Gentlemen Read Online Free

wondering if Haberman knew we liked Mr. G and hated him and was trying to like steal some of his thunder. I took the club from him and weighed it in my palm, you could feel the sweat and grease on it from the other hands, but it was a good, solid club.
    I glanced over at the guesses so far. A lot of them were types of plants: watermelon, tree stump, things like that. Bridgit guessed clay, which wasn’t a plant but sort of had that feel to it. I was thinking something along those lines, and I hauled off and really slammed the side of the barrel. I hit a knuckle on the plastic and the club stung my palm, but I stood there real still, trying to read the vibrations.
    There was definitely something solid in there, and then a little liquid give at the center. Watermelon was a good guess, but I didn’t want to copy Max. Plus, whatever was in there was big. It was tough to get an exact read, but too big to be a watermelon, except maybe at the farm exhibits at the Big E. What did it feel like? And then it came to me.
    â€œMeat,” I said. “Some kind of meat.”
    A few of the girls were like, Ewww, and then there was laughter in the back of the room. I figured that Reedy’d probably said something about me beating my meat, so I gave him a look. He looked down quick, but I could see he was smiling, so I knew I was right.
    â€œMeat,” said Haberman, as if he’d never heard the word before and he was mulling it over. “Very interesting.”
    He wrote it on the board and I sat down. This went on for a while, burning up like half the class. It was sort of interesting at first, but by the time it’d snaked around to the last desk, we pretty much got the point. Finally, there were fourteen guesses on the board, one for each student, and Haberman was ready to settle in on a nice boring lecture. Sometimes he just pulled what he said out of his ass, but you could tell that he’d put some thought into what came next. It sounded planned out, rehearsed is the word.
    â€œWhat do we have here?” he said, putting the little club into a drawer in his desk and turning back to look at the board. He looked at it like he’d just come across it, like he wasn’t the one who just wrote all of those words and there wasn’t still chalk dust on his fingertips. He should’ve known by then that we didn’t respond to open questions like that, and one little stunt with a barrel wasn’t going to change that. He remembered, I guess, and without turning around, he said, “Mr. Benton? What do we have here?”
    I wasn’t sure why he was singling me out, so I kept it simple. “A list.”
    â€œThat’s right, Mr. Benton. We have a list. A list of what?”
    â€œA list of words.”
    â€œYes. It is that, but what else is it?”
    He turned around, but he wasn’t looking at me. He waslooking around the room. I guess he was looking for someone who might answer his question, but there were no takers.
    â€œThese,” he said, waving behind him, “they are words, but what else are they?”
    There was still no response—the kind of no response where you could imagine hearing crickets.
    â€œThis,” he said, stabbing his finger into the W in watermelon, “what is this?”
    I thought he was going to call on me again, but he didn’t.
    â€œMr. Reed, you seem to have a lot to say today”—Haberman heard every whisper, he just didn’t react to most of them—“so what is this?”
    â€œUh, watermelon,” Reedy said in a fake-dumb way designed to get laughs, but he only got a few little snorts.
    â€œIs it? Is it, really? Do you like watermelon, Mr. Reed?”
    â€œYeah, it’s OK.”
    â€œWell, then, would you like a slice? Why don’t you come up here and take a slice of delicious watermelon?”
    He circled the word in chalk as he said it, so we knew he was talking about what was on the board and