Man of the Hour Read Online Free Page B

and give a speech about “taking back our schools,” possibly as a prelude to announcing his own candidacy for President.
    “No, it’s not Larry,” said Donna. “It’s a blast from the past. I told him he could wait at your desk.”
    “Thanks, Ms. Vitale.”
    He started to move past her, but she caught his elbow “I also wondered if I could talk to you about coming over for dinner next week,” she said softly.
    He stopped short, flattered but awkward, suddenly feeling like a bashful ape. How did women handle this kind of attention? “Um, can I get back to you on that, Donna?”
    “You got the number.”
    He wondered if he was missing a great opportunity here, waiting to see if he could still work things out with Renee. Ms. Vitale was smart, she had ballast, and something about her suggested a kind of rowdy availability. You could imagine sitting up in bed, drinking beer with her.
    “But don’t wait too long, David.” She brushed by him on her way to the Xerox room. “I might not be around forever.”
    He continued on into the office. A narrow little blue room, off a main corridor, with a dozen desks for the twenty teachers in the English department. The junior staffers were expected to roam like nomads and put their papers and books down on any surface that happened to be clear, while the senior teachers hunkered down and defended their areas like mangy old primates. Three students loitered inexplicably by the water fountain and a work-crew guy stood on a ladder pulling down parts of the ceiling, looking for God knows what hazardous materials. A tattered print of Edvard Munch’s The Scream adorned a wall above an overstuffed file cabinet, and a group of painters stood around with dripping rollers, trying to freshen the room up for the governor’s visit.
    The visitor was sitting in David’s chair, studying the papers on top of his desk and the placard above it with the Melville quote God keep me from ever completing anything.
    What did that mean? Nasser wondered. He’d never trusted this one, this Mr. Fitzgerald, with his patient smile and unruly brown hair. He’d sat in the back of his class for a whole term, too bored yet too intimidated to speak up. Feeling the work was both above him and beneath him. Not understanding most of what was said; not getting the jokes; not liking the fact that he’d been left back once already and was older than most of the other students. And especially not liking it when Mr. Fitzgerald would call on him in class, asking him to explain what he thought of The Great Gatsby or The Deerslayer or some other immoral American book. It was humiliating, like being stripped naked in front of the other students. He stammered and stuttered, wanting to crawl under his chair, while this man read him immoral poems and tried to force him to think and speak in an uncomfortable way.
    He’d dropped out soon after that. But there was another part of Nasser that was confused, being back here. The weaker part that needed to talk to someone about the things he’d seen. He remembered how he’d watched other students talk to Mr. Fitzgerald, sharing jokes and intimate secrets after class, and how he’d wished he could unburden himself to someone that way.
    “It’s Nasser, right?” David set down his bag and offered his hand, grateful for the excuse to ignore the pink phone message from Visa lying amid the piles of uncorrected papers from his five classes on his desk.
    The thought of the $2,500 he owed on his credit card made the back of his neck ache.
    The visitor looked up, startled, with luminous brown eyes, just like his sister’s. “I am surprised for you to remember me.” His handshake was limp and cautious.
    “Sure, I remember almost all my students.”
    Not that he’d done much worth remembering, this Nasser. Just sat in the back, looking pissed off all term. There was a certain number of kids like him every year, maybe twenty, thirty percent. The unreachables. Who either didn’t