Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock


TWELVE


I walk into A.P. English halfway through the period and Mrs. Giavotella stares at me for just about seven minutes before she says, “How nice of you to join us, Mr. Peacock. See me after class.”

My A.P. English teacher looks like a cannonball. She’s short and round and has these stubby limbs that make me wonder if she can touch the top of her head. She never wears a dress or a skirt but is always in overstuffed pants that are about to explode and a huge blouse that hangs down almost to her knees, covering her belly. A beaded line of sweat perpetually sits just above her upper lip.

I nod and take my seat.

The troglodyte football player who doesn’t even belong in A.P. but just so happens to sit directly behind me—that guy knocks my Bogart hat off my head and everyone sees my new fucked-up haircut before I can get my skull covered again.

“What the—?” this girl Kat Davis whispers, making me realize my hair looks worse than I had imagined.

Mrs. Giavotella gives me a look like she’s really worried for me all of a sudden, and I look back at her like please return to the lesson so everyone will stop looking at me because if you don’t I will pull the P-38 from my backpack and start firing away.

“Mr. Adams,” Mrs. Giavotella says to the kid behind me. “If you were Dorian Gray—if there was a picture of you that changed according to your behavior, how would that picture look right about now?”

“I didn’t knock Leonard’s hat off, if that’s what you’re implying. He knocked it off himself. I saw him do it. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Mrs. Giavotella looks at him for a second, and I can tell she believes him. Then she looks at me, like she’s wondering if I really did knock my own hat off, so I say, “Why would I knock my own hat off? What purpose would that serve?”

“Why would you interrupt my lesson by arriving late?” she says, and then gives me this lame look that’s supposed to intimidate and control me—and it probably would on any other day. But I have the P-38 in my backpack, and therefore am uncontrollable.

Mrs. Giavotella says, “So. Back to Mr. Dorian Gray.”

I don’t really listen to the class discussion, which is all about a painting that gets uglier and uglier as its subject ages and becomes more and more corrupt, but magically never ages himself at all. It sounds like an interesting book, and I probably would have read it if I weren’t so obsessed with reading Hamlet over and over again. If I weren’t going to shoot Asher Beal and kill myself this afternoon, I’d probably read The Picture of Dorian Gray next. I’ve liked everything we’ve read in Mrs. Giavotella’s class this year, even though she’s always going on and on about the bullshit A.P. exam and dangling the college-credit carrot way more than she should. It’s almost obscene.

Mostly, as I’m sitting here in A.P. English, I think about the way my classmates are always raising their hands and sucking up to Mrs. Giavotella just so she will give them As, which they will send to Harvard or Princeton or Stanford or where-fucking-ever, to go along with their lies about how much community service they supposedly did and essays about how much they care about poor minority children they’ll never meet in real life or how they are going to save the world armed with nothing but a big heart and an Ivy League education.

“Save the world in your college application essays,” Mrs. Giavotella likes to say.

If my classmates put as much effort into making our community better as they give to the college-application process, this place would be a utopia.

Appearances, appearances.

The great fa?ade.

How to Live Blindly in a Blind World 101.

So much bullshit gets flung around in here, the stench gets so strong that you can hardly breathe. The best thing about killing myself will be that I’ll never have to go to a fake university and wear one of those standard college sweatshirts that’s supposed to prove I’m smart or something. I’m pretty proud of the fact that I will die without officially taking the SATs. Even though Linda and everyone here at my high school has begged me to take that stupid test just because I did so well on the practice one a few years ago.

Illogical.

Epic fail.

Somehow the class ends and I remember I’m supposed to speak with Mrs. Giavotella, so I just stay put when everyone scrambles out the door.

She walks over all slow and dramatic, sits on the desk in front of me so that her feet are resting on the seat, her knees clamped together tight so that I don’t get a direct view of her overly taxed zipper, which I appreciate very much, and says, “So, do you want to talk about what happened to your hair?”

“No, thank you.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then. Why exactly were you late for my class?”

“I don’t know.”

“Not good enough.”

“I’m thinking of dropping down to the honors track. You won’t have to worry about me then.”

“Not a chance.”

I’m not really sure what she wants from me, so I look out the window at the few leaves clinging to the small Japanese maple outside.

She says, “I graded your Hamlet exam. How do you think you did?”

I shrug.

“Your essay was very interesting.”

I keep looking at the few clinging leaves that seem to shiver whenever the wind blows.

“Of course, you completely ignored the prompt.”

“You asked the wrong question,” I say.

“I beg your pardon?”

“No offense, but I think you asked the wrong essay question.”

She forces an incredulous laugh and says, “So you gave me the right question.”

“Yes.”

“Which was?”

“You read my essay, right?”

“Do you really think Shakespeare is trying to justify suicide—that the entire play is an argument for self-slaughter?”

“Yes.”

“But Hamlet doesn’t commit suicide.”

“You did read my essay, right?”