Jaine Austen 8 - Killer Cruise by Laura Levine Read Free Book Online

students’ childhoods, their jobs, their marriages, their children—in short, their lives.
    If completed, I told them, the questionnaire would serve as a memoir to pass on to future generations. Or it could serve as a springboard to a longer, more ambitious project. All the while I chatted, I kept looking at the door hoping for somebody else to wander in. But alas, it looked like it was just me and my gang of five.
    “So,” I said, my smile now frozen in place, “why don’t you all take turns and state your name and tell everybody why you decided to take this course.
    “You, sir?” I asked a bushy-bearded guy with an opulent unibrow.
    “I’m Max,” he said. “Actually, I wanted to take Professor Heinmann’s lecture series on his Arctic explorations, but, unfortunately, he had to cancel his cruise, so the class was called off.”
    So that’s why Paige had offered me the job. I was a last-minute replacement.
    “And bingo was too crowded,” he added, “so I wandered in here.”
    Great. Nothing like an enthusiastic student to get the ball rolling.
    “I’m Rita,” piped up the woman sitting next to him, a wiry-haired dame with small, squinchy eyes. “I’m president of the West Secaucus Women’s Reading Club, and I never miss an opportunity to hear an author speak.”
    Okay, at least this one had a vague interest in writing.
    “On my last cruise,” she announced proudly, “I saw Mary Higgins Clark.”
    “Really?” I said. “That must’ve been fun.”
    “Yes, she was fabulous. Just fabulous. Utterly spellbinding.”
    “Looks like I’ve got a tough act to follow. Haha.”
    “Humpph,” she sniffed, clamping her arms over her chest, having clearly reached the conclusion that it would be a cold day in hell before I came close to filling Mary H. Clark’s shoes.
    “And what about you?” I asked a long-haired teenage boy, sitting at a table some distance away from the others. He couldn’t hear my question, though, thanks to a pair of earbuds stuffed in his ears. Totally oblivious, he nodded his head in time to music from his iPod.
    “Young man!” I screeched.
    “Who? Me?” he asked, popping out an earbud and peering at me through his fringe of bangs.
    “Yes. What’s your name?”
    “Kenny.”
    I couldn’t help wondering what a kid his age was doing in a class like this.
    “Well, Kenny. Tell everybody why you’re taking this class.”
    “My parents made me. They want you to help me with my book report on The Scarlet Letter .”
    Oh, for heaven’s sake. First Samoa, and now this. It seemed like everyone on board had something for me to edit.
    “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that. This is a memoir-writing class. Feel free to drop out if you want.”
    I hated to lose him, but I was not about to play High School English Teacher.
    “Nah,” he said, “that’s okay. There’s nothing else to do on this dumb ship. Everybody here is like a hundred years old. Besides, my parents are paying me fifty bucks if I stay out of their hair for an hour.”
    I nodded wearily to my last two students, a sixty-something couple, dressed in identical jogging suits—his blue, hers pink.
    “We’re David and Nancy Shaw from Seattle,” the man said.
    “And after forty years of marriage we’re taking this cruise to renew our wedding vows,” his wife chimed in.
    Eyeing their matching jogging suits, wide, toothy grins, and Early Beatle bobs, I wondered if they’d always looked like each other, or if they were one of those couples who grew alike as the years went by.
    “Anyhow,” David said, “we thought it would be a wonderful idea to write down our memories to pass down to our children.”
    Alert the media! At last I had some people who actually wanted to write their memoirs.
    “That’s wonderful,” I said, fighting the impulse to race over and kiss them.
    I spent the next few minutes giving my students a mini-lecture on the principles of writing, trotting out the old “Show, Don’t Tell”