Sometimes Never, Sometimes Always Read Online Free Page A

Kayla—well, the only class, actually—and I’m pissed. I accost her at the door with a barrage of complaints.
    “How could you leave me like that? You disappeared. You totally dodged out of the way and let me fall down the stairs, Kayla, and then you were … gone. Do you realize I may have broken my fucking tailbone?”
    “Cassandra,” says my English teacher, stepping between us on his way into the classroom. “I don’t need to hear that kind of language in my workplace.” He raises an eyebrow, but his tone is indulgent. He’s not the type to get hysterical about an F-bomb, luckily. Ms. Franklin would have emailed my mother. Which … well, I’d rather not contemplate that scene. She’d probably make me go in for counseling with Pastor Fordham or something. I shudder at the thought.
    “Oh, relax,” says Kayla, sweeping past me into the room. “It’s not like I meant to abandon you.” She shrugs. “The tardy bell rang. I thought you were right behind me. How was I supposed to know you’d go over backwards?”
    Mr. Dawkins stands at the front of the room and claps his hands twice, his customary cue that we should shut up and get down to business.
    Right. So she’s trying to get me to believe she didn’t notice that I fell down half a flight of stairs? I make my way to my assigned seat, which is inconveniently across the room from Kayla’s, and take out my notebook. She’s not going to brush me off like this, not about this. She dragged me all the way across the school and then left me to die on the stairs. I start scribbling a note, my hand quickly cramping up from my angry grip on the pen.
    “Cassandra, really. You’re not impressing me today.” He keeps his voice quiet—Mr. D is not the type of teacher who believes in public humiliation—but he holds his hand out for the note. “You know my thoughts on notes. No reading, no writing, no folding, no passing.” He leans in closer. “Please, Cass. Can you put this out of your mind, at least for the next fifty minutes?”
    I nod and hand him the page from my notebook, grateful to him for immediately crumpling it up into a little ball. And then, when he actually walks across the room and drops the ball on Kayla’s desk, I’m blown away. I see him lean down and speak to her, and she nods, shoving the paper into her pocket without reading it.
    “ I celebrate myself, and sing myself , ” says Mr. D, in that voice that means he is quoting some writer he loves. “ And what I assume you shall assume .”
    “Narcissistic much?” mutters the boy next to me. He doodles in the margin of his literature book with a heavy black pen. I turn my head, startled to hear, for the first time, the voice of this kid I’ve been sitting next to for weeks.
    “Exactly so, Darin,” says Mr. Dawkins with a smile and a nod. “And many people at the time were shocked, outraged by Whitman’s poetry. They called it indecent.” Mr. D continues reading from the poem, cradling the heavy textbook in his arms as he stalks around the room, quietly tapping the page of the books of students who aren’t listening as he walks by, never pausing in his reading. He drops a clean sheet of drawing paper on Darin’s desk as he strides past. Darin shrugs and moves his doodling to the approved medium without a word.
    “Whitman talks about celebrating himself, and indeed the speaker in this poem is named Walt Whitman, but the details here are not all autobiographical.” Mr. D jots some phrases on the white board and I copy them into my notebook: Praise of the Individual. The Collective Experience. Democracy. The Boundaries of Self and World.
    Poetry is pretty, but I’m not very good at making sense of it on my own. Luckily, although Mr. D wants us to think for ourselves, with a little prompting we can always get him to tell us his own thoughts. Which I then write down and regurgitate in a similar form on the tests, in the essays. Easy peasy as long as I take notes. As long as I