“We just came from dinner,” Paul said. He looked a little scared of Sullivan, as if discovering that he was a real person and not that much older than us was something terrifying.
I walked over and looked into the skillet. “It looks like scrambled eggs.”
“It’s an omelet,” Sullivan insisted.
“It still looks like scrambled eggs. Smells like them too.”
“I assure you, it’s an omelet.”
I pulled out one of the mismatched chairs at the round table and sat down. Paul hurried to follow my example. “You can assure me it’s a suckling pig if you like,” I said, “but I still think it’s scrambled eggs.”
Sullivan grimaced at me and performed the elaborate ritual necessary to transfer scrambled eggs to a pan while still allowing them to maintain an omelet shape. “Well, I’m going to eat while we talk, if that doesn’t bother you guys.”
“I would hate to see you wither away on our behalf. Are we in trouble?”
Sullivan dragged his desk chair into the kitchen and sat down with his eggs. “You are always in some kind of trouble, James. Paul never is. How long is it until sundown, anyway?”
“Thirty-two minutes,” said Paul, and Sullivan and I both looked at him. I realized in that moment that I’d never really looked at Paul since the first time I’d seen him. I’d just sort of formed a first impression of him based upon round eyes behind round glasses and a round face on a round head, and just kept accessing that first round image every time I looked at him since then. It seemed strange that I hadn’t really noticed how sharp the expression in his eyes was, or how worried the line of his mouth was, until we were sitting under a little florescent light at Sullivan’s kitchen table, weeks after we’d spent every night in the same room. I wondered if he’d changed, or if I had.
“You’re a regular meteorologist,” I said, a little pissed at him for showing Sullivan he cared about when the sun went down, and also for somehow changing his round demeanor while I wasn’t watching. “Or whoever it is who knows when the sunrise and sunset and moon phases are.”
“No harm to being informed,” Sullivan said, and shot me a look as if the statement was supposed to make me feel guilty. It didn’t. He took a bite of eggs and spoke around them. “So I heard from Dr. Linnet today.”
Paul and I snorted, and I said, “What’s she a doctor of? Ugly?”
“Weak, James. She’s got a PhD in some sort of English or psychology or something like that. All you need to know is that those three letters after her name—P. H. D.—mean that she has the power to make our lives excruciatingly difficult if she wants to, because I have only two letters after mine—M. A. Which at this school, translates into ‘low man on the totem pole.’” Sullivan swallowed some more egg and pointed with his fork to a folder on the table. “She brought me your outlines. Apparently they made a deep impression on her.”
“Yeah. She shared some of her impressions with us during class.” I opened the folder. Our duplicate outlines were tucked neatly inside, one of the corners still crinkly where Linnet had bent it back and forth. That still pissed me off.
“She brought up several … weighty points.” Sullivan set his plate down on the table and rested his feet next to them. “First of all, she noted that your outline seemed to interpret my assignment rather loosely. She thought my approach to my class in general had been lax. And she also seemed to think that James showed quite a bit of attitude in her class.”
I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t like any of her weighty points were particularly untrue.
“She recommended—let me see. Hand me that folder. I wrote them down, because I didn’t want to forget them.” Sullivan stretched out his hand and Paul gingerly placed the folder in it. Sullivan pulled out a sheet of paper from behind our outlines. “Let’s see. Recommendations. ‘One. Establish narrow rules for your assignments and be prepared to enforce them diligently, particularly with difficult students, of which you have at least one. Two. Maintain strict teacher-student relationship to engender respect. Three. Be particularly unforgiving when grading difficult students; attitude problems arise from a lack of respect and excess of ego on their part.’”
Sullivan lowered the paper and looked from me to Paul. “Then she recommended that I tell you”—he nodded toward Paul—“to redo your outline, within the limits of the assignment, before Monday’s class for a chance to improve your grade from a C to an B, and to give you”—he looked at me—“a C and tell you to redo your outline before Monday to keep it from being an F.”
Paul’s mouth made a round shape that I’m sure he wasn’t aware of. I crossed my arms across my chest and didn’t say anything. Whatever Sullivan was going to do, he’d already made up his mind—a blind monkey could figure that out. And I wasn’t about to beg for a better grade anyway. Screw that.
Sullivan slid the folder onto the table and crossed his arms, mirroring me. “So I have just one question, James.”
“Go for it.”
He jerked his chin toward the outlines. “Who do you have to play Blakeley’s character? I think I would make an excellent Blakeley.”
Paul grinned and I let one side of my mouth smile. “So does this mean I’m not getting a C for the outline?”
Sullivan dropped his feet off the table. “It means I don’t do well with rules. It means some bitter drama teacher isn’t going to tell me how to teach my class. This play burns, guys. Even in the outline, I can see it. It could be wickedly self-deprecating satire and I don’t see why you guys shouldn’t do your best and get a grade for it. But you’re going to have to work harder for it than the rest of the class—they only have to write a paper.”
“We don’t care,” Paul said immediately. “This is way cooler.”
“It is. Where are you going to rehearse?”
But neither of us answered right away, because in the distance, the antlered king began to sing, slow and entreating.
With some effort, I spoke over the top of the song. “Brigid Hall.”
“Interesting choice,” Sullivan said. He slid his gaze over to Paul, who was drumming his fingers on the table in a manic, caffeine-inspired way and blinking a lot. Paul wasn’t out-and-out singing along with the king of the dead, but he might as well have put out a big neon sign saying “How’s My Driving? Ask Me About My Nerves: 1-800-WIG-N-OUT.”