The Body Human by Nancy Kress Read Free Book Online

said, thinking about it. “What about connecting to the material? English literature has some pretty exciting stuff in it, you know.”
    “I’ll take your word for it. But no books are exciting to most of these kids. Not initially. They can only connect to the material through a person. They’re that starved.”
    She took another bite of sandwich. “And the second thing?”
    “I already told you. Get control of Jeff Connors. I m mediately.”
    “Who is he? And what was all that bullshit about old people killing themselves?”
    I said, “Didn’t you see it on the news?”
    “Of course I did. The police are investigating, aren’t they? But what did it have to do with my classroom?”
    “Nothing. It was a diversionary tactic. A cover-up.”
    “Of what?”
    “Could be a lot of things. Jeff will use whatever he hears to confuse and mislead , and he hears everything. He’s bright, unmotivated, a natural leader, and — unbeliev ably — not a gang member. You saw him — no big gold, no beeper. His police record is clean. So far, anyway.”
    Jenny said, “You worked with him a little last year.”
    “No, I didn’t work with him. I controlled him in class, was all. ” She’d been asking about me.
    “So if you didn’t really connect with him, how do I?”
    “I can’t tell you that,” I said, and we ate in silence for a few minutes. It didn’t feel strained. She looked thoughtful, turning over what I’d told her. I wondered suddenly whether she’d have made a good cop. Her ears were small, I noticed, and pink, with tiny gold earrings in the shape of little shells.
    She caught me looking, and smiled, and glanced at my left hand.
    So whoever she’d asked about me hadn’t told her ev e rything. I gulped my last bite of sandwich, nodded, and went back to my room before 7H came thundering up the stairs, their day almost over, one more crazy period where Mr. Shaunessy actually expected them to pay attention to some weird math instead of their natural, intense, conte n tious absorption in each other.
     
    Two more elderly people committed suicide, at the Angels of Mercy Nursing Home on Amsterdam Avenue.
    I caught it on the news, while correcting 7H’s first-day quiz to find out how much math they remembered from last year. They didn’t remember squat. My shattered knee was propped up on the hassock beside the bones and burial tray of a Hungry Man Extra-Crispy Fried Chicken.
    “…identified as Giacomo della Francesca, seve n ty-eight, and Lydia Smith, eighty. The two occupied rooms on the same floor, according to nursing home staff, and both had been in fairly good spirits. Mrs. Smith, a widow, threw herself from the roof of the eight-story building. Mr. della Francesca, who was found dead in his room, had apparently stabbed himself. The suicides follow very closely on similar deaths this morning at the Beth Israel Retirement Home on West End Avenue. However, Captain Michael Doyle, NYPD, warned against premature spec u lation about—”
    I shifted my knee. This Captain Doyle must be getting nervous; this was the third pair of self-inflicted fatalities in nursing homes within ten days. Old people weren’t usually susceptible to copy-cat suicides. Pretty soon the Daily News or the Post would decide that there was actually some nut running around Manhattan knocking off the elderly. Or that there was a medical conspiracy backed by Middle East terrorists and extraterrestrials. Whatever the tabloids chose, the NYPD would end up taking the blame.
    Suddenly I knew, out of nowhere, that Margie was worse.
    I get these flashes like that, out of nowhere, and I hate it. I never used to. I used to know things the way normal people know things, by seeing them or reading them or hearing them or reasoning them through. Ways that made sense. Now, for the last year, I get these flashes of knowing things some other way, thoughts just turning up in my mind, and the intuitions are mostly right. Mostly right, and nearly always