Blind Rage by Terri Persons Read Free Book Online Page A

that week.
    Not surprisingly, his classes were popular with female students. His looks and the subject matter were both big draws, but they weren’t the only ones. The professor listened to women when they spoke. It was a precious and rare commodity, a man who listened to the female voice instead of tuning it out.
    Before opening her notebook, she reached around to the back cover and ran her index finger over the outline of the octagon. She’d seen the stickers before at student health fairs and the like but had been too self-conscious to pick one up. On the first day of class, the prof had distributed them to his students. Most of the kids waited until they were in the hallway and then tossed theirs in the trash can. A couple had made derisive remarks. She’d kept hers, plastering it to the back cover of the notebook. Just in case.
    She opened the notebook to a clean page, clicked her pen, and emptied the last inch of Slim-Fast into her mouth.
    The prof spun around and spotted her sitting in the back row, chewing. “Glad you could join us, Ms. Klein.”
    He called all the students by their names. Without assigning seats or checking a cheat sheet, he’d learned the first and last names of all twenty of them by the third day of class. Most of the students still didn’t know one another’s names. He went around the Formica-topped table that served as his desk and leaned his butt against it. She was glad she wasn’t sitting in the front row; she’d be staring where she ought not. “Kyra, swallow your breakfast and read us anything by Dorothy Parker.”
    Kyra Klein cracked open The Poetry & Short Stories of Dorothy Parker , ran her tongue across her top front teeth to make sure she didn’t have a nut wedged between them, and opened her mouth to launch into the poem.
    “Wait,” the professor said, holding up his palm like a traffic cop.
    Klein glanced up from her book.
    “Read us anything by Dorothy Parker as long as it isn’t ‘Résumé.’”
    She looked back down and turned the page.
    “Kyra. Don’t tell me.”
    Grinning, she looked up. “It’s my favorite.”
    “Fine,” he said. “Torture me if you must. I’ve only heard the damn thing a million times.”
    She continued her page flipping. “I can find something else.”
    “While you’re doing that, tell us why you picked Dorothy Parker for your paper in the first place.”
    She looked up from her book. “Actually, my first choice was Sylvia Plath, but you told us we couldn’t do her.”
    He stood straight and ran his eyes around the room. “How many of you wanted Sylvia Plath?”
    Nearly everyone raised his or her hand.
    “Good God, people. Sylvia Plath?”
    “What’s wrong with Sylvia Plath?” asked a girl sitting to Klein’s right.
    “Cliché city,” squeaked Jess, who always sat in the front row, smack-dab in the middle. Jess had a shaved head and was either a puffy guy with a Truman Capote voice or a puffy woman with the downy beginnings of an Ernest Hemingway beard. Out of sensitivity and without prior planning or discussion, the entire class avoided the minefield of transgender issues in literature while Jess was in their midst.
    “I could fill the Metrodome with undergraduate papers on Sylvia Plath, and to a one, they would be wretched,” said the professor. He went back to the board, scribbled madly, and stepped to one side. He’d scrawled Sylvia Plath , drew a bell shape around the name, and then slashed a diagonal bar across it.
    A young woman two seats in front of Klein raised her hand. “How can we take a class like this without Sylvia Plath?”
    “I didn’t say we’d do without her, Alisha.” He went back around the Formica table and poked an index finger in his chest. “ I shall discuss Sylvia Plath, and you shall listen.”
    He walked between the rows of desks, heading for Klein. Clasping his hands behind his back, he came up next to her. “Now tell us about number two on your hit parade.”
    He was wearing cologne.