Man of the Hour Read Online Free

couple of the other guys in the class started mumbling behind his back and pointing in contempt, but David cut them off with a cold stare.
    “All right, enough ,” he said, before turning his attention back to Kevin. “Thank you, Kevin. I give you props for opening up like that. Shawn was in my class, and for the record, I think you did the right thing. And if anyone disagrees, they can take it up with me personally after class.”
    Okay, so it wasn’t “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” but to have a kid like Kevin let his guard down so much was a small miracle. The kind—along with having Elizabeth in his class—that kept David going year after year in spite of budget cuts, school board politics, and plaster dust drizzling down on his desk.
    He cruised by Kevin’s desk, collecting the glove and quietly telling him, “Come talk to me later if you want.” The morning was developing a kind of unusual gravity, with kids dropping their hearts on their desks. He made a U-turn back toward the front of the class and used his booming voice again, trying to lighten the discussion a little.
    “Okay, I don’t want to turn this into a therapy group or a talk show,” he said, picking up a piece of chalk. “I want to bring it back to the books. Because that’s what we’re here to talk about. Right? So can somebody else give me an example of a character in one of the books who’s either being tested or maybe even testing something?”
    A Russian boy named Yuri Ehrlich slowly hoisted his arm in the fifth row, over by the radiators. He was a brilliant but unscrupulous kid, with long, straight brown hair and a disturbing habit of cheating when he didn’t have to, as if the old Soviet habits of beating the system were too deeply ingrained in him. David wondered if he’d change this year.
    “Raskolnikov.” Yuri rolled out the name with a thick accent.
    “Raskolnikov who chopped up the old widow and her sister?” David tossed him the mitt. “Should I have brought an ax instead of the glove to throw around today?”
    Uneasy laughter. They were reading Crime and Punishment in Advanced Placement English, not in this class. But why make a deal out of it if the kid wanted to contribute?
    “All right, I’ll bite. Why Raskolnikov?”
    Yuri sat there, silent and brooding, letting the glove tumble to the floor.
    “Maybe he means that Raskolnikov is testing the definition of what it means to be an extraordinary man,” Elizabeth Hamdy said earnestly, leaning forward on her elbows. She was taking A.P. for extra credit too.
    “Okay, I can live with that,” said David, thinking this really was the day for heavy topics. “So does he succeed or fail?”
    “I think he fails, because his definition of ‘extraordinary’ is flawed,” said Elizabeth in her perfect diction, obviously glad not to be talking about herself.
    “Yuri, is that why you think he fails?”
    A tensile moment of anticipation. Other kids looking at each other, checking their watches; David holding up his arms, wanting everyone to hush up and listen.
    “No.” Yuri stared down at his red Converse high-tops. “He fails because he turned himself in.”
    The period buzzer went off.
    “Yuri, you’re scaring me.” David went to pick up the glove. “The rest of you give me three to five pages on this subject by next Friday.”
    With the change-over between classes, the hallways exploded in sound and visual chaos. Students stood around in exclusive circles and insolent clusters, as if daring people to pass.
    Nasser moved by them gingerly, feeling just as invisible as he had felt when he was a junior here, repeating the grade, four years ago. Everything looked the same, except for some red-white-and-blue bunting on the walls. The green-tiled walls, the dull streaky floors, the chipped mahogany banisters, the names of war veterans and valedictorians of years past painted in gold letters on brown plaques, the sports trophies in glass display cases, the