"Oooh." Gatsby Hat winced. "Been there. Let me help you." He dropped to his knees and started poring over the floor. The halls had already emptied out. We were both going to be late, but he was clearly a true Samaritan and was not going to give up until he helped me find my lens ... which didn't exist.
I sat back on my knees. "I don't wear contacts."
Gatsby Hat peeked up at me from his position on all fours. "You don't?"
I shook my head. "I ... I'm new here."
"I see," he said. "And at your old school you crawled everywhere?"
I sighed. How exactly was I going to explain this to him? Then I saw his sly half smile and realized I didn't need to.
"Yes," I said, "we did. It was an underground school. Literally underground. Tunnels everywhere. Very low ceilings. They said it was once part of the Underground Railroad."
"Ah," Gatsby Hat said. "Sounds very edifying."
"Very. 'Experiential Education,' they called it."
"'Experimental Experiential Education,' no doubt," he said.
"Exactly."
Gatsby Hat and I smiled, taking goofy delight in our mutual powers of alliteration. Then he sat up and held out his hand to help me.
"My name's Archer," he said, "and we're both very late for class. What do you have first period?"
"Cara." I of course responded to the question he didn't ask. Oops. "My name's Cara. First period I have..." I rummaged through my funkadelic brown and orange paisley messenger bag until I found my schedule. "English. Mr. Woodward. Room ten."
"Me too. We're lucky; he's the best in the school. I'll walk you there. Or we could crawl, if it makes you feel more comfortable."
"That's okay. I think I'm getting used to the standing-erect thing." Like an idiot I blushed. I waited for Archer to pounce on it.
He didn't, though he did raise an eyebrow and smirk almost imperceptibly before leading me down the hall.
Claudia had way too much faith in me. I could already imagine my next journal entry. "I really thought this would be the year everything changed, but even though the place is new, Cara Leonard is exactly the same."
Chapter Three
"My reputation precedes me," Mr. Woodward boomed as Archer and I tried to sneak in. "You were afraid to enter my class. You were wise."
The room tittered as we sat, and Mr. Woodward retreated to a closet. He pulled out a two-foot-long billy club. Archer gave me a knowing look. He had told me Mr. Woodward was infamous for this: "the Bat." No one knew what the Bat was for or what horrors it could unleash, but it was legend. A chill ran down my spine and my palms started to sweat. Was he taking out the Bat because Archer and I were late?
Mr. Woodward sat at the end of the horseshoe of three long desks. He held up a book and said, " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." As good, trained automatons, we all scrambled to pull out our copies, but Mr. Woodward cleared his throat and shook his head. "Watch and learn."
He held the Bat by its handle and let it rest on the desktop. He started to read.
"'Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky...'"
As he read, he let the Bat rise until it was almost at a ninety-degree angle to the desk.
"'Like a patient etherized upon a table.'"
He let the Bat drop back down.
He did this for several lines of the poem: let the Bat rise as the narrator got excited about his topic, then let it drop when his enthusiasm deflated. Finally, with a gleam in his eye, Mr. Woodward turned to us. "What is Eliot illustrating with his choice of words?"
It seemed pretty obvious what Mr. Woodward was illustrating, and while Eliot was doubtless illustrating the same thing, no one in the room wanted to say it out loud. Several people in the room snickered, but none of them tried to answer.
"Come on, kids, this is the good stuff. This is Junior English. This is T. S. Eliot. Let's dive into this! What is Eliot doing with his images? Anyone: shout it out!"
I almost giggled when I realized I could now say this twice in one hour. "Um..." I began, "he's making them stand erect?"
"Yes!" roared Mr. Woodward, and this time Archer didn't hide his smirk. "You've almost redeemed yourself for being late..."
"Cara," I said.
"Cara," he repeated. "So each time, Cara, when his images are at the