Lullaby for the Rain Girl Read Online Free

there filled me with a strange feeling. She stood directly in the middle of the downpour with no umbrella, no hat, not even a newspaper over her head. That brown coat of hers looked much too thin for winter in Washington. Her legs were bare below her knee-length skirt. Her simple black schoolgirl shoes appeared totally inadequate to the cold and wet. What’s more, she had nothing with her—no backpack, no books in her arms, not even headphone wires snaking from her ears down to some unseen Discman. Nothing whatsoever. Her arms dangled straight down at her sides.
    “Hello there,” I called, wondering if I could help her somehow. She’d said she was new; maybe she’d missed the bus or needed directions to the Metro or something.
    She looked toward me then with her big blank eyes. But it wasn’t her eyes that made me back away suddenly, turn, and hustle quickly up the street away from her. It was the fact that I realized in the moment her head turned in my direction that, as the rain cascaded down around her, her face and hair were perfectly dry.
    2
    The next day, Friday, my headache came earlier and stayed later.
    My temples were already throbbing by lunchtime. The kids were going into their final weekend before Winter Holiday, so naturally they were loud, distracted, impatient, silly. I knew it was probably a mistake to try to say anything meaningful about The Great Gatsby during last period, but we were behind schedule and I thought that, if nothing else, I might be able to bore them into submission and get to the end of the day that way. While many of the kids in the back talked openly to each other, I tried to keep the ones nearer the front engaged.
    “So when Daisy goes back to Gatsby’s house,” I said, looking out at the thirty or so mostly dark faces, “Gatsby starts showing her all his shirts. Why do you think he does that?”
    “He wants to show her what a big success he is,” my star pupil, a somewhat brittle girl named Annie, volunteered. Annie was smart, but knew it too well for her own good.
    “Sure,” I agreed, wandering in the front of the room with the book in my hand, “but why shirts? I mean, if you’re trying to prove to someone you love what a successful person you are, are you going to show them your shirts?”
    “If they’re nice shirts, hell yeah,” said Dion, a moderately bright boy given to smart-ass responses. There was a general chuckling, which I joined.
    “Dion, Gatsby has a mansion. He’s incredibly wealthy. There must be a million things he could show her that would impress her more than shirts.”
    “Well, it got her into his bedroom, didn’t it?”
    Another chuckle. The kids at the rear were paying no attention, but then they never did. I hated the fact that I invariably found myself teaching only to the front of the room—nine or ten students—and I occasionally made at least token efforts to include the twenty or so farther back; but anyone there who actually wanted to be a part of the class quickly learned to sit near the front anyway. It was a Faustian bargain: in return for being left alone, the kids in the back half of the room kept the noise down, falling completely silent and pretending to be attentive if another teacher or an administrator happened to walk in. In return for that, I let them be. As a result they learned nothing; and as a teacher, day in and day out, I failed. What was interesting to me, and very sad, was that I’d never talked to the kids about this arrangement. It was understood, that’s all.
    The fact that many other teachers did similar things was only a slight comfort. I still felt sick inside when I thought about it too much; but not nearly as sick as I’d felt ten years earlier, when I’d first taken this job and, in hopeless frustration at the crazy, off-the-wall behavior of many kids that made it impossible for anyone to learn anything, I’d first decided to perform a kind of triage and direct my attentions largely to the students