fate, intervening to spare him any more of Linda’s lip-licking curiosity.
But it had been a lucky shot, hadn’t it?
Principal Vogler, on the other hand, was furious. A courtly man himself, he obviously found pegging a woman with a water balloon to be an outrage. He reached out and snagged the nearest teenage boy, a kid with dark hair and deep blue eyes. “Bedroom” eyes, in fact.
“Come here, young man,” Winston bellowed.
He didn’t wait for the poor kid to say a word. He dragged him by the collar and forced him to face Linda.
“Ms. Tremel, this is Mr. Eddie Mackey. I believe he has something he’d like to say to you.”
THERE MUST BE A LINE from Hamlet for a moment like this. Claire studied her sedate navy-and-white spectator pumps and considered the issue. How about the one that said a person could “smile and smile and be a villain?”
It seemed apt enough. Mrs. Gillian Straine, the principal of the Haversham Girls’ Academy, never stopped smiling. It was how she wooed the best parents, the best girls, the best alums, the best college recruiters. But after almost two years teaching seventh grade here at HGA, Claire had learned how sharp the steel was that lay behind that smile.
Today the metal was in full, lethal force as Mrs. Straine sat at her huge mahogany desk, in her magnificent wood-paneled office, and read a letter of complaint that had just arrived. The letter stated that Miss Claire Strickland was teaching the girls from texts of questionable morality.
The letter was apparently very long—or else Mrs. Straine was a very slow reader. Claire adjusted her modest navy skirt and tried not to be nervous. But Mrs. Straine’s smile was so tight right now her lips had almost disappeared. Not a good sign.
Maybe the better quote was “To be or not to be.” To be or not to be fired.
Finally Mrs. Straine looked up. “This is very troubling,” she said softly. She said everything softly. It forced other people to be perfectly quiet, and to lean in slightly, in a deferential pose, in order to catch her words.
“Is it true, Miss Strickland? You have unilaterally decided to teach Hamlet to your seventh graders?”
“Not the entire play,” Claire said. “Just some of the famous speeches. It’s part of a larger unit on Shakespeare.”
Mrs. Straine took off her reading glasses and tapped them against the letter. “It says here you’ve been telling the children there are such things as ghosts. It says you’ve told them about fratricide and suicide.” She shook her head. “They even accuse you of using the I word.”
Claire frowned. The I word? What on earth was the I word? Insanity? Iago? No, that was Othello.
Iambic pentameter?
Mrs. Straine closed her eyes, apparently grieved that Claire was forcing her to utter it.
“Incest,” she whispered.
Oh, for heaven’s sake.
“I didn’t call it incest,” Claire said. “Shakespeare did. Or rather Hamlet did. It’s just a small part of the overall story. You see, Hamlet’s mother marries his uncle—”
“I know what happens in Hamlet, Miss Strickland.”
Claire leaned back in her chair. “Of course you do. I’m sorry.” She’d swallowed her pride in this job so often she’d almost gotten used to the bitter taste. “Then of course you know it isn’t incest with the same connotations we might have today.”
“I don’t believe any of that word’s connotations are socially acceptable,” Mrs. Straine said. She was sitting up so straight her back wasn’t touching the chair. “I honestly would have thought you understood that vocabulary like that has no place in an HGA classroom.”
Claire tried one more time. “But this is Hamlet, Mrs. Straine. This is Shakespeare. Hamlet is taught in classrooms all over the world every day, and—”
Mrs. Straine waved her hand. “We do not judge ourselves by everyone else, Miss Strickland,” she said. “At HGA, the standards are far higher.”
Higher than Shakespeare?
“I’m afraid we must insist that our teachers meet those standards. Every teacher, every day.”
So was this it? Was this where Claire would be told to take her copy of Hamlet and go home? She realized suddenly that she didn’t care very much. Since Steve died, she hadn’t cared about much of anything. But she tried to look earnestly concerned. She did have to earn a living, and HGA at least had the virtue of paying well and recruiting bright, well-behaved students.
“However,” Mrs. Straine went on, “I don’t think we need to overreact. Overall, your performance since coming to HGA has been exemplary. I think it will be adequate merely to place you on probation.”
“Probation?”
Mrs. Straine folded up the letter and placed it in a file marked Strickland, Claire. “Yes. It should not be construed as punitive. It’s merely precautionary. I’ll be keeping a close eye on your work. I’ll need to see your lesson plans daily, of course. After six months, we’ll review the matter and see where we stand.”
Claire understood she’d been dismissed. She stood and nodded—though she drew the line at thanking Mrs. Straine for her tolerance. She looked at the other woman—at her high, tight, extremely sophisticated French braid, her severe Armani suit, her Tiffany-set diamond wedding ring—and she wondered whether there really was no Mr. Straine, as the other teachers sometimes suggested.
It was possible. Claire’s own mother had pretended she was a “Mrs.,” and she undoubtedly wasn’t the only woman who did. Mrs. Straine’s reasons would be different, of course. She wouldn’t be trying to protect her two illegitimate children. But whatever the reason, living a lie took its toll.
As she left the school, Claire thought how much nicer it would be if she could go home and tell Steve about all this. What fun they’d have parodying Mrs. Straine’s Victorian syntax and ridiculous whisper. If Steve were there, this would seem hilarious in no time. They’d laugh away any sting, and then they’d sit around and think up absurd new meanings for the school’s initials. She could almost hear him now. Humongous Growling Amazons. Hippos Gathering Acorns. Hot Greasy Aardvarks.
But Steve wasn’t there, of course. Her half-furnished apartment would be empty when she finally got home later tonight. She had a meeting after school, which she would go through like a robot. Then she’d stop by the grocery store, and then drive to the apartment.
When she got in, she’d ignore the five or six messages on her machine—it was easier to ignore an invitation than to turn it down, and the result was the same in the end. She’d read a little. And then, as soon as she possibly could, she’d go to sleep.
To sleep. Perchance to dream. Yes, Hamlet knew where the real dangers lay. Claire still dreamed about Steve at least once a week. They were cruel dreams—the kind that woke you up with your heart in your throat. In the dreams, she always drove down Poplar Hill one second too late. Steve always died in her arms while Kieran McClintock stood over them and smiled.
But
