The bike-riding Bender who invented debate…
But I had a whole day to get through first.
My next class was AP English with Ms. Alvarez. She was new to the Academy, and though this was only the second day in her class, she was already my favorite teacher.. Mid-thirties, with a long dark braid down her back, she had a relaxed, friendly vibe. She reminded me of Harper Bennett with her earthy clothes and funky jewelry…and then I saw Harper sitting toward the back. Students had shuffled seats and now the only available desk was beside hers next to the only available seat. A flush of heat crept over my face at what my friends had said about her. WhatIhad said.
Whatever. What do you care what she thinks?
But that was the bitch of being popular—we all pretended we didn’t care what anyone thought, when we actually cared whateveryonethought.
I took the empty seat. Harper kept her eyes straight ahead, chin up, hands folded neatly on her notebook. Ms. Alvarez moved to the front of the class and wrote on the whiteboard the wordvillanelle.
“Can anyone tell me what a villanelle is?”
A few hands went up, including Harper’s.
Ms. Alvarez smiled. “And, no, I’m not referring to the character inKilling Eve.”
Hands went down along with some laughs. Harper’s remained.
“Yes, Ms. Bennett?”
“It’s a poem in which the first and third lines of the first stanza are alternated and repeated throughout.”
“Very good.” Ms. Alvarez returned to the board and wrote as she spoke. “To expand, a villanelle is a nineteen-line poem comprised of five tercets, or three-line stanzas, and one quatrain, or four-line stanza. It has a very specific rhyme scheme and, as Ms. Bennett said,repeating refrains. The most famous villanelle is Dylan Thomas’sDo Not Go Gentle into That Goodnight, but it’s not my favorite.Thisis my favorite.”
She turned to the class with a smile and tapped the whiteboard, where she had somehow written out an entire villanelle while explaining a villanelle.
“Sylvia Plath’sMad Girl’s Love Song,” she said. “Is anyone familiar with Plath?”
Hannah Greenway raised her hand. “Didn’t she kill herself by sticking her head in an oven?”
Ms. Alvarez’s smile tensed. “She did. That’s the sensational, unfortunate detail that overshadows her many achievements. But Plath was a prolific writer of scores of letters, journals, short stories, and a novel, and she won the Pulitzer-Prize for poetry—all before the age of thirty.” She stepped aside. “Please take a moment to yourselves to readMad Girl’s Love Song.”
I did and it felt like the poem had slapped me in the face, each line screaming Xander Ford’s name. Now that he was back, there was no escaping him. He was everywhere I turned, even in the words of a poet who died more than sixty years ago.
“Would anyone like to tell me about this poem?” Ms. Alvarez asked. “Not only what you think it means, but how it makes you feel?”
My hand rose, almost as if pulled by a string.
“Ms. Wallace?”
“I think the poem is a girl writing about a boy who went away. He said he’d come back but he didn’t, and so she waited and waited. She waited so long that now she wonders if everything that happened between them was only in her imagination. Like, maybe she made him up inside her head.”
“Very good,” Ms. Alvarez said gently. “And how does it make you feel?”
“Sad,” I said. “And lonely. Like true love is a delusion. It isn’t real. Like it breaks promises and doesn’t come back.”
The class went silent until a few murmurs broke me out of whatever crazy spell had come over me. Two senior girls—not in my group—whispered and made boo-hoo faces at me. My cheeks burned.
Ms. Alvarez smiled. “Well done, Emery. Thank you for sharing.” She turned back to the board. “Our first unit is going to be poetry, where we will be studying the works of Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Mary Oliver, among others. You can find our first unit’s reading on your iPad. Please click on the link…”
Ms. Alvarez continued with classroom business, assignments, and her expectations for the year while I stared at the poem on the whiteboard. It was as if Sylvia had written it just for me.
Harper leaned and whispered, “That was really good.”
“Thanks—”
“Too bad you’re a total fake.”
