each time feigning spontaneity, until one student said, “Dude, you’re stuck on repeat,” which got the biggest laugh of my teaching career. With seven classes each semester, it’s inevitable that you forget which class you said what to, and no one seems to care when it’s some note of pedantry, but at the first hint that humor might be calculated—that a quip comes from anything other than a flash of pure inspiration—people get angry.
    â€œThere you go,” Chris said. “Oliver’s email.” We were looking at the Elkin Media website, a handsome display, sleek presentation, much nicer than Grade-a-Prof, which, graphically, was like a junior high AV club production; Elkinmedia.com , however, was a Simpson-Bruckheimer production, each bit of text, it seemed, a link, a wormhole to something else.
    â€œThe way you talk about this guy, I thought he was like your best friend,” Chris said.
    â€œHow many best friends you got?” I said. “Scoot.” I shooed him out of the way, sat down, and drafted a quick email to Oliver from my new COLA email account: Oliver, buddy. It’s me. Call me ASAP . I hit send. Then I wrote a second email: By