by Jon Gerrard
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In Ms. Silver’s English class, Danny and James were having a tough time keeping themselves awake as well. They were reading Shakespeare, which both of them found difficult enough to stay awake through on a normal day. The problem was that they didn’t understand it. Ms. Silver insisted that they read it in the original Old English which most of the class had a hard time understanding. Usually, James and Danny would sit with Dimitri who for some reason actually understood the Old English and would explain it to them. Unfortunately, Dimitri wasn’t in class with them today.
“But I saw his car in the lot,” Danny whispered to James.
“So how come he’s not in class?” James whispered back.
“I don’t know,” Danny said, and yawned.
“Is there something the two of you would like to share with the rest of the class?” Ms. Silver asked them.
“Sorry, Ms. Silver,” James said, scooting himself upright in his seat.
“Well, Mr. Caruso,” Ms. Silver said, “seeing as we are short one student today, why don’t you take over the role of Edmund. We are beginning on the first page of act 5, scene 1.”
The teacher had arranged the chairs in a circle for today’s reading. They were finishing up King Lear and had just started the final act. Each student had been assigned to read one of the characters. They would cover a page or two then spend some time discussing what they’d read. It was an agonizingly slow process.
As James thumbed through his dog-eared copy of the play, he mumbled to Danny, “I’m going to kill Dimitri when I catch him.”
James would have been surprised to know that at that very moment Dimitri was less than two hundred yards away, asleep behind the wheel of his car in the student lot. Out of their entire group, Dimitri had been the first one to make it to school. He had been so early in fact that he had pulled into the parking lot almost twenty minutes before the first bell. Since he didn’t want to go into the building alone, he decided to wait until one of the others showed up. Meanwhile, he reclined his seat to take a quick power-nap. He figured that all he needed was ten minutes of rest and he would be ready to go.
That was his last conscious thought before he closed his eyes and fell fast asleep.