Tampa by Alissa Nutting Page A

joke, but not making them himself or asking for the class’s attention. Each day he wore a T-shirt and sportlike mesh shorts that fell just below his knees, but his lower calves suggested that his upper thighs were covered in a thin layer of blond hair. In the light these tufts seemedlike a gossamer confection; if licked, I imagined they would dissolve on my tongue.
    The reading list for the nonadvanced eighth-grade English classes was preselected and not to be deviated from:
Romeo and Juliet
began the fall semester, then we would be moving into
The Scarlet Letter
and
The Crucible
. To begin I had students draw names from a bucket: in each class, we’d read Shakespeare’s play aloud to kill time. Jack drew the character of Paris, and visibly blushed when Marissa Talbet, an annoyingly theatrical redhead who on the first day of class asked if she could, from time to time, make pertinent student council announcements, spoke of Paris’s legendary attractiveness in her role as Nurse. Marissa was the first student to modulate her voice for the part, raising it several octaves higher and attempting a British accent. Her classmates found this hilarious, but Jack never doubled over with sugar-induced laughter. Instead he simply smiled, all the while looking at the text of the play, hardly ever raising his virginal brown eyes—but when he did glance up, he found me watching him, and we’d lock into a stare for the briefest second before his head lowered back toward the safety of the book.
    Reading aloud, his voice was steady overall, though he stumbled a bit between antiquated words and spoke with the misplaced stressors of one who doesn’t fully grasp a line’s context. “Thou wrong … sit … wrongs … it … more than tears … with that report ,” he spoke to Juliet, whose name happened to be drawn from the bucket by the exacting Frank Pachenko (when the teasing about this role immediately began, Frank was quick to remind his peers that in Shakespeare’s time Juliet and all of the female characters would have indeed been played by male actors). In generalFrank’s appearance and organized demeanor bucked the stereotype of the typical fourteen-year-old male: his hand always went straight up in the air when a question was asked, and his glasses had lenses too large and too circular for his age. Occasionally I saw him speaking with Jack, usually a quick question or two that Jack answered with a low, short phrase, but there was a familiarity between them that suggested they’d known one another since childhood despite the different paths the social jungle of adolescence was beginning to put them on: Jack was an accepted outlier in the circle of the popular jocks, while Frank took geeky solace in social failure by channeling his energy into academics. Frank wasn’t an outstanding mind—his response papers formed simplistic arguments with an average vocabulary—but he looked the part of the young academic: his shirt tucked into his slightly too- high-waisted shorts, his bulky white sneakers that somehow didn’t appear to ever have been worn.
    Since lunch directly followed Jack’s third-period class, I made it a habit to drop into the lunchroom and take note of his whereabouts , even watch him eat if the opportunity presented itself. Less than a month after school started, I’d already begun to shut his peers out with the myopic blindness a focused goal brings. I’ve no doubt there were others, throngs of students not in any of my classes, who were watching me as I stood in the humid fog of the cafeteria and sipped a carton of chocolate milk through a straw, placing myself in front of one of the large industrial fans positioned at each corner of the cafeteria and letting it lift stray hairs from the gathered bun at the base of my neck. A sound-based traffic light at the cafeteria’s front entrance registered how loud the collective sound in the room was: green meant the students were talking atan acceptable volume,