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When it’s my turn, I mumble, “Peter, and, uh . . . pizza,” which is both stupid and unmemorable, but for some reason it’s the first thing that popped into my head.
Oh my God. Why didn’t I say freaking piano?
As I feel my face warm, Mr. Lozano wraps it up with “And I’m Mr. Lozano, and I love literature!” This sparks a few groans. “Sorry, guys, I had to.” He puts a medieval poem up on the screen. “Since I’m sure everyone did the summer reading, which included The Canterbury Tales, this language shouldn’t be too alien. At least for those of you who read the book and not the SparkNotes version. Which I’m sure none of you did. Any brave souls want to try reciting it?”
Middle English isn’t too foreign to me, but I’m not about to volunteer on my first day, especially after the whole pizza situation. The girl next to me raises her hand, stands up, and clears her throat:
Whan the turuf is thy tour,
And thy pit is thy bour,
Thy fel and thy whitë throtë
Shullen wormës to notë.
What helpëth thee thennë
Al the worildë wennë?
“Great pronunciation, Abby,” Mr. Lozano says. “Spend the next few minutes discussing your interpretation of the poem with the person next to you. Then we’ll talk about it as a group.”
I shift toward Abby, but she’s already moving her desk so she can partner with the girl to her right. I’m next to the window, so there’s no one on my other side.
Partners. When I thought about going back to school, I never once considered the anxiety that comes with picking partners because I stupidly assumed Sophie would be there next to me. More specifically: the anxiety of realizing no one wants to be your partner. The back of my neck grows warm as I glance around the room, trying to catch the eye of any other loners. But everyone’s already deep in conversation.
Then the guy in front of me twists around. “Partner?” he asks. The seat next to him is empty, and I nod, trying not to let on exactly how relieved I am. He gets up so can he sit backward in his chair, which is attached to the desk. “Are you new? I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”
“Sort of. I’m Peter.”
“Chase. So what language is this poem in again?” His hair’s a golden brown, his skin a light olive. His glasses aren’t the massive thick-framed ones most kids are wearing; they’re thin and oval-shaped with wire frames. Old-man glasses, really. Earlier, he said, “I’m Chase, and I like challenging teachers who make us play getting-to-know-you activities.”
“Middle English.”
“And that has nothing in common with our kind of English because . . . ?”
“Did you not read The Canterbury Tales?”
Behind his grandpa glasses, his dark eyes shift left. Right. Back
to me. “Shh. I was one of the people who read the SparkNotes version,” he says conspiratorially.
My first day, and I’m helping someone else instead of the other way around. I used to do it with Sophie all the time. “Middle English is really inflected, and it’s actually a Germanic language. The grammar is more similar to German than to English.”
“Interesting. What does this poem mean, then?”
“Well,” I start, because while I’m not one hundred percent sure, I have a guess. “I think it’s a reflection on mortality. A memento mori. We can translate it to, ‘when the turf is your tower/and the pit is your bower/your skin—‘fel’ is skin—and white throat/shall be food for worms/what will help you then’ . . . and then I’m not entirely sure of the last line.”
Chase is staring. “How . . . did you get all that?”
“I . . . read a lot.” The mahogany bookshelves in my room. All those first editions. A warmth flows to my cheeks for the twelfth time this morning, though Chase obviously has no idea what my room is filled with.
“So it’s about the passage of time? Like, this is what’s gonna happen when you die?”
“Yeah, I think so. Oh! It could be that all of this is going to happen when you die, so what will the good things in the world matter to you then? So take advantage of all of this while you’re alive?”
“I can appreciate that.” He pushes the sleeves of his plaid shirt to his elbows. It occurs to me that at least forty percent of the male population is wearing plaid. “A little depressing, though.” He actually looks sad, like he was expecting the poem to have a deeper, possibly more upbeat message.
“Maybe it was less depressing a thousand years ago?”
